APOCALYPTIC FEARS

Volume II

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A Multi-Author Box Set

Reaper Press

Dear Reader:

You’re looking at the first page of a lot of good stuff: over a million words, around three thousand Kindle pages of fiction, by eleven talented independent or small-press authors. The stories range from straightforward apocalyptic adventure about the chaos after a nuclear war through twisted dystopian societies, zombie attacks, westerns, modern fantasies and cities full of plagues. In fact, along with its companion volume, Apocalyptic Fears I, there isn’t much in the genre that isn’t covered.

Some works are violent, others “merely” psychologically disturbing. You’ll find some sex and rough language in a number of them, while others you could read to your children – if you dared. Some are written in British-style English, but most are in American English. Each author has his or her own style, so I hope you take the books as they stand. If you don’t like one, move on to the next, secure in the knowledge that you’re still getting great value for your dollar, your euro, or your pound sterling. The beauty of this buffet of fiction is that there’s something for everyone, and I sincerely hope you’ll discover at least one new favorite author here.

Cheers, and happy reading!

– David VanDyke, Reaper Press

All works copyright © 2012-2015 by their respective authors. All material within this anthology, “Apocalyptic Fears II” not copyrighted by the respected authors is copyright © 2015 by David VanDyke and Reaper Press. All rights reserved, except those specifically granted to this anthology. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for brief excerpts for the purpose of review or quotation, without permission in writing from the respective author.

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Table of Contents

Knights and Demons: Tanshuku
Massacre at Lonesome Ridge: A Zombie Western
You Will Be Like God
Ink: Red
Numbers Game
Swarmers
Thrown Away
The Flense: China
Zombie Maneuvers
The Moon Dwellers
No Kinda Life
The Protectors

Reaper's Run

Knights and Demons: Tanshuku © 2015 by Greg Dragon

Years of martial arts training never prepared nineteen-year-old Alysia Knight for the battle she has to face. War is raging in the streets of New Jersey, and surviving the apocalypse means staying clear of monsters preying on the citizens. As a teen, Alysia never dreamed her first years as an adult would be spent fighting demons. However, as the chosen warrior of the Turevila, she must defeat them in order to save the world.

This Omnibus contains the five books that compose Knights and Demons, Season One.

Knights and Demons is an urban fantasy, action/adventure, about one woman's struggle to save a world besieged by demons.

Massacre at Lonesome Ridge: A Zombie Western, © 2014 by Samantha Warren

Don't stop. Don't look back. Just RUN.

Sheriff Connor McClane would like the world to leave him in peace at the bottom of the bottle he's crawled into. Unfortunately an army of the undead, lead by Charity Banks, former debutante and very unhappy transplant to the west, have other plans for him.

In order to save the town he's sworn to protect, McClane will have to find it within himself to stand up to an enemy unlike any he's faced before. And when those he loves become embroiled in the zombie battle, and the lines between love and duty become blurred, the sheriff will face his toughest challenge yet.

You Will Be Like God, © 2015 by Steve Stroble

In 2095, being a parent is complicated but eliminating grandchildren is profitable. Bud Lee believes he has proof that his boss is plotting to decide Earth's fate by recruiting surrogate children into a think tank named The Club. Only one other agrees to help him: a ghost writer convinced that computers control him, Bud, and everyone else.

Family relationships are anything but pleasant for the unlikely pair because of expectations placed upon them, so exposing a conspiracy, no matter how farfetched, is welcome relief from the constraints of a micromanaged existence. Their search for the truth eventually takes them around the world as they trace down the only ones capable of verifying Mr. Lee's story.

Ink: Red, © 2015 by Al K. Line

The needle buzzed. The nightmare began. Strapped to a gurney, Edsel watched in horror as they started to tattoo him bright red from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. No piece of skin would be left unmarked.

His captors were overconfident; he escaped, only to be chased across the ravaged city as he tried to get home to Kathy before it was too late.

She was dead. Kathy. Dear sweet Kathy. The only beautiful thing left in a world gone rogue after The Lethargy almost obliterated humanity. They’d taken her; taken everything away from him. He would have his revenge.

Numbers Game, © 2015 by Rebecca Rode

Treena isn't sure she wants to be Rated anymore. Sure, she's prepared for Rating Day her entire life. Sure, she's one of the top contenders in Level Three school. But this number will brand her forever—a valuable citizen, or a pathetic waste of space. And then there's the the issue of being within 100 points of her top-rated boyfriend if they'll attend the academy together.

But Rating Day comes and her number is announced--and it shocks everyone.

To get her life and boyfriend back, Treena must go undercover and expose a military spy. Doesn’t sound too hard, except that someone wants her dead. And then there’s Vance, the mysterious soldier with a haunted past and gorgeous brown eyes. Together, they discover a dark numbers conspiracy, one that shatters the nation’s future. Treena must join up with Vance if she is to survive the dangerous game of numbers—and the terrible war that rages within her heart.

Swarmers, © 2013 by R. V. Doon

A lethal virus with no known cure is awakened in a secret lab and goes airborne. When an unusual seismic event eclipses the first incident, people claim an evolutionary jump caused the twin disasters. Others call it Judgment Day. Both calamities lead to a haunting day of fear and carnage. Their world is forever altered, and the stunned survivors must keep fighting for their very existence. Night—everyone fears the looming darkness and the terror of being stalked.

Thrown Away, Parts 1-3, © 2015 by Glynn James

No one knows how the world died. They only know that it happened centuries ago. Among the remnants of mankind - the people that live and die scavenging in the ruins - it is thought that the strangers who live behind the barrier, inside their protected city, may still hold that secret. But no one taken by the hunters from the city ever comes back.

For Jack Avery, living among the ruins of the outer zone and scavenging to survive is not the worst of nightmares. Something haunts him far more than any hunter patrol. In one short moment, two years before, something happened that changed him. Can Jack find the answer to his torment among the shattered ruins of the past?

The Flense: China, © 2015 by Saul Tanpepper

Hundreds die in a fiery train crash in northern China. A cargo ship smuggling refugees is lost to calm seas off the Libyan coast. Entire villages in Ghana are abandoned overnight.

Contracted by an apocalypse prepper group to investigate a series of seemingly disconnected global tragedies, a young freelance medical reporter, Angelique de l'Enfantine, uncovers a disturbing pattern: each event is preceded by the sudden spread of a mysterious ailment and is followed by the appearance of a man dressed in black and silver who witnesses claim is the devil himself. Are the tragedies harbingers of an impending biblical catastrophe or practice runs of a fanatical organization bent on global annihilation?

Zombie Maneuvers, © 2015 by Griffin Carmichael

Before the world fell apart, Janet’s life was already indistinguishable from Hell. In Connor, she’d thought she found a strong protector, someone who would take care of her.

What she got was a controlling, brutal man who used and abused her. She felt trapped by her choices and the ravening dead, until the two joined up with some other survivors.

Something changes in Janet as she travels with the group in search of a safe haven. Faced with the horrors of a zombie apocalypse, she begins to see a better path, if she just has the courage to take it.

The Moon Dwellers, © 2013 by David Estes

In a desperate attempt to escape destruction decades earlier, humankind is forced underground, into the depths of the earth, creating a new society called the Tri-Realms.

After her parents and sister are abducted by the Enforcers, seventeen-year-old Adele, a member of the middle-class moon dwellers, is unjustly sentenced to life in prison for her parents' crimes of treason.

Against all odds, Adele must escape from the Pen and find her family while being hunted by a deranged, killing machine named Rivet, who works for the President. She is helped by two other inmates, Tawni and Cole, each of whom have dark secrets that are better left undiscovered. Other than her friends, the only thing she has going for her is a wicked roundhouse kick and two fists that have been well-trained for combat by her father.

No Kinda Life, © 2012 by Ryan King

When the world as we know it falls, the New Texas Republic rises to face the harsh realities of holding civilization together, one town at a time. Such is the task before Austin Reynolds, Texas Ranger, as he rides into the community of New Hope where a shifty-eyed mayor, his alluring and beautiful assistant, and a blind prophesying preacher complicate an inevitable battle against wild northern raiders.

The Protectors, © 2013 by Ryan King

It’s been twenty years since the Great Plague. In a few months, Teal will turn sixteen and be able to Take the Chit from a Protector as so many have before her. In a cruel and dark world the Protectors supposedly keep away the violence and madness. But Teal is starting to realize that all is not what it seems, and her grandfather and mother harbor old secrets about Before and the Dark Years. As she seeks to stand for truth, Teal inadvertently sets off a chain of events that could destroy them all.

Reaper's Run, (c) 2013 by David Vandyke

When US Marine Sergeant Jill Repeth's blown-off legs begin to regenerate, she thinks it's a medical miracle. But the breakthrough that heals her war injuries is exactly what the government desperately wants to quash - by any means necessary. Hunted, she must cross an America wracked by strife to try to find a family who may already be dead, searching for the inhuman secret of what started it all.

Reaper's Run is an origins story and apocalyptic novel, the beginning of one warrior's journey from tactical cop to freedom fighter and beyond. It leads the reader into the acclaimed Plague Wars futuristic thriller series.

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Knights and Demons: Tanshuku

GREG DRAGON

BOOK 1

And Then There Were Giants

“He’s coming to our school; Tavi Michaels is coming to our school!”

Alysia Knight and Lisa Cheung could not contain their excitement at the prospect. One of the most controversial figures of their generation was coming to the University to give a lecture.

It was strange that a school as mired in tradition as Ellen Lok University would allow Tavi Michaels to step foot on their campus, but Lisa was a Journalism major, and she had gotten the scoop from a reliable source.

The two girls planned to be some of the first students Tavi would encounter. Alysia had her trusty camera, and Lisa had her recorder, ready to capture anything that Tavi would say to them. She wondered if the police would escort him or if he would be alone. It was so exciting!

At the front of the class, their professor had his back turned so he didn’t notice that the girls had slipped out. Lisa’s lookout had sent a text to her, saying, “Tavi’s entourage just pulled up,” so the heavyset girl snatched Alysia by the arm and pulled her out of class.

She was intent on catching the icon before the other students swarmed him. They began to sprint. The University was large and the Journalism class was quite a distance from the entrance.

As they ran, Alysia thought about Tavi and wondered if he would be willing to take a photograph with her.

She was still in mid-thought when a firm tremor threw her and Lisa to the ground. Lisa looked disoriented as her recorder lay broken next to her and she began to panic. A second tremor came, but this time with an explosion, and before they could react, a large man pulled them to their feet. He retrieved their items before pointing back the way they had come.

“RUN!” He shouted at them before taking off. People were rushing past them and Alysia feared injury if they didn’t join in the escape.

“Those were explosions. Did Tavi do something at the entrance of the school?” Alysia asked between breaths as they ran from corridor to corridor.

“He would never do that!” Lisa said. “If anything, someone attacked him, or tried to set him up for failure.” She was not having an easy time running and Alysia felt sorry for her.

They broke into the center of the school where walkways lay crisscrossed amid a field of grass. Another explosion shook the school, and some of the bricks from the student hall broke off and fell into their midst. The refuse injured a few people, but in the chaos and the panic, no one stopped to help them.

Everyone seemed intent on getting to the rear of the school, even though it dropped off into the sea. This realization gave Alysia pause and she veered away to investigate. Lisa joined a group of students running down the stairs towards the beach, not realizing that her classmate was gone. Alysia needed to see what was causing the explosions so she headed through the library and up to the roof.

The roof of the University was in the style of an old medieval castle, and it was a running joke that the architect had loved ancient mythology. They had a centaur for a mascot and there were brass sculptures of nymphs all over.

When she got to the rooftop something whizzed past her, and then one of the taller towers exploded. Loose stones and debris began to fall and Alysia ran to where she could see other people hunkered down behind the battlements. It seemed as if the attack was coming from the sea. What sort of sense would that make? she thought as she ran with her head down.

Another shot flew above her head and smashed into the stairs, causing the entire building to shake. She wondered if Lisa had made it to the beach and whispered a silent prayer, begging her to be okay. She poked her head up to look over the ocean, her curiosity getting the better of her.

The sky was on fire, its color a bright crimson, broken only by dark clouds that floated over the setting sun. It was near noon, according to her watch, but here was the sun, trying to retreat just like everyone else.

Below the fiery sky were four ships, unlike any she had ever seen before.

“Am I dreaming?” Alysia asked aloud as she saw what the ships were fighting.

Within the ocean were three giants. These large, ugly, humanoid behemoths were swatting at the ships and shielding themselves from the missiles.

“Oh my, and then there were giants,” she said, and sat back behind the battlements to think things over. It had to be a dream. Why would there be giants fighting strange ships in the year 2048? What sort of sense did that even make? Why were the ships firing their cannons towards a University where America’s future studied?

She looked again just to be certain, and a missile took a part of the wall off near where she knelt, causing her to fall back hard and twist her ankle. She crawled towards the hole where the earlier missile had broken up the stairs. She needed to get to the beach with everyone else; lower ground seemed to be the safest.

Alysia got up, limped to the ruined staircase, and made her way to the bottom. She glanced up at the sky and saw it was overcast, where just an hour before it had been sunny. Dark clouds were forming a mass, as if they gathered to bear witness to the absurdity that the fight in the sea was.

She reached the sand below the University steps and another missile hit the battlements on the roof. This time, the explosion was epic. Stone took to the air like hail, and the people on the beach were horrified as it fell within their ranks, killing some and injuring even more.

Alysia watched it happen in horror, thanking the heavens that a large chunk had only fallen next to her and not on top of her. She brought her hands up to her face to scream, then removed the beach from her mind and limped up the hill that led towards the front of the school.

She didn’t know how much time had passed as she walked, but when she found her car she was alone. Did they all run to the beach? she asked herself. It wouldn’t make any sense that out of the thousands of students at the school, none of them would venture to the front. She got inside of her car and started it up, half-expecting that it wouldn’t start, but the engine turned over, and it lifted ever so slightly off the ground.

“Ren, take me home. I want to go home,” she said to the vehicle and then reached down to see how bad her ankle was. It felt swollen and she knew that she had made it worse by walking on it. The car’s dash lit up with pretty neon blue lights and the GPS hovered over the steering wheel. She maneuvered the car through the parking lot and then started down Barrier Avenue.

Alysia saw bodies strewn about, the evidence of an attack on the city itself. She looked around, trying to figure out the source of the attack.

The houses of the subdivision she drove through belonged to the University and only students lived there. Stella Leibowitz, who used to be Alysia’s classmate in high school, stayed in one of them. So when the car slid past her tiny house, Alysia looked for her and saw that the doors were open and the windows broken.

Since Stella’s car was missing, she hoped she had made it out alive. As she tried to figure out what had caused the mass exodus of the neighborhood, a large, lizard-like creature ran out from behind one of the houses.

The lizard smashed into her car, causing it to float up into the air and crash down on top of a roof. The impact and fall caused Alysia to black out and when she recovered, she could hear the chorus of sirens for the first time. Everything was dark as she rubbed her eyes and stood up next to her wrecked car.

She saw helicopters on the horizon, and squad cars and soldiers were off in the distance, trying in vain to fight back against the chaos. On the street below the house, the lizard was walking around. He seemed determined to get at her if she made the mistake of coming down from the rooftop.

Is that a dinosaur? she asked herself as she looked around, wondering if anyone else was alive to give her a hand.

There was no one around and the police and the military were not in the neighborhood. She seemed to be alone and with a swollen ankle and a new pain in her side, she didn’t know how she would deal with her lizard friend.

“Are you hungry?” she asked the creature, and it turned its head as if to get a better look at her through its eye. She asked it again and this time it screamed at her, a blood-curdling roar that made her flinch and slide back closer to her car.

“I wish I had a gun,” she mumbled, then got to her feet to look in the trunk for a weapon of some sort to chase the creature away. She had thought that it was a dinosaur but the scream it made sounded mechanical. It looked like a tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it had no arms, and its skin consisted of black scales. Can I even hurt it? She wondered, but resumed her efforts to find a weapon to get the creature to leave her alone.

After some perusing through her now messy trunk, Alysia managed to find a lengthy pipe for refueling her hover-tank. She found a sharp knife that was in the toolbox that her father had given her on her 18th birthday. She used electric tape to attach the knife to the pole, and made it into a crude spear. She stood up and tested it against the car to see if it could withstand a firm thrust. It held true, giving her confidence that it would do the job. She lodged it by the twisted door of her car and then gathered her thoughts as the creature continued to pace.

Alysia went back into her car to see if she could find her phone. When she found it, she called her mother, praying that there would be an answer and she could let her know that she was okay. After the phone rang a few times, someone answered and the voice on the other end was a whisper.

“CeeCee?” her mother asked, as if she were trying not to let anyone hear her.

“Mom, are you okay?” she replied, too excited to contain herself. “Mom, where are you guys? Is everything okay?”

She could hear some shuffling around in the background and then her father’s voice came on to the call. “Baby girl, you all right?”

“Yeah Dad, I’m okay. Everything is crazy. Do you know what’s going on?” she asked, afraid to go into detail just in case her parents weren’t aware of the monsters.

“You mean the demons?”

“Dad, demons, really?”

“Yes, demons, baby girl. Horns, wings, straight out of Dungeons and Dragons. Where are you? Did you get hurt? The whole country is under attack by all sorts of supernatural creatures, and me and your mom are in the basement.”

“I’m surprised to hear that you’re hiding, Dad. This sounds like a dream come true for you. All of that warrior code stuff that you’ve been obsessed with. I pretty much expected you to be on the streets with sword and armor on, saving us all.”

Her father laughed and she could tell from the slight pause after she spoke that he either had done something, or was thinking about it.

“Everything within me makes me want to do what you expect me to do, CeeCee, but your mom can’t be left alone. One of those things came in here and, well, she got hurt.”

“Oh no, Dad! Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she’ll live,” he said and he laughed again as Alysia heard her mother mock his laughter, annoyed at him for being so light-hearted in the hour of panic.

“The school got destroyed,” Alysia said, switching back to serious matters.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m in the University condo area, Pleasant Palms, but I had a wreck and some sort of armless dinosaur has me trapped on a rooftop.”

“Can you fight?”

“James!” Alysia’s mother yelled at him, annoyed that he would ask her that question.

But Alysia understood the question. Her father was a fighter and had raised her to be a fighter like himself. She could wait for him to come for her, but he needed to know that if anything were to happen she could defend herself and stay safe, regardless.

“I made a spear, Dad, a good one… but I twisted up my ankle and I have a pain in my side.”

“CeeCee, do you need me to come for you?” he asked, and her mother exploded into even more objections.

“The basement may not be safe, Dad. I think you guys should try to get out of the village. I’ll be okay; I’m your daughter, remember? Just keep me updated on where you are and I’ll find you.”

“That’s my girl,” she heard him say and then he hung up.

It was funny to Alysia that their discussion had centered on survival and not on the absurdity of the situation. There were demons, dinosaurs and giants popping up in the world. Those creatures had always been the substance of fantasy books, movies, and games, yet here they were in real life.

The hour was late and the grumbling in her stomach reminded Alysia that she had not eaten all day. The creature was waging a war of attrition with her, and she was losing due to the pain and hunger that wracked her body. She thought about going to the edge of the roof, hoisting her weapon, and letting it fly into the neck of the creature.

In her mind’s eye, she saw it strike home and the creature wretch and shudder before falling to the ground—dead. Would it be that simple? She got up and held the spear, balancing it on her palm as if that would tell her whether it would be effective. Next, she grabbed some of the loose rubble that was next to her and threw it at the creature, but that only seemed to annoy it.

Defeated and frustrated, Alysia went back to the car and sat down. She wished that she had paid attention when her dad had tried to teach her how to service the hover-lift, but it was all so boring. Martial arts was a different thing, however, and she was confident in her ability to fight.

Should she go down and face the creature—sprained ankle and all—or should she wait until morning? The urge to get home to her parents was getting the better of her, and she again measured the spear to determine what she wanted to do with it. I could use it as a bo-staff, she thought. The pipe was the right height and weight for her to do that.

Night came and as Alysia worked up the nerve to jump down from the roof and face her stalker, a police car flew slowly down the street. The creature perked up when he heard the sirens and smashed into it as it drove by. The impact caused the car to careen out of control before crashing into another house.

Before she could think better of it, Alysia ran to the side of the roof and jumped. When she landed, it felt as if a bolt of hot, painful electricity shot up her leg and she screamed. She clasped her hands over her mouth as soon as she realized her mistake but she had already given away her location.

The creature, who had been tearing into the wounded police officer, turned when Alysia screamed, and remembered that she was its original prey. Why settle on one body to eat when you could have two, it probably thought, and rushed to the area of the sound. When it rounded the corner to the back of the house, it did not see the wounded girl like it expected. It put its nose to the ground to track her scent but that was where it made its first mistake.

Alysia jumped from behind the house and brought the pipe down on the creature’s neck with all of her strength. It screamed and recoiled, but she drew the spear back and thrust it towards its eye, striking home. She kept at it, striking and poking any area she saw vulnerable, and before long, it was still—though her heart was beating out of her chest.

As the adrenaline settled, the pain came back and Alysia fell and held her leg, which was now too sore for her to move. She heard a rustling as she did this and before she could react, another creature, similar to the first, came charging at her. She reached for the spear to protect herself, but she was too slow. She closed her eyes tight but a gunshot brought them open as she saw the police officer standing over the other creature. Her attacker fell, dead from the bullet, and Alysia counted her blessings.

“Are you okay?” the officer asked, and Alysia turned quickly to look at her.

It was the same officer that the creature had attacked, and though she stood in place with her gun drawn, Alysia could see that she was bleeding from her side.

“I’m okay,” Alysia replied and then forced herself to stand and limp over to her spear.

“Whoa, stay where you are, girl. Identify yourself.”

“Alysia Knight,” she said, and then froze. How ironic would it be that after surviving the attack of two creatures, I end up shot by the police? she thought.

“Do you live here, Alysia?” the officer asked.

“No, but I go to Ellen Lok. Look, I sprained my ankle pretty badly and I need that pipe to help me walk. Can you please point the gun somewhere else?”

“Do you have some ID?” the cop asked, determined to stick to procedure despite the world going to hell.

“Yes, here,” Alysia said as she took out her wallet and held it up for the police officer.

When the woman came over to take it from her, Alysia noticed her injury. The creature had bitten her badly, and the blood stained her light blue shirt to the point where it looked as if she had been dipped into purple ink.

“Okay, Alysia. Sorry about that. Let me help you up.”

“Help yourself, you look like you’re about to bleed to death. Are you okay?”

“Officer McLeay…Tracy, just call me Tracy.”

“Tracy, thank you for saving my life, but we need to get you some help,” Alysia said as she retrieved her spear and limped over to the officer.

“Car’s busted and no one’s picking up on the radio, Alysia.”

“CeeCee. My friends call me CeeCee.”

“CeeCee. I like that,” Tracy said, sounding tired and out of breath.

“My friend, Stella, lives here, but she’s gone—just like everyone else. Is it breaking and entering if the world is gone to hell and you desperately need supplies?” Alysia asked, smiling at the notion of asking a cop’s permission to break into a friend’s house.

“Desperate times breed desperate measures,” Tracy said, and Alysia was happy to hear it.

The two women walked over to the back of the house and jimmied open the lock. When they got inside, the place was still in order, but it looked as if someone had left in a hurry. Alysia helped Tracy to the bed and removed her top, then went to the bathroom to look for medical supplies. When she came back and saw the officer laying their topless, she thought she looked like a John William Waterhouse painting.

“Found a box full of Band-Aids and medicine,” Alysia said, and Tracy nodded with a smile.

“I feel so tired,” she said as Alysia began to clean out her wound. “Are you a premed major?” she asked.

“Marketing actually, but my mom is a pediatrician. She’s shown me how to treat minor cuts and injuries.”

“So how do I look, doc?” Tracy joked, and Alysia thought she looked good despite the situation.

“It could have been worse, considering that thing was gnawing at you for so long. The bites aren’t deep and you have some bruising from the accident, but I think meds and a night’s rest will make you better by tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, CeeCee,” she said meekly, and Alysia nodded with a smile and handed her some pain pills.

Once she was finished helping Tracy, she went into the kitchen and dumped ice into a grocery bag. She secured it with a twisty-tie and then went back into the room. She sat on the chair next to Tracy and removed her shoes, and then elevated her leg onto the TV stand and placed the ice on her throbbing ankle.

“Wow, that looks bad,” Tracy said when she saw the swelling.

“Yeah, I know, and it’s not like I’ve been trying to stay off of it, either,” Alysia replied. She turned on the television and there was an emergency broadcast telling people to stay inside their homes. “I don’t know if that’s good advice considering what I saw at the school.”

“What did you see?” Tracy asked, propping herself up on an elbow, trying in vain to get more comfortable.

“I saw giants.”

“Giants! What sort of giants?”

“Oh, the kind that can step on this house and crush us both. Pick us up and bite our heads off; use a whole lake as a bathtub. You know … giants,” Alysia replied, as if the question was absurd.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on; dinosaurs, flying dragons, and now giants? Is this a really messed up dream or what?”

“I don’t think it’s a dream, but I have no explanation for any of it. I just know that today went from me having a chance to meet a celebrity, to me sitting here, nursing a leg after escaping death. All I know is that the sooner it ends, the better. I keep wondering if when I close my eyes and fall asleep, I’ll wake up with everything back to normal.” She thought then on her friend and a slight panic washed over her. “Everyone at the school ran to the beach. I wonder if they are doing okay. I left my friend Lisa … I can’t even—”

“Don’t blame yourself for things that you have no control over, Alysia. It’s during these tough times that we really get to see what we’re made of, you know? A monster attacked you, and you made a spear and killed it. That says a lot about you; most people would have stayed down and died.”

“Thank you,” Alysia said, and Tracy gave her a wink. It was odd seeing the older police officer, lying on her friend’s bed below posters of different bands and movie stars. As Alysia thought on the whereabouts of Lisa, the throbbing pain distracted her. She looked over at Tracy, who had fallen asleep, so she turned the volume on the television down and closed her eyes.

2

The sun was up, Alysia was sweating, and the plastic bag full of water – formerly ice – sat precariously on her swollen, brown ankle. She noticed that Tracy was up with her gun drawn, and she looked madder than a gorilla with a back itch.

“What is that noise?” Alysia asked, and Tracy motioned for her to be quiet.

She stood up and tested her weight on the sore ankle but it felt no better than it did the day before. The earthquake – or whatever it was – stopped, but the sound of gunshots resumed the symphony of fear that had woken her up. Tracy slipped to the side of the bedroom window and peered out before looking back at Alysia as if she had seen a ghost.

“Y-you said that you saw giants, right, CeeCee?”

“Yes … a few of them fighting ships off the coast. Wait—that sound! Is it—?”

Before she could finish her question, an area of the house exploded with rubble as the arm of a giant crashed into it. The sun poured down on them now as they sat on the ground, exposed, and unaware of how they had managed to fall so fast.

“Alysia … RUN!” Tracy managed, and Alysia scrambled to her feet and pushed through the busted up wall to gain the streets. She felt as if she had a spike in her ankle, the pain being so immense and raw, but as she looked back to see if Tracy was behind her, she saw helicopters hovering above the fallen giant.

Tracy caught up to her and lifted her off the ground. The officer was a muscular woman, but with the injury, it was amazing that she could do this. She threw Alysia over her shoulder and raced down the road towards the woods. “There is a trail here,” she said between breaths, and Alysia tapped her rapidly on the back to put her down.

“We won’t make it if you’re carrying me. Look, we’re out of harm’s way. I can walk with you to the trail.”

“You mean limp,” Tracy joked.

“Not funny, but what do you expect to find there?”

“The giants are coming from the East, like you said. They came from the water, probably wading in from overseas. We can use the trail to get to Salter County. I’ve run it many times back when I was training for my 5K races. It opens up to a main road and if we’re lucky, we can hitch a ride.”

“Okay girl, lead the way. I’ll try to keep up, but you don’t need to carry me.”

“You’ll need to get off of that leg for a few days, Cee, or it’s going to get worse. We’ll get to the main road, and then I’ll see if I can get someone from the station to come pick us up.”

They pushed through the woods towards the trail and walked along it for an hour or so. Alysia tried to take her mind off the pain by concentrating on nature, but it was futile. The walk took them through a few hills that made the pain unbearable, and over a bridge that spanned a tiny brook.

Alysia gave Tracy a long look of admiration as the officer helped her along. She was pretty, which was strange since she never thought that pretty girls would join the police force. She had long, curly red hair, large hands, and a demeanor that was all business.

Alysia found her easy to like; she was like the big sister that would cook you dinner and help you with your homework. In a way, it made sense that she would be a cop or some other position of authority. She could see Tracy being the eldest daughter of a whole clan, the responsible one that had to protect the others.

“Are you from around here?” Alysia asked.

“No, not exactly. I’m originally from Dallas.”

“That’s funny, you don’t have an accent.”

“Oh, you expected me to sound like a cowgirl?”

“Heh, well, now that you mention it…”

“Girl, please, I came here when I was much younger than you. I may sound like one of you Yankee girls, but I’m a Texan through and through. What about you? You grow up here?”

Alysia moved to catch up and winced when she stepped down a little too hard on the sore ankle. “Yeah, I’m from here. We haven’t left the city much in the last few years but my dad used to take me on trips and stuff.”

“You talk about your dad a lot, you know that? You must really love him.”

“I do, but I love my mom, too. It’s just that, well, this is the sort of thing he prepared me for.”

“What? He prepped you to fight dinosaurs and giants?” Tracy teased, making sure to look back at her and smile as she said it.

“Sorta. He always said that the human race was due for a humbling. When it came, he wanted me ready.”

“Our dads would get along,” Tracy said. “Mine taught me how to shoot when I was little. We had guns all around the house but he taught me to respect them. Never played around the way a lot of these kids do nowadays, but when I did need to use one ... I was pretty good.”

“I can tell. The way you shot that thing that came after me was pretty badass.”

“Well, thank you, ma’am. You were pretty badass yourself with that spear.”

“You’re quite welcome, Cowgirl Tracy,” Alysia said, finding herself liking the cop even more.

They continued their talk until the trail brought them out of the woods and onto a strip of road. Alysia was exhausted and the familiar rumbling of her stomach came out in the loudest fashion.

“I’m hungry, too,” Tracy said when she heard Alysia’s stomach, and then she took out her radio to call her department.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s as if the whole department just turned off their radios and went home,” she said, frustrated.

“I hope that’s what they did and not—”

“Don’t say it,” Tracy said, snapping her head around, her cold blue eyes staring into Alysia’s large brown ones. “We were all trained to protect and serve. I think there is something going on with the signal and it’s cutting us off from communicating for some reason. Let’s stop here so you can rest your ankle. This is the road I was talking about and if we’re lucky, someone will pick us up and give us a ride.”

Alysia didn’t like the idea of getting into a hover-car with strangers, but she could barely walk and it wasn’t up to her. As they waited and talked more about their parents, Tracy broke off two pieces of wood from a rotted fence that ran along the road. She took off her jacket, pulled some straps from it, and fashioned a splint for the young girl’s leg. Once she finished, she motioned for Alysia to get up and walk to test it out.

“Feels great, Tracy. Thank you,” she said after limping around for a bit to see if it made a difference.

“Like I said, CeeCee, you’re a tough girl. Just … take better care of yourself out here. I’m sure that your dad has told you how it can go from bad to worse if you don’t plug a leak.”

“Sorry, I don’t get it,” Alysia said.

“Forget it; bad analogy. You need to take care of the minor things, like your sprain, or they turn into big problems. What if I get hurt and you have to carry me?”

“Yeah, I need to be on my toes. I get it.”

An hour passed and the girls thought they would end up having to walk back into town. They felt the familiar tremor of the giant from before and they both looked at each other as if they shared the same thought.

“We need to go,” Tracy said, and she reached down for Alysia to bring her back to her feet.

“Where IS everybody?” Alysia asked, frustrated. It was as if the people around the University had simply vanished. Tracy quickly picked up a large branch that had fallen and cut the limbs off to fashion a walking stick for Alysia. They began to walk north along the road, hoping that the further they went, the more the tremors would decline.

When they got to the first intersection, the light was out and there were several vehicles piled up from a collision. There was a parked car to the side and as they looked around to see if its owner was nearby, several of the dinosaur creatures came running at them from the road.

Tracy pulled out her handgun and fired off several rounds. Two of the creatures went down screaming, prompting the others to stop and investigate the fallen. She dropped the spent clip and began fumbling for another, but Alysia didn’t wait to see what would happen. She jumped into the driver’s seat of the car and popped the passenger door open.

“Wait, we can’t steal this car!” Tracy said to her as soon as she was in.

“Bad time for a joke, Tracy. This is life or death,” Alysia said, and she triggered the manual override and grabbed the steering wheel to control the car. The owner’s starter code was still in the console, so it obeyed her command and lifted into the air, ready to drive.

Tracy jumped in and slammed the door, and Alysia gunned it away from the creatures. She steered them towards the city, focusing only on the situation and not the “what if’s” that kept trying to invade her mind. Tracy relaxed in the passenger seat and reloaded her gun before putting it away.

“Pity these things can only hover and not fly,” she said.

“But then we’d have to deal with the flying monsters up there,” Alysia said, pointing her chin up at the numerous shadows that circled the skies above the city.

“What do you think is behind all of this?” Tracy asked as they cruised down the narrow two-lane road.

“I don’t know. I was trying to think of what the dino-things reminded me of, but the only thing that comes to mind is a video game.”

“Which one?”

Alysia looked over at Tracy, happy and surprised. She couldn’t believe that she, too, was a gamer.

“Uhm, Blue Fantasy… part six, Soula’s Blessing. When you run around gaining your experience on the game, you have these annoying little lizard things that charge you.”

“The kreples!” Tracy said as she thought on it, and it dawned on her that Alysia was correct. “Wait, those things look exactly like kreples!”

“Yeah, so technically you should have leveled up by now.” Alysia giggled. “Being that you killed like four of them back there.”

“That’s because I’m the high level archer of the group and you’re an injured monk class.”

“Call me a lowbie and I swear I will crash this car,” Alysia mumbled under her breath.

“No girl, you aren’t a lowbie. Just unlucky, but we’ll get you healed so you can level up, too.”

The banter was silly but necessary for their morale as they began to see more of the flying creatures circling the city in the distance. Periodically, there would be a giant’s head poking above the buildings, but it seemed like the military was trying to hold them off.

“The kreples are mutants,” Alysia finally said after there had been a block of silence between the two of them. “I think these are mutants too, considering their skin reminds me of a snake and they only have two legs. They’re so freaky looking.”

“I can accept that those little monsters are the results of an experiment gone wrong, but if you look over there, we have giant men walking around.”

“What’s to say that they aren’t an experiment, too?” Alysia said, and she looked over at Tracy and shrugged.

“Where are we going, CeeCee?” Tracy asked.

“What do you mean? We are going … well, I don’t know. I wanted to meet up with my parents.” Her voice trailed off and she thought on the question longer before looking over at Tracy. “You haven’t mentioned any family to me, or any concern for a husband, boyfriend, anything. I’ve just been talking and driving to my house but where do you want to go? Where are your people?”

“It’s just me, but I’d love to get some things from my apartment. I want to check in at the station, too – see what the situation is and why my guys are offline.”

“Are we ever going to wake up?” Alysia asked. “I keep telling myself that this is a dream, that at any moment now I’m going to wake up and find I was just dozing off in class. This nightmare or whatever it is it just can’t be real; I mean, look at that.” She pointed at the flying creatures having dogfights with what seemed to be fighter jets. The city was in turmoil and there was open war against the supernatural creatures.

“Maybe driving into town isn’t a good idea. We’re bound to get caught up in the crossfire and it looks like everyone evacuated the city,” Tracy said.

“Evacuated? They gave us no warning at school when it began. Normally, the intercom would go off and we would at least have some sort of warning to seek safety. It just happened and a lot of students lost their lives. I keep thinking about Lisa and—” Alysia caught herself as she felt a lump in her throat from the thought of her friend not making it out.

“Hey, it’s okay, CeeCee. I’m sure your friend made it out okay. We just need to—wait, slow down!”

They came to the last traffic light leading into the downtown area but a massive pileup of cars blocked the road. Injured people lay everywhere, and a crowd of panicked citizens ran towards them. As if anticipating the danger that was to come, Tracy stepped out of the car with her hand on her pistol. The mob didn’t seem to notice or care that the women were in the way, and they pushed past Tracy, almost knocking her down, in their mad dash to get out of the city.

Tracy jumped back into the car to wait it out, as they couldn’t move now that people were in the way. Some banged on the hood and screamed at them to run, but none stayed to see if they would listen. The entire town wanted away from the danger and to a man, they ran as if their lives depended on it.

“What’s in your apartment that you need to get?” Alysia asked.

“I have a cat, and I have some extra guns and ammo. My apartment is a few blocks up there; I’ll go get my things and meet you back here.”

Tracy didn’t hesitate in her departure and was running through the crowd by the time Alysia thought to say something to her. In a manner of minutes, she was gone, and it took everything within Alysia to keep her cool and to not panic. I have to call my parents, she thought, and pulled out her phone to make the call. Her charge was at 15% and she realized that she and Tracy hadn’t swapped numbers.

What if she gets in trouble and needs my help? Alysia thought to herself. How could I be so stupid and scatterbrained? Always get the contact information for people you’re responsible for, girl. Ugh, you know better!  She dialed the number but the phone went straight to voicemail. She hung it up and called her mother, praying with every ring that her voice would come on the other line, sweet and worried, the way she always sounded. The phone kept on ringing and she tried several more times before putting it away.

The skies were starting to darken from what appeared to be an incoming storm and the crowd running by her began to thin. Tracy will expect me to stay here, she thought, but moved the car to a curb and parked it to get out of the road.

~ * ~ * ~

Two long hours passed and there was no sign of Tracy. Alysia knew something was wrong. It wasn’t just because of the amount of time Tracy was taking, but because of the sinking feeling in her gut. She got out of the car, using the stick to support her foot, and limped towards where she had seen Tracy run. The empty streets reminded her of those old, post-apocalyptic movies. It almost looked like an old Western where the town emptied out before the good guy and the bad guy squared off. But there were no tumbleweeds blowing down their empty road. Just injured people and … Tracy.

At first, Alysia assumed that she had fallen and was catching her breath, based on the way she was laying. But as she got closer, she noticed there was blood.

“TRACY!” she screamed and her friend turned her face to look at her.

She could see tears streaming down Tracy’s face as she hustled to her side to help her out. She saw that the wounds from the day before were open and there were visible boot marks all over her body. It was as if she had fallen and the escaping citizens had run her over.

“What happened to you? Can you talk?” Alysia asked, feeling helpless and worried for her friend, who seemed to be in immense pain.

“Those bastards. They saw me leaving the apartment with the weapons and they jumped me,” she managed to say. “CeeCee, we needed those weapons. We can’t survive without them. Those thugs don’t care about anything that is going on. They’ll just prey on the weak, and with my guns a lot of innocent people will be hurt.”

“What about your cat?” Alysia asked as she knelt to help her up.

“He’s right here,” Tracy said as she shifted her weight and brought up her hand that held the kitten. “His name is Luciano.”

“That’s an odd name for cat, but it’s kind of cool. Come on, Luciano, we need to get you and your mama back to the car.”

It was hard for Alysia to tell the amount of pain that Tracy was in but she knew that it was significant. This athletic woman had run with her on her shoulders but could now only walk a few steps before stopping for air. They were both damaged and needed time to heal from their wounds. But by the time they made it to where she had parked, Alysia realized her mistake.

With that many people running to escape the city, why did she think it was a good idea to leave a functional car in the open? She stopped on the sidewalk, looking this way and that, knowing that someone had taken her car but hoping that she was wrong.

“As if anything more could happen to us,” Tracy said, then sighed and sat on the sidewalk as if in surrender. “We can go back up to my place. I have food and water, and we can rest up until we have the energy to go looking for another car.”

“I can’t believe I was so stupid,” Alysia said under her breath.

“Don’t beat yourself up, girl. You’re worried about me and I appreciate it, so don’t dwell on it. We’ll adjust and get through this, then we’ll go find your parents. I can’t tell what everyone’s running away from, besides all the fighting that’s going on above us, but we need to stay put for a day or so.”

“A day or so? What if another one of those giants comes through and smashes the apartment?”

“Look, CeeCee, we’re out of options. It has taken everything within me to walk, so forgive me if I can’t pick out a nice safe spot away from the giants. We’re going to have to take our chances here, make you a proper splint, and get my wounds cleaned. Plus, I got a couple more guns that I’ll be damned if I let get stolen by a bunch of hoodlums.”

Alysia agreed, and they limped to the tall building where Tracy lived and pushed open the glass sliding door to enter. The lobby looked ransacked, as if looters had found their way inside, but Tracey led them past it and towards a flight of stairs. She stayed on the fifth floor, but to Alysia and her aching ankle, it felt like the twenty-fifth.

When they got inside and locked the door, she fell to the ground, exhausted. Luciano was happy enough to be back in his familiar home, so he leapt from Alysia’s hands unto the couch, and made his way back into the bedroom.

“Are your parents expecting you, CeeCee? You may want to call them,” Tracy said after pouring herself a shot of vodka and knocking it back as if it was a painkiller.

“They aren’t answering their phones,” Alysia said, feeling even more worried when she heard the words come from her mouth. Why are they not answering their phones?

~ * ~ * ~

Tracy’s place was like a bunker that had everything stocked for the end of the world. She had a refrigerator full of food, a pantry stocked with hard rations, and her guest bedroom had the most comfortable bed Alysia had ever felt. As the days went by, they watched the television to keep up with the efforts to combat the invaders. They joked, argued, and told each other stories, but most important of all, they healed. It was on the sixth day, after many more failed attempts, that Alysia finally got a call back from her parents.

“Hey, baby girl, you okay?” Alysia’s dad said when the call connected.

“DAD, why haven’t you guys been answering my calls? I was so worried! You have no idea.”

“Alysia, your mom … She … I’m sorry, baby. Mom didn’t make it. She …” His voice cracked as he spoke but he kept his composure, though she could barely hear him because his voice was so low. “Your mom is dead. She passed a few days ago. I—I just couldn’t talk—”

“Oh no,” Alysia said as the words took time to register in her mind as reality. It felt as if time slowed down inside a bubble around her and the only thing moving was her brain. Quick flashes of memory tried to profile a vision of her mother. Her mind conjured up an image of her, watching television and laughing, or singing loudly to one of her old songs. When the memory was established and the sense of loss took over, Alysia found that she could talk again. “Mom died and you didn’t call to tell me?”

Alysia dropped the phone, put her hands up to her face and cried. She didn’t want Tracy to see her so she faced the wall away from the entrance to the bedroom. She cried hot, painful tears that knew no end, the pain of her loss too much to overcome. She understood why her father couldn’t call her but she had to lash out at him, anyway. It was too surprising, too much of a shock to lose her one and only mother.

She felt numb; now everything that was going on meant nothing. The concern for her safety, the wondering at why their world had turned upside down … nothing mattered but the fact that she would never be able to see her mother again.

She could hear her father’s voice through the fallen phone as she stared at the wall in disbelief. He was calling her name, begging her to pick it up and talk to him. She couldn’t move; she didn’t want to move. What was the point? Why bother?

She stood like that for a long time until a tremor shook the apartment and she heard Tracy curse in the background. She wanted to be okay, to move on and find her father so that they could mourn her mother together, but she could not move. Why me? she asked herself. Why is this happening to me?

Throughout her entire life, Alysia had heard her mother refer to her as the best thing that had ever happened to her. She was a gift in the form of an early pregnancy that had slowed her mother’s rise in the corporate sector. She went through abuse, poverty, and shame as a single mother before she started her own business.

When Alysia would hear the stories of her mother’s struggles, she would always feel a pinch of guilt. She used to wonder if her mother held any resentment towards her because of her birth, but Kendra loved her more than life itself.

There were rough patches in grade school and Alysia got into many fights. It felt as if her mother had a permanent seat in the principal’s office. Like many children in her position, she lashed out for attention.

When James Knight came into Kendra’s life, he claimed the entire package. Alysia was his daughter: no step, and no veiled titles. She was his, and he loved her to the point where she had to accept him, too. Her grades picked up and her behavior got better. He was there day and night, doting on her, loving her, and training her. The fractured Bell family became the Knights and when Alysia became a woman, love was the only thing that she remembered.

These memories of the past took over the young woman’s mind as she sat, frozen. James was still calling for her on the phone, the tremor of a giant still shook the ground, and Tracy was still screaming out expletives in the background. James Knight loved her, he loved her as his own, he was trying to talk to her, and she was ignoring him.

She realized what she was doing and picked up the phone and spoke into it. “Sorry, Daddy.”

She could hear him sobbing in the background when she did this. He didn’t want to lose her, too, and to hear the noises in the background and her silent on the other end had been torture.

“CeeCee, you okay? I know it hurts, baby. Your mother loved you more than life itself, you hear? So what I’m about to say to you is important.”

“What is it, Dad?”

“You need to survive and keep on living, no matter what comes in the next few days. Don’t let grief and carelessness squander your life. It’s what Kendra would ask of you. Live, so that you can tell your children about her. Look out for yourself, and don’t be a stranger.” He was speaking as if it was his last words and Alysia noticed this and panicked.

“Wait, where are you going, Dad?” she asked.

“I love you, baby girl. I need to handle something here, but when it’s done, I’m coming to get you.”

Alysia collapsed upon herself and bawled aloud when this happened, which prompted Tracy to run inside the room to see about her. She kept on asking her what was wrong, but Alysia was screaming and crying, so she ran over and held her close.

~ * ~ * ~

Two weeks passed before the power went out. The helicopters in the sky had disappeared and the streets were empty, save for looters and random creatures. The days held no sunlight, due to the thick black clouds that wouldn’t break, and the tremors had stopped completely. Alysia’s ankle was better but still a little sore, and Tracy was preparing for war.

When she wasn’t playing with Luciano, the policewoman was cleaning guns, stockpiling ammunition, and speaking violently about her plans for the creatures. Every other day they would leave the apartment to collect supplies. Tracy did not feel it was a good idea to travel until Alysia was “war ready,” as she put it, so they kept food stocked and she readied their weapons.

“How you doing, kid?” she asked Alysia one day as the young woman stared out through the glass door at a number of atrocities happening in the streets.

“That’s a good question,” Alysia replied. She was still numb and hurt from the loss of her parents, but she had gotten good at going through the motions.

“I bet you miss school,” Tracy joked, and Alysia looked at her to see if she was being serious.

“Do you know what I miss? I miss … control. I miss the ability to wake up, decide what I want to wear and then run with it. Whether I would take the bus or hover-lift to campus, skip a day, cram for a test, and attend a party. I miss all of it. Right now, we’re two fireflies stuck in some kid’s jar. We make plans as if we can get out, but in reality, we’re doomed, aren’t we? Any day now, something can come through that door and eat us, or some other thing can knock the building down. We—” She was crying again and screaming at Tracy and the police officer let her vent her frustration.

“We have control. Think about it, girl. No police.” She winked at her to let the irony sink in. “No rules, and all the guns and ammo we can use. I say we go down into the city and take it. We can become Amazonian queens and rule this hell until our last days!”

“Tracy, maybe I should be asking YOU how you’re doing,” Alysia said as she looked at her intently. “You sound insane.”

But she smiled at the thought of Tracy on a throne, protected by the dinosaur creatures that had attacked them. She was about to say something more when they heard gunshots and she saw a group of masked men running across the intersection. Tracy walked up to stand beside her and to see if she could get a better look at what had happened downstairs. They expected to see a creature chasing the running men but what they saw was a young man. He was lying on the street, bleeding out from the bullet wound he had suffered.

Tracy grabbed her handgun and ran outside, her police instinct too strong to resist the urge to get involved. Alysia made to go after her but Tracy stopped her, locking the door behind her as she descended the stairs to the street. This is foolish, Alysia thought, she is one woman and there were at least ten men running from the murder scene after it occurred.

She walked back to the glass door and stepped onto the porch; it was the first time she had been outside in days and the air smelled strong with sulfur. She could see Tracy hiding behind a post, trying to find the murderers, but they were gone and the streets had gone silent like they were before.

Tracy stood at the post for a time and Alysia began to worry for her being out there alone. I should be down there with her, she thought. But she felt weak and her leg was still hurting. As she made to go back inside to change and join her friend, she noticed some movement behind Tracy.

Without thinking better of it, she screamed at the top of her lungs. “TRACY, BEHIND YOU!”

The policewoman spun in time to catch the lizard-like kreple that had come to investigate the gunshot that it heard. She fired six shots into the creature as it ran towards her with its jaws agape. The bullets did the job and it crumpled lifeless in front of her as she spun this way and that to make sure there weren’t any more.

After another minute had passed, she checked on the young man. Alysia could see that they were having a conversation but after some time he slumped over and stopped moving. Tracy stood up and brushed back her unruly red curls before running back to the apartment building. When she came back inside and locked the door, she didn’t say anything. Alysia walked back inside and sat in front of her. Tracy looked up at the young girl and shook her head.

“We gotta get outta here, kid,” she said to Alysia after some time. “That poor guy told me that those murderers were once his friends but they’ve gone crazy.”

“Why did they shoot him down in the streets like that?”

“He said that he wouldn’t play along with their anarchy. We’re women and there is no one around to help us right now, Cee. We’re no longer safe in the city.”

Alysia understood what Tracy was getting at and knew that it was only a matter of time before the men found them. “Isn’t it a little early in the game for people to go full on Viking raider?” Alysia muttered.

Tracy shrugged and then ejected the clip from her handgun and replaced it. “You’re gonna have to learn how to shoot,” she said to Alysia while flipping the gun around to shove the butt into her hands. “Safety’s on. Let me show you where it is.”

She then proceeded to give Alysia a quick lesson on guns and their different properties. The lesson went on for a time before she heard a knock at the door and her heart fell to the floor. She put a finger up to her lips to tell Alysia to be quiet, and she tiptoed to the kitchen to collect a shotgun.

Alysia stood frozen, not knowing what to do, until Tracy pointed to the bedroom and mouthed the words for her to go. Alysia did as she was told. She took the safety off the gun and held it pointing down, thinking it wouldn’t be so difficult to actually shoot it.

The knocking on the door grew louder and more violent until it flew open and a large man with long brown hair stepped inside with a gun. Tracy deployed the shotgun and the man screamed and fell. A number of other men rushed at her and she jumped over the couch and rolled before firing off a few shots from her handgun. But one of the attackers shot back at her and she slid to the ground with her mouth open.

Alysia was upset with herself for her delayed reaction but it had all happened so fast that she was in shock. She raised her gun to fire it but couldn’t complete the motion. A few of the men pointed in her direction and then all of a sudden, everything went black.

3

“Wake her up and bring her over here,” were the first words Alysia heard.

She had been conscious for a time, but she was working out her options, and she worried that if she opened her eyes for too long, the big men inside of the house would get curious.

There wasn’t anything good about her captors. First, they were all men—four of them, from what she counted, and one of them was touching her thigh. The one barking the orders was a massive brute, and he called out to them from what appeared to be a bedroom. She gathered that she was in a cabin.

She was sitting in between two white men who looked like junkies, and there was a big black one guarding the only door. The leader was dark and disgusting, but she couldn’t tell if it was his complexion or the dirt from staying unwashed for days. The stench that permeated the house made her settle on the latter, and her imagination began to play at time-traveler, showing a future that she wanted no part of.

The two junkies grabbed her arms and started to drag her into the bedroom but she reacted instantly and somersaulted backwards, forcing them to release their grip. She kicked the closest one in the groin and he collapsed into a heap, but she didn’t wait for the other to react. Knocking his hand away when he reached for her, she threw a finger into his eye – a bloody good strike – and then scrambled for the gun that the first one had dropped.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Alright now, girl, calm on down,” the leader said as he walked to the doorway of the bedroom. He placed his hands above it and leaned forward. “Yo, Vinny we got us a live one here,” he said to the man by the doorway and smiled at her with a wicked glint in his eye. “I saw you in that apartment. You didn’t shoot at us like your girlfriend did. You ain’t got it in you.” And he walked forward and backhanded her across the face in what seemed like a millisecond.

The big man’s hand echoed painful throbs into her skull and Alysia was dazed and blinded by her tears. She knew what was coming next and she steeled herself to fight back. But a scream that came from Vinny made her look towards the front door.

Something had broken the door down and pulled him out, and the leader turned away from her to see what it was. He dropped her and ran outside, shouting. A few gunshots went off and she could hear the thumping of someone beating something rapidly. She hopped up and checked the gun. Why was she so afraid to shoot a human being? I am not a murderer, she reminded herself, and then threw the gun down.

She sprinted outside, making sure that she headed in the opposite direction of the leader. It was dark and the clouds were covering the moon, but she could make out some cloaked figures that moved to intercept her as she fled. They were relentless in their pursuit, and though she got deep into the woods that bordered the cabin, they eventually caught her and threw a bag over her head.

~ * ~ * ~

It had been early in the morning when James Knight took off to find Alysia, but by the time he rolled into town, it was late in the afternoon. He observed the lay of the land and found the silence disturbing.

He parked his bike and stepped out into the street, looking up at the high-rises and trying to see if there was any sign of his daughter. He couldn’t find anything, so he rode around on the various streets for a time until he found the dead body of the man.

James was a master tracker, back when he was a US Navy SEAL, so he checked the body and the nearby buildings. Tracy’s footsteps led him upstairs and he followed them until he found the charnel house that was her apartment.

A kitten poked his head up from behind Tracy’s body, and James walked over and looked at her, recognizing that she was the friend Alysia had told him about. Tracy was still alive but she had lost a lot of blood. James helped her up and took her to the room, where he looked over her wounds and did what he could to help her.

“Are you Alysia’s dad?” she asked in a weak voice as James bandaged her shoulder and held her still.

“Yeah, I’m James Knight,” he said, smiling at her as he walked to the sink to wash his hands.

“Thank you, James… CeeCee—”

“They got her? Those punks got my girl?” he asked, and Tracy tried to read the emotions in his face but found that he was too composed to reveal them.

“I—I think so,” she managed and shook her head in disappointment over what had transpired.

“Who are these fools and what do they want with Alysia?” he asked, his focus solely on getting enough information to rescue his child.

“They are thugs, taking advantage of the situation. CeeCee is alive, I’m damn sure of it, but they took her away, and I was too hurt to notice where they took her to.” It was after saying this that Tracy realized that she had left the guns out when they attacked and more than likely, they had taken everything.

~ * ~ * ~

Alysia woke up to a loud noise and the feeling of something burning against her face. She felt binds on her hands and feet and when she opened her eyes, she saw a strange ritual going on. There were a number of men dancing around a bonfire. Some of them she assumed were her kidnappers, but all she could make out were their silhouettes. She wanted to scream, but she didn’t know where she was or why they had taken her so she thought better of it.

She was no longer in the city and all around she could see trees. The men ran around the fire screaming like banshees and as her vision got better, she noticed they weren’t men, after all. Their ears had points, and their posture held a beastlike quality. Some of them had small horns, and their skin looked charred – black with a bit of red poking out. When she looked at them, they reminded her of barbecue.

How funny would it be if gangs of barbecue ribs were my captors? she thought. They were probably upset with the human race for eating them.

Two females walked over, released her bonds, and then dragged her to a tent nearby. The combined smell of their sulfurous bodies and the heat of the bonfire made Alysia gag. She sized them up to see if she could get the slip on them but she felt weak to the point of passing out.

They stripped her of her clothing and undid her braids, brushing oils into her hair and on her skin. When they were finished, they forced her into a purple dress, lay her on a bed and tied her hands and feet to the post.

“Really, this is what you captured me for?” she said to them, defiantly. “I’m sure some demon king or something is going to walk in here next and you all are just going to let him do whatever he wants with me, right?”

The women looked at one another and then kept on working, and then they left the tent to join the circle with the others. Alysia was frightened and she could feel the loud thumps from her heart beating in her ears. The demons were singing now and the fire had grown, its brilliance shining through the thin fabric of the tent. She tugged at the ropes that held her wrists and cursed at the fact that she was too weak to break them.

She used her body to see if the bed could move, and when it rocked from her attempts, she felt a glimmer of hope. Rocking and shifting her weight this way and that, Alysia managed to loosen one of the binds on her arms. She kept this going until she had one hand free, and when she was finally out, she looked around for a weapon.

Run Alysia, she told herself, and then looked at the doorway where the women were waiting for whomever it was that was supposed to be her consort. She lifted the lower part of the tent near the rear and slid under it, staying low to the ground as she did.

The demon circle was right in front of her, but they were looking at a particularly large, shadowy figure as he stepped from out of the circle and walked proudly to the tent. She slipped into the bushes and started sprinting; this time, she had a good lead on them and since they hadn’t discovered her escape yet, she felt good about her chances. I must be special, she thought. A city full of people and they choose me.

The woods were thick and black on all sides but she kept on running despite the rocks digging into her bare feet. When she came upon another campsite she pulled up short. Her heart sank as she looked at what seemed to be the aftermath of a massacre.

There were bodies everywhere, charred and disfigured, and on the ground near what used to be a bonfire lay the corpse of a woman in a purple dress very much like her own. Alysia paused to examine her fully, and the evidence of what the demons meant for her played itself out in graphic detail.

The girl looked as if they had drained her blood, and her skin was pale to the point where she was alabaster beneath the moon. They had drawn all sorts of symbols on her body, and her wounds were different compared to the others that lay strewn all over the clearing.

Alysia cursed herself for staying too long, and took off running back into the woods. She was crying but she didn’t know why. Maybe it was the thought that she would have been that girl if she hadn’t escaped the night before, or maybe it was tears of joy.

She kept on running until she came upon another site, this one empty and eerily quiet. She walked through it towards a large expanse of grassy field that sat bordered on three corners by the untamed forest. She wondered what the city had planned to do with this big field but it didn’t matter; the grass felt good beneath her feet.

Her mind was racing and all she could think about was the pale, marked up girl in the purple dress. What were the symbols, why did she look drained? Alysia thought of all the movies she had seen and all of the games she had played and her imagination went wild. She thought of the demons summoning something that they needed, or better yet “someone.”

She realized she had been standing in the open field going over this and that she had stopped moving. The moonlight shone down on her like a spotlight and she turned around slowly to see if the demons were coming for her. She saw nothing and the only sounds she could hear were the sounds of people screaming in the direction of the city. She forced her legs to start walking, the soft grass of the field massaging the soles of her feet and tickling her toes. Why me? she thought. Why was I the one chosen for sacrifice?

She brought her wrist up to her nose and smelled the oil; it was strong and sweet. She wondered what the demons wanted to summon. Was it a beautiful, demon queen, born from the vessel of a young, chaste woman? Or was it something monstrous and terrible, bursting from the flames and gobbling up any demon that stood too close when it emerged?

Alysia was still deep in thought when suddenly the clouds covered the moon, and the sky turned pitch black. When lightning struck she fell to her knees as her fear finally broke through. The lightning had revealed the form of a giant that stood up from the forest and was looking down at her as she sat frozen on the grass. The clouds pulled back a bit and the silhouette of the giant stood menacingly before her as he watched her every move.

“Snap out of it, CeeCee!” she yelled at herself, and she stood up, shaking, looking about for a place to run. Anywhere she ran, the giant could catch her. The only thing she could do was retrace her steps and run back the way she had come. The giant was forcing her to confront the demons, or go back to the ritual and play her role. She could face the giant, who could smash her with one step, or she could turn around, hide until daytime, and let the demons have her.

Fight or flight, baby girl, she could hear her father say as she dusted off the dress and ran towards the giant. He stepped out into the clearing to face her, but she didn’t slow her sprint as she darted towards his feet. The creature let out a loud roar that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but she was too committed to let it stop her. She was going to get out of the clearing and into the woods behind the giant.

The giant lifted his foot and slammed it down at Alysia but she jumped and rolled out of the way as she ran to his other foot. She grabbed one of the jagged toenails on his planted foot and jerked up on it hard, causing it to tear away from the toe. The giant bellowed out in pain and fell backwards to grab his injured foot and Alysia sprinted towards the woods.

She laughed at herself loudly as she ran. She was fearless, and she didn’t know why. She had faced kreples, demons, and fought a giant, but much of it came from instinct, nothing calculated, planned, or even reasoned through. Her adrenaline was up and she had gotten used to her heart racing. It felt good, and for the first time she could appreciate the cool night air against her skin.

~ * ~ * ~

James Knight washed the blood from his hands as he looked over at the bullets that lay in a plate next to the sink. He lifted his eyes to the sleeping woman bandaged up and lying on the couch. He knew that he should leave her and find his daughter but he couldn’t do it. Tracy was hurt and she needed him; he would give her one more day and they would set out for Alysia together.

He hoped that he had gotten her bullets out without rupturing anything, and he hoped that he had found all of them. It was in this instance that he missed his wife the most. Kendra was an ace when it came to patching people up, and everything he knew he learned from her. He thought about her smooth, mahogany skin and her large brown eyes, and a painful loneliness took over him.

It was Luciano, the happy kitten that saved him from his dark thoughts. The cat managed to get his attention, as he stood frozen, letting the water wash over his hands and coalesce into the drain. He turned it off, dried his hands, and lifted the tiny cat up to look him in the eye. Luciano meowed and pawed playfully at his face, forcing him to smile and pet behind his ear gently.

“Well, aren’t you the little survivor,” James said to him as he took him to the loveseat next to Tracy and continued to pet him.

“How long was I out?” Tracy asked as she looked over at the big man, petting away at her Luciano. “Aww, I see he got you too, huh?” she said and smiled at Luciano and waved.

The kitten lazily looked away from his new friend to see the familiar Tracy and meowed meekly before hopping onto her chest.

“Back to mommy,” James said, and then stood up and looked around. “You were out for a few minutes. How do you feel?”

“Alive, but I can barely move,” she said, looking down at her bandages and then throwing her head back in frustration. “You know, I’ve been a cop for three years now and I haven’t gotten so much as a scratch on my body this whole time. World goes to hell and I start getting hurt. Helluva lucky streak I got going.”

“Who took Alysia?” he asked her bluntly.

“A couple of thugs. They were wrapped up and masked real good, like they don’t want anyone to identify them.”

“You got one of them,” he said, as he walked over to the window and looked out at the setting sun.

“Yeah, just one, but the others got CeeCee.”

“It’s not just men out there capturing people,” James said without looking at her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, trying in vain to sit up.

“I shot, killed and burned the body of someone that tried to pull me from my bike. What I burned was not a man; it was some kind of demon. Red skin, horns, black lips… just no horned tail or bat wings.”

“Demons? Are you freaking kidding me? Demons are running around, too?” Tracy asked and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had always joked about it being the end of the world but now the religion of her youth was flaring up. It must be the end of days, the apocalypse, and Satan was sending his creatures up to earth in order to harvest souls. “So, we have kreples—”

“Cripples?” James asked in a concerned tone as he turned to look at her.

“No, kreples. The lizard creatures that are everywhere,” Tracy said, hoping he wouldn’t ask anything more about the name.

“How do you know their name?”

She sighed. “It’s from a videogame that CeeCee and I both play. Those creatures look just like them, so we call them kreples.”

James wanted to smile. “You mean, Blue Fantasy Six. I’m the one that got her into that game. So you’re a fellow Paladin, too, huh?” he asked, referring to the common title players of the game dubbed themselves.

“All Paladin here, James. Just like your daughter.”

“Call me Jimmy,” he said and sat back down on the loveseat to look at her. “Need anything? Painkillers, liquor? I know it hurts like hell.”

“I’m good; the conversation helps take my mind off it. So demons, too, huh? kreples, giants, and freaking demons.” She made a popping noise with her mouth and then stared past him to the setting sun. “It will be dark soon. We have no lights here and it gets pretty creepy outside with all the screams and whatnot.”

“Do you have candles?” James asked.

“I have a couple bulb droids,” she said and pointed to a mechanical orb on the table.

James picked it up and twisted it once. The droid hummed and floated up towards the ceiling where it began to glow, illuminating the entire room.

“Tomorrow we will need to get moving, find Alysia, and take her back from those damned things,” James said.

Tracy smiled at his small voice. It was a welcome surprise from the large, intimidating man, and she wanted to get to know him better. There was something gentle and pure about him, and she really, really liked him. Maybe it was Alysia’s story about how he had taken her and her mother in, or maybe it was the fact that he had saved her life. Whatever it was, she enjoyed him being there. And as they talked into the night, she fell asleep to the sound of his voice.

It was early the next morning when they headed out. Tracy could barely move and the cold air that seemed to come from everywhere made her pain worse as she struggled to walk with him. The big man had bandaged her up, and she was on enough painkillers to make it tolerable, but still it wasn’t enough.

“No way am I gonna be able to ride on that thing,” she said when she saw his hover-bike.

He looked at her and sized her up. “It hovers. No bumps, no discomfort. Plus, this one’s been rigged to fly up beyond a foot,” he said proudly as he walked over to her and placed his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m not worried about the pain; I’m worried about falling off. That seat is obviously meant for one person.”

“This is why you will need to trust me,” he said. “You’ll have to sit facing the other way.” And he watched her eyes to see if she understood.

“You mean sit on your lap facing the other way,” she said, looking at him to see if she could read something in his intent.

“Listen, my girl is out there hurting somewhere. I only hesitated because of your condition. Do you really think that—?”

“Okay!” Tracy said, realizing he was right. “Let’s just head out. The longer we stay out here, well, you know.”

He kick-started the bike and it roared like a mechanical lion. She tugged at her jeans to pull them up more as she threw her leg over his and sat facing him. She almost found it comical, as he adjusted her enough so that he could see past her face. She reached down and held the bars that ran alongside his seat and he handed her a large handgun.

“If we get followed, you can keep ‘em off us,” he said and she tried to ignore her pain and think past the fact that she was on his lap.

“So, quick question before we leave,” she said.

“Yeah, sure, what is it?”

“This tiny crotch rocket you have us on. It will get us around, no doubt about that, but what happens when we find CeeCee? Where is she gonna fit?”

“I’ll figure it out,” he said, and they lifted into the air and took off.

4

“So, how do we find her?” Tracy asked as she lay on the dirty sleeping bag, bordered by tall grass.

It was the question of the century and James didn’t have an answer for it. He had tracked the demons that took his daughter all the way to a campsite, but something had caused them to scatter. He would follow some steps one way and then come back to follow some others, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. Tracy was doing better, but they had to take numerous breaks and on this particular day, he had allowed her to stay still while he did his tracking.

“She ran this way,” he said and pointed back towards the area that he had come from. “Into the city, away from those things. I found a bathroom where she was for a time, and then a few corpses up further. My girl was fighting all night, and it looks like she got a few of ‘em. We should keep moving; I’m on to her trail now.”

Tracy nodded but groaned as the pain was becoming unbearable. She tried to soldier through it but James took notice.

“Tell you what, Tracy. Let’s get you somewhere safe; you don’t need to be running around with me, looking for CeeCee. I’ll find her and then we’ll come back for you. I don’t know what kind of hell the world is turning into, but you’re a survivor. We need your help just like you need ours.”

Tracy wanted to object, but sleep and recuperation sounded like heaven. She knew James was a military man, and he more than looked like he could take care of a few thugs.

“Not cool of me to let a partner go out on his own against the enemy,” she joked, and he looked at her as if he was trying to decipher the meaning behind her words.

“Wouldn’t be my first time soloing it, Tracy. You just heal and stay alert. No telling what those damn things really are.”

They rode back into the city and found an old Raze Hotel. It had 23 floors and the refrigerator, which should have been raided, still had water in it. James grabbed anything that hadn’t spoiled from the heat, lifted Tracy into his arms, and walked her up to the eleventh floor. She tried to object but he ignored her; speed was more important than ego for him. Tracy got down and gingerly walked over to a door, motioning for him to come over when she got there.

“I think I like this, room number 1121. It’s easy to remember, plus it’s lucky number twenty one, right?”

James smiled at her as he tried to slow down his beating heart. “I see that the police lady plays a little blackjack on the side eh?”

“Actually I meant basketball, big man. When I heal, I’ll take you out on the court and school you.”

“Yeah, and that won’t be happening,” he said under his breath as he tried the door. He knocked three times before putting his ear down and listening. “You just might be in luck, lady,” he said to her as she forced a smile and played with her hair. He spun, causing her to fall against the wall in a panic, and side kicked the door in. Once inside, they found the room spotless, and Tracy walked over to the bed and tested it with her hands.

She pushed open the curtains to let the sunlight in and then kicked off her boots before sitting on the bed. James walked into the bathroom and tried the tap; there was still running water and he walked back into the room to give Tracy the thumbs up.

“You have my number, right?” he asked her, and she shook her head and pointed to her phone, which was out of battery power. “We should have broken into one of these electronic stores and grabbed us a few of those,” he said, frustrated.

“Aww, it’s okay, Jimmy. When I feel better, I may do that. Just keep trying to call – one day I’ll pick up.”

James nodded and then looked around the room as if he were taking inventory mentally of what was in there. She had a bag full of junk food, wine and water; courtesy of the downstairs bar, and then there was a little refrigerator stocked full of more adult beverages, in case she ran out. “Looks like you have enough liquor to keep you under until we get back,” he joked and she brushed her wild hair back to wink at him, then turned to look out at the abandoned city.

“Why don’t you stay?” Tracy said without looking at him. “Just the night. It’ll be evening soon and you won’t get very far. Plus, you just carried 130 pounds up eleven flights of stairs. You’re a big guy but you have to be exhausted. Just like, sit down for a sec, will you? Alysia needs you, I know, but you won’t be any good to her worn down and hungry.”

~ * ~ * ~

Darkness, loneliness, and anxiety, were just a few of the emotions Alysia experienced as she walked through the woods away from the giant. She had heard him stand up when she ran away and had come into the woods to look for her. She kept walking the entire night, worried that a gang of kreples would assault her, or the demons would catch up to her again. When she grew tired, she wanted to stop, but her mind wouldn’t let her do it, not until she was out of the woods—literally.

She pushed on through until the sound of helicopters pulled her up short, and she walked up to a fence that kept the trees back from what appeared to be a compound. There were many parked vehicles and military personnel walking about, and in the background, she could see a large assortment of tents. So, this is where they evacuated everyone to, she thought and looked around for an exit to the fence. There was none and she assumed that it had electricity flowing through it to stop the creatures. It was tall enough to stop a giant, and in the distance, she saw large guns pointed in her direction.

She flagged down a guard walking by and he came up to her with his gun drawn, ready to shoot. When he saw that Alysia was an actual human being, he motioned for her to come close so he could talk to her. The way he kept looking around made Alysia suspicious.

“You cut all the way through the barrens?” he asked, looking her over suspiciously and flinching a bit when he saw that she had bare feet.

“Yes, I was chased by one of those giant … things.”

“What about the red zombies; you see any of them out there?”

“Yeah, they were who I was running from when I saw the giant,” Alysia said, annoyed at the questions that didn’t seem to hint at him letting her in.

“Well, sorry, see I can’t let you in here,” he said, looking down at his feet as if they would help him.

“How come? Look, I’ve been walking all night, those things want to kill me and—“

“This is a military base. We have strict rules not to take in any civilians. We got our hands full with those damn things attacking us, and the last thing we can do is take care of you.”

Alysia looked over his shoulder at the tents, and she could see a number of people who were obviously civilian, talking to one another and walking about.

“You mean that you don’t want me in there,” she said to him, and he made to object when she started screaming loudly. “HELP! I NEED HELP! WHY WON’T YOU LET ME IN?”

A few more soldiers ran up to see what the noise was about and after a few exchanges and a Major being summoned, Alysia was led to an area of the fence where they could power it down and allow her access. She wanted to punch the man that denied her entry but held her composure as they escorted her into the camp. The soldiers gave her a tent to sleep in and it was more than she expected. It had a bathtub full of hot water and food, along with books and electronic equipment. She took a long bath and massaged her sore feet, and then she dried herself, tried on a few of the clothes and scarfed down the foodstuffs.

When she was finished getting situated, she lay on the inflatable mattress and tried to sleep. It was something that her body needed but her mind refused to let her have. She lay there for what felt like hours, thinking about the demons and the giant that almost took her life. When she finally closed her eyes and drifted off, she dreamed the same scene repeatedly as if she was under a curse to keep on reliving the nightmare. Gunshots and explosions forced her awake and when she finally got her bearings, she noticed there was a lot of movement going on outside.

She rose and turned on the lamp next to the mattress and looked around for anything that could serve as a weapon. The only thing she saw that could work was a box of pots and pans. That wouldn’t do, so she pulled on a pair of jeans and slid on some canvas shoes that fit her. She snatched a ragged t-shirt from the pile of clothes to complete her ensemble and then pulled open the zipper that sealed her tent.

It looked as if she was in the middle of a war. There were soldiers everywhere, firing this way and that, and the demons were among the tents, tearing them apart, as well as their inhabitants. Alysia couldn’t believe what she was seeing; the fence had collapsed under the body of a dead giant and the demons were pouring through, violent and enraged. The soldiers were fighting bravely and efficiently, and although the demons number seemed endless, the humans were winning.

Alysia didn’t know what to do in that instant. She didn’t have a gun to help in the fight, and she was still exhausted and groggy. She couldn’t take her eyes off the fallen giant, wondering how it was they had managed to kill it from behind the fence.

A pair of young men that seemed to be around her age ran up to her tent, and the first one used his handgun to shoot a demon that had slipped past the soldiers. He wasn’t dressed like a soldier but he was armed, and Alysia wondered if he was up to no good.

“Hey, you can’t just stand out in the open like that,” he said to her as he ran up to her and turned to protect her from anything incoming. He had brown hair and broad shoulders and seemed too skinny for his frame. The other boy was heavyset with glasses, brown skin and a mass of black hair. He didn’t say anything as he looked around frantically. She saw that he was holding a gun, too.

“Do you have a gun I can borrow?” Alysia asked as she came out to join them, looking around to make sure that a demon hadn’t gotten behind them. The second kid handed her a small revolver, and she took it and nodded at him as they all stood watching the soldiers fight against the waves of demons. “What the hell are those things?” Alysia asked, and the brown-skinned boy looked at her as if she was crazy.

“What? You haven’t heard?” he said, and his songlike accent threw her off guard as she mentally tried to figure out where he was from.

“No, heard what?”

“They’re like zombies or something. When people started dying in the cities from the baby dinosaurs or whatever, the red zombies came in to finish them off. I mean, they aren’t ‘zombies’ like they want your brains or something, but they aren’t human. Some of them even have horns, like little devils or something.”

A demon ran at them after smashing in a soldier’s face and the trio shot at it several times until it went down screaming. Alysia wasn’t sure if either of the two shots she fired had connected.

“That’s an MA15, small caliber weapon,” the brown-skinned boy said as he looked at her. “I got it off the body of a guard during the last attack. As long as you don’t shoot it a bunch of times in succession, it will regenerate the bullets. All of these guns have that feature, not like our civilian guns. Pretty cool, right?” When he said this, the quiet, taller boy gave him an annoyed glance, then focused again on the fighting.

“What about the giants?” Alysia asked. “The giants, the kreples—I mean, dinosaurs or whatever, and the flying bat creatures? What are they?”

“What do you think they are? Creatures from hell, come to collect our souls and turn us into demons,” the taller boy said. It was obvious that he was joking sarcastically but Alysia wondered how far off he was from the truth. “My name’s Jaime, by the way. This here’s my frat brother, Debdan.”

“My name is Alysia, but you can call me CeeCee. I just got here a few hours ago.”

The boys nodded and got quiet as they concentrated on the demons, shooting at the stragglers that got near them, doing their best not to hit any of the frantic refugees running about. Some of the men and women in the camp were trained fighters, so the soldiers had help to hold off the demon rush. When the attackers quieted down and they began to tend to the wounded and dead, a loud screech pierced the air and a large kreple charged the camp. No matter how many bullets they pumped into the charging behemoth, it wouldn’t slow as it gained access to the camp and bit into a large, portly man before moving on to another.

One by one it went around biting at them until a brave soldier shot it point blank with a shotgun.

“Debdan, Jaime, we can’t stay here,” she said to them. “I’ve survived on my own against those things but I think I only managed because I kept on moving, sleeping on rooftops during the night and running through the woods during the day.”

“We have guns, ammo, and shelter here,” Debdan said to her. “Why do you think you are safer out there with no resources than in here where people have your back?”

Alysia thought he had a point, but she looked around at the chaos from their skirmish. What would happen to them if three kreples of that size were to charge their camp? What if five, six, or even twenty showed up?

“What is the plan here, guys? Why did the military bring everyone here? Are they planning to bomb the city, or is there rescue coming for us?”

The boys looked at one another and shook their heads at her. Nobody knew what the plan was, if there even was one.

There was some commotion amongst the huddled refugees as a rather large, bearded man led his family through to face the soldiers, and Jaime nudged the other two to look at him. He was angry and he began cussing and yelling at the soldiers so that everyone could hear. He was upset about the raid and the soldiers, in their own dramatic way, silenced him with threats to remove him from the settlement.

Things went on like that for a time; soldiers and civilians were angry and frustrated with what had happened. So to get out of the line of fire, the boys took Alysia to their tent where they continued their discussion on the military’s plan.

“They’re saying that those creatures aren’t supernatural, after all,” Jaime said as he sat on the mattress and took out a cigarette. Alysia glanced at it with disdain but bit her tongue on objecting since it wasn’t really her tent.

“Oh yeah, then what are ‘they’ saying that they are?” Alysia asked, her eyes locked on the cigarette as Jaime took a long drag and exhaled the smoke through his nose.

“Genetically engineered, mutant experiments, perfected,” he said, looking extra relaxed from the tobacco smoke. “You a smoker?”

“No,” she said to him and he shrugged it off. “So, someone made those creatures to wipe out humanity, but to what end? What is the point of all this, and how in the hell is that even possible?”

“The speculation is that it isn’t one person that made these things but a team of scientists, hired by a government agency, or an evil genius-type to take over the world,” Debdan chimed in, his face excited as the light from the lamp illuminated his features in a strange way.

“You both watch way too many movies and read way too many graphic novels. Do you hear yourselves? Evil geniuses, genetic mutants … the next thing you’re going to tell me is that there is some flying man or woman in tights, ready to save humanity with her ice breath or whatever.” She sighed. “Oh, boys.” She feigned a laugh and looked at them, then turned it into a real one. “I love that you can joke about it though; I needed that. I haven’t laughed in days.”

Jaime didn’t seem amused by her laughter. “Have it your way, then. Don’t believe us. But how difficult is it to believe what we’re saying when you yourself were being chased by a giant man and a bunch of little red demons? Wanna talk logic, Alysia, let us start there.”

Alysia didn’t know what to say so she remained silent, and thought about the days of escape that had led up to her meeting them. Would things ever go back to normal, or was this to be her life moving forward? “Hey, sorry, Jaime, Debdan, but do either of you have a phone? I want to see if my father is okay.”

Jaime handed her his phone and pointed at the power. He had ten percent left on his battery and she understood immediately. She took the phone and punched in her father’s number, not to call but to send a text with the location of the camp and a simple “I love you, please be safe.” She knew her father well and knew that if anything, he would be trying to find her.

“You’re lucky to have people alive,” Jaime said as he pulled on the last bit of the cigarette. She made to ask him what he meant but he quickly waved her off as if he anticipated it. “Don’t ask; I don’t want to think about it. But you’re lucky. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Alysia got up and peeked outside at the campgrounds. It was still chaotic out there and the hour was growing late, but she was beginning to feel a sense of urgency. She ducked back inside the tent where Debdan was laying down and Jaime was looking over a map of the city.

“Hey, do you think I can keep this gun you loaned me?” she asked them, crossing her fingers that they would say yes.

“It wasn’t a loan; you’re gonna need it,” Jaime said without looking up from the map. “Tiny girl like you, everything big and badass out there. You need to keep that to protect yourself, or us, for as long as we’re together.”

She was happy to hear it and sat down to look at its features. She could see where the safety was, a switch to change the mode of fire, and a place to attach an extension to the barrel.

“That second mode allows you to depress the trigger without it overheating,” Jaime said to her as he watched her play with the gun. “See, you can fire that thing rapidly and it will get hot, but that setting makes it shoot twice every second. You can keep up a steady rate of fire, but it’s slow. Depends on the situation.”

“Thanks for being cool, Jaime,” Alysia said and he smiled at her and nodded as he went back to his map. “What are you looking for anyway?” she asked, walking over to sit in front of him at the table.

“I’m trying to see if there is a pattern with these damn things. They came from the east, like from the Atlantic, and hit us like a wave that’s trying to swallow the entire country. Only a handful of giants, but those dinosaurs are spreading faster than you can imagine.”

Alysia thought about the ritual and her capture. She wondered what it was that they had planned for her before she managed to escape. “Can those demons infect people to turn after they die?”

“Not that I’ve seen. The zombies have intelligence; they want to kill us but it’s not for food or anything like that. At the school, Debdan and I saw them slaughtering people. They weren’t taking prisoners or biting on anyone.”

“So why are you calling them zombies? They look and act more like demons to me.”

“We call them zombies because they sorta look like ‘em. Just because they have horns and red skin doesn’t mean that they’re from hell or whatever. Tell you what, we can think of them as demon zombies. That way we’re both right. All I know is that I don’t want to turn into one of them. So if I go down, you all need to make sure to double-tap. One in my chest, and another right here.” He pointed to his forehead.

“Debdan, is he always this dramatic?” Alysia asked, and the boy rolled over and nodded his head, which prompted Jaime to give him the middle finger.

“Call me Dan,” he said to Alysia after he returned the finger to Jaime. “You can call me Dan.”

“My friends call me CeeCee,” Alysia returned and the two boys said “cool” in unison, which prompted her to smile.

5

Tracy woke up about a day later and it took her some time to realize where she was. Looking around, she could tell that she was in a room of sorts, but she didn’t know if it was a hospital or some sort of hotel. The one thing she did know was that it was unfamiliar, and the stinging pains in her chest were from the bullets from a few days ago.

Her vision was blurry and she felt weak from the drugs James had given her. She sat up on the bed and tried to replay everything in her mind in terms of what she had gone through. She remembered James running her up the stairs and she remembered a little bit of their conversation.

One thing that stood out vividly was her asking him to stay, even though he wanted to go and rescue his daughter. She felt embarrassed by the memory. Why did I do that, she thought. He probably thinks that I am the most selfish woman in the world right now. Then she remembered that he stayed and it made her feel a little bit better.

She hoped that Alysia was okay; she really liked the girl and she knew that to James, she was not only family but also much more. She could feel the slight stinging of her wounds through the bandages and she pulled up her shirt to see if everything was in place.

Aside from a few dry bloodstains on her bandages, everything seemed okay. She kicked her legs off the bed and forced herself to stand even though the drugs made the room shift as if she were on a boat. She steadied herself and threw open the blinds, looking out on the city which stood stark and abandoned under the high noon sun.

She opened a large bag of chips and scarfed them down as if she were starving. She consumed another bag, along with some warm soda and a tall bottle of water. When she was through eating and feeling sick, she lay down and closed her eyes, trying to pull up whatever memory she could of the last few days.

Alysia’s dad had saved her twice and she found herself thinking a little bit too much about him. It was something about the way he looked; no, it was more like the way he was that she found very attractive. When she had asked him to stay, it wasn’t so much for him to rest but more so that she could stay with him.

She had started to notice the crush when they talked about guns during the hover-bike ride. She thought she knew everything there was to know about the guns of their age, but James was a wealth of knowledge. She knew that he’d been in some branch of the military at one point but he changed the subject when she asked him. Still, it wasn’t often that she got to talk guns with anyone, considering it was such an unpopular topic during that time.

She got up and went to the bathroom to wash her face, bathe, and change clothes. When she was through, she tried to walk around more but she quickly got tired and decided it would be best for her to lie down for at least another day. She sat back on the bed and peered through the window, looking to see if she could spot some kreples or some of the sneaky demons. She went through the struggle of fighting boredom for another hour before it got too much to bear and she decided to exit the room.

When she got down to the ground floor, she heard some people talking and she crept to the glass and looked through to see who it was. There were several men and women going through the storage area, looking for food. She hadn’t realized that so many people were still in the hotel and although she wanted to make friendly, she wasn’t yet ready to trust outsiders.

She watched them for a time until a sound from above the stairs brought her around. She knew that someone would be coming down to join the rest so she slipped to the back of the stairs and hid beneath them.

A little dark-haired girl and her mother came down the stairs and opened the door.

“Is there anything left?” said the mom and the replies were both hostile and loud as the desperate people all but told her where to shove her question. Tracy came out and looked through the glass again and saw that they were not only shouting at her but were not letting her anywhere near the bar while the little girl was crying.

After a time, the mother walked back to the staircase, defeated. She shut the door and Tracy stepped out of the shadows and motioned for her attention. The little girl posed to make a loud scream but her mother covered her mouth quickly and looked back through the glass.

“Calm down, little one. I am here to help,” Tracy said as she too looked through the glass to make sure nobody else was coming. “I have some food in my room if you guys are hungry but it’s just junk. Potato chips, water, and candy.”

The little girl perked up when she said candy and the mother smiled through a face that looked drawn and emaciated. She nodded rapidly at Tracy as if she were unable to speak in that instance. “Okay, then follow me, but please be quiet and you cannot tell the others where I am or what I have,” Tracy said.

They climbed the stairs up to where Tracy’s room was. This took a bit of effort due to her injury and the tiny girl’s struggle to climb the steps. Once inside, she handed them the bag and they immediately dove in, eating like people that hadn’t eaten in days.

“When was the last time you guys had anything to eat?” Tracy asked.

“It’s been two days,” said the mother. She stared at Tracy for a time with a half-finished chip hanging out of her mouth and then looked at her daughter and motioned for her to stop eating. She stood there for a moment, looking at Tracy. “I’m so sorry, where are my manners?” she said, the chip falling down onto her lap. “Thank you so much for your help. My name is Angelica and this is Maria.”

Tracy smiled at Maria, brushed her hair gently out of her face, and then touched Angelica on her shoulder to let her know that it was okay. She was happy to have the company of people and it felt good to help others even though she knew that the smart thing to do would have been to hoard the food for as long as she could.

“You’re wounded and hurt,” Angelica said as she saw a bit of blood peeking out of Tracy shirt.

“Yes, these are bullet wounds,” said Tracy. “I’m a police officer but I didn’t get shot from doing my job. These wounds actually came from men looking to take advantage of me when I was in my apartment. They came when the monsters were everywhere and tried to rob me and my friend; that’s when they shot me.”

“We have had our share of bad men during this whole thing, too,” said Angelica.

“The ones out there?” Tracy asked.

“No, others, when Maria’s father was with us.”

“What happened to—” Tracy stopped the question when Angelica shook her head quickly. It was obvious that it was a secret being hidden from little Maria so she decided she would ask later.

~ * ~ * ~

The alarm sounded like a hundred cars blowing their horns all at the same time. It was deafening and when it stopped Alysia could still hear the ringing in her ears.

“Attention, citizens of the United States,” the voice of the President said, loud and commanding as if he spoke from the heavens. “It is with great regret that I must ask you to abandon your homes and find the closest military base to evacuate. The bases will have a pillar of red smoke ascending into the air so that you can have an easy time finding them. You have 24 hours to evacuate to the bases. Once there, our soldiers will direct you to the underground bunkers where you will be safe.”

Alysia saw that the soldiers were forming lines to keep them back as they pulled a large lid open from the ground. The people began to question one another loudly, but the President continued with his speech.

“As most of you have experienced and witnessed, we are currently under attack. Not by a foreign force but by strange animals that have managed to overrun our cities. The combined forces of law enforcement and our armed forces have been fighting them for three weeks now. The risk is growing and with the need to protect our American people from danger, we ask that you move underground for a few days to allow us to remove the enemy. Regretfully, our efforts so far have been a hard fight; most of this stems from our inability to use certain weapons within our own cities. The enemy seems to know this, so they go into homes, parks, and cities. All of the places that people are known to be.

“After fighting against these things and losing with conventional weapons, our military has asked permission to utilize a more effective weapon. We do not want to harm any of our citizens so I ask that you take the next two days to get into one of our bunkers.

“Some of you are asking, is it only North America under attack by these things? The answer so far is that it seems that way. The attack started on the eastern shores of New Jersey, spread across the country—even into Canada, and continues at a rapid rate. We are now responsible for what happens with this and since our friends to the north are now affected, we feel it absolutely necessary to stop the attack immediately.

“So please, find a barracks and get inside of the bunker. We built these facilities in the interest of keeping our citizens safe if ever we come under threat by an invader. They are numerous, connected, and roomy. You will find that while it is not home, it should have the space, supplies, and facilities needed to keep you and your family safe until all of this is over. We are doing everything we can to get these creatures off our land so that we can return to our lives. There will be busses coming around to collect you if you are unable to drive or walk to your bunker. God bless America.”

As the President said his goodbye over the intercom, Alysia, Jaime, and Dan walked over to the bunker’s entrance and peered down. There were stairs that descended deep down into a well-lit hallway, and from the look of the lid, they’d built the bunkers out of a heavy, reinforced metal. Alysia turned to the boys and brought them in close.

“I think this so-called weapon is a bomb,” she said, looking around to make sure that none of the soldiers were within earshot.

“Of course they’re gonna bomb,” Jaime said.

“The question is, what kind of bomb,” Dan said as he looked up into the air, trying to imagine the jets flying by, delivering their payload.

“I don’t think it’s the kind we are used to,” Alysia said. “We want to preserve our way of life, monuments, etc. It will be chemical, and they are going to drop it everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if our allies don’t have carriers off the coast ready to light this place up and then fly elsewhere while it settles in and kills the creatures.”

“I wonder how they know that would work, though,” Jaime said. “How do they know that the zombie demons breathe air, or are vulnerable to whatever chemical they are dropping? I think that they are going to seal up the border to Canada. Quarantine certain areas here, bomb the hell out of the woods and the shoreline, and force the creatures back into the cities where the soldiers can kill them all.

“Right now, the problem is that everything is so open. You fight them and they can run off into the woods and regroup. Not to mention some of them fly, so bombing will not be the magical fix. We’re going to be in the bunker for a long time. You notice he never said anything about time. He should have said ‘you can expect to be in there for a week tops’ or something like that, but he didn’t touch it. That makes me think that they want us out of the way so they can take their sweet time building walls and whatnot.”

Alysia thought about Jaime’s words. The thought of being stuck in an underground facility with a bunch of strangers made her anxious. She thought about what her chances would be in the wilderness if she ran away now, but if Jaime were right, she would be a victim of the bombing.

“What if the President’s voice wasn’t really his? What if that was the crazy person who built the creatures, looking for a way to gather the humans in one place?” Dan asked.

They both looked at him as if he was unto something.

“I think we’re all in agreement that nothing at this point can be taken at face value,” Jaime said as he put out his cigarette and looked down. A number of people had begun to descend into the bunker and they were close enough to hear him so he stopped talking. Alysia wished they had more time to make a decision, but they didn’t, so she tapped them both on the arm and led them to the back of the compound near one of the electric fences.

“We have to make a decision fast, guys. It’s not like we have all the time in the world, and it needs to be the right decision or we are going to be killed by our own people. My dad is on the way here to meet up with me so I need time to tell him what I’m doing.”

Dan nodded at her but then turned to Jaime, excited. “You know, I bet they have phone chargers and electricity down in those bunkers. You heard what President Hill said. He said that we will have all the facilities down there. I’m thinking underground city with air conditioning, food, electricity, everything. CeeCee, you could call your dad. Hell, if we stay he’ll be down there with us. It doesn’t have to be terrible, plus we’ll know they are up here, killing those things. I say we go claim our bunker rooms. That way, we can make sure that we’re all neighbors, and we can pick out the best spots!”

“You do make it sound enticing,” Alysia said after some pause.

“Alright, let’s do it,” Jaime said. “It’s not like I have anything to counter. We don’t even have a plane if I were to suggest we leave the country. If you’re right about them tricking us into gathering to get eaten, Alysia, we at least can fight back. I didn’t see the soldiers confiscating weapons from the people going down there.”

“I guess you weren’t looking hard enough, Jaime. There was a guard near the door at the bottom of the bunker, tagging and collecting weapons. Do you truly think the government would trust us to be in a closed-in environment together with deadly weapons?”

Jaime looked as if Alysia punched him in the stomach with her words, but shrugged it off. What choice did they have in the matter? They had 24 hours to get underground, and even if they were to run and find somewhere else, they would be susceptible to the same weapons used against the monsters.

The trio gathered their things and then descended the long stairs down into the barracks. Neither they nor the people walking alongside them said anything as they reached the large metal door. They walked beneath the metal detector and gave up all of their guns to the soldier at the door, who tagged them with their names and then placed them into a large vault.

When the soldier gave Alysia the green light to enter, she stepped through the large doors into what looked like a long metallic street that had tiny square houses running along it.

She thought of it as a street because it had signs to indicate the block and name of the person’s address. The ceiling was tall and well lit, and there were gigantic television screens jutting out of it that angled down so you could watch them from the street easily. She assumed that in the future they would show the more important announcements on them.

“This place is so Science Fiction,” Debdan said, unable to hide the smile that came to his face as he walked ahead of them, looking at every detail.

They walked for ten minutes and turned a corner to a cul-de-sac where three of the block homes stood close to one another.

“This looks like us,” he said and smiled, then ran to the central house and jabbed his hand on the panel to claim it.

Alysia and Jaime glanced at one another and shook their heads as they went to the bordering houses and placed their palms on the panel. It was an older technology (the palm-reading lock) but it was secure, so Alysia felt a little more reassured of her safety.

When she stepped inside, she was quite pleased. It looked like a dorm room but was no bigger than her bedroom back home. She saw a shower in one corner, a tiny kitchen in the next, and a segmented off area, which held a twin bed, a washer and dryer, and what appeared to be a safe. On the wall was an embedded television, along with a number of outlets and a platform for charging phones.

Alysia made herself at home immediately, but once she settled in, she went next door to Jaime’s house and pressed the chime to get him to come to the door.

“This place is awesome,” were the first words out of his mouth when he came to the door, and then he invited Alysia in. “Let me guess: you’re freaked out by how good this seems and you expect that any minute now they’re gonna let loose a million dinosaur things to run into these homes and bite us up?”

She rolled her eyes at him and smiled. “I know you think I’m paranoid but come on now. I came in here to borrow your phone; I need to let my dad know where I am so that when he comes in, he can find me. Have you seen how dense the houses are down here? It’s like a shiny, metallic version of the Favelas in Brazil. The last thing I want him doing is to get here, only to start on a new quest of going door to door.”

She got his phone, dialed her father’s number and sent him the message. She went back to her own room, where she took a long hot shower and tried on one of the robes that came with it.

The luxury of water, soap and clean clothes was something Alysia could not imagine appreciating as much as she did now. For days her hair had held the oils the demons had put into it. Now with it washed, it blew out into a curly mess. She sat on her bed and dried it before twisting and pulling it back into a stylish ponytail.

She thought about the journey leading up to where she was and she wondered at the future of America and how long it would take for her world to revert to normal. She didn’t wonder long, as it had been a mentally exhausting couple of hours leading to this. Before long, she was fast asleep.

6

When James Knight returned to the hotel where he had left Tracy, a number of people were running towards him.

“Stop, you don’t want to go that way!” he yelled at them, but they weren’t listening; the panic of the President’s announcement had them in a frenzy.

When the kreples that were chasing James saw the crowd, they charged and as he pushed on towards the building where Tracy was, he heard gunshots from behind him. He smiled as he pushed on, not knowing why he thought they would be helpless. As he rounded the corner to the hotel, he stopped short at a scene that had him perplexed.

Tracy was in a faceoff with a crowd of men and women in front of the hotel’s lobby. She had a pistol in her hand and leveled it at the crowd. Cowering behind her was a woman and a little girl; the girl seemed hurt and the woman was taking care of her.

When he approached them, the little girl screamed and Tracy shot him a glance before returning to the standoff.

“I left you to heal, woman, not take on the world. What are you doing out here, and who are these people?” he asked as he came up next to her and looked them over.

“These aren’t ‘people’ Jimmy, these are rats! Rats that do anything to survive, like attacking a little girl to steal our supplies!”

James looked at the group and counted about fifteen people. He noticed one of the men had a gun. He raised his rifle to eye-level and aimed it at the man, who saw the laser pointed at his head and shrank away into the hotel.

“Come out, all of you, and take a knee on the curb,” James commanded. When they didn’t comply he shot the wall and they ran out and took a knee. “You, come here.” He motioned to the man with the gun, and when the tall, dark-haired man walked up to him, he quickly disarmed him, pocketed the gun and sent him back to the others. “Please don’t move, folks. The only thing I want to kill today is monsters, not civilians.”

Tracy walked over to check on Maria, then came back to where James was standing. She looked ready to shoot them but he was ready to stop her if she tried.

“What did they do to the baby?” he asked her.

“ANIMALES INCIVILIZADOS!” Angelica screamed at them as she picked up her daughter, who hugged her tightly with her legs wrapped around her body.

“Those two are the ringleaders,” Tracy said as she pointed to a man and woman that kept their heads bowed as they knelt on the sidewalk. “They lured little Maria out and hit her, all to take the bag of snacks and water.”

“Where were you two?” James asked, trying to remain diplomatic in the situation.

“She was helping me with my bandages when it happened. We thought Maria was asleep, but when we heard her scream, we ran out and there they were, assaulting her for the food.” Tracy’s anger seemed to be building when she said this and James looked around to make sure they were alone.

“That sounds like two people, Tracy. Why do we have everyone out here being punished for it?”

“Because they all watched it happen! All of them stood there, letting it happen. Not one of them tried to fight for this poor child.”

James was not surprised by what he was hearing. He had seen family members sell one another out in the war, along with a number of other atrocities that made him question the good of humanity. When placed into a corner, some people would look out for themselves and themselves only.

What he was used to was looking out for his brothers and sister in arms, keeping them safe, and worrying about himself last. But assault or no assault, a collective of cowards did not need to be executed. Tracy, as injured and tiny as she was, was letting her anger take it to another level. He pulled her in and whispered something to her. She pushed him off, frustrated, but then brushed her hair back and sighed.

“Okay, fine. We’ll do it your way,” she said.

James didn’t appreciate the shove, but he looked at the people and relaxed his grip on the pulse rifle.

“Here’s how it’s gonna work. Emotions are running high right now on both sides but we need to focus. They’re asking for everybody to get into the bunkers and I would suggest we do it as soon as possible. If you want to live, you will go to the bunker at Wharton. That’s northeast of here – just follow the red smoke. As you travel, I would think about what happened here and know that most people would have killed you all for what you did. Now get up and get moving, and get out of my sight.”

When he said this, they stood up and began to walk quickly towards the street. Some of them stopped briefly to apologize and plead their case with Angelica, but the mother was not hearing any of it. When the two that had attacked Maria made to follow, James motioned for them to stay and then turned towards the rest and told them to keep walking.

“Mom, Tracy, this is your call. What do you want to do with these two?” he asked, and as they went to plead their case, Tracy pistol-whipped the woman to the ground, the momentum causing her to fall as she did it. When the man made to retaliate, James picked him up into an arm lock, then switched it to a wristlock and held him steady as Tracy worked him over with a series of punches. When she had worn herself out on the pair of them, James checked them for weapons and then left them retching on the ground.

As he made to check on Maria, Tracy ran to him and hugged him tightly. It was strange and unexpected, but he stood for a moment as she did this before moving an arm to return the hug. “We need to get going,” he said finally and Tracy released him and went over to hug Angelica. “Anything left upstairs?” He asked them, and little Maria lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder to look at him.

“No, the bad people took it away from me,” she said, her voice tiny and cute. It made him think of Alysia when she was just a child.

“The bad people are gone now, big girl; you don’t have to worry. We won’t let them hurt you again, I promise. Are you okay?” he asked, and she nodded at him with tears welling up in her big brown eyes. She reached out to him and he took her from Angelica, shifting her around to sit on his shoulders so that he could continue to use the pulse rifle. “Listen up, Maria, you’re gonna be my little soldier, okay?”

“Can I have a gun?” she asked, and he laughed at her innocence as her mother yelled “Maria,” as if embarrassed by the question.

“No gun, soldier; your job is recon. When I tell you to hide, I want you to close your eyes, hold on tight, and tuck your head. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s practice it. Maria, hide!” he yelled and she quickly clutched his big neck tightly, and buried her head into his shoulder, closing her eyes tight. “Awesome. I’m very proud of you, Maria. Okay, since there’s no supplies and three of us have injuries, we should get to the bunker fast so that we can be taken care of before the late comers rush in tomorrow.”

“How far away is the base?” Angelica asked as they walked away from Maria’s injured attackers.

“I would say about eight and a half miles on foot,” James said as if it were nothing, even though he noticed that Angelica balked at his answer.

~ * ~ * ~

The reunion between Alysia and her father was bittersweet. It was a boost of elation to see the other alive, but it was also a reminder of their loss. After the hugs and tears came the stories, each relaying the events of the last two weeks to the other, and then came the painful conversation about mom.

Tracy had come over to see Alysia with James but when she saw the conversation veer towards the mother, she let them be so that they could talk and catch up. When she went back to the rooms that she and Angelica had picked out, she knocked on her door to check in on her.

Angelica opened the door after some time and after greeting Tracy, she locked it and then walked back into the tiny kitchen. Little Maria was on the bed playing and Tracy saw that Angelica was cooking something.

She felt strangely out of place, as if she was invading on their little family, not unlike how she felt with James and Alysia. It made her want to leave but there was no way she could explain the sudden departure. She went over to the bed to play with Maria, who was scribbling on a stack of paper with a red pen.

“You don’t have family in Jersey, Tracy?” Angelica asked and Tracy wondered if she should ignore the question or answer truthfully. She decided to give the truth a chance.

“No, not here. My family is down south in Texas. How about you, Angelica, any family here?”

“Ahh, I see, you don’t like to talk about it,” Angelica said. It was as if she picked up the awkward feelings in Tracy’s tone. She stopped stirring the food inside of her pot to look in her direction. “I’m so sorry, Tracy. I don’t mean to pry into your business. I’m just … you know, just making conversation.”

“It’s no problem, Angelica, don’t worry about it. I don’t really get along with them. My parents, I mean. So that’s why you don’t hear me talking about it. I see how Alysia is with her dad and it reminds me of how things used to be with my own. We all went our separate ways a long time ago and I haven’t spoken to them in ages.”

“Have you talked to them since all this started?”

“All what started, Momma?” Maria asked, interrupting Tracy’s answer. She had grown tired of drawing and had hopped off the bed to talk.

“Maria Georgiana Morales, you get your little butt back in bed and lay down, now. I am not going to tell you again,” Angelica snapped, giving the little one the evil eye.

Maria stuck out her lip in a pout but like the ‘little soldier’ that James had dubbed her, she took her orders and climbed back unto the bed.

“That one. What a handful,” Angelica said to Tracy and jabbed her finger in the direction of Maria.

“She’s a good girl,” Tracy said and then walked back to the doorway as if she meant to leave.

“No, no, Tracy, you stay,” Angelica said when she realized what was going on. “I am making this for you; a real home-cooked meal. You kept me and my daughter alive and we owe you everything, so please stay and eat. Okay?”

Tracy nodded, as she was indeed starving. However, the awkward conversation that Maria had saved her from still lingered fresh in her mind, and memories of a broken past with her family held her attention. She sat at the table and Angelica produced a triad of bowls, spoons and a large pot of soup.

The spices made it smell delicious and since her meals had only been chips and water for the last two days, Tracy wanted to dive right in. Maria was invited to the table where they all held hands while she said grace. Angelica was a Christian, so it was important to her that they blessed the food and Maria as the youngest member was elected to do it.

“Father, thank you for the food we are about to eat and that Mommy made for us. Bless Auntie Tracy and keep her happy, and protect Poppa, too so that he can come home. Amen.”

Tracy smiled at the prayer and kissed Maria’s hand, which made her giggle and snatch it back, embarrassed. Everyone ate the soup until they were full and even Maria went back for seconds. Afterwards they sat over empty bowls, chatted a bit, and then little Maria went to bed. Tracy decided to help Angelica with the dishes.

“This is nice,” Angelica said, when they were finished washing up.

“You mean the house, or just the peace that we are getting away from those things?” Tracy asked.

“Everything, since you came into our lives. I never thought I would ever get the chance to make soup for Maria in a normal place like this again. The monsters ruined everything, and when we got in with those people to raid the hotel, I thought we would be on the run forever.”

“So you weren’t staying at the hotel when all of this hit?”

“Oh, girl, no,” Angelica said, wiping her hands on a cloth and draping it over the stove. “We couldn’t afford to stay there, are you kidding? We just followed John and the other people because he said that a hotel gave us the advantage of being up high and that would keep us safe from the monsters.”

“John didn’t think you and your baby would be worth a share of their food though, huh?” Tracy asked and Angelica noticed her sarcasm.

“I am not stupid, Tracy. I joined with reassurances. It’s just that he wanted other things that I was not willing to provide. He told lies to the other members. They all hated me and punished Maria for it.”

When Tracy was sure that Maria was asleep and that they were alone, she motioned for Angelica to come over by the door to join her.

“Everything all right?” Angelica asked and Tracy nodded, then looked intently into her eyes.

“It’s about our conversation earlier. You said men did something to your husband. Was it the same ones? The couple who attacked your daughter?”

Angelica looked over at the bed where Maria lay, and her tiny form was a silhouette beneath the nightlight. “No, not them, but people like them. When the monsters came and started to attack everyone, there was a man that my husband owed money to. He was going to leave the country but came around to make his collections first. Javier didn’t have it, so they took him away. I woke up to my bed empty and him gone. It was a nightmare.”

“That’s freaking terrible! What about the police? Ugh, never mind. Sometimes I forget how lawless things got when all the craziness happened. I hope he’s okay—”

“You don’t have to say that, Tracy. I know better. Javier got caught up in a lot of bad business with his gambling. He was a good man and the best father, but it caught up with him and now we are out here alone.”

“Well, thanks for dinner, and thanks for a great evening, Angelica,” Tracy said and she exited the room and stepped out into the strange world that was their underground city.

The high ceiling of the bunker was now displaying a graphic of clouds sitting against a sky that represented dusk. Tracy thought it was interesting, being that it almost tricked her mind. If she were to forget for an instance that she was underground, she could technically pretend that she was in a suburb in the outside world.

She walked past a few people talking and a number of soldiers patrolling and helping people move their belongings. It was different seeing so many people being helpful when a month earlier they probably would not have even looked at one another.

~ * ~ * ~

When Tracy finally made it to her doorstep, she hesitated for a moment, trying to decide whether it would be appropriate to check in on James. She knew that he was hurt, though he had not said anything about it. There was something primitive and attractive about his silent acceptance of the pain and it reminded her of the old movies that her father loved.

There was always a large, muscular, man—macho, they used to call it—and they would try to be like machines instead of speaking up to get their injuries mended. The men she knew on the force were very different from that. They would try to outdo one another in their complaints: “I tripped and skinned my knee on the curb chasing some perp today.”

It was what they all did. Yet here was a soldier, older, out of place in the modern age, who exhibited kindness, selflessness, and so much love and understanding for little Maria. But he had experienced a massive loss; the woman he loved taken away by tragedy. She knew it would upset Alysia if she acted out on her feelings and she wondered if he would reject her.

She unlocked her door and stepped inside. It took a few breaths for her to accept that the space was hers, but even after forcing herself to accept it, it still felt odd.

“You’ll get used to it,” a voice said and she turned around to find James. He was in a clean tank top with black cargo pants stuffed in his boots, but he had bandages visible beneath the shirt.

“Alysia wrap you up?” Tracy asked as she stepped outside to stand in front of him. She had forgotten that she had removed her shirt, and was in a sports bra with her police pants on.

James noticed that she was nearly topless but the black bra could have passed for quirky fashion; and she had bandages around her abdomen just like him. They looked like a pair of wounded space marines swapping war stories.

“CeeCee didn’t do this, the medics did. They recognized me when I got here and forced me to get looked at right after I finished talking to her.”

“Is she all right?” Tracy asked.

“It was a pretty big blow, losing her mom. She’s a tough girl but you can’t tough this out; you know what I mean?” He said.

“You seem to be handling it well.” Tracy said.

“Don’t get it twisted. I have a gaping hole in my chest with that woman gone. But I don’t want to put that on you, just wanted to check in on you and make sure you’re good.”

“Are all ex-Special Forces this sweet?” Tracy joked, and gave him the slickest smile she could muster.

“Sweet? Ma’am I don’t know that flavor, and how do you figure I’m Special Forces?”

“It’s written all over your face, Jimmy, not to mention I know what the hell that frog tattoo implies. The one you have stamped across your heart.”

He didn’t reply but smiled and then made to walk back to his place. “They want some volunteers to hold the door, just in case those things make to pull us out,” he said as he walked backwards, staring at her.

“Is that an invitation for some action?” she asked and James nodded, causing her to smile. “Will you be there?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then so will I. Just come get me when you’re ready,” she said and watched him turn and walk back to his room and wondered if he had noticed her flirting. Did it matter? she thought. He said that there was a big gaping hole in his chest.

“The ball is in your court now Jimmy,” she said under her breath and then walked back inside to clean herself up.

BOOK 2

And Then There Was Darkness

When the alarm sounded throughout the bunker, it was well past the 24-hour mark that was expected. It sounded like one hundred angry birds, screaming as loudly as they could at the world, forcing every living thing to wake up and pay attention.

The people of the underground city assumed the alarm would have come during the earlier half of the evening, but it was now 2:00 a.m. and at a time when they were not prepared to hear it.

Alysia’s tears from crying over her dead mother sat like tiny, silver lakes beneath her eyes, dry but still visible to the world. She had gone to bed late, a side effect of those silver lakes, so the alarm woke her up amidst darkness and she wondered if she was in a nightmare.

The sound was deafening and she got up angry, and slipped on her shoes to peer outside. Masses of people were in the “street” looking up at the television screens. The film of the hour was a newsreel that showed a bird’s eye view of New York. There was a frantic reporter giving a blow-by-blow of the events, and a number of aircraft were firing rockets down at the monsters.

Alysia stepped out onto the street and walked up next to the boys. Jaime was in a long black robe with bunny slippers and Debdan was in his boxers. She wanted to laugh at how funny he looked—since he wasn’t fully awake or aware of his attire—but she had no place to laugh. She was in pink pajamas like a little girl, her dried tears adding to the effect as if the only piece missing was a teddy bear or her safety blanket.

“What’s going on?” she asked them, her voice sounding irritated and angry.

“Your friends are attacking the bunkers,” Jaime said.

“What? Then what the hell was the point of putting us down here?” Alysia yelled. “Weren’t they supposed to bomb them, or wipe them out, or something?”

“I think they tried and failed, CeeCee.”

She looked up at the screen as a giant reached down for a bunker lid and tugged hard at it, causing it to bend. A number of FAA Spitzer jets flew past him with machine gun fire and he backed away while fanning at them, holding the wounded area they’d shot.

“That’s the biggest giant I have ever seen,” said Debdan.

“I didn’t realize they could get that big,” Jaime said, his mouth agape in apparent surprise.

“You do realize that is our bunker, right guys?” Alysia said, and the creaking from above them confirmed it.

Alysia looked around for her father. Maybe he could explain what was going on. Some soldiers had congregated near the area where the street led up to the lid. James and Tracy were standing with them, each brandishing a rifle and an assortment of weapons.

Tracy had not spoken much to Alysia since they rendezvoused inside the bunker. She had kept mostly to herself or with James and the family that had come in with her. Alysia wondered why that was. Did she do something to offend her, or did she just not like her?

“What happens if that lid pops open?” Alysia asked.

“We all die from the radiation they are using to kill the creatures, I suppose,” Jaime answered.

Another alarm went off within the bunker and a voice came over the loudspeaker, asking all of the citizens to return to their rooms and put on their masks. Each room had a panic kit in case of the worst and the doors held seals to stop fumes from getting inside. Alysia saw that her father wasn’t budging, but instead pulled out a mask and placed it on his face. She thought long and hard what to do next and then she saw Debdan run inside and lock his door while Jaime walked past her towards the soldiers.

“Jaime, what the hell are you doing?” Alysia asked and he waved her off.

“I’d rather die in a fight than be sealed inside some can like a sardine,” he said. The words resonated with her and she walked behind him along with a number of other men and women who wanted to stand with the soldiers.

Alysia expected her father to object when he saw her there but he looked as if he wanted her to be there. Tracy was standing very close to him and she wondered when the two of them had gotten to be so close.

“Now listen up,” a soldier shouted as he walked out in front of them all. “If you aren’t here to volunteer, get your ass back to your room and lock yourself in. Final warning. If you are here to help, I would ask that you step to the rear if you have no experience with guns. You will get the most important job … we need you to flank us and seal the exit, should we get overrun. For those of you who can shoot, you are here to shoot the monsters, not each other. I will personally put down anybody who volunteers to pick up a weapon and poses a threat to this group. Do you understand me?”

The people agreed in concert but the thought of it made Alysia a little nervous.

“We will move out on my command to clear the entrance. Once we’re out, you volunteers can follow and take care of anything trying to come at us from the back. Do you understand me?”

They answered affirmatively and he was satisfied. “Now the trunks at your feet have the anti-radiation gear you’re going to need to survive outside. You only get one each, so make sure it fits, that it’s secure, and that you are tight and ready for when that door opens.”

Alysia took the mask and suit a soldier handed her and retrieved her gun from the case. She pulled on the suit and it made a sucking sound, pulling itself tightly around her limbs and then puffing back out just a tad to where it felt comfortable. She tried on some boots that were in the box and when she found her size, she added gloves and then walked over to her father to check if she was ready.

He looked her over, adjusted a few straps, and then gave her the thumbs up when he was satisfied.

“It’s cool seeing you two together after all this time,” Tracy said, smiling with her mask in her hands and watching them intently. Alysia looked up and smiled at her, but James didn’t seem to hear her. The mask and black suit made him look like a bug-eyed ninja, but he was armed to the teeth with guns and ammunition. Alysia followed his lead and grabbed a few more items, strapping a knife to her leg as a final touch.

“What you need that for?” Jaime asked, pointing to the stick she had strapped to her back. “You plan to pole vault out of here when it’s done?”

“Just watch and learn, young tadpole. I’m pretty good with a staff, aren’t I, Dad?” She looked up at her father for affirmation.

James Knight nodded and touched her shoulder. “You stay at my hip no matter what happens, okay, baby girl?”

“THREE SECONDS!” the lead soldier yelled and they all hastened with their preparation.

Alysia hated when he called her “baby girl” but she knew how he meant it and it almost broke her heart. “I won’t leave you, Dad, I promise,” she said. “It will be like the old days when we sparred.”

“Stay close, and stay awake. This is the real thing,” he said but as soon as he did, the lid was pulled open and a horde of demons rushed down the stairs and got peppered to death by the soldiers’ machine gun fire. They moved up the stairs while everyone followed, and as they fought their way to the outside, the non-combatants closed the door behind the volunteers and sealed it shut.

Outside the rain was pouring down, and the glass on Alysia’s mask adjusted itself to clear up the mist and residue that threatened to blind her in the atmosphere.

“What does that mean?” Alysia asked, pointing at the locked door behind them.

Tracy turned and shrugged her shoulders. “It means that we are now the guardians of the bunker. I’m guessing this was a suicide mission that no one bothered to tell us, huh, James?”

“Every mission is a suicide mission, but if you’re going to go out, this is how you do it,” he said and brought up the pulse rifle to drop a flying creature, then spun it around to put a few more rounds into the swarming horde of demons.

“I’ve never seen them this desperate!” Jaime yelled as he fired shot after shot from his pistols.

“They’re after me,” Alysia said, and a number of people turned to look at her to see if she was joking. They couldn’t tell through the mask, but from her voice, James knew she was being sincere.

“What are you talking about, Alysia?” he said as he turned around to face her.

“I mean throughout the time you’ve been searching for me, Dad. They’ve been trying to capture me for some sort of ritual.”

James couldn’t believe it. The story just didn’t make any sense. Why Alysia, why now? Why would it be his daughter out of a country of millions that the demons wanted to capture?

They continued to fight but a few men went down and Alysia began to feel guilty for people dying on her behalf. Maybe it would be better to let them have her; then they might go away and the country could get back to normal once that happened.

She thought of the first day, wanting to see Tavi and how the calls to evacuate did not reach her school. She couldn’t go anywhere without them finding her, and so many people had died trying to keep her safe. She was only one person and she could save millions, yet here she was amidst brave people, fighting back. Wouldn’t martyring myself for the greater good be the right thing to do?

She thought about the stories her father would tell her, how soldiers were trained to give themselves up to protect their brothers. She loved life, she had so much left to do, but what sort of future would there be if she was always running, and people were dying for her?

She looked over at Jaime, who was past guessing at her odd words and was firing into the crowd with his two pistols. Tracy was next to him, like a warrior queen from the books she had grown up reading. Then there was her father, who was now in the front, taking charge, pointing out targets, keeping them all alive.

It felt like time slowed as she thought about what to do: to choose life and stay in hell, or choose death and save everyone. What would James Knight do? But as soon as she asked herself this, she broke into a sprint and ran back past the entrance of the bunker to the area where the old concrete barracks lay vacant. Time moved slowly in her mind as she sprinted, and the demons surged towards her. Some kreples broke past them to get at her, but she was fast, too fast, even for them.

James and Tracy saw what happened and were after her in an instant, shooting what they could and screaming her name in unison. She was almost to the barracks when the wounded giant from before knelt right in front of her, appearing as if from nowhere.

She tried to stop to avoid him but slid and fell on her face. His wounds were grave and a puddle of blood splashed near where she lay. It was the end of the line, and as he reached for her she shot at his hand to stop him. It didn’t work and she was lifted airborne despite her attempts to claw her way out. She felt the pressure as he squeezed her slightly and she kicked her legs and punched at his hand to let her go.

James and Tracy shot at the giant but he ignored them as if their shots had no effect. It was like Alysia was a magnet he just couldn’t resist. James shouldered his rifle and then ran to the giant’s feet while pulling out his knife. Tracy kept the demons off of him with her automatic rifle, and as the soldiers caught up with her to help, the giant shifted and tried to step on them.

James moved quickly and cut where his Achilles tendon would be. The beast bellowed in pain as he dropped Alysia to reach back and clutch at his damaged foot. The injury was severe and as he shifted to touch it, it tore open into a bloody gash and he groaned loudly and toppled to the ground in pain.

The earth shook from the giant’s impact, but Tracy ran up and slid gracefully to catch the falling Alysia. As she did this a number of aircraft flew by, pumping even more bullets into the body of the giant. James rallied the people to him and together they ran back to the barracks where they could get out of the rain.

“No use in staying out there when the threat to the bunker is dead and bleeding out,” he said.

The soldiers lined up by the windows to pick off any demons that got close, and Tracy laid Alysia on a bench and checked her body for any wounds.

“How you doing, kid?” Tracy asked.

“Why did you guys follow me? I was leading them away. They are after me, remember? They—”

“Stop it, CeeCee!” her father shouted from across the room. He walked up to her with a look of anger flushed across his face. “They aren’t after you, they are after girls like you. I need you to bring it in and stop acting like this is all about you. Many of us are out here to protect the ones we love down there.”

He jabbed his finger downwards to indicate the bunker where thousands of families were locked in their rooms, praying that the monsters wouldn’t break through. “I have the luxury of having the one I love up here, and I don’t appreciate you trying to kill yourself on my watch. What were you thinking?”

Alysia shook her head, not knowing how to shake the shame she felt at her actions. “I just … I just thought that I could lead them away so everybody could be okay. I thought they were after me. Why else would they keep me alive after capturing me twice?”

Tracy stood up and nodded at James, indicating that she hadn’t found anything off about Alysia’s gear. She helped the girl to her feet, and then handed her a rifle and touched her on the butt. “Give her a break, Jimmy, her intentions were good.”

When she said this, it took all of James Knight’s patience to not lash out at Tracy for stepping in on their family disagreement, but he simply turned away and rejoined the soldiers who were shooting out at the demons trying to reach the bunker.

Alysia did the same thing and walked over to a window to shoot. Jaime took up a position next to her.

“You okay, CeeCee?” he asked. She looked at him to see if he was mocking her but he seemed to be sincere.

“Yeah, it’s just a little too surreal for me right now. I keep trying to fight and do what I assume is right, and it keeps on ending up with me hurt or captured somehow. I don’t know why you guys stay with me. I’m nothing but trouble, apparently, and I can’t get out of my own way.”

“You know, it’s not so hard to see why people stay with you, Alysia. You’re human, you’re allowed to mess up. Does your dad demand perfection from you or something? Were you one of those kids, nothing less than an A or you get shamed?”

“Nothing like that,” Alysia said, and then tried to aim down the sights to shoot at a kreple that was tugging at the bunker’s handle. She squeezed the trigger, which was too tight for her untrained finger, but the shot flew true and the creature’s head exploded.

“Nice shot!” Jaime exclaimed, and a man standing next to her reached over, touched her shoulder, and gave her a nod of approval. I can do this, Alysia thought, and decided she would not make any more rash calls when other people’s lives were involved. She looked over to see if her father had seen her make the shot, but he was behind his pulse rifle, focused on the objective and dropping the demons one after another.

“My dad didn’t demand straight A’s. He made me understand their importance so that I could hold myself to that standard,” she said. “When I had a low grade, I beat myself up more than my parents did. My problem is that I strive to be perfect, it doesn’t have anything to do with anybody but myself.”

Jaime didn’t say anything more, but he knew that she was okay by the way she responded. He wondered how long they would have to hold the bunker until the patrolling soldiers returned.

They had been out there an hour, and the excitement with Alysia had sent his heart beating faster than he had ever felt it beat before. He had wanted to vomit but the suit and mask prevented it from being a real solution. He was glad they’d run into the barracks as it had given him a chance to catch his breath.

“Any word from the front?” a large man asked.

A soldier with a radio attached to his suit shook his head. “Negative. There must be a lot of those damn things on the perimeter. When I hear something you will know.”

So they kept on fighting, Alysia trying to forget her poor decision to run, and the others trying to keep the bunker clear.

~ * ~ * ~

“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Alysia said as she sat with Jaime on a bench in the rear of the barracks. “What do we plan to do with all those bodies once things settle down around here? The smell already makes me want to hurl, and I can only imagine that with this rain and a few days of rot … ugh! As if those demons could get any worse.”

Jaime looked over at her and then back at his gloved hands. He was tired, hungry and worn-through, but he would be the last to admit it. Their group was now taking turns at the windows, shooting at the creatures when they got close. They had decided that the first group of soldiers to the north was trapped or dead so it was up to them to protect the bunker, and they needed rest to keep going.

“You’re worried about the demons with the smell. We’re required to keep wearing these suits, remember? Imagine how we’re going to smell in a few days,” Jaime said as he played with his gloves, looking as if he wanted to remove them. “Like, how do we even know that anything is in the air? There’s no indicator to tell me how toxic the air is. And besides the giant that attacked you, everything else seems to still be intact and healthy.”

Alysia had been thinking the same thing, but she didn’t want to be the one risking everything to prove a theory like before. “We’ll be back in the bunker sooner than you think. So don’t do anything crazy that could get you killed. Okay?”

“Yeah, I’m not, don’t worry about it. But I can’t promise that tomorrow, if we’re still stuck here, I won’t pull these gloves off. This bunker thing was a dumb idea, CeeCee, and I still think that wasn’t really the President on the intercom.”

Alysia shook her head and leaned back, hoping to get tired so that she could fall asleep. “So you’re back on that topic, huh? The conspiracy theory about our President. Come on, Jaime, even if that wasn’t really him, we’re screwed. Just look around you. It’s only a matter of time before we are overrun.”

“Not if I can help it. And look at you now, throwing the towel in and being a Debbie Downer. What if I were to go over there and tell your dad what you said? How do you think he’d like it?”

“He wouldn’t, so keep it to yourself. Look, I get it, and I’m not giving up, okay? It’s just depressing, and I’m tired and can’t even bring myself to close my eyes.” She sat up out of frustration and checked the watch attached to her glove. It read 4:30 a.m. “It’s gonna be light soon. Once the sun is up, things will settle down. Those demons are quite nocturnal.”

“How do you know this, Cee?” Jaime asked as he struggled with the sudden urge to remove his mask and light up a cigarette.

“Spent a couple nights with them, remember? They get pretty cranky in the day.” She rubbed her head in remembrance of the demon that had punched her in the face for fighting back. “You know, I found a body when I was on the way to this camp.”

“So what? There’s bodies all over the place nowadays.”

“This one was different. They had done something to it, the same thing they were going to do to me. She—the body, I mean—was pale, like really, really pale, and there were demon corpses all around her.”

“That’s some freaky stuff. What if they awakened some sort of evil spirit in her, and the spirit—upset that they brought her into our lame world—wiped them out, drifting back to hell where there’s beds, cigarettes, and the ability to fall asleep,” Jaime said. He was enjoying his sarcastic retort and the reaction he was getting from Alysia, who stared daggers into him.

“Joke all you want, jerk face, but I’m being honest.”

“Okay, but so what?” Jaime said, suddenly sitting up to look directly at her. “So what if they drained some poor girl and died while attempting it? They’re after us to kill us — all of us! I think that their rituals is the least of our problems right now, don’t you?”

“Jaime, I think that it’s important. With them running into our gunfire, there is a chance they will die out, but what if this is all a ruse and there is something bigger going on?”

Jaime stopped and thought about it for a second and then went back to his brooding. “You’re tired, Alysia. Why don’t we try to get some sleep so we’re able to function in the next few hours?”

~ * ~ * ~

Alysia hadn’t realized that she had passed out, but when she woke up, it was eerily quiet in the barracks and the sun was coming through the windows. It sounded as if the rain had picked up, but it was now light outside and the creatures had slowed down their assault on the barracks.

“Wake everybody up and get them back to the bunker,” Alysia could hear her father saying. The first team of soldiers had never shown up and he took easy command of their tiny army of volunteers. She looked over at Jaime, who was curled up on the ground like a baby. It made her smile, considering how hard he tried to be a classic male.

“Get your friend up, CeeCee, we’re moving out,” her father said, and she looked up at him with surprise.

“Dad, can we talk?” Alysia said, and James walked over and sat down next to her.

Alysia told her father about the girl she found, the details of her own capture, and her concern with their motives. James sat quietly for a long time afterwards, running the details over and over in his head.

“CeeCee, you and the boy pack up and head back to the bunker. Tell Tracy and Donald I need to talk to them,” he said.

“Which one is Donald?”

“The skinny guy with the sword on his back.”

“You’re going to investigate this without me, aren’t you?” she asked, ready to argue with him if he confirmed.

But he merely looked at her and shrugged. “Baby girl, are you trained for reconnaissance?”

“Well, no Dad, I’m not, but—”

“Have you had any real-time experience sneaking into enemy territory?”

“No.”

“Then let me do this, CeeCee. Let me go see what you’re talking about with these things. I need you to get these people back to the bunker and keep them ready. There ain’t no telling what our future is here with the Army guys missing in action. The three of us are going to look for them and rescue them if we can. Once we do that, we’re going to find this campsite you told me about and figure out what they have planned for us.”

2

A gloved fist was thrust up into the air and the party of three froze amidst the tall trees of the forest. Tracy could see everything through her night vision goggles, but she couldn’t make out what it was that made James give the signal to stop.

The light rain continued to play tiny drumbeats on the leaves as it had been doing the entire day that they tracked the demon party. She closed her eyes to try and enhance her hearing and then opened them quickly when Donald shot forward and impaled a kreple on his sword.

“Good, we’re still undetected,” Donald whispered and they made to keep moving towards the camp.

Donald, from what Tracy had learned about him during the day, was a man of many talents. His origins were Japanese and he had come from a long line of military people. He had a rich history and had served in the Marine Corps as a sniper.

After his service he had become homeless but managed to live off the land through hunting wild animals and camping out in various parks. His skills for tracking were even better than James, and he was an accomplished master of the sword. A skill he had honed since childhood when he was a competitor in Kendo.

They walked for a time, sliding their feet to mask their footsteps with the rain. Then the fist came up again, followed by a finger jabbing in the direction of a light. Tracy turned off the night vision to see if she could see and was quite surprised by the large bonfire that peeked through the trees about one hundred yards ahead of them. They worked their way through until they were close to it with James and Donald leading the way with their guns out, ready for action. She pulled out her handgun and did the same thing, ready for any kreples or demons that might hop out.

When they closed in on the campsite they could hear the whimpering of a girl that the demons had captured. Tracy wanted to bolt in and rescue her but James held her back, cautioning her to remain quiet as they listened. She forced herself to comply as they crept forward through the trees to see what was going on.

There was a large bonfire with demons swaying rhythmically around it. A tall, beautiful, brown-skinned girl was bound and levitating near the fire; she looked extremely frightened but seemed unable to get free of her binds. She wore a purple dress and there were dark stains of blood spattered on it. She floated around the fire—as if being swung by an invisible line from the heavens—and the demons kept dancing as if she wasn’t there.

“We need to stop this!” Tracy whispered, and James nodded his head at her.

Suddenly the flames exploded, and the demons were consumed in its fire. Tracy, James and Donald were forced to shield their eyes as the explosion produced a blindingly bright light. When it was finished, the campsite was dark so they put on their night vision goggles to see the aftermath of the explosion. There were demon corpses all over the ground along with the girl in the purple dress who looked as if she had been drained of all color.

Tracy didn’t know what to think about the entire ritual but she was too focused to try and apply logic. Above the corpse of the girl floated a shadowy figure. This silhouette held a blackness that was incredibly dense. Even with the goggles, the only thing she could see was a slightly feminine shape to it along with two angry, glowing eyes.

“I think we found our answer,” Donald said as he stared at the apparition in disbelief.

The shadow scooped up some of the flesh from the demons and consumed it. It continued doing this for the next half hour and by the time it was done, it had taken on the form of an actual human being.

The form was that of the girl they sacrificed and she reached down, removed the clothes from the corpse, dressed herself, and adjusted her hair. The shadows around her were dense and moved unnaturally and the three warriors who witnessed this ritual stayed frozen as they saw the demon disguise itself as one of them. When the girl was dressed and ready, she made to leave but then looked suddenly at the area where James and company stood.

She opened her mouth and emitted an ear-piercing scream that was painful to hear and then the shadows moved towards them, like a living creature that no longer needed a host to survive. Tracy saw it coming and started to shoot at it, but it was a shadow and her bullets simply passed through it, some hitting the demon woman behind it.

The screaming intensified and when the shadow reached their party, James, Donald and Tracy added their own screams as the ice-cold chill that came from the shadow’s touch made them drop their weapons involuntarily. It was colder than anything any of them had ever felt and as they stood there, paralyzed by its touch, the woman walked over and began to tear Donald apart with her bare hands. It was hard for Tracy to watch it happen and even harder to hear his screams as she sat there helpless, frozen by the dark.

The torturing of Donald went on for a time and when he was dead, it moved on to James, slashing and clawing at him like a frenzied beast. The big man fought back as much as he could but the damage was too much and his legs buckled from beneath him. Tracy fought against the cold when she saw this and grabbed her phone to call Alysia. If she would be dying along with the men, she wanted people to know where they were so they could get some payback.

When the demon saw the phone, it swatted it out of her hands and pushed her back as if annoyed. What followed next was a bit of a standoff as Tracy stared down the demon and its glowing eyes as it stopped and stared back at her.

It was as if it were looking deep within her soul for vulnerability, but Tracy had no weakness in this instance. She was still the tough cowgirl whose father had taught her how to shoot from the time she was able to walk, and no shadow, no mysterious demon conjured up from the bodies of fallen men, would get the better of her.

James lay on the ground, his wounds too much to bear. The cold made them feel like the least of his problems; the most he could do was look on. Tracy was all fire with her fists balled up and her face grim, and she stared at the screaming demon as if she didn’t care what it had in store for her. As soon as the demon made to get close to her, she swung a right cross into its jaw and the demon woman backed up, holding her cheek. The chilling darkness followed her as she retreated, surprised at Tracy’s actions, and seemingly hurt by the punch.

Tracy then pulled a pistol that was in a holster by her leg and began to shoot at the fleeing demon who now backed up and disappeared into the trees. She kept the gun high, waiting to see if the demon would reemerge but after a while when it stayed hidden, she assumed that it had given up and holstered her weapon to pick up her phone.

She sent a text message to Alysia, asking her to send help. She sent a GPS beacon with the message and hoped that Alysia would receive it and be able to send a rescue party their way.

She thought about the ritual and the way it felt when her fist connected with the jaw of the demon woman. It felt no different than a human’s jaw—having punched out her share of bad guys on the job—and she remembered that when she stared at the demon, it looked very much like a woman with the only difference being that slight glow to her eyes. She let the thought pass and then knelt down to check on James since he was laughing hysterically, and she wondered if he was going through a bit of psychosis during the last hours of his life.

“Jimmy, are you okay? How you doing? Can you move?” she asked and James looked up at her nodded.

“I think I just need to catch my breath, Tracy,” he said, as he rolled to one side and tried to move his legs, happy when he realized that he actually could.

“Sometimes it takes a good ass kicking to remember just how old you are,” he joked, then looked over at Donald and shook his head “I feel so bad for what happened just now,” he said. “Donald didn’t deserve to die like that. The man fought for his country, several tours actually, and did many good things when he came back. Man like that is supposed to be honored in his death, people are supposed to cry over him. But look at this.” And he motioned to his friend’s corpse with his open hand. “You know, I’ve always told CeeCee that life ain’t fair, but when it comes to stuff like this, it just seems like life likes to pick the wrong sides a whole hell of a lot.”

“Well I’m glad you’re alive,” Tracy said. “When I saw how that thing tore Donald apart, the only thing I could think about was that we need to do something or she’s going to tear us apart the same way. He got the short end of the stick when she attacked, and not even his fast reflexes could have helped him against that. It could’ve been any of us, and I think we need to make sure we kill that thing, not only for Donald, but for the people that she intends to hurt.”

James nodded at her and pulled up his legs. “If you don’t mind, Tracy, I need to stay here for a while. I just feel … tired, and it’s not so much because she attacked me, but well, as you know, we haven’t slept in about thirty six hours.”

Tracy knew James was right. When she saw the darkness moving, she had thought she was hallucinating from lack of sleep, but when the men saw the same thing she knew it was real. Until now, there had been no moment when they could afford to be sleepy. They had been fighting all night against the rushing demons, trying to keep them away from the bunker.

The three of them had forgone the luxury of going back to their bunker beds to fall asleep. Alysia’s revelation about the demon’s ritual was a top priority for them. So, they had set out to catch the demons in the act and here they were, reeling from the aftermath. It wasn’t as if they had much of a plan coming out there, but at the same time, they needed to see what the demons were doing. Tracy’s thoughts moved towards the bigger picture.

What could the demons do with a form that looked as human as the one that attacked us? So now, we have giants, flying creatures, kreples, demons, and now a version in the form of a beautiful woman. In this last thought, her mind took her to a scenario where the demon managed to get into the bunker. She thought about how most of the people would accept and defend her because they had not seen a demon like her before.

What if she could stop her eyes from glowing? What if she could speak their language? Who would be there to show the others she wasn’t real? On top of that, she thought, what if there were already demons within the bunker, within the government, and within the military, making key decisions? How do you combat that?

She looked over at her friend and it suddenly dawned on her that he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

“James, your mask is off!” Tracy exclaimed, as the old Seal sat up and made himself more comfortable in the grass. The clearing seemed eerily serene and there was a light mist settling in around them. It felt strange having to wear a mask as if she was on another planet.

She looked down at Donald with the memory of his death fresh in her mind. That could have easily been me, she thought and then she looked over at James, who had suffered a portion of the shadow’s attack himself. The creature had shredded his mask and suit, and she could see the dark red wounds on his body that bled freely from the cuts.

Tracy removed her helmet and gloves, determined to suffer the same fate as her friend. She inhaled the stench of sulfur and death that was all around her, then turned her phone on, took a photo of herself with a forced smile, and sent it to Alysia, asking for an update. She wondered at the so-called chemicals in the air. Had they even deployed them to kill off the creatures?

“What do you think, Jimmy? This whole ‘bombing the creatures to save the country.’ Is it a crock of crap or what?” she asked and James looked over at her with the same expressionless glance he always had.

“Of course it is. There’s nothing in the air save for demon stink. Whoever was on that broadcast wasn’t the President. I’m starting to question everything about this operation too. The missing troops, giants popping in whenever they want. Now we have this foolishness. It’s like we’re in a horror movie now. Screaming ghosts?”

“You know, the whole premise of random monsters storming the coast with minimal military personnel to fight back is a little strange. Have you tried calling out to anyone beyond state lines?” Tracy asked.

“No, I don’t really know anybody that ain’t here. A few war buddies, and Kendra has some family in Florida, but I haven’t tried.”

“Kendra. Is that your wife’s name?”

“Yep, that is her name. I keep thinking she was the lucky one in that attack. She was a good, God-fearing woman. Not the way you’re thinking, bopping people over the head with her bible or throwing around scripture to trump out arguments, but really a genuinely good woman.

For her to see the world turn into this, despite who or what is behind it … I don’t know, Tracy, this nonsense is enough to make someone lose their religion. I know how much her faith meant to her, so maybe she was spared all of this for a reason.” He chuckled and looked off to the side, and Tracy saw emotion come across his face for the first time since she met him. He looked as if he would cry but he dug deep and steeled himself against it.

“Are you not a Christian, Jimmy?” Tracy asked, since his words were hard to take from someone who actually believed. Raised in the church, Tracy still believed very much in the kingdom of heaven, but James sounded like a cynic, so she wondered where he was spiritually.

“I’m an old war dog that has witnessed and committed acts that would make any god cringe, Tracy. It’s not for everybody – religion, I mean. I’ve seen guys with their guts on the floor, crying for their mothers to help them instead of their god, and before all of that they could recite the whole damn bible. We fool ourselves with stories of make-believe. Nobody wants to hear that when you die you just take an extended sleep that you don’t wake up from. They want white, cloudy highways, an eternal father to be proud of them, and someone to forgive them when they behave badly as human beings.” He smiled when he said this last part, as if he was proud of himself for the speech.

“Okay,” Tracy said. “You still haven’t answered my question. Are you a Christian?”

James looked at her with ice in his dark brown eyes, and she could tell by his posture that he was getting weak from the blood loss. “I’ve been baptized, Trace. Let’s just leave it at that.”

So, I’m Trace now, Tracy thought and it pleased her to have James drop his formality with her, even if it was just a name. She got up to administer aid for his wounds and she found that most of them were treatable, even with what they had there. Her phone came to life and Alysia’s name was on it, so she stopped wrapping James’ leg to answer it.

“Alysia, did you get my messages?” Tracy asked, hoping the reply would be something along the lines of “yes, actually we’re on our way to you.” What she got instead was a long pause, and she could hear shuffling in the background as if she was moving.

“I’m coming to help you.” Alysia said, and Tracy didn’t like the singularity in her promise.

“So, none of the others are willing to come out here to get us?” Tracy asked, her voice cracking with the disappointment she felt in the people of the bunker.

“No, it’s not that, Tracy, see … well, we took all of the suits. I turned mine in with Jaime when we got back but now those are missing too. Some soldiers went out to go look for their missing team. I’m pretty capable, so don’t think you’re going to be alone. They called in for help from the neighboring bunker, but you guys sounded desperate, so I’m coming out to help. Please don’t argue against me doing it.”

Tracy understood what Alysia meant, and so she didn’t object to her risking it. She had been in the wilderness longer than most. She had been a prisoner of the demons, had fought them up close, and even faced a giant or two. Alysia Knight was a barrel full of bravery rolled up into a small woman’s body, so who was she to tell her not to come out to rescue her father?

“Bring medical supplies if you can and hurry CeeCee,” Tracy said.

“Are you hurt? How is my Dad? Can I talk to him?”

Tracy handed James the phone and resumed her wrapping of his leg to cover the wound. She looked around for the demon, thinking it was at times like this when an ambush was likely. She pulled the rifle close and saw that James hadn’t released his. If anything tried to get the jump on them he would get a few rounds off, and this reassured her that he was doing better than he looked.

“Dad, how are you feeling?” Alysia asked.

“Better, loads better. Your voice helps, but a shot of Jack would do the trick.”

“I’m not bringing you liquor, Dad, but it’s good to hear you joking despite what I saw in that photograph.”

Tracy hadn’t realized that the photo she took of her face had also caught the mangled body of Donald on the ground. When Alysia had seen it she panicked, thinking it was her father and that she needed to act immediately. It prompted her to rush out of the bunker without asking for anybody’s help. The suits were indeed gone and many people would not risk their health to step out without one, but the rash action of Alysia did not afford them that choice. She had snuck out and ran to the barracks, but forced herself to slow down to call Tracy for a better idea on their situation.

“Sit tight and I will be there soon,” she said to her father and then hung up the phone and looked around for supplies.

~ * ~ * ~

The moon was out. Alysia could still make out the bodies of the demons and soldiers, scattered around the entrance to the bunker. She gripped the handgun firmly and then looked behind her to make sure that nobody was following her. What are you doing CeeCee? This is crazy, she thought as she briskly walked towards the trees. They loomed like slim giants daring her to come at them, and the wind that made their limbs sway like mocking hands only added to the illusion.

The GPS on her phone led her to where her father was, but she felt foolish for coming out there alone. She thought about doubling back to get Jaime and Debdan, but she was too far now, so she pushed her fear as far to the side as she could and then slipped into the forest, trying her best to stay quiet.

Alysia wore all black clothes but there was no armor or mask to protect her. All she had on was a dress with a pair of combat boots and the gun that Jaime had given her when they first met.

She cat-walked past the damp trunks of the shadowy maple trees, but the wet mud through which she sloshed made enough noise to warn anyone she was coming. She wished she could take them off and sneak along with her bare feet, but the fear of stepping on something sharp and crippling made her reconsider it.

Without a mask to filter it, the air smelled like rotten eggs. It was that same distinct odor of sulfur that the demons emitted, and it made her skin crawl at the thought of being captured again. She was a few minutes into her trek when she thought she heard a noise coming from behind her. She walked a few more steps and then spun with her gun out, pointing back at the source of the sound.

All she could see was blackness, and the eerie silence was only broken by the sounds of crickets. She resumed her march until she heard it again, but this time she was quite sure that something was behind her. Is it walking in cadence with my steps in order to mask its approach?

She pulled out her phone and activated the flashlight, then stepped and spun while simultaneously bringing it up. This time her pursuer was revealed; four demons stood in front of her, covering their eyes from the blinding light. When Alysia saw them, she panicked and took off running. She could take on one demon if that was what was following her, but what she saw was a group and that meant she would be captured.

The GPS chimed, letting her know she was close, and she cursed herself for not setting it to silent. She held it up, wondering if the direction she sprinted had taken her off course. Does it really matter? The hellions were coming, and she couldn’t afford to get caught.

When she came upon a campsite, she slowed her sprint without looking behind her. In front of her and kneeling with her rifle aimed directly at Alysia was Tracy, and behind her was James—her father, lying on his back but still holding his rifle.

Tracy’s shot whizzed past Alysia’s face and the first demon got it in the chest and fell down screaming. This prompted Alysia to dive and roll past the dead embers of the bonfire, and she shuffled to the area where her father lay. She saw the mangled body of Donald, and at his head were the rifle and sword he always kept with him.

Tracy dropped the other three demons, but she could hear more of them coming off in the distance. Alysia did a quick check on her father and sighed in relief when she saw his eyes blink and then focus to look up at her.

“Baby girl,” he said, wincing, and she fought back the tears and touched his face.

“I’m gonna need you to help me out here!” Tracy yelled back at them.

“Yeah, we have to keep them off us,” James managed to say and then struggled to his stomach and brought the rifle up.

A large number of demons burst through the trees but were dropped by the gunfire of Tracy and James. Alysia lifted Donald’s rifle and then whispered a prayer as she knelt near her father and readied herself for anything that would try to sneak up on them.

“Where are the others?” Tracy asked between shots, and Alysia felt foolish for coming out alone.

“The bunker’s on lockdown, so I had to sneak out,” she lied.

“Even with us out here dying?” Tracy asked, not believing that the soldiers of the bunker would abandon them to the monsters of the surface. “I find it hard to believe that Jaime would let you come out here by yourself, Alysia. Are you sure?”

Alysia grew quiet as she shot and caught a demon in the shoulder. She still didn’t have a handle on aiming and the recoil hurt her bicep due to the way she held it. After a while she spoke again, but she hoped that Tracy’s preoccupation with the rushing demons would allow the subject to drop.

“I came out alone when I saw your text and signal, Tracy. I was worried and wasn’t thinking. Nobody knows I’m out here. They probably think I’m in my room.”

Tracy didn’t answer her but she could feel the tension in the air from her disappointment. They all kept on shooting until fifteen demons were killed and the air was so thick with the sulfur that they couldn’t bear it.

“A one woman rescue squad, huh? Okay Rambolinda, Audie Mary, or whatever your real name is. How do you propose we get back to the bunker with your father like that?” Tracy said to her as she closed the distance on them and got in her face.

“Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry. I can call Jaime and Debdan to bring some help. We aren’t out of options,” Alysia said, desperately hoping that Tracy would believe her.

“Jimmy, Jimmy, look at me,” Tracy yelled, and she knelt over the big man to shake him awake. “You can’t sleep out here, Jimmy. I know you’re tired and losing blood. Get up, we need to get you walking,” she said to him as she reached down and grasped his massive paw.

Alysia wondered what had gotten into her to make such a foolish decision as to go after her father alone. She wished she had listened to her instinct when it urged her to get her friends. She reached down and grabbed the crude sword that was lying next to Donald and then untied its scabbard and wrapped it around her waist.

Tracy made to walk with James towards the trees, away from where the shadow had fled, but he stopped her short and turned around to look at Donald’s body. “Nobody gets left behind, Trace. We can’t allow him to die out here like a dog.” He struggled a bit and held his ribs, but he dug deep and pushed down the pain in order to finish what he was saying. “He is a United States soldier, and a hero. We need to bring him, give him a proper burial, and … honor him.”

Alysia and Tracy exchanged glances of helplessness at James’s request but they knew it wasn’t up for debate. Alysia used the sword to cut two long, wet branches into staves and then wrapped Donald’s cloak around them to make a hammock of sorts. She and Tracy laid his body on it and secured it as best they could so that he wouldn’t slide off. Tracy then helped James to walk into the woods and Alysia followed, struggling to pull Donald along with her.

“This isn’t going to work!” She yelled at them as Tracy’s pace grew too much for her to keep up with.

“What’s the matter, CeeCee? Think we may need some help to pull him? Like say, two young men that have actually gotten some sleep?”

Alysia ignored the sarcasm and stood her ground as Tracy looked at her with cold blue eyes before sighing loudly and stopping. “Here, help your dad and—”

“Stop the bickering. I can walk without help,” James said as he shook Tracy’s hand off his shoulder and hobbled forward, away from them. Tracy moved back and grabbed one of the sticks from Alysia as they took to dragging Donald’s corpse behind the wounded Navy Seal.

It didn’t take very long for the shadow to appear in front of them and force James to stop and pull his rifle from his back. Tracy dropped the stick and moved up next to him with her rifle at eye level, ready to put it down.

The shadow surrounded them in a matter of seconds and the chill took hold of them. Alysia was experiencing it for the first time so she exhaled a squeal quite loudly as it chilled her to her bones and forced her to drop her gun. Tracy again fought through it and began firing, and James followed her with his own shots, but the demon girl darted through them and came at Alysia with her fingers outstretched.

Alysia reacted to the charge instinctively and spun with an elbow catching the demon in her nose. The blow stopped her short, but Alysia was already out of the shadowy, cold smoke with the sword free and ready.

The demon came at her again, leaving the shadows to occupy Tracy and James, but Alysia didn’t wait for her to strike, dashing in so fast that the demon couldn’t react. It was years of Kendo classes, tournaments, and drilling by her father that had given her these reactions.

The sword was merely an extension of her arm, an extension she was more than familiar with, and she brought the blade down on the demon’s arm, then up again and down on her head with a resounding, “KIYAH!”

The demon had been wounded but it healed quickly and she slashed at Alysia, who stood with the sword outstretched, expecting that her coup de grace had done its job. She pulled away from the wild gestures of the creature and used the trees to put obstacles between them as she darted one way while swinging the blade and countering. New shots rang past her as James and Tracy fired at the demon with their pistols, and when one of the bullets hit her in the back, the demon decided once again to flee.

“Whoa, Alysia! Where the hell did that come from?” Tracy said in the particularly boisterous way she did whenever she was excited.

“I don’t know,” Alysia said, trying to catch her breath. “It just sort of popped up around us. Is that—is that what they turn us into?”

“No, not where did the demon come from. Where did those crazy, ninja, samurai skills come from?” Tracy asked, ignoring everything Alysia had asked about the demon.

“You’re standing next to him,” Alysia said as she examined the blade for blood or anything out of the ordinary. “I’m surprised that nasty thing didn’t have acid for blood or something similarly tricky to punish me for cutting her. This blade isn’t even sharp. Were it one of our swords, she’d be split in two pieces. Right, Dad?”

James smiled at her proudly and nodded his head. “You sure did chop the hell out of her, CeeCee. She would be split for sure if that thing had a proper edge.” He motioned for them to continue walking and Alysia wiped the blood from the sword with the end of her dress and sheathed it. She and Tracy resumed their hauling of Donald’s body and James took point, never allowing his rifle to fall as he stumbled ahead in front of them.

“I don’t think that’s really a sword,” Tracy said. “It looks like someone just took a flat piece of steel railing and put an edge on it.

“Yeah, old Donald used to fly a chopper back when he was active,” James said. “Told me that when they shot him down and he was in the bush he took a part of it, gave it a handle and used it to survive. That blade may not have an edge on it, but it’s got history. Said he carried it with him ever since. It saved his life a few more times when he was trying to be a mountain man, and look at that … it saved my CeeCee too.”

Alysia felt her heart grow heavy with respect for the sword’s history and regretted the words she had spoken into the air about its dull edge. “When we get back I will give it a real edge,” she said, and focused her efforts on pulling the body in cadence with Tracy. She could feel the woman struggling with her side and knew it was exhaustion taking its toll on her, since Tracy was normally very strong.

They broke out of the woods an hour later and James almost passed out before they could get him to the barracks. They placed Donald near a wall and wrapped him in the cloak while Alysia called Jaime and asked him to bring medical help. It was strangely quiet after that as they watched the sun make its rise and another day of hell slip in. Tracy sat with her father, who hadn’t said anything since they stopped, and Alysia noticed how comfortable she was leaning against him.

Her father was dying but she didn’t know what to think about the way Tracy was with him. Her mother’s death was still fresh on her mind, and the idea of her father moving on so fast made her want to lash out and cut her. Maybe I’m just imagining it. She looked away from them towards the bunker, her hand on the handle of her makeshift sword, ready for anything that would come.

3

“CeeCee,” the voice said. It was so light that Alysia thought she might have imagined it. Her mind would do that to her periodically as she sat next to her father’s bed and like the other times she heard it, she felt the need to investigate.

Her chair was on the side of her father’s bed, but he faced away from her so she got up and walked over to the other side. James Knight smiled when he saw her face, and it was an effort that seemed to be both pleasing to him and physically painful.

“Oh, thank God you’re awake,” Alysia said, ignoring the injuries and bandages wrapped around his chest to hug him tightly and kiss his face. “I thought I’d lost you, Dad, but I knew you wouldn’t go out so easily.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said with a whisper, and his words forced a painful lump in her throat that ended with tears painfully pushing their way to her eyes. Even with death looming he had fought. Not for himself or for fear of passing, but for his daughter, and it made her feel selfish for the way she had been acting. “I know that you haven’t had much time to grieve your mother. I know it’s not easy.”

“I’m okay, Dad. It’s not as if you’ve had any time to grieve yourself.”

“I’ve had plenty of time for reflection, CeeCee. You’ve been ducking and dodging death for many days now. The last thing you need is more grief.”

“How are you feeling, Dad? Are you in pain?” she asked.

“I’ll live. How long was I out?” he asked. He looked around the room, taking in the reality that he was lying in a bed inside of the tiny bunker clinic.

“About a week,” Alysia said, getting up to greet whomever it was she heard outside the door. “I’ve been watching you whenever I can. Visiting to see if I could coax you to stick around in this world with the rest of us that love you.” He was touched by her words and averted his gaze to look up at the ceiling while she answered the door.

Tracy, who had come up to the clinic to see him, dropped her bag when she saw that he was awake. She ran up to the bed, beaming. “Well if this don’t beat all! I knew that you were too stubborn to die.” And she took James’s hand in hers and held it. “How long has he been up, CeeCee?” she asked.

“About fifteen minutes now, I think,” Alysia replied, observing the strange connection that Tracy seemed to have with her father.

“So much love … from everybody,” James managed as weariness took over his body and forced him to close his eyes to will it away. He squeezed Tracy’s hand, grateful that she had come to see him.

“Oh he’s talking!” she said, and brought his hand up to touch her face. “You deserve all the love in the world, big guy,” she said as Alysia continued to stare at her.

When Tracy caught her gaze and saw that it wasn’t a look of happiness that was reflected there, she made a questioning gesture and Alysia motioned with her head for them to step outside.

“I’ll be right back, Dad. I need to tell the doctor that you’re awake,” Alysia said, and then walked over to kiss him again before touching Tracy’s arm and leading her outside of the clinic.

When she got outside, she placed her back to the door as if she meant to block it. “What’s going on with my Dad, Tracy?” she asked as soon as Tracy turned around to face her.

“You mean his condition? You saw what happened out there with that demon. Before you came out there we—”

“I don’t mean his condition; you guys gave me the details. I mean, what’s going on between the two of you?” she said, but then she wanted to look away as Tracy’s eyes hardened. Still, she held her ground despite the gaze and stared at the tall redhead, as if that would force her to come clean.

Tracy sighed at the question. She couldn’t believe that after everything that had been going on with the monsters, Alysia—an adult herself—was acting like an overprotective child for her father. She didn’t think she had to explain herself to the girl, them being consenting adults after all.

“There’s nothing going on,” she finally said, letting the hard edge of her voice cut through to Alysia’s senses. “You know, even if there was, I don’t appreciate the attitude. Your dad and I are friends, what? Do I need your permission for that?”

Her tone and defensiveness made Alysia want to lash back out at her, but then self-doubt snuck in and she wondered if she was wrong for what she assumed was happening. She froze and looked away as she thought on it and then struggled with her words as Tracy looked at her, confused. It seemed like an hour passed before she spoke, but when she did her emotions got the better of her and it came out as a barely audible whisper.

“I just—I just need you to understand,” she said, and then stopped to compose herself as Tracy watched her, allowing her to finish. “Look Tracy … you can’t date my dad.”

“By date, I assume you mean ‘like’, right? Or do you mean, ‘love’? Wait,” she said and pretended to find it hysterical. “Do you mean something more primitive and crass, Alysia? You don’t want the dirty police lady to go anywhere near your daddy?”

Alysia found herself getting upset at Tracy’s mocking tone, but she held it together to finish the thought that she struggled to find the words for. “You’ve done so much for me since the day we met, Tracy, and I mean no disrespect. I look up to you in more ways that you think, but with my dad … what I think I mean is that I’m not ready for him to forget my mother.”

Tracy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. At first she thought it had something to do with her background, her manner, or something close to racial prejudice that made Alysia stand opposed to the idea of she and James being together. But now she saw that it was her mother’s death.

It felt like a million years had passed since she’d run into the bedroom to console Alysia over her mother’s passing. That day, she had received the phone call from her father and collapsed into a screaming fit. In reality it had only been about a month, and Tracy felt terrible for the entire situation.

“CeeCee, your father will never forget your mother, trust me. He talks about her all the time. Their love was the type that you read about in romance novels and you … you are his life. I understand your concern, and I don’t want to lose you as a friend. But know that I care about Jimmy; these last few weeks together has caused us to become close, but it is no different than the closeness we would have if I were a man. I don’t know what else to say.” And she touched Alysia’s shoulder and walked by her to check in on James.

Alysia stood at the door, brooding, trying to digest what Tracy had told her. She saw a lot more than friendship in their exchange, and she wondered if she had really gotten through to Tracy or if she had merely told her what she wanted to hear.

She put it out of her mind and walked over to the doctor’s bunker to let him know her father was awake. The door had a makeshift red cross on the door and when she went to knock, it swung open and she could see the big soldier sorting through his supplies and punching in information into the computer.

When she walked inside, the big, dark-haired man didn’t turn around. He had the standard buzz cut that one would expect a military man to have and he wore blue fatigues with a stethoscope. “You ladies finish having your lovers spat outside?” he said in a dry, sarcastic tone and Alysia slammed the door to force him to look at her.

“I got your ladies, Carmichael,” she said, and then gave him the finger when he finally looked at her.

“Figured I’d get the sexy ginger and not you, chocolate fury. You barely come visit me,” he said as he stood up to face her. “Still, you’ll do. I bet you clean up nice when you’re not trying to play at soldier.”

She kept staring at him with a slight smile on her face and fierce eyes. She wanted to show him that his words were meaningless, but she knew that it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing could slow down the tongue of PFC. Tony Carmichael Jr., the combat medic turned bunker doctor.

“Do you ever shut up, Tony? My dad’s awake. I wonder how he would take to his daughter being called ‘chocolate fury’ by a douchebag like you.”

“You know you love the way I talk to you,” he said to her and his wink caused her to roll her eyes.

“Keep on trying me, it will never happen,” she said as she gave him a long glance. She wanted it to confuse him, but she didn’t wait to see his reaction as she went back in to check on her father.

Tracy was still there and they were holding hands. Alysia noticed that they were talking in hushed voices and it brought back the feelings of betrayal within her. She had always admired Tracy but now that she was involved with her father—which was obvious by the way they looked at one another—it felt too much like a violation for her to ignore. She was a bit disappointed in her father; he was hurt and in recovery but he could have sent her away. He was just as bad as his red-haired “friend.”

She spent some time with her father while Tracy stepped outside, then she kissed him goodbye and walked back to her room. She saw that Carmichael had cornered Tracy near his office and a part of her wished that he would be successful with his advancements on her. That would keep her away from my father, but that isn’t how life works, is it? she thought, and then set foot to path in order to get home quickly.

The time of day should have been a little after 2:00 p.m. but the bunker was reflecting a look of night. Within the massive underground city, the ceiling would produce images that reflected the time of day, and she was expecting to see the artificial sun amidst artificial clouds, floating overhead. What she saw was the metal that comprised the structure, and a periodic flashing of the sky, indicating that the system was malfunctioning and there was an electrical issue.

“ATTENTION, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST,” a raspy voice uttered on a loudspeaker. Alysia saw the numerous people walking about stop and look up, and it was as if the entire world paused to listen to it. “WE NEED EVERYONE TO GO BACK TO YOUR ROOMS AND LOCK THE DOORS NOW. THERE IS A DANGEROUS ENTITY WITHIN THE BUNKER AND WE NEED YOU TO STAY SAFELY INSIDE OF YOUR ROOMS. WHEN THE THREAT IS ELIMINATED YOU CAN SAFELY RESUME YOUR OUTSIDE ACTIVITY.”

Alysia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. A dangerous entity? Was there some sort of psychopath loose inside of their bunker, or did something from the outside manage to slip in with them? The whole situation felt sinister and after the announcement only a few people were outside of their rooms being blatantly disobedient. Soldiers were running about, trying to stay alert, and they were armed in case there really was a breach.

She quickened her pace, unsure of what was going on. In her room, she had hidden the sword she had inherited from Donald. Having it there had been a small victory for her psyche. With the excitement of her father’s return and the retrieval of the dead soldiers, the security had become lax at the entrance and she was able to smuggle it in. It was expected that the military would keep order within the bunkers but her encounter with the demon had made her think differently about it all.

She made it past Jaime’s door and was about to check in on him when she felt the familiar chill that the demon used within the forest. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms as she looked around for an open vent or something else that could be the source of the strange wind. Everything looked the same, but she couldn’t understand how it could only be cold in that location.

She knocked on the door and waited for an answer, but the cold seem to intensify while she stood out there. Suddenly, Jaime opened the door and pulled her in. He slammed it shut behind her and handed her a gun as he put a finger to his lips to tell her to be quiet. They waited by the door, listening, and Alysia could still feel the chill from outside. Could it be her? Could she be here in the bunker? They waited for a few more moments in relative silence, and then Alysia heard what had caused Jaime to go into combat mode.

The sound was very low at first, but then it grew louder as they listened. It turned out to be the sound of a man whimpering. He seemed to be walking around outside of the house trying to get help—at least that’s what it sounded like—but nobody was helping him. As the sound grew louder, as if he neared Jaime’s door, the cold intensified and Alysia couldn’t help but think again of the demon huntress.

When she had returned from saving her father, she told Jaime all the details of their encounter. He had seemed more impressed with Alysia’s fight than of the demon, but he hadn’t stopped talking about it ever since. Jaime was ready and he had made sure of it by smuggling weapons into his bunker room, but what they were hearing was a man, not an attractive demon in a woman’s skin.

There was a knocking on the door, and Alysia’s heart went into her throat. The man was asking them to open up, but the chill he was giving off was telling, and they knew that the demon was with him. Jaime stood still at the side of the door, his tanned, handsome face drawn taut by his determination as he held the gun to his side, ready for the demon to kick it in.

The waiting went on for many moments until Jaime got impatient and motioned for Alysia to get behind him. He pulled open the door, and a slashed up, bloody Debdan sauntered in with the chill wrapped about him, and his mouth open in a cruel smile that revealed his intent. Where his eyes used to be stood black voids with deep red centers that glowed like lively embers. He had become something vile and corrupt, and the cold made Alysia think that it had something to do with the demon from the woods.

“No, not you buddy. Not you,” Jaime mumbled as he held his gun up, trembling, but Debdan was no longer in that body and Alysia recognized this. She stepped through the crippling cold and kicked him square in the chest, causing him to fall back outside of Jaime’s house and onto the street.

Screams were everywhere within the bunker as similar creatures to Debdan began to pop up and terrorize the unarmed citizenship. “We are about to be massacred!” Alysia shouted at Jaime, and her mind ran back to her father who laid helpless in the clinic, weak and vulnerable to the world.

“What happened to Debdan, CeeCee?” Jaime desperately asked. “We’re supposed to be cut off from them down here. Did we get breached, or did one of you bring it in?” he asked, frantically trying to make sense of his friend’s condition.

“The cold says it all, Jaime, and this is not the time to point fingers. We need to save these people and find the source. I think the demon that ran away from us managed to come down here.”

She ran into her house and collected her gear, quickly slipping on the sword and scabbard and strapping her pistol to her leg. She had let her hair out for many days now, but she pulled it back into a ponytail, using the shoelaces from her damaged boots to tie it in place. When she was finished she sent a text to Tracy to let her know the situation. She then walked back outside to collect Jaime.

He was struggling with Debdan at his door, unable to hurt him but reeling from the chill that emitted from his body. Alysia walked up and kicked Debdan in the side, forcing him to release Jaime. She struggled with the urge to draw her sword, remembering how frightened the demon huntress was of its edge, but she didn’t know if Debdan was still in that body or if he was gone from them forever.

If he was still in there somewhere she would be a murderer, and the thought of killing another person made her hesitate in her action. Debdan stood up and rushed at her, but she pulled her blade free to hold him off. The edge glinted in the flashing light of the malfunctioning ceiling, giving presence to the hard work she had put into sharpening it during the week. She circled him until his back was to Jaime’s door, then she nodded to Jaime and he tackled him back inside the home where Alysia quickly pulled him off.

Jaime closed the door and Alysia used the hilt of her sword to bash in the fuse box which allowed the door to be operated. Debdan became a prisoner inside of Jaime’s home, and Alysia took Jaime to the side to talk to him.

“Jaime, look, we’re not even sure if that’s really Debdan. So don’t freak out on me when I really need you to be yourself.”

“It’s cool, I got it, CeeCee,” he said. “Just wasn’t expecting that guy to look like that. Then the fact that he was coming at me was just a lot to process. I’m good now, let’s go get this b—”

“You can’t take that,” Alysia said, pointing to the guns that he was cocking.

“Why the hell not?” he asked, looking at her as if she was crazy.

“Jaime, we’re in an underground bunker. There are innocent people inside of houses that the bullets from one of our guns would shred through easily. What about little Maria and her mom? The ones that stay near Tracy. What if you shoot at the demon and miss? Your bullet could hit someone like them. We need weapons that are not going to hurt innocent people. I have a feeling that the demon is down here possessing people like Debdan, and we will be running into more like him, trying to do her will. We’re going to have to find her and finish her.”

“How do you propose we do that?” he asked as he holstered his pistols and picked up a pipe that had broken off one of the lines that ran behind the rooms.

“When I cut the demon girl, my blade did a number on her. She had retreated when I did that, but she was healing when she did it,” Alysia said.

“So this thing can heal wounds that we deal to it? Why the hell did it run then, if it’s invincible?”

“I think that it isn’t invincible. I think that if we do enough damage to her, she will die. We just have to make sure that she can’t run while we do it.

“How do you handle the cold?” Jaime asked.

“The cold sucks. It’s meant to paralyze you, but if we focus on killing it, we can push through.”

Jaime nodded his head and took the lead as he started down the dark road that separated the rows of bunker houses. People were locked inside of them tight, and Alysia noticed that Tracy’s room was dark, as well as Angelica’s. I wonder where they could be, she thought, and then quickened her pace to catch up with Jaime, whose long legs were marching along quickly as if time was of the essence.

He led them down the path towards the main hub of the bunker. The entire network of houses was built upon a web-like footprint that connected the different entrances that were aboveground within the city.

This web of roads crisscrossed and stretched in a way that made it easy to find the center, and from this hub you could locate your main road to get back to your house. Normally it was busy with people but with the demon loose, it was all quiet, except for the occasional sound of gunfire.

Alysia had never been to the center before, and as they got close to it she saw that it was set up very much like a mall. There were stores everywhere, and places for people to sit around and eat. She could see the bodies of the demon’s victims, and the temperature began to drop as they grew closer.

“Screw the soldiers and their rules, CeeCee. Draw your blade,” Jaime said, and he pulled out his pistol, which annoyed Alysia since she thought that he had listened to her.

“Just try not to shoot any of us with those,” she said under her breath and pulled the sword free.

“You know, this whole time I thought that would be a samurai sword or something,” Jaime remarked, looking at Alysia’s sword curiously. “What the hell is it? Kinda looks like a blade from a lawnmower, or some sort of machete.”

“It’s a demon killing sword that I inherited from Donald,” Alysia said.

“Whoa, you mean the old, Asian soldier? Kick ass. Well, I hope it’s at least sharp,” Jaime replied as he rushed ahead to find the demon.

“Oh, you better believe it is,” Alysia said.

The air got colder as they walked past the corpse of a man who looked and smelled the same way that Debdan did. He had a bullet wound in his skull, and he was on his stomach, indicating he had been shot in the back.

“What the hell are you two doing out? Are you crazy?” a young soldier shouted at them as he came from behind a store with his gun pointed at them. He was in the same black suit that they wore outside and had black paint around his ears. It made his blonde, spikey hair look like a geyser of straw sticking out of an all-black body. He probably thought it made him look cool, but Alysia thought he looked ridiculous.

“I’ve fought that demon before,” Alysia replied, cutting off Jaime before he could get them in trouble.

“What do you mean you’ve fought it before?” the soldier said as he walked up to Jaime and confiscated his pistol. “You need to get back inside and stow your weapons. You know the rules. You can’t be out here while we’re trying to eliminate this threat.”

“Do you even know what ‘this threat’ is, soldier?” Alysia said as she stepped forward to stand eye to eye with him.

“I’m not gonna tell you to move again,” he said as he moved his gun around in an aggressive way in order to intimidate them.

“My father is a Navy SEAL, and a hero to this bunker, you jerk. If you think I’m afraid of you shooting me, you must be crazier than you look. We were just out there fighting this demon when he killed one of our friends and injured my father. You may not recognize me but I was there. I’ve fought this demon before, and I know what to do to stop her.”

The soldier looked as if he wanted to object, but after a loud scream broke the tension from a distant building, he flipped the pistol around to point the butt at Jaime, who took it back reluctantly. “You two just aim straight and be careful out here with these things. Anyone ask, you never met me, you hear?” And he took off running in the direction of the scream.

“Let’s stay out of the road to avoid any more like him,” Alysia said with a sigh of relief, and they stepped between the nearest two houses, right in front of a large man in overall shorts with glowing red eyes.

~ * ~ * ~

During the announcement for everyone to stay inside their rooms, the injured James Knight and Tracy McLeay were talking to one another within the clinic. She was sitting on his bed and holding his hand, and he was pretending to be calm after what he had heard over the loudspeaker.

“I wonder what that means,” Tracy said when she heard it, but James showed no indication that he was worried about the announcement. In his mind, he wondered whether they were fated to lock themselves inside the clinic for however long it took the military to get things under control. It was hard being out of the fight, and he didn’t want to sit there doing nothing.

“I really hope that it isn’t what I think it is,” he said to her and then turned his head see if she was on the same page as him.

“You mean the demon?” she asked.

“Yup, the demon,” he replied. “I knew we would run into her again eventually, but if she managed to come down here then we have us a problem. See, we were worried about the giant and those other demons coming in here causing a bunch of ruckus and whatnot. But that demon, she can freeze people, slash people up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she could fly and disappear, too.”

Tracy didn’t know what to think. She looked around to see if there was anything that could become a weapon in the event of the demon finding them, but all she saw was medical equipment, chairs, tables and trash bins; all of the mundane things that comprised a living area. She got up and walked to the kitchen area to see if there were any knives and she found two long ones. I wonder what effect these will have on that demon and her freezing cloud of darkness.

She remembered what Alysia was able to do with her sword and her confidence in the knives grow. She brought them over to the bed and slid one under James’s covers. The big man took it and held it next to him, thanking her silently as he lay there considering their options.

Tracy walked over to the door to try it and was quite surprised to find that she could unlock it and peer outside.

“So, they didn’t lock us in,” she said. “Do they really expect us to listen to what we’ve been told without question? Well that’s gonna be a problem. I mean, people have a hard enough time listening as it is. I imagine there are a couple fools out there right now, running about and getting themselves messed up by this demon while the soldiers try to shoot past them to hit the actual target. Jimmy, this is a disaster. They’re gonna need our help since we know what to do against that thing and they don’t.”

“I agree,” James said. “But I think we need more than knives to do anything worthwhile.”

“Yeah, and you’re in no condition to be running around looking for disappearing demons yourself.”

“You underestimate me,” he said to her and got up off the bed and pulled the tubes out of his arms. He then made to stand up to show her just how ready he was, but when his bare feet touched the cold ground he stumbled into her arms. He didn’t realize just how weak he was after not being up and about for so long, and Tracy tried her best to help him up. After looking at her and shaking his head, he moved away and stood up by himself, trying not to wince despite the pain that spread throughout his entire body.

“We need a plan,” he said. “We can’t just run out there all willy-nilly, looking to hunt this demon down or we will suffer the same fate that everyone else out there will. We have the advantage of having fought her before, so what do you think? What should we do?”

“Well,” Tracy said. “We know she can be hurt, so that’s a bonus. She ran away from us when our bullets hit her but she healed and you saw what Alysia was able to do with Donald’s sword. But I’m assuming she healed from that, too. That’s gonna be the one thing we’re going to have to figure out to get to her.”

“That thing seems to heal from anything that comes at it so we need to keep applying pressure,” James said. “We can’t allow it to heal. I think it runs away because it needs time to get the bullets out, and to regenerate limbs and whatnot from the cuts. In here, it’s all walls except for our exits, but we can seal off those exits and put constant damage on it. If we work together it’ll go down; we just have to get everybody on the same page as us.”

“I think you’re onto something there,” Tracy said, “but you see how these houses are laid out. It’s not going to be easy to stop her from escaping, not when it’s just the two of us.”

“That’s the thing though; it ain’t just the two of us. I’m sure these guys running around out there trying to get this thing under control are open to suggestions. No telling how many people already died for them to sound off an alarm like that. But if we can get them to block off the exits for this evil chick and all of us together pump bullets into her, I think we can stop her. If she doesn’t die, at least she’ll be too weak to do anything, and we can contain her and, I don’t know, maybe … maybe one of the scientists down here can take a look at her and figure out what the hell we’re dealing with.”

“I still have a hard time believing that she is some kind of supernatural demon or that those giants are actual giants or those dinosaur things are whatever they are. I still think this is some sort of genetic experimentation gone wrong and there’s an actual person behind all this. Some sort of enemy to the United States, you know what I mean?” Tracy said to him as she walked over and checked to make sure that he wasn’t hurt anywhere.

James nodded his head and looked at her intently. “Yeah, I hear you, Trace. There is definitely something else going on.”

“You know I’m not religious, so I don’t believe in angels and demons, plus even if that was the case … I have yet to see an angel in all of this,” she said.

“Well we do have some things flying around out there,” James joked and Tracy shook her head at him as if she was unimpressed.

“Okay, it sounds like we have a plan,” she said and he walked over to the storage that sat inside the kitchen to collect his things. “I’m just gonna change and gear up so I’ll see you outside,” he said to her, and Tracy nodded at him and walked outside, shutting the door behind her as she held the knife to her chest.

Carmichael, the medic, was outside of his room staring at the wall as if there was something there to stare at. Tracy watched him as he stood there and then the deep chill of cold that emitted from his body came over her, causing her to shiver uncontrollably. She stood staring at him, wondering why he was giving off this temperature. She thought it might have been the demon disguised in his likeness, trying to pull her close so that she could finish the job that she started back in the woods.

“What are you?” Tracy announced, and set herself into a fighting stance with the knife held up in a guard position, waiting for the demon to strike at her. Carmichael turned around and looked at her and the deep dark pits that were his eyes held tiny orbs of red that glowed bright. She looked for intelligence inside of those crimson orbs but found nothing but hate and confusion.

He screamed at her, and it was a loud guttural scream that froze her where she stood. What the hell has happened to him? she wondered, and when he lunged towards her she slashed the knife at his face left and then right, leaving lines of blood wherever it struck.

“Thank God, you bleed!” she shouted at him, too fired up to contain herself.

Carmichael retreated, holding his face, and this made Tracy pause as she thought he might still be human. When he had attacked her and she countered, the knife was not sharp enough to do immense damage on his face. But it had made its point and he backed down, looking at her angrily as he touched his wounds.

He screamed and came at her even more violently this time. On nothing but instinct, Tracy stepped out of the way and brought the knife down between his neck and shoulder blade, then pulled it out and shanked him again in his back.

Screams continued as he kept trying to get at her but she kept slashing and stabbing at him. This went on for a good five minutes and when Tracy was tired and the doctor was desperate, he made one final lunge which resulted in him becoming impaled on her outstretched knife.

Carmichael fell from the fatal wound, and from his mouth poured a black, ink-like substance that kept on pouring as he lay there. There was so much of it coming out that Tracy wondered how it was that he had that much inside of him. His skin, which used to be a golden brown, turned pale and dry as he lay there. He became the image of an old corpse lying inside a puddle of thick, black oil.

When James came out of the clinic and saw the mess, he looked at Tracy breathing heavily and put the situation together as best he could. “What the hell happened to the doctor?” he asked, and Tracy showed him the bloody knife and shook her head.

“He attacked me,” she said. “And his eyes were glowing just like the demons.”

“Damn, this is getting more messed up as we go along. You okay? Did he get you?”

“No, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I fought for my life while you were inside getting cute,” she joked, and he couldn’t help but smile at her bravery.

“So, you mean to tell me that she can possess us, too?” he asked and Tracy merely shrugged.

“I don’t know, Jimmy; this is all new to me. All I know is that I just had one hell of a fight against a man whose only former offense was undressing me with his eyes.”

James knelt down to examine the body of the medic, whose skin had become gray and flaky. It was as if he was slowly turning into ashes before their eyes and he found it quite fascinating.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “And I’ve seen death in just about every way imaginable.”

“I bet you have,” Tracy said. “You won’t give me any details, but I know you’ve been through some stuff, that’s for sure.”

“You don’t want to hear the stuff I’ve been through,” James said. “You know there are things that I would rather forget than bring it back up to you. But this right here is getting close, and if it keeps up, you won’t need my stories. You’ll be having your own share of nightmares.”

Tracy found that she couldn’t look at the body any longer and she stared at her bloody hand with the long knife still gripped tight within it. The knuckles on her hand were hard and white and she was still shaking from the adrenaline.

“Jimmy, can we go?” she said, and he looked up at her and saw that she was going through a hard time. He decided to delay his investigation of the doctor and stood up, then put his hand on her shoulder.

“I got you, Tracy. You know this, right? I got your six, just like I know you got mine.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that one.” She tried to joke, but he could see that she needed more time.

They moved on to the cul-de-sac where Alysia, Jaime, and Debdan lived and James knocked on the door of his daughter’s room.

“You think he’s in there with your daughter?” Tracy asked with a little smile on her face.

“Don’t joke about that,” James said, and he shouted his name again.

Tracy felt like something was off, so she ran towards the door and kicked it open with her boot. The door flew open, knocking someone down and when she moved to apologize, she noticed the demon on the floor. It looked very much like the red and black ones that were scattered all about the forest but there was something about it.

“What is one of these doing here, Jimmy?” she asked as she looked at the demon who looked back at her. His appearance was very familiar. There was something about his gait and mannerisms that gave them pause, but they didn’t have much time to ponder, as it made to rush at them. James saw what it was trying to do and brought up his knife and cut the air in front of it. He held it up in front of his face, hoping that it would buy them some time to get the demon back inside the room.

“It would be good to have one of them captured so we can figure out what it is that is going on,” he said. “We could just shut the door an—”

His words were cut short by the demon, who swung at Tracy’s face with his fist. James countered by stabbing him in the bicep and twisted the blade as he pulled it out. The demon backed into the room screaming and James dashed forward and kicked him in the abdomen.

The force of the kick caused the demon to fall back onto the bed and James wiped the blood from the blade onto his pants. Always wipe your blade when the final cut is made, he remembered telling Alysia. One of many lessons that stuck with her, and the vision of her training made him smile to himself.

He pulled the door and tried to lock it, but Tracy’s kick had almost taken it off the hinges. There was no way they would be locking the demon in, so they pondered what to do next.

“If I had a proper blade, I could just take his legs out,” James said, but Tracy wasn’t listening as she walked over to hand him a length of electrical cord.

“This was lying behind the building where it had been cut,” she said. “At least now we know what caused the system to go haywire.”

James took the cord and tied the demon’s arms and legs, then pushed him into the bathroom, where he locked the door and wedged a piece of pipe beneath the handle.

“Do you think that’s gonna hold him?” Tracy asked.

“It better,” James said, “because if he comes at me one more time, you can forget about all this ‘saving him for experimentation’ business. I’m gonna snatch the life out his body.”

He then walked over to Debdan’s house and pushed the door wide open. As he suspected, there was no one inside.

“Do you think that the boy somehow turned?” James asked. He was worried—now that he knew what was going on—that Alysia was vulnerable and out in the underground city, looking for the demon.

“Yeah, seems to be that way,” Tracy said. “They seem to go through phases, too if you think about it. We are used to the red and black demons, who I’m thinking used to be people.”

“Even if you’re right,” James said, “I hope it’s a complicated process to get us to turn into one of them. Because if that isn’t the case, then I don’t know how to feel. It would mean that all the demons we’ve been shooting up are actually people possessed by whatever the hell we fought in the woods.”

Tracy thought about his words and felt a wave of sadness come over her. “This sucks,” she said.

“We can’t dwell on it,” James said. “Let’s stick to the plan and not obsess over guessing at what they are. We have a demon queen to find and we had better do it fast.”

“Hey, I have an idea,” Tracy said and James looked at her to see if she was making an ill-timed joke again. She took his arm and led him up towards the entrance rather than deeper into the bunker to look for the demon. “They store weapons up here, remember? All we have are these knives and they just aren’t going to cut it. No pun intended. We need to get some real weapons.”

“Good thinking,” James said and they headed up towards the entrance together.

4

“It’s a bust, CeeCee, we have to do something else. Either one of those guys is going to accidentally shoot us, or we’re going to get jumped by those demons,” Jaime said.

Alysia had been running when he said this, and she pulled up and stopped to talk to him. “You’re right, it’s a wild goose chase. But I know she’s out here, hurting people, and I need to find her to put a stop to it.”

“With what, that old sword?” He laughed. “Have you even considered that you got lucky the first time? She had two other people shooting at her when you fought her, right? Now it’s just us, and she has the element of surprise. What’s to stop her from—?”

Alysia put her hand up to stop him when she saw a body lying in the street. She recognized the red dress and the black tuft of hair below the blinking lights, but she couldn’t remember whom it was that dressed like that. She ran over to the person and flipped her over, and Angelica’s face revealed itself beneath the mass of hair. “Oh, no…” Alysia whispered, and she checked her vitals to see if she was dead. There was a weak pulse, and she thanked God as she motioned for Jaime to help get her up.

“Knock on one of those doors. She needs help!” she ordered him and he knocked on the door of the nearest house. It took some time before he got an answer, but he had to curse and make a few threats before a woman inside opened up to see who he was.

“This woman is hurt, and she cannot be out here,” he said to her, and the dark-skinned woman cursed at him, and took Angelica in before slamming the door in his face. Jaime tried to apologize, but the woman was not trying to hear it. He turned back to Alysia, looking tired and extremely annoyed.

“That was Angelica, you remember her, right?” she asked him when he came back over to her side.

“Yeah, she has a little girl,” he said.

“Yes, she does. I hope she’s fine!” Alysia said, looking around frantically to see if she could find Maria.

Jaime shrugged and took a deep breath. “Maybe she made her sleep and locked her in the house,” he said to her, and as soon as he said this he felt the cold.

Three large men slid from behind one of the bunker houses and surrounded them. Jaime couldn’t finish his thought as he pulled his pistol free and held it low, examining them intently as he did this. They had the glowing eyes and the chill, and he backed up into Alysia as the demons inched closer towards them. The cold was becoming unbearable and Alysia pulled her sword free and slashed the hand of the nearest one that tried to touch her. His hand came off easily from the blow—almost too easily—and he retreated, holding it as she lifted the blade above her head.

“Oh no,” she said to Jaime. “I can’t believe I just did that. I only meant to scare him off. When he wakes up, I’ll be responsible for hurting him so badly.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?” he asked her as he raised his gun threateningly at the remaining two. “These guys aren’t possessed or coming back. CeeCee, they’re just like Debdan. Don’t you feel the cold? They’re like that thing you told me about. They’re gone, and you need to get serious with them.”

He glanced at her and then shot one right between the eyes.

“JAIME!” Alysia screamed, and another demon ran up to join the rest. She was a pretty blonde with long hair that hung loosely over her shoulders. She was wearing heels but seemed to have no problem maneuvering in them. Outside of her red eyes, she was every bit the super model, but her skin was outlined in red veins, and she was even colder than the rest.

“See her? That’s the progression, Alysia. You haven’t been paying attention but I have. Whatever is getting these people is taking them over completely. We can’t save them. We have to think about our friends, like Angelica and her baby.”

The one-handed demon rushed in to claw at Alysia, and she cut him in the legs and spun quickly into a sidekick that knocked him off his feet. He reminded her of her Uncle Ronnie. He was a shade of brown lighter than her mother, and his hair was in a fade—immaculate in its care—with a little beard, just like her uncle. Jaime had killed one of them, and she didn’t know what to think, but what if he was right, and she was putting them at risk by playing nice?

“I’ve never killed anything before,” she said to Jaime. “These are—were—people, and I can’t do it.”

“You’re gonna have to learn to get past that,” was all he said, and he shot the blonde in her arm. “Damn, this gun is overheated,” he said, and as if on cue the group of demons charged in.

Alysia was not expecting the sudden rush, and before she could think to do anything else, her instincts kicked in and she stuck the blade into the stomach of the nearest one. She pulled it free, spun and cut him again, but this time the cut caught his throat and was ultimately fatal. The demon fell back into a bloody mess, retching on the ground while she stood stunned, not believing what she had just done.

Jamie hit the blonde with the butt of his gun, and she stumbled away from him as he pulled the trigger, forgetting that is wasn’t functional. He didn’t give her any time to retreat, and he charged at her, pushing her down. He then proceeded to stomp on her face, over and over until he heard bones crunching.

“Jaime, stop!” Alysia said. “Lord, forgive me. I can’t believe I’m a murderer now.” She turned to face the last wounded demon and closed both her hands on the hilt. She looked over at Jaime, who was staring at her. He was still breathing hard and ready to take on anything.

“So, what are you waiting for?” he said to her, and before she could answer they heard the “BANG” from a high-powered weapon. The demon went down with a gaping wound in its chest and Alysia spun to see her father with his rifle pointed at it. He was dressed in all black, along with Tracy, and the two of them had a similar look of no nonsense.

“Dad, you’re up!” Alysia exclaimed and James sighed and lowered his gun as he looked around to make sure there were no more demons.

“The soldiers have been briefed on what to do when they see the main demon,” he said to them, and he stepped in and hugged Alysia before slipping back in between the buildings. Tracy came over and looked at the carnage, then glanced at their weapons and shook her head.

“She turned a lot of people in a short period of time,” she said to them. “We saw your friend, Jaime. I’m so sorry. We tied him up so he couldn’t escape, but I can’t lie, he don’t look so good.”

“What do you mean?” Jaime asked as he walked up to her, glancing at his pistol to see if it had cooled down.

“You plan to use that on me if I say something you don’t like?” Tracy asked, and Jaime quickly shook his head at her.

“No, I’m overheated so I was checking the gauge.”

“Those pistols are crap. You should grab one of the more advanced Glocks,” she said to him.

“Tracy,” Alysia interrupted her, and took her to the side away from Jaime. “Tracy, we found Angelica—”

“YOU FOUND HER OUT HERE?” She screamed the question, shocked and frightened at what Alysia said.

“Yeah, just over there before they attacked.”

“Where is she, and where is Maria?” Tracy asked. She knew the answer would be grim, but she needed to hear it and she didn’t want to wait for an answer.

“Angelica is being taken care of by the lady in this house. We haven’t seen Maria, but we were thinking that Angelica left her in the house.”

“You don’t know Angelica; she takes her baby everywhere. If she’s out here then she would have either been looking for Maria or the little one escaped when her mother was attacked.”

Tracy knocked on the door rapidly to get the woman to open up, and Alysia went back over to Jaime, who was being questioned by a patrolling soldier.

“You all can’t be out here,” he said to them, and Alysia fanned him off as if he was a mere bug.

“We’re with my father who you know as Lieutenant James Knight,” she said.

“Oh, you’re the daughter of The Stunner?” he asked with a smile.

“The Stunner?” Alysia repeated with a puzzled look on her face. “I guess, but we’re hunting that thing alongside him.”

“Alright, I’ll let the team know, but you can’t be staying still. Those things like to crowd you if they feel that they can get the drop on you.”

Alysia thanked him as he took off, and Jaime checked his pistol again then looked at her and nodded. “Looks like we’re back in business,” he said and then he pulled it out and kept it ready.

The woman in the house had let Tracy in and they could hear her talking loudly, trying to get answers from Angelica.

“Let her worry about finding the kid and all of that,” Jaime said to Alysia. “We need to rejoin your father in hunting the demon. He went up that road, so what say we take this one over here?”

They ran up the road without attempting to hide between the buildings like they had done for their few hours of searching. Then the lights cut out completely, and Alysia stopped in her tracks, her hand finding Jaime’s as they backed into a wall. There were screams and the temperature all around them dropped as people went into a panic over the loss of lights. A few floodlights came on, but they were low and red, so the houses became mere silhouettes against a backdrop of crimson.

All around them were glowing eyes, and the sounds of gunshots picked back up.

“LET’S SEE THEM TRY AND HIDE NOW!” a loud voice yelled, followed by a fit of maniacal laughter. Then there came a chorus of cheers as the soldiers began to track the eyes down to kill them.

“I can’t believe someone killed the lights on purpose,” Jaime said as Alysia held her sword up, paranoid that a set of those glowing eyes would pop up on them and beat them to death.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Jimmy said suddenly, and fired two shots into the back of a figure that ran in front of them. The demon he shot was using the body of a soldier, so he was dressed in the armor they wore. Jimmy’s shots didn’t do much damage but the impact of the bullets caused the demon to stumble and Alysia leapt forward and brought her sword down, removing his head.

“Whoa, ninja!” Jaime said, his voice a mixture of admiration and surprise at Alysia’s speed. The blood splattered on them and all over the street, and Alysia looked down at the head with a look of disgust across her face.

“It’s not funny or amusing that we have to do this,” she said, facing him. She pulled out a piece of cloth from her waist and wiped the blood from off her sword.

“See, we make a good team,” Jaime said, and Alysia looked at him as if she couldn’t believe it.

“I figured that out since the beginning,” she finally said. “Why do you think I always come and get you when there’s trouble?” Jaime laughed when he thought about how she said it. Her tone reminded him of people who were caught red-handed but still acted as if they were innocent.

“You know, I always thought it was because you liked me or something,” he said, and she rolled her eyes and sheathed the sword.

~ * ~ * ~

When James Knight left the company of Tracy and his daughter, he had seen a little girl running behind the buildings and had decided to track her down. He didn’t know who she was and wasn’t sure if his mind was playing tricks on him, but he wanted to stop the demon and save as many lives as he could. A child would not be able to handle the cold or the attacks of the demon so he had to make sure she was okay.

He had tracked her for about fifteen minutes when he came upon the woman that had attacked him in the woods, and in her arms was Angelica’s Maria. It was so sudden and unexpected that he literally rubbed his eyes, and as she looked at him with what seemed like lust, he raised his gun and aimed at her head.

“You don’t want to do that,” she said to him, her voice sounding like a multitude of voices instead of the sultry, feminine one that he expected to hear.

He noticed that he didn’t feel cold, and that her eyes were no longer glowing. It was frightening and mysterious, this female demon that talked, and he wondered if the entire time she had simply blended in with the civilians that now locked themselves inside their homes.

“Put the baby down and step away from her,” James ordered the woman, but she simply smiled at him and stood where she was. There was something odd about Maria: she didn’t seem to recognize James, and she looked extremely comfortable in the demon’s arms.

“Shooting me will not end us. We will not die,” she said, and she flashed him a wicked smile. “You have tried to kill us before. Why do you think you can do it now? We are beyond death, but you must listen, or this one will be turned and made to join our legion.” She followed the threat by using a hand to touch Maria’s nose and the tiny girl started to laugh as if she was with a loving aunt.

James lowered his gun and considered his options; he had not expected to run into the demon alone. If he had Tracy with him, or a few of the soldiers that knew him, he would have opened up on her because she would not have an easy escape. He stood with his feet slightly apart, and watched the demon as she bounced Maria in her arms and smiled at him.

“Maria, hide!” James shouted as he reached behind him for the E11 Sultan Magnum he kept tucked away in the small of his back. The little girl buried her face into the demon’s shoulder and hugged her close, just like she and James had practiced when they traveled to the bunker.

He brought the gun around and pulled the trigger, ripping a hole into the face of the demon, causing her to leave her feet and fall on her back with Maria still holding on for dear life. James sprinted to the fallen demon and grabbed Maria with one motion. He swung her around to his back, and she locked her legs around his body and held on tightly to his neck.

“Good job, baby girl. You remembered. I’m so proud of you!”

“I’m your little soldier,” Maria said proudly, and she hugged him close as he slipped between the buildings and made his way back to Tracy.

The demon huntress, blinded and disoriented, tried to regain her vision. The shot from the powerful handgun had blown a hole in her face and the bullet flew through as if unobstructed and lodged itself within the bunker wall. The wound was taking too long to heal, so she summoned the darkness from her minions to collect itself around her body and heal the wound from James’s bullet.

As the darkness left the bodies of the possessed, it released the control she had over their minds, leaving them petrified and moronic. They became easy targets for the soldiers, who took full advantage to cut them down. The darkness, freezing and vicious in its form, came to her quickly, and before long, she was healed and whole again.

She threw all caution to the wind and made to pursue James, determined to punish him for what he had done. She cut through the buildings and grabbed a soldier, freezing him where he stood, and pouring one of the many demons that lived within her into his helpless form. He was instantly changed and ready to protect her, and she sent him ahead of her to find James Knight.

The lights came on, bright and painful to her eyes as the ceiling reflected the sky outside and the darkness wrapped itself around her like a shield. She slid out into the streets, looking like everyone else out there running about screaming or lost, the soldiers and guards pushing them to get back into their temporary homes.

She didn’t run, but simply walked, terrible and beautiful, as she moved with determination to the area where James Knight had run. The only way that people around her could tell that she didn’t belong was by the black, misty shadow that seemed to move with her. It whipped around her legs as if it was a living thing and unlike her, it was sinister and unnatural to witness.

She set her gaze forward and kept on walking until she got to the area where James, Tracy, Jaime and Alysia were waiting in anticipation of her attack. They were ready for her and their weapons were drawn but she paid them very little attention. Her focus was on killing James, and she would not let them distract her from her goal. She saw the minion that she sent, dead on the ground, and when she got near him, a few soldiers encircled the square and had their weapons pointing at her.

“You’re not going to get the baby,” James said to her. He pointed the Sultan Magnum at her, the same weapon that had done so much damage to her earlier. It made her hesitate, the pain still fresh in her mind. Next to him was the girl, his daughter, Alysia who brandished a more ancient weapon that she had used to hurt her badly when she was in the forest.

She looked around desperately but there was nowhere to run, so she screamed at the lot of them and sent the darkness out, spinning it like a tornado into their midst. For every man and woman it touched, there were screams of agony. The cold was so intense and painful that some of them dropped their weapons and fell to their knees. The soldiers started shooting at her, but even though she was getting hit, she kept the shadow spinning and focused it on each member, freezing them to the bone and killing them before moving it to the next.

Alysia saw what the demon was doing, and that the bullets of the weapons the soldiers used were not enough to stop her. James could not shoot the magnum, even if he wanted to. It was too close for that sort of weapon, and the risk of shooting one of his men was too great for him to do it. His hesitation did not go unnoticed by the demon, and she broke a part of the shadow off to send it at him as she continued to kill the soldiers one by one.

More ran into the square to fight her, but the darkness only grew to accommodate them. Jaime was on the ground, unmoving and Alysia couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen him go down. Tracy was back by a house with Angelica and Maria, sticking to her promise to keep them safe, and though she wanted to join the fight, she stood with them just in case the demon switched focus.

The carnage continued, and the road was littered with the bodies of the men and women who had fought bravely against the demon huntress. Alysia saw her father rolling around, trying to fight the shadow that engulfed him, and it was in this instance that she realized that she was alone.

Her only family member was dying, and her friend was in terrible shape. The stress of the situation overtook her actions and she teetered on the precipice of inaction and suicide. It was the type of choice her father had always reminded her would come to a warrior. Fight or flight … there was no third choice.

The demon threw more darkness to engulf her as she stood, and though it hurt—a sort of burning sensation instead of cold—she dashed in and swung the sword in an upward arc, catching the top of the demon’s abdomen and leaving a bloody gash where it struck. The shadows felt like hundreds of tiny razor blades, threatening to cut her to bits, but she refused to succumb to the pain and the weakness, spinning a back fist into the demon’s jaw and bringing the blade down onto her shoulder.

Shadows left the soldiers and rushed in to help their master, spinning like a maelstrom of black around the two fighting women. Alysia was all rage as she fought through the pain, whipping the blade this way and that, catching parts of the demon’s body whenever she would swing.

The demon brought all the cold she could muster to stop Alysia, but she couldn’t control the shadows, not while the strange blade of that crude weapon distracted her with sudden pangs of pain. In one desperate move she grabbed it. The naked blade cut into her hand but she held it still. She came face to face with Alysia as she held it, but the young girl was not stopping her attack.

With her sword held, Alysia brought a leg up and snapped three quick roundhouses into the demon’s jaw. She loosened the blade to let the shadows heal her hands, but Alysia was back at it again, cutting this way and that. The panicked demon retreated from the girl, pulling the shadows into her so that she appeared as a pillar of blackness, with glowing eyes piercing through to stare at them.

James Knight saw an opportunity, stood up with the magnum, and fired a single shot into the black mass. The bullet ripped through the chest of the demon and plastered her against a building, where she began to shake, and the shadows moved in, trying to heal her as fast as they could.

“Light her up, now!” James yelled, and the remaining soldiers began to fire on her fallen body. It was loud and terrible, this murder of the demon, and she screamed so loudly that Alysia thought it would damage her eardrums. The shadows gave up on healing their host, and faded into nothingness after ten minutes of continued shooting. The demon was dying and in her last breath, she screamed out.

“ALYSIA KNIGHT!”

It was frightening to hear her voice with its multiple tones, and Alysia knew she was in trouble. She crawled over to Jaime’s body, who hadn’t moved during the entire ordeal, and though she felt as if she had been in a car accident, she wanted to make sure that he was okay.

“Jaime?” she whispered, touching his face.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m alive,” he said and reached down to feel for a cigarette. “It felt like a million icicles hit me. But you, you took it like a champ and kicked her collective ass,” he said. “Good job. I’ll be damned if I didn’t lose my box of cigarettes.”

Alysia laughed at his words and then lay down next to him. She held the sword above her head and examined the blood that stained its blade. It was an odd contrast to the bright blue sky reflected on the ceiling of the bunker and she wondered if the demon was truly dead.

“CeeCee, Jaime, can you all move?” Tracy asked as she and Angelica walked over to them and helped them up.

“I’m all right for now,” Alysia said. “But I can’t stay here.”

“What do you mean you can’t stay here?” her father said as he walked over to them.

“Did you hear what she said, Dad?”

“Yeah, she screamed your name. I would scream your name too if you put a whooping on me the way you just did to her.”

“No, she threatened my name. I told you they want me. They’ve wanted me since the very beginning and it’s the reason why they kept capturing me and not killing me like everyone else. Dad, that giant lifted me up as gently as he could before we killed him, and the demons took me into their camp to make me into something like her. Now I’m a threat. Just think about the way she said my name.”

“So they no longer want you,” her father said as he began to check her arms and legs for any wounds from the demon.

“I am a threat, and so are you. I think that they use female hosts for whatever reason, but if they cannot have me, they will send more to try to take me out. Just look how much damage just one of them is able to do. I cannot honestly stay here and allow more people to get killed over me.”

“So, we’re leaving then,” James said, and he looked around at the crowd of people that gathered to stare at his daughter in awe.

“They got Debdan, and I freaking hate this place,” Jaime said as he walked over to stand next to Alysia. “I’m leaving with you guys.”

“Are you sure, Jaime?” Alysia asked.

“Shut up,” he said, shaking his head at her as if what she asked was so ridiculous.

“Need some police back up?” Tracy asked, and James looked as if he wanted to object. “Don’t you dare, James Knight,” she said to him and then shot him a glance that could probably cut a diamond. Alysia saw the exchange as confirmation for what she believed: Tracy and her father had become more than friends and it probably happened while he was in the clinic. She wanted to tell Tracy that she wasn’t invited, but that would be her acting like a child. She saw the way her father looked at her, and as much as it stung, she decided to let them be.

“So that settles it,” she said. “We go to the surface and try to see if we can get help.”

“I don’t think that it’s gonna be so bad,” Jaime said, and he pushed his way out of the square to walk back towards his bunker house. Alysia followed behind him, and James stood back to brief the remaining soldiers on what their plan was.

~ * ~ * ~

Jaime and Alysia opened the door to his bathroom and kept their weapons ready for the possessed Debdan. What they found was red gook smeared all over the walls, and evidence of an escape out of the building. They ran outside to track it, and it led back towards the entrance. They followed the bloody footsteps as they moved onto the road and up the ramp towards the bunker’s entrance.

“We need to wait for my father and Tracy,” Alysia said, and Jaime stopped and whipped around to look at her.

“What’s going on between you two?” he asked.

“Me and my dad?”

“No, you and Ginger Fury, the cop,” he said, making a motion with his hands to emulate Tracy’s wild, bushy hair.

“I think she and my dad are dating but hiding it from me,” she said to him.

“What’s the big deal? She’s pretty hot, and your dad isn’t old.”

“Of course you wouldn’t get it. How would you feel if you lost your mom and your dad was out and about loving on other women?”

Jaime put a finger on his lip and walked around as if he was in deep thought. Alysia could see that he was still in pain, but he didn’t want to show it.

“So, it’s the end of the world, Mom dies, Dad wants to get some action before he joins her. Is that what you’re saying? Well hell, I’d be like, hell yeah, Dad! Get you some!”

“You can be such an insensitive jerk when you want to be, you know that?” she said. “Why don’t you stay and spare me the annoyance of dealing with you out there.”

“I could kill for a cigarette right now,” Jaime said, ignoring her words, and ignoring the topic they were discussing. “Alysia, when things go crazy people act out of character and do things that are outside of the boundaries of what we would consider normal, okay?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m saying your dad probably cries himself to sleep every night because of your mom, but Tracy is the type of girl to help him through it. I see how you are and I know you’re not helping him. Let your old man be happy. If it were the other way around I’m sure he’d want you to be happy.”

Alysia bit her tongue on the objection she was about to make, and looked around to observe the bunker’s situation. People were leaving their homes to look at the aftermath of the demon’s terror, and a few of them stopped to thank her and Jaime. Tracy and Angelica walked up towards them, and Maria was sitting up on James’s shoulders, trailing behind the two women.

“Let’s get some things together and make a plan for the outside,” he said as he walked up and placed the skinny young girl on the ground.

“Will we see you again?” Angelica asked, a hint of sadness in her voice as she looked at Tracy and then at James.

“Hard to tell, but I will come visit once we’ve found a place,” Tracy said to her friend.

“I owe you my life, several times over,” Angelica said. “Plus Maria will want to see her Auntie Tracy and Uncle Jimmy.”

“What about her Auntie CeeCee?” Tracy said and smiled at Maria.

Maria twisted around to look at Alysia, and then her eyes fell on the sword and she got serious. She touched the scabbard and then looked up at her and in the most matter-of-fact, innocent way she proclaimed: “Auntie CeeCee is going to save us all from the monsters.”

BOOK 3

And Then We Had Chaos

A week had passed since Alysia and her company left the bunker to take their chances in the woods. They had no directive as of yet but knew they could not stay around the citizens of the bunker city.

The small party trudged through the woods, bearing east beneath a sky that looked like an abstract work of art. It was all dark purple, splashed with hints of blue, and it would soon change to something wonderful when the sun came up. They didn’t speak, most of them tired and sleepy from a night of uncomfortable rest, but they had to leave, according to Jaime. Staying would only delay the inevitable.

Out of everyone who marched along through the well-preserved forest, James Knight was the most composed. He pulled them up short at what appeared to be a clearing, and got down on a knee. He then used the detachable scope from his pulse rifle to see what was in front of them.

“Don’t make a move!” he whispered and they all complied, too frightened to move an inch.

A slow rumbling sound caught them as a giant pushed past the trees, walking in a southwestern direction. He was small, about the height of a two-story building, and he walked so close to them that it took everything within Tracy not to react. When he was gone, James exhaled, and they all looked at one another with a mixture of fear and relief. The light from the dawning sun cut through the darkness and as they recovered their march, James spoke again.

“I think that the demons become giants,” he said, and they all looked at him.

“How did you come up with that one?” Tracy asked.

“Did you not look at the one that just passed us?” he said. “It had the red and black texture on its legs. We keep wondering where they come from… well, that is my theory. Some of them grow into giant men while the others just stay red.”

“That makes no sense,” Tracy said. “I think they are a different species altogether.”

But James didn’t want to argue, so he shrugged and kept them moving.

“You notice something?” Jaime asked. He hadn’t spoken since they set out, so everyone was curious as to what was going on inside his mind.

“No, what?” Tracy replied.

“It’s quiet; like, too quiet. I don’t hear the helicopters and jets in the air shooting anymore, or any guns or things blowing up. It sounds as if we gave up, or we lost the fight and all our soldiers are dead.”

“Not all of them,” James shouted back at him, but they knew he was right. Since the day when the monsters first attacked, they had heard the sounds of war going on all around them. Now it was quiet, and once the giant’s stomping had passed on into the distance, it had become very peaceful. It was a cruel illusion that masked the reality of their lives, and it begged to question where the U.S. military was.

“I bet they left us,” Jaime said to Alysia as they walked behind James and Tracy, who had sped up their own pace in order to have a private conversation.

“Who, my dad?” Alysia asked, looking at him to see if he was joking.

“No, I mean the government, the elite few with all the money in the world. The world goes to hell, they tell the military to get us into bunkers, and they rush to their escape boats and ship off to a safe house of some kind. Like maybe Antarctica.”

Alysia rolled her eyes and sped up to get away from him, but he caught up to her without saying anything.

“Is your stomach okay, Jaime?” she asked.

He frowned. “Yeah, I’m a little hungry, but I’m good. Why do you ask?”

“Because of the diarrhea of the mouth you have going on. Your imagination is immense; I’ll give you that, but safe houses in Antarctica? That just about says it all.”

“Okay, but when you find out that everything I’m saying is true, I’ll have a big fat ‘I told you so’ waiting for you,” he said.

They exited the park a little past midday and were on the street, moving toward the city. There was an old, rusty water storage tank sitting behind a fence, and old broken-down trucks and cars from the age of gasoline. The tank brought back memories of a childhood spent in the country for Tracy, and she wanted to run up to it and climb it to the top to play queen of the mountain. James Knight stopped and observed the area, using the scope from his gun to get a closer view. He held his hand up to tell them to stop, and then he pocketed the scope and led them across to the short fence.

They jumped the fence and entered the junkyard, each person holding a gun at the ready as they cleared the area and worked themselves back to the tank. There was nothing but silence, and the air was humid, causing them to sweat. Tracy ran ahead when she saw something, but pulled up short and looked around frantically when she got there. Jaime ran up next to her and then James, and Alysia could see that they both had the same reaction.

She wondered what they were looking at, and as she got closer, she could see there was a corpse on the ground. It was an older woman in a flowery dress, and there were human remains next to her.

“Why do they kill some of us and turn others?” Tracy asked. “I just don’t get it.”

“It may have to do with the age,” Alysia said.

“What do you mean, the age?” Jaime asked.

“I mean our age. The people we saw turned inside the bunker were all young people. The oldest one I saw was the blonde-haired woman, and she looked to be about thirty, thirty-one. These people are older; they probably owned this junkyard and didn’t get the memo about getting to a bunker.”

“Or, they just had no means of getting to one,” James said. “I don’t see a functioning car or bike around here.”

“That or they got left,” Tracy said. “What is this place? I can’t even call it a junkyard since there is nothing here to indicate that this crap was being sold. It’s a dump. How did the city allow them to get away with this? Rust everywhere, the grass is all tall and out of control, and just look at the water tank. This place looks as if nobody has lived here in years.”

James brought his rifle up to eye-level and then started to move towards the small house that sat several yards behind the junkyard. He motioned for Tracy to move to his rear and she did so quietly, staying a bit behind him with her own rifle pointed at the door. Alysia and Jaime sat back, watching. It had been explained to them that during infiltrations they were to cover the flank, never to rush in ahead of their trained teammates.

James crossed the entrance of the door until he was on the right side, and Tracy checked the windows. Alysia and Jaime inched up to get closer, and then James kicked the door in and moved inside quickly, checking the corners while Tracy did the same.

Alysia heard several quick bursts from the pulse rifle, and several demons burst from the backdoor, running across the yard to gain the street. Jaime took aim and began firing at them, but Tracy walked out and calmly lifted her rifle and put them down with precision shots.

“CLEAR!” James yelled, and Tracy lowered her weapon and sighed. She brought out a bit of cloth from her pants pocket and wiped the sweat from her brow.

“Jesus,” she said under her breath, “that whole sequence frightened the hell out of me.”

“I can’t freaking tell,” Alysia said to her as she ran up to the house to check on her father.

He was kneeling down over the corpse of a large man, and from the red veins running the length of his legs, Alysia knew he had turned and had tried to attack her father.

“Good job, Trace. For someone who hasn’t done this before, you were all right,” James said. “So what do you say, CeeCee? I bet you all are tired and hungry. The folks that own this place just got attacked. We can set up here and rest, and catch our breath before we head out again.”

Nobody wanted to argue against the idea. It had been a long time since any of them had slept in a real bed, under a real roof that wasn’t an apartment underground. Jaime and Alysia dragged the corpses out to the backyard and set them on fire, and then they went back inside to clean up the mess.

Their new shelter was a cozy home that had all the amenities you would expect: black leather couches that surrounded a mid-sized curved flat-panel television. There were random paintings on the wall, the refrigerator held photos of the extended family, and there were three bedrooms, two connected to their own bathroom.

They decided that Alysia and Tracy would get their own bedroom, and James would do the couch, but Jaime insisted that they trade. A solar-powered generator powered the electricity, and with the Film-Jet 3.0 movie player beneath the television, Jaime wanted the luxury of falling asleep to a movie.

They cleaned the blood from the walls and floor, and then checked the refrigerator and cupboards for food. The owners had stocked it full prior to their passing, and they had enough to last them for a couple of months. James went outside to secure the perimeter. A short, chain-link fence bordered the house, so he tied a number of bells to it, bells he found in the couple’s Christmas storage that sat in boxes in the garage.

“Okay, a few ground rules since we’re going to be here for a while,” James announced once they had all picked out their rooms and had gotten time to catch their breath.

“Rule number one: Do not ever leave without letting the rest of us know. We want to shoot demons, not civilians, and if you are missing and come back to us unannounced, you may accidentally catch a bullet from a friendly.

“Rule number two: No fighting. We need to get along; we are like a little family in this thing. Any beefs we talk them out, and if you need to consult someone else about me, or whomever… talk to that someone. I’m serious.

“Last rule: We need full transparency with food and supplies. If we’re running short on something, speak up. There’s a whole city over there that we can go scavenge if we need it.”

Everyone agreed to James’s rules and set about doing their own thing. Tracy started to tidy up the place, and Alysia took to the backyard with her sword, practicing old katas that she hadn’t done since her childhood. Jaime flipped on the television and put on a movie, a classic action film where zombies were swarming a city.

“You’re such a sucker for irony, aren’t you?” Tracy said to him, and he nodded with a big smile on his face. “Well, you enjoy your terrible movie. I would so take zombies over the monsters we’re dealing with.”

~ * ~ * ~

It was late afternoon on a Saturday; the clouds were few, and the sun was out in all its glory. The irony of a beautiful day during such a dark hour was not lost on the inhabitants of the junkers’ home, but it lifted the moods and Alysia decided that she and Jaime should go scavenging. James turned down his daughter’s offer to join them on their hike; he had made himself busy, looking at the engine of one of the old vehicles that sat in the yard.

“What you doing?” Tracy said to him as she walked up to the car. He was bent over, looking inside the hood, and didn’t hear her come up on him.

“Damn woman, you’re gonna get yourself shot messing around like that,” he whined to her, a bit annoyed, and she stuck her tongue out at him playfully.

She was wearing some overalls she had found inside the house, and the sun shone on her exposed skin, revealing her muscular arms and shoulders, along with a number of scars that crisscrossed all over them. She was barefooted and her hair was up, and he wondered why she was so comfortable.

“Where are the kids?” she asked, and he lifted his head to point with his chin as he always did.

“Gone scavenging,” he said.

“Do you think those two are—” she began.

“Oh, hell no,” he said to her. “Don’t you even say it. He’s not her type, I’ll tell you that, and he ain’t confident enough to try it either way.” He was about to say more when Tracy walked up really close to him and put her hand on his arm. He tilted his head and looked at her with a question mirrored across his face. She bit her lip, looked off to the side, and then shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.

It was obvious what she wanted, and numerous things ran through his head: his protective daughter and this beautiful woman he had been trying to keep out of his mind since the day he met her. His physical urges made it hard, and he placed his large hands on her hips and brought her in for a kiss. Their lips touched and time froze in that sudden “finally” gust of surrender that comes when lovers that have held out from one another finally meet.

Tracy parted those lips to allow their kiss to deepen, and he took her in as if his life depended on it. She tasted like silvery strawberries with a hint of almonds, and as their tongues touched and their hands roamed the mountains and valleys of sinew and flesh, they both silently begged fate to let them be; let them have the time to realize the things they had always wanted since that first bike ride they’d shared together.

It was a beautiful, dirty, and lengthy union between them, and as the sun dimmed a bit from a sole grey cloud, they found themselves on the grass in front of the car, wrapped in each other’s arms and afraid to utter a word out of fear they would wake up from their beautiful dream.

“What do we tell, Alysia?” Tracy finally said as she felt James’s large bicep flex beneath her head. She rolled into him to be more comfortable and propped herself up on her arm to look at him.

“I’ll tell her in time, Trace. Don’t worry about it.”

“You think she’s gonna be mad? Well, I know she will be, at me … but she loves you; you’re like her life. I think she will hate me for … I don’t know. I just don’t want there to be any problems between us. And I don’t want this to be our only time.”

James took her head with his hand and gently brought her in to kiss her. He let it linger for a bit before they separated and then he simply answered. “It won’t.”

When they had grown tired of lying in the tall grass, Tracy retreated into the house and James went back to working on the car’s engine. He noticed that the world felt different to him now that he had been with her, and where he had once only cared about his daughter’s wellbeing, he was now looking into a future where Tracy was always by his side.

A few hours later Alysia and Jaime returned, toting a large bag of supplies they had looted from the neighboring homes.

“See any action out there?” James said to them when they came through the gate and saw him.

“Just a kreple with an attitude,” Jaime said, and James looked at his daughter, trying to read in her silence if she had noticed what had happened in her absence.

“Yeah, he was a feisty one,” she said, and then dropped the sack near the car. “How are the repairs coming along, Dad?” she asked, and he saw her look down at the depression in the grass and then glance back at the house.

“To be honest, I can’t tell you,” he said. “Everything is right where it needs to be, and it really isn’t that old. I’m just trying to pick up where the old man left off and see if I can get us some wheels to get us to the coast.”

She smiled at him and slapped him on the back before picking up the sack and walking back to the house. Jaime followed behind her, but when he turned around and winked at James, he knew something had given him away. James looked around to see what it could have been and when he glanced down at the area near his feet, he saw that Tracy had left something behind when she hurriedly dressed to go back inside.

The embarrassment was too much to take, and James feigned working on the car for another hour before picking up Tracy’s forgotten item and placing it in his pocket. He went inside and Tracy was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He could hear music coming from the garage and Alysia had her bedroom door closed, so he quickly crossed the threshold towards the kitchen.

“What are they up to?” he asked when Tracy noticed him walking towards her.

“CeeCee is taking a shower and Jaime found a carton of cigarettes so he’s in the garage listening to music and doing damage to his lungs. Did you see what they found?” Tracy said to him, and she looked genuinely happy as she held up a bag of fresh Granny Smith apples.

“That’s one helluva haul,” he said with a grin. “But it’s probably nothing compared to this,” he said and he handed her a silky undergarment. She quickly tucked it away and stared at him with her eyes large and her face turning red. She smacked him hard on the chest and then scurried away into the master bedroom. He picked up the sandwich she was making, and then shook his head at the entire situation. If Alysia knew and wasn’t saying anything, why bother to hide it from her? he thought.

He looked down at the bread, saw the black dirt from outside, and couldn’t believe he had neglected to wash his hands. “God made dirt, dirt don’t hurt,” he said aloud and then walked into his own room to get a shower.

2

“Dad, did Donald ever tell you the history of this sword? I know it wasn’t originally a sword, but how did he do it?”

“Growing attached to that thing, huh?” James asked his daughter while rubbing the area behind his neck. He sat on the old bed with his shoes off, and he seemed comfortable, despite the fact that they were squatting inside the home of an unfortunate victim.

“I’m just going over it in my head. Why did it hurt the demon girl, and what makes it so special that she was so powerless against me?”

James motioned for her to hand it to him, and she stood up, loosened the laces from the scabbard, and handed it to him.

“It’s funny how different a killer can look from a copycat pretending to be one,” he mumbled to himself as he moved his hand along its length, paying close attention to its imperfections.

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“I mean everything, sweetheart. Me, you, Tracy, Jaime, this piece of metal. We’re the real thing. I know you don’t like to hear that, but we are, baby girl. When they portray killers—the people who are forced to commit the ultimate sin—they hardly look like us. Their swords are always flawless, beautiful renditions of historical relics; not crude, wicked-looking blades like this one.”

He stopped talking and kept his hand running on the flat side of the sword. It was fashioned into the style of a Japanese katana—one edge curved and long—but forced into that form from something else. Not from a blacksmith—who could probably make it into a convincing sword—but from force. It was bent, chipped up, and ugly. James brought it up and smelled it, brought it close to his face and flicked the blade with his finger, and then put it up to his ear as if to listen to it.

“Good God almighty, she’s singing,” he whispered, then stood up suddenly and sheathed the sword gracefully as if he was at the end of a Japanese Iaido kata.

“I didn’t think you still cared for that sort of thing, Dad,” Alysia said when she saw him, and she smiled with pride as it brought her back to the days when they would spend hours together inside of his dojo.

“A warrior never forgets his discipline, CeeCee. I know you know this, but don’t write your old man off yet. I may prefer the weapons of my age, but under all of this bone and flesh you see here lies a focused spirit.”

“A focused spirit with a thing for police women?” she said to him, slitting her eyes to show her disapproval.

James turned in such a slow, graceful way that it caught her off guard and he looked at her intently. He shifted his hips so that the sword clicked as it rested perfectly into its sheath. “We’ve been through this, CeeCee. I’m not going to defend her every time you decide Tracy isn’t good enough for me. The world is ending, let’s stay focused on that.”

Alysia rolled her eyes and took back her sword, tying the ribbons around her waist and positioning it where she could feel it against her hip. James moved in to take her down in a sudden attack, and she fell with his motion, rolling away smoothly and coming back to her feet with her hand on the hilt of the sword, ready to defend herself. Her father smiled when he saw this and she nodded at him. Always be ready, he used to say, and it was a lesson that had made itself into her very being.

“There’s silver in that weapon,” he said to her. “Old Donald must have taken it from something other than what he told me, but that blade definitely has silver in it. When you cut into one of them, it will sing for you, CeeCee, but beyond that – I think it tells us that silver hurts them.”

“Just like werewolves,” Alysia said as she walked over to sit on the bed next to him.

“So, we will need to make some modified silver ammunition for our guns,” he said.

“That sounds like a pain in the butt, Dad. You should just get a sword; actually, three swords. One for Tracy and one for Jaime, too.”

“That won’t work; they don’t know how to use them,” he said. “No, we need to make some silver bullets. We’ll restrict them to being used on the big ones, major ones like that thing in the bunker. The rest of them die easily enough from our regular shots. So I think we have a good plan with that.”

“Okay, Dad, I will keep that in mind the next time we’re near a silver mine and a place that will allow us to make bullets,” she said as he shoved her gently away from him. She looked at him, laughed, and then hugged him closely.

“You know, your mother always thought we had the strangest relationship,” he said to her as she leaned in on him.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, we Knights aren’t the most affectionate people, you know, and while people can see the love we have for one another, we don’t always show it.”

“Well, Dad, we shouldn’t have to. That’s why we’re family.”

“Yeah, you said it, baby girl, you said it.”

~ * ~ * ~

The sound of something tinkling woke her up, and she opened her eyes to find that she was alone. The front door and the back door were open, and a light breeze blew the evening air into the house, causing the curtains to dance like apparitions.

Alysia hopped up and crept to the front door. She checked to see if she still had her sword at her waist, and touched the hilt reassuringly. The tinkling of the bell sounded again, and she looked outside to find her father working on the fence. She breathed a sigh of relief and then walked back through the house towards the back door.

She walked around to the side of the house that was closest to the street and looked out at the trees in the distance. The air was still and the temperature was cool. In the past, it would have led her to taking a stroll or a light jog on the sidewalks around the university. There was no need for jogging now, she thought. The monsters keep us in good shape with all the running and fighting for our lives.

The tops of the distant trees were starting to darken and become mere silhouettes against the brilliant blue of the sky, which darkened as the sun said its goodbye and dipped below the horizon. She watched the tree line as she walked, trying to see if she could spot any red eyes, or the head and shoulders of a giant, roaming towards their new home.

The bells tinkled once again, and she spun to see if her father was securing the fence. There was no one at the fence, but inside the house she could see lights on in most of the rooms.

She crept forward and pulled her sword. She rounded the corner to the far side of the house and saw what appeared to be a cloaked figure slip to the back. How did he manage to hop the fence so quickly? she wondered, and then ran towards the back to investigate.

“DAD? JAIME!” she screamed as she got to the back. But when she looked around, she saw nothing. Jaime was nowhere and her father had not come out when she screamed his name. She felt her heart drop to her ankles, and a wave of fear took over her as she entered the house, both hands resting on the hilt of her sword.

She slowly walked into the kitchen. It was silent and she stopped to listen for any movement, heavy breathing, or evidence of her friends. There was no sound inside the house and all she could hear was the sound of her own heart beating in her ears as she stood there, waiting.

She was about to move forward when a jolt of what felt like electricity ripped through her body. She dropped the sword and fell to her knees. It was so harsh and sudden that she didn’t even realize she had fallen until she was on the ground and looking up at the ceiling, confused.

She tried to look around and managed to look past her feet where a man in a red cloak was standing with a strange-looking gun in his hand. He pulled the hood back and revealed a hard face with long blonde hair that was thinning in the middle. Where his scalp was sparse in hair follicles, his face and chin were full of them and it all descended into a greyish-blonde beard that ended in a knot.

He looked at Alysia and walked over to her, kicking an ottoman out of the way as he retrieved her sword in a smooth, effortless motion. He scanned its length and then flicked it like her dad had done before. He stared at her intently, his grey eyes kind despite his gruff demeanor.

“So, you’re the one,” he said to her, his face stoic and hard to read. She saw that he was muscular, and she wondered if her father had managed to get any hits in before this predator subdued him. “You killed one of them. You got them to utter your name. Alysia, right?”

Alysia nodded her head and then looked around to see if she could see where he had stored the bodies of her friends and family.

“They are safe; we removed them from the house and took them to a place where they can’t be hunted,” he said.

“Who are you? How did you—how did you manage to attack me and get rid of everyone so quickly? And, where is my dad?” Alysia asked. She could sense feeling in her arms and legs again, but she lay still, hoping to catch him off guard when he least expected it.

“Get up,” he ordered her, pulling back his cloak to reveal a belt full of guns and weapons. Some were so exotic that she didn’t know what they were or what they were capable of. She complied and scrambled to her feet, glad she was still alive but curious and concerned about what it was he had used to shoot her.

“What did you hit me with?” she asked.

“Nothing you could fathom or even understand, Alysia Knight. At least not yet.”

“How do you know my name, and how did you know to find me here?”

“You are all loud, sloppy, and pathetically lucky,” he said to her as he leaned against the bar, playing with her sword. He was not concerned about her retaliation and she could tell that even if she tried something he would be ready for her.

“Your father hasn’t been a Navy Seal for ages and the policewoman is such a brute that her stomping gave you all away even at a mile’s distance. Then there’s the loud-mouthed boy-man you call ‘friend.’ Instead of asking me how we found you, you should ask me how it is that you aren’t dead by now.”

“We? Who else is here with you?” Alysia asked, daring to walk around the disheveled living room to see if anyone else was hiding inside of the house.

“My darling locusts, sisters of the Bloody Garot; they joined me to remove the distraction from your life, and they have taken them away to a safe place. Like I said before.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had only been walking and thinking for ten minutes when she left Jaime, and that was all it had taken the cloaked man to remove them quietly from the house. Her father had often told her stories of how Special Forces operators could perform frightening miracles like that, but this man was not a soldier. He looked like the leader of a heavy metal band, and he spoke with an accent she could not place.

“So you came for … my sword?” Alysia asked, trying to push back her growing fear.

“This silver piece of junk? No, Alysia Knight, I didn’t come for your ‘sword,’” he said, and then gave it back to her as if it disgusted him. “We came for the one that the lost ones named. The one who managed to kill one of their matriarchs.”

Alysia was puzzled. It had been a team effort to take down the demon. Besides, she didn’t have any sort of super powers that would be cause for a group of creepy, cloaked people to seek her out. “A—are you a demon?” she asked him, and he stared at her without moving an inch.

“Demon? Is that the name you gave them? You are asking me if I am one of them, the creatures that are corrupted with the taint. My dear, I am not, but I am not like you or your father’s kind. The only thing that you need to know is that you are safe, we have found you, and luckily it was before the V’Kosha.”

“What do you want from me?” Alysia asked, cursing her luck again for being the one singled out for the special horror of another’s entertainment. “You weren’t there at the fight, so how do you know it called my name? Are you one of the soldiers playing a trick on us? Were you there? Did you follow us out and track us to this house, got your buddies to jump my dad, and then threw on some red sheets to make yourself look like some sort of grand wizard or something?”

“I knew it wouldn’t be easy with you,” he said under his breath, then walked up to her and punched her in the stomach. “Enough talk. We have a long journey ahead, Alysia Knight.”

The stomach, always the stomach. She winced and doubled over from the impact. The man scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder as he stepped out into the night air and began to move. He ran very quickly, too quickly for it to make any sense to her, and before long, he was amidst the trees.

The pain from Alysia’s abdomen made it hard for her to concentrate, but from what she was seeing, the ground was giving out from beneath them and then there was the crunch of branches as the big man ascended. It appeared as if he was whisking them from treetop to treetop using the limbs as his platforms.

This makes no sense, she said to herself, but she couldn’t argue that what she was seeing was actually happening: the man was running across trees and there were several other people with him.

~ * ~ * ~

The voices were muffled and barely audible, and Alysia could tell they were trying to be quiet. It wasn’t so much that they were concerned she was awake and hearing them, but they seemed to be trying to keep it from someone else.

“She is the one. You heard what Lord Chaos said,” a hushed female voice said.

“The hell she is. I think it’s a mistake. She’s old, and she looks too normal to be the one,” a male voice barked back.

“There’s nothing remotely normal about me,” Alysia replied as she sat up on the stone slab and looked at them, then glanced down at herself. They had dressed her in black tattered robes, and on her feet were tiny black slippers with embroidered red dragons on the tops of them. The girl was an Asian teen of at least sixteen, and the boy was older, dark-skinned, and had dreads in his hair. They both wore beige kimonos with the same dragon on their chests, and on their feet were black sandals.

The teens stared at her in disbelief and then rushed out of the room. Alysia could see there were tracks below the slab and it looked as if she was in an old subway tunnel of some sort. The walls had been constructed recently, since they looked relatively new compared to the rest of the place, and when she looked above her head at the ceiling she knew her assumptions were right. They were below ground in one of the old subways that the city had sealed off so many years ago.

“She’s arisen.” A voice spoke from somewhere behind her. She turned around and saw nothing but darkness until a pair of glowing eyes revealed themselves to her. Alysia started and scrambled around to the back of the stone slab, to make sure that it was between her body and whatever it was that stared at her.

“Demon!” she exclaimed, and held its gaze, waiting to see if it would make the next move. The eyes rose to float about six feet off the ground, and as they moved towards the light, Alysia could see that it was the man who had taken her from the house.

“Not all eyes that glow mean you harm, girl. In fact, you will find the ones you must fear the most have eyes that don’t glow. You have experienced the cruelty of men, have you not? Plus, we are not all the same. We the children of Yalem.”

“So you admit that you are one of them?” Alysia spat at him. “You came from the sea with the giants and the kreples. You came to our land to terrorize us, didn’t you?”

He kept moving forward, and she could see that he was no longer in the red robe he’d worn when she encountered him inside of the house. He now wore the same beige kimono as the children from before, but his had a cape that hung loosely from his shoulders, and flowed down to the floor where it dragged along the dirt from the filthy, subway tracks.

When he was in front of the slab, he moved so fast that Alysia couldn’t even blink before he had her. She felt her heart stop as his vice-like hands gripped her shoulders, and she felt her body go limp from his touch. Fight or flight, CeeCee, she told herself, but unlike before, her body wouldn’t react. The demon had rendered her helpless and she couldn’t even make a sound.

“We are Turevila. In your tongue it translates to ‘hunters of the lost’, but we go by the name of Bloody Garot, and we came here to rein in the prisoners of our realm.” He released her and motioned for her to follow him as he walked towards the darkness of the only door, gliding as if he defied gravity.

Alysia wanted to lash out at him, to demand that he answer her questions and tell him never to touch her again. However, his touch had chilled her to her bones. She felt frightened by him, and she didn’t want to repeat the helplessness that had come over her when he had touched her. She followed behind him silently, his willing slave for now, and he didn’t need to look back to know that she was there.

“You are trained, and I can see this,” he said. “Many of you here on this plane of existence… you are trained warriors. The savage nature of humanity demands it, doesn’t it? Combat sports, the need to dominate one another to prove who stands superior. You forge crude, ugly weapons—like the one I took from you earlier—and you learn to make fists and lash out with your legs.”

“Do you all not fight?” Alysia asked. The man got quiet, as if he was thinking, and then he stopped to open a set of large, double doors.

There were several kimono-wearing children inside a deep hall, lined with lanterns on the wall and long tables with an assortment of food on them. At the far end of the hall was a throne-like chair, and next to it on two sides were smaller thrones. A beautiful, white-skinned girl occupied one. Her hair was a light, silky shade of greenish blue, and her armor was black and red with spikes.

“Oh, we fight, Alysia Knight, but we do not do it for sport, for establishing dominance, or to show superiority. We fight to keep realms like this one free of the ones that would consume you all. We failed to do our job recently and now your world is facing the crisis that you are well aware of.”

“Where exactly are you all from? Hell? Or is there somewhere subterranean where you needed to come through the deep sea to get here?” Alysia asked.

“You have quite the imagination,” the man said, and then showed her to a place on a bench in front of the food that sat untouched on the table. “Sit, eat, and relax, Alysia Knight. We have much to discuss, and I don’t want you to lose focus.”

“The only thing that I can focus on right now is that my dad has disappeared and I am being led to my doom by Satan and his children,” Alysia said.

“Satan? The horned menace from stories meant to keep cruel humans suppressed,” he replied, rhetorically. “No, Alysia, I am not Satan. I am more like your angel, Gabriel, here to remove the Satans from your world. Now, I am not going to ask you again. Eat, and get comfortable. You will be spending a lot of time here.”

The tables had an assortment of fruit and pickled cold cuts that were delicious to Alysia’s taste buds. She ate until she wanted to pop and when she could not eat any more, she turned around and sat, watching the man talk to the white woman on the throne.

“This is Dibolosa,” he finally said, and waved a gesture towards the woman who sat staring at her in her red and black armor. Dibolosa got up from where she sat and did a mock curtsy. “Dibolosa was once like you, a chosen target for the lost. We trained her and prepared her for the legion, and she was able to save her world and send them away for good.”

“So she’s from a different world is what you’re telling me?” Alysia asked.

“Yes, a parallel world to ours and yours. She got our training, removed the lost, and then joined our cause to liberate future warriors like yourself from their perversions.”

“So you and Diaboloso want to—”

“DIBO LOSA!” the woman screamed at her from across the hall, and the numerous children stopped eating and turned to look at Alysia as if she were in trouble.

“Dibolosa, Dibolosa, I’m sorry,” Alysia said.

“Yes, our lady is very particular about her name. The rules are firm in the affairs of the realm, young Alysia Knight. Only warriors from the world chosen can fight them. This means that we cannot interfere with our own, or we would be out there taking the fight to the lost. What we can do is train you to be one of us, and with that training you can start to build yourself an army.”

“An army.” Alysia whispered to herself, trying to imagine being at the front of a horde of fighters, and unable to visualize the thought. “Is it always women?” she finally asked.

Chaos got up, sat in front of her and bit into a peach. The lights from the torches that lined the walls put dancing shadows on his face, and he took his time to eat the peach as her question floated in the air.

“Always,” he said, throwing the pit with keen precision into a metallic bowl that sat on top of the table.

“Why is that?” Alysia asked.

“It seems to have something to do with procreation, my dear. Women are the vessels that bring forth life into this world, so the lost ones choose the body of a woman in order to bring forth their leaders into this realm.”

“How is it that you know all of this? I mean, I get it, like you’re some sort of demon of light or whatever, but you knew it called my name. How would you know that unless you yourself were there?”

The big man smiled and rubbed his hands together, and as if by command one of the young men ran up to him and handed him a damp cloth with which he wiped his hands. When he was finished, the boy took it away, and a girl came forth and handed him a long, slender, sheathed sword. He had worn the same one when he invaded Alysia’s home, but it was now polished and shiny and he rose and tied it to his waist.

“We ‘demons’ as you call us are all connected in one way or another. This is why it is easy for us to hunt them, and why we are disallowed from wiping them out when we are outside of our world. We can hear their thoughts, just like they can hear ours. They know that we have you now, and that you will become our weapon against them.”

“So, it’s like a game of chess between your factions. You can see plainly what the other is up to, but you have to maneuver in a way that will eventually get you the checkmate,” Alysia said.

“Exactly, young warrior. This means that—”

“So, this means that I am literally your pawn. The pawn of a demon trying to outwit another demon with the poor citizens of the world being the chessboard that you play upon,” she said without realizing that the volume of her voice had grown to the point where everyone in the room could hear her.

“Not a pawn, my young human friend. More like a knight.” And he winked at her.

“SERIOUSLY?” Alysia exclaimed. “I’m glad that this is some sort of cute joke for you. My mother died to one of your demons, and I can’t even imagine how many more of my family, friends, and colleagues. I don’t think it’s funny, not unless you tell me the whole thing will reset if we manage to defeat your lost ones.”

“You mean some sort of time travel reward for the victors?” the demon asked. He didn’t wait for her to answer, waving his hand dismissively as he rose and looked around. He clapped his hands loudly, twice, and the young people in the beige robes gathered in front of him in groups of four. There had to be about forty of them, and the lines they formed were tight and neat. To a man, they dropped to one knee, and Alysia could see that they all brandished swords that were similar to his.

“These are my legion of warriors, Alysia, my Bloody Garot, and each of them have over one hundred kills on the ones we call the lost. The enemy can produce new members from the corpses of those that they corrupt, but our order disallows us the advantage of that disgusting practice. They will be your trainers for as long as you need. Then you must prove yourself worthy of leaving this place.”

Alysia looked around, trying to analyze the skills of the warriors kneeling. “How am I to prove that I am worthy of leaving?” she asked their leader, and he turned to face her, his large hands resting on the hilt of his sword.

“Why, you have to succeed my dear Dibolosa, of course.” He smiled, revealing a perfect set of white teeth with canines so long that it made him look like a vampire.

“I must defeat the champion of an ancient world? Sure, no problem at all, mister demon lord,” she said sarcastically.

“You can call me Chaos,” he said without a hint of amusement in his voice. “Your training begins now.” Without waiting for her reaction, he walked to the large throne and sat down.

3

James Knight hadn’t realized he had dozed off but when he woke up he was not inside of the house or near it. He was sore everywhere and when he felt around, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, he could feel train tracks below him.

He was in the subway underground, and he knew it immediately when he saw that the dim light came from above his head inside of a depression in the wall. He looked around frantically, hoping to see Alysia, but all he could make out were the bodies of Jaime and Tracy.

He struggled to his feet and walked over to Tracy. She had blood on her face and she was lying in an awkward position on the tracks. James knelt down and lifted her into his arms. She felt lighter than he remembered and he walked her over to a set of stairs where he set her down and worked at waking her up.

“Trace,” he said after nudging her for a time. She woke up with a start and flashed him a wicked glance.

“WHAT?” she yelled at him, upset that he had brought her out of whatever dream it was that she was having at the time.

“Wake up, baby, we’re not at home anymore,” he said to her lovingly and brushed some of the dirt out of her hair as she looked around groggily.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said. “It was, it was that thing. Did you see it, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, it was in all red and had a sword. All I remember is that it came at me and the next thing I know, I’m dreaming about happier times.”

“We should wake up Jaime,” she said when she noticed that he was still slumped against the wall near the tracks, asleep. “Where’s CeeCee? Did she get away from that thing, or is she here somewhere?”

“CeeCee ain’t here, Trace, but I don’t think she’s at the house, either. They called her name, remember? And she kept telling us over and over that they want her. I think they have her kidnapped somewhere. We’ll need to get out of here to find her.”

Tracey nodded and got up, wiping her eyes. She walked over to Jaime’s body and shook him hard to bring him around. Jaime woke up and went through the same motions the other two had, cursing loudly several times and pacing the tunnel, looking for an escape.

“Why would they put us here?” he asked after exhausting his search and letting his temper cool down a bit.

“They put us out of the way so that we can’t find Alysia,” James said. “This was intentional, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re half a state away from where they’ve taken her.” They all grew quiet after he said this and it was as if he had said that Alysia was dead. He took note of their unsettling silence and got up to start searching for his daughter. It didn’t matter that it could very well be a futile effort; he had to do something. So instead of sitting around, he chose to get up.

He was about fifteen minutes into walking through the cavernous subway tunnel when Tracy caught up with him.

“Hey, I have an idea,” she said through labored breathing. He held her waist with his right hand and led her over to one of the lights. She looked up at him through eyes that barely hid the pain she was feeling.

“Trace, what’s going on?” he asked, and then he turned her around slowly to look her over for any injuries that may have escaped him.

“I dunno, Jimmy, I’m just tired. I feel like I haven’t slept in days and my body hurts, like the gunshots and bites from the kreple didn’t heal.”

James looked around for Jaime and then knelt down in front of her. The young man was nowhere in view, so he lifted her t-shirt up above her breasts and observed her abdomen where the kreple had bitten her when she first met Alysia. There was a yellowish discoloration where the teeth marks were, and when he touched one of them, she flinched hard, almost screaming aloud from the pain.

“Oh man, this is bad, baby. You’ve got some sort of infection,” he said, looking up at her grimacing face.

“An infection after all this time?” Tracy asked as she tried in vain to pull him up to his feet. “There is so much going on that I don’t understand, Jimmy. Now we’re trapped in this endless tunnel and I’m sick.”

“What could have brought this on?” he asked her as he stood up and touched the sides of her face. “We all got knocked out, and now you have this infection. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right now, to be honest, I just need love,” she said to him. She reached up to touch his beard and he leaned in and kissed her passionately as they held one another beneath the flickering subway light.

~ * ~ * ~

“Why should I need training to fight things that I had no problem fighting with before?” Alysia asked the young girl who stood with her. They were facing some sort of obstacle course that was the first in several trials she was to undertake. She thought the girl was cute, but there was something dangerous behind the cuteness.

Her tiny body, bursting with confidence, hinted at severed limbs, intense pain, and her little face laughing as you died in your own blood. She looked like Angelica’s Maria, if she was about eleven years old and taller. She had long, curly, black hair that she pulled back into a ponytail and her complexion was a golden brown.

“You won’t get it until you fight a real one,” she said in a sweet, melodic sort of accent that reminded her of Debdan.

“What’s a real one? The one I fought was real enough; turning people into zombies, killing without a care. What can be more real than that? She was dangerous.”

The little girl laughed, a sinister, yet cute sounding cackle that came from behind a gloved hand that she used to cover her mouth. “That was a mere rookie you fought, Alysia Knight, the equivalent of a newborn. She was inexperienced, and untrained in the way of leading her horde. Had she been left alone for a long enough time, she would have ascended and been given more power. One such as she would have taken more than mere silver and primitive fighting skill to defeat. This is why you are losing your world; you are not prepared to fight them, not without us. Not without us.”

When she repeated the last three words, she touched her heart and then waved all around her to indicate the rest of her people. Alysia understood the gesture and thought about the cold, the shadows, and the ferocity of the demon that she had fought. A mere newborn compared to what it could have become. The thought gave her chills, and she imagined that its intent was to convert the entire bunker, like many of her sisters were probably doing now.

With a bunker of servants, their number would grow. If you multiplied that by the amount of bunkers that were all over the country—all over the world for that matter—Alysia was stunned. She looked out at the obstacle course, which consisted of thin logs sticking up vertically from a dark lake that stood stagnant and foul. The sky was a color both unnatural and frightening, and all around them, flying creatures flew in flocks, menacingly.

“Where are we?” she asked the girl, wondering how it was they had gone from the subway to the outside without climbing. The girl smiled again, forgetting to cover her mouth when she did, and a set of those fanged canines poked out, similar to her master, Chaos.

“Alysia Knight is not very observant.” She laughed, and adjusted the belt of her kimono. “We are no longer in the world of men. We are in Yalem, my realm. This is where Alysia Knight must train in order to prove herself against the slayer of the lost, Dibolosa Vyne.”

Alysia looked at the water, the trees, and the mustard-colored sky. There was something about the place that made her frightened and uneasy. There was something even more frightening about the ease in which the demon girl was able to bring her to this realm involuntarily, and she wondered if it was possible that they could leave her there, permanently.

What if it was in this realm that her father, Tracy and Jaime were? Chaos had promised to release them if she complied with his wishes for her to become his champion, but what if he was lying, and was merely toying with her to take these trials?

“Okay, little one, let’s get this show on the road. Show me what to do to pass this test, and I will do it,” she said.

“Not so easy for a clumsy human like you, Alysia Knight. You must be reformed, to be like us, to do the things we do, to fight the way we fight,” the little demon said.

“Enough riddles. I don’t care. I want my friends released, and I want to help get rid of the things attacking them. Show me what I need to do. Let’s go; I’m sick of everything.”

The tiny girl hopped onto the first log, which began to sink slowly beneath her weight, and then she skipped from log to log, traveling down the stream away from Alysia. When she finished, she called back to her, telling her to do the same and Alysia nodded. It can’t be that hard, she thought, and hopped onto the first log.

It became immediately apparent that Alysia was too heavy for the exercise, and that her balance was not what it needed to be to complete the trial. She jumped to the next one out of desperation. Perhaps if she moved fast enough, she could get past it, but when her foot touched the third one, she fell into the murky waters, striking her head and passing out.

She awoke on the shore where she started, and the demon girl was smiling down at her. “Now we prepare you,” she whispered to Alysia. She lifted a knife marked with runes, and drove it into her chest. Alysia felt a shock of pain and fire flooded her body. Blood oozed from the wound and she could not move, forced to look up at the demonic pixie, whose face was now grimacing as she concentrated on her cruel work of holding the knife in place.

Alysia wondered why she wasn’t dying as the blood flowed free. She felt another sensation as the blood ran out; it was as if it was being replaced by something lighter, cooler, and more rejuvenating. When she had been lying still for over thirty minutes, she stopped her panic and relaxed. Maybe now I won’t have to live with the suffering of Mom’s death and the constant worry for Dad’s life, she thought to herself. It feels so good to lie here, under this strange yellow sky with its dark-blue sun. It feels so good.

The demon girl jerked the blade from her chest and then stuck a finger in her mouth and rubbed the edges of the gaping wound with her spit. The skin began to heal where she touched it, and Alysia noticed that the blade was glowing, throbbing more like it, and it throbbed in cadence with the beating of her heart. Once the hole was sealed, she found that she could move again, and she stood up quickly and observed her arms and legs, trying to find something different from before.

“You are still you, Alysia Knight.” The little girl laughed. “But, now you are a sister. You can proceed with the tests without the penalties of being fully human, and you can prove yourself against Dibolosa!”

Alysia tried to feel if there was anything different about her to back up what the little demon was saying. She felt her chest where the wound once was and there was nothing there. She jumped but didn’t get much higher than she could before. She darted this way and that, testing her speed for anything extra.

She felt and acted as human as she did before the stabbing. She looked at the demon curiously; she was more than a little disappointed at her absence of gifts.

“Do the trial, Alysia Knight. You don’t have much time,” the girl said with a hint of annoyance.

“What do you mean I don’t have much time?” Alysia asked.

“You must pass the tests in time to save your friends. If you take too long, Lord Chaos will not reward your efforts by healing them. You must beat Dibolosa at the end of the trial to be reunited with your friends.”

Alysia felt her heart skip. The demon lord had put her father and friends somewhere where he could kill them if she didn’t meet his demands. She looked out at the poles that sat silently in the black water and ran to them, jumping without any care for falling like she did before. Her foot floated down gently on top of the first log, and she found that her balance was intact, as if she was merely playing hopscotch. She bounced from log to log effortlessly, picking up her speed as she did, thinking of her father’s safety. By the time she made it to the end, she was comfortable with her newfound skill. She could be weightless when the situation depended on it, and this was the gift that the dagger had given her.

When she landed on the far side of the lake, the small girl landed right behind her. She hadn’t heard her when she had followed, but was impressed that she was able to.

“The kreples… are they from this world too?” Alysia asked as the girl took her hand and began to skip along down a dark path of the forest that led away from the lake of logs.

“What are kreples?” the little girl asked, and Alysia stopped so she could describe one to her.

“What is your name, little one?” she asked the girl, and the girl’s face lit up like a cloudless sky when she did.

“You want to know my name?” she exclaimed. “My name is Isobel! Isobel, warrior for Chaos.”

“Isobel, that’s a pretty name for a very pretty girl,” Alysia said, and the child blushed even more. “Kreples are big lizards, but they only have legs. They are black and shiny; the ones I’ve met bite and run extremely fast.”

“Ohhhh, zentans! Nasty, nasty, zentans! They are always hungry, and they attack in packs. Don’t worry Alysia Knight, once you defeat Dibolosa, the zentans will fear you, because they fear the warriors of the Bloody Garot!”

Alysia wanted to laugh at the tiny girl’s gusto. Whenever she would describe her order, she would get intense. She would ball up her fist and raise her voice, and her eyes would narrow into mere slits.

They ran for another ten minutes, and Alysia was confused at how fast they could move. It wasn’t like she wasn’t feeling it, but a ten minute run on earth was nothing, since she had been an athlete her entire life. Now, with Isobel leading, their run felt like she was moving ten times her speed. Her lungs labored from it all, and when they stopped, her heart was racing.

They had gone for over twelve miles in their dash, and she had seen a number of strange, exotic creatures along the path. Some of them seemed predatory, but none were fast enough to keep pace with them. When she had caught her breath, Isobel handed her the runed dagger. The runes still pulsated in tune with her heart, and it felt strangely warm and organic to the touch.

“Now you must defeat the Dra’yr, Alysia Knight. It is a necessary step to complete your transformation. You are a fighter, yes? One that has fought different types before? Then this is no different for you, but it’s not like the other test.”

“What do you mean; it’s not like the other test?” Alysia asked, noticing a hint of fear in the other’s voice.

“You only get one chance to kill him, Alysia Knight. If he kills you, there is no coming back. You will die and your friends will die with you.”

Alysia strengthened her resolve when she heard this. I’ll treat it like the finals in a martial arts tournament, she thought. Isobel ran up to hug her, then quickly scampered up the trunk of a tree.

Alysia held the knife to her chest, kicking off the tiny slippers so that she could feel the cold dirt between her toes. She waited, but it didn’t take long for her to hear the snapping of branches as something large pushed itself through the trees to get at her.

Before she could react, a large, green man with thick black fur all over his body burst into the clearing. He lifted her into the air and slammed her into the ground. The wind left her lungs so fast it was as if she blinked her eyes and was instantly on the ground, trying her best to catch her wind.

The beast had his hands around her throat, crushing her windpipe slowly. She looked into the deep pools of blackness that were his eyes and saw that there was nothing there but wickedness. It was then that her training kicked in and all struggles for life took a backseat to fury. She shifted her weight towards her right side and threw her left leg over his head. He struggled to move his head out of the way, but she was too fast and moved her right leg up to meet the left, isolating his right arm in between them.

She grabbed the left hand that was choking her and rolled to her back, forcing the monster’s right hand to loosen as she braced backwards with his left elbow resting on her crotch. He was hers now, as he kept on trying to regain his right hand grip. She sat up slowly, holding his arm, and then fell back violently, lifting her groin with a sudden thrust and pulling his arm taut while bracing herself. A loud pop came from where his elbow was and he bellowed out in pain, reaching for his broken arm, thrashing this way and that.

Alysia rolled over onto her knees coughing, trying desperately to put air back into her lungs, but she knew that to hesitate would mean certain death. She looked for the knife, and saw that it had fallen near where the creature was recovering from his pain. She ran for it but he was on his feet, swinging at her face with a fist from his right hand. Instinctively, Alysia put up a tight guard to cover her entire head. She ducked her face as the blow connected, then squatted down to the knife as he swung again.

The first blow seemed to rattle every bone in her body, but she ignored the pain as she recovered the knife. Then as the creature moved in to swing down at her, she wrapped her free arm behind his knee and used the knife hand to pull his foot up as he lost balance. She lifted his leg while simultaneously driving into him, and he fell backwards as she raised the knife and drove it home into his abdomen.

Nothing could mirror the sound the creature made when she stabbed him, and she felt a strange sensation as its life force drained into the blade and simultaneously mixed with the blood inside her veins.

She backed up off the downed monster and looked at her arms. They now held luminescent veins, as the change came through fully to her body. She screamed out in horror as an invisible force lifted her off the ground, and as she felt her wounds heal and her bones break to become stronger, she could only cry out in pain as it finished the job.

The pain became too intense for her to take. Alysia passed out, and when she awoke, she was back in the subway tunnel, with Isobel wiping her skin gently with a warm wet rag.

“Hello sister,” the little girl said, and Alysia felt a wave of panic at the way she said it. She ran her tongue along the outline of her upper row of teeth and found that her canines had extended.

“What does this mean?” she asked Isobel. “What does my change mean? You have to tell me. Am I no longer human? Am I dead? Will I ever get to see my father again?”

“You are merely a part of us. Don’t you worry, Alysia Knight. You fought bravely, killed the Dra’yr better than any of us did. I told Lord Chaos and he is proud. He said, ‘Alysia Knight will be the one to drive the lost back to our world.’”

“What else do I need to do to be ready for Dibolosa?” she asked Isobel as the girl dried her and began to oil her limbs.

“Lord Chaos has decided that since you were able to defeat the Dra’yr in record time, you do not need to spend any more days proving yourself. You will be formally trained in our fighting arts, and will be washed and oiled daily by your handmaidens until five days have passed,” she said.

“Handmaidens? I have handmaidens?” Alysia asked, sitting up so that she could look at the girl.

“Why, yes, Alysia Knight.”

“Call me CeeCee. It’s really weird when you keep on using my full name like that,” she said.

“CeeCee? That sounds awfully childish, but I will obey your command and call you CeeCee from now on. Now, I am your handmaiden, along with Jasmine.” She nodded to a corner where a tall black girl was fiddling with her kimono. “And of course, Koko.” She pointed to another dark corner where the Asian girl from before stepped out and waved to her. “We are responsible for your training and care until your fateful match with Dibolosa.”

“Did Dibolosa have to go through this same treatment?” Alysia asked.

“She did,” Isobel replied. “When the lost attacked her home world.”

“So, the lost, as you call them, have a habit of rushing into people’s worlds in order to build up armies to overthrow your realm. If I’m wrong let me know,” Alysia said, looking at them one after the other.

“Yes, they have been trying it for over ten thousand years. It is why our lord is building his own army, so that when the lost are driven back and weakened, he can attack them in our own world and wipe them out. That would stop these attacks on your worlds and give us peace. Lord Chaos is a hero in our realm and he has promised our people that he will finish the lost in time.”

Alysia thought about Isobel’s words and what they meant. Chaos was relying on her to drive out the demons. “Why must I kill Dibolosa?” she asked suddenly, and Isobel looked at her through large, seemingly innocent eyes.

“The savior of the world is forever chained to our order, and to Lord Chaos,” Koko spoke up. “Dibolosa has been with us for many years after her world was released.”

“Okay,” Alysia said. “I still don’t get it. Don’t you guys like her as your queen? Why would she have to give it up just because another world is in need of saving?”

Isobel and Jasmine started laughing uncontrollably. It was so annoying that Alysia hopped off the stone table and yelled at them to stop. “What the hell is so funny?” she asked.

“Well, you called Dibolosa ‘queen.’” Jasmine giggled. “There is no king or queen, silly. We all fight for our realm and our lord, Chaos. Dibolosa is trapped here, due to the ritual that allows her to wield The Twilight Sword.”

“The Twilight Sword?” Alysia asked. “Can you all just give me the whole damned story instead of the bits and pieces?”

“Okay CeeCee,” Isobel said, and then handed her a black kimono as she spoke. “The only way an outsider to our realm can wield the Twilight Sword is to take on the life force of Xatas. It is a mystical energy that can only occupy the soul of one individual and that individual happens to be Dibolosa.”

“So when the earth is saved then I will be trapped here as well.” Alysia said. “Trapped and awaiting another heroic girl to come along and best me in a fight to take on this life force. I’m not doing it. It’s all so stupid. What if Dibolosa was to beat me? What happens then? What does she get out of the bargain, and what will happen to your holy war?”

Jasmine pointed to the slab and Alysia sat down. She then knelt, oiled her feet, and placed a pair of soft leather boots on them. She looked up at Alysia while she did this and her eyes were sad and distant. “You would die a dog’s death if Dibolosa kills you, CeeCee. You will vanish from your world. One of your friends that Lord Chaos asked us to hide will also die, and he will simply find another girl that is better than you to become his champion.”

“What does Dibolosa think of this whole arrangement?” Alysia asked.

“Why do you care so much?” a strong, but sultry voice intoned as the girls scattered to one side of the room and bowed.

Dibolosa walked in, all white legs and grace, and she nodded to the girls to let them know that it was okay for them to rise. Alysia was in awe of her looks. She had removed the spikey armor in exchange for a long, black, silk gown; and she looked human with the exception of her alabaster skin color and hair that favored the sea. She had light-green eyes and her tiny, button nose floated above lips that were full and ruby red, which completed a mask of hard, high cheekbones, and a neck that kept it miles away from slender, muscular shoulders.

“For a non-queen, you sure do look like one,” Alysia said to her, trying hard to swallow but unable to look away from her. The beautiful woman walked up to her until she was in between her legs and whispered into her ear.

“Worry not for me, sweet Alysia. My death will allow me to return to the wasteland that my world has become, but your death will allow me to live on as a revered warrior in this, the world of Chaos. Once you cross over and have the Xatas, life and death become less absolute, my dear.” She stepped back from Alysia with a smile on her face and then walked out, letting her gaze linger on the three cowering girls that stood in the corner.

“Okay, that woman is absolutely frightening,” Alysia said once a few minutes had passed and the girls were back to their normal selves.

“Dibolosa is a phenomenal warrior, CeeCee,” Isobel said to her, as she strapped her old sword to her waist and stepped back to make sure that she looked the part. Koko had begun to do her hair, so she couldn’t get up off the slab, but the girls seemed pleased at what they had managed to do with her.

“Where are you girls from?” she asked them. “You took the trials too?”

The girls exchanged glances when she asked them the question, and they seemed to struggle with an answer for her.

“You’ve all been lying to me haven’t you?” she asked them next, and Jasmine stood still with her hands fidgeting uncontrollably.

“You will become like us,” Isobel said sadly. “Trapped, fighting for the worlds.”

“So, all the stuff you’ve been telling me about this fight is a lie?” Alysia asked. “I won’t die if I lose, I just lose my humanity. Awesome, girls,” she said, shaking her head and sighing as she looked around. There goes my other parent, she thought. “Thank you for the bath, and for oiling me up to be a slave. So, is anybody ready to tell me what really happens if I win?”

“You won’t win,” Koko whispered as she walked out from behind the slab, finished with her hair.

“I won’t win because you think that she’s better than me, or I won’t win because of something else?” Alysia asked, motioning with her hands for them to spill the beans.

The girls stood tight-lipped and Alysia realized she was asking them to answer a question that would get them in trouble. “Never mind,” she said. “You’ve told me enough already and I’m grateful. Look, I’m sorry I yelled at you. I know what you’ve given me is probably enough to have you punished, but you did it anyway. Let’s go ahead and start with the training, rituals, or whatever it is we need to do. I want to be ready for Dibolosa, and I know that you all will do your best.”

4

They came upon an old station and climbed the stairs out of the subway to the mostly vacant streets of New York. It was midday but shadows flitted this way and that in the distance, and a few desolate, hungry people shambled by, looking at them as if they were hopeless.

“Well, we’re back in the city,” James said. He held on to Tracy’s waist as they stepped out of the subway. Jaime came up behind him and began to look around frantically.

“You mean we’re back in the middle of hell,” he said. “Except this time, we don’t have the guns to hold those things back. We’re all consumed with finding CeeCee, but we can’t even survive our damned selves if we don’t find a set of guns and a whole lot of ammo!”

James knew he was right so he merely nodded. They hadn’t gone very far from the house that they had commandeered, but he wondered where the creature had taken his daughter and how much of a fight they would have to go through in order to get her back. He looked down at Tracy, who looked pale and emaciated, as if poison wracked her body. She had wanted him to lance the wound, but he refused to do it since they had no medicine, and he didn’t want her to get a worse infection and die.

“Mr. Knight, she’s starting to smell,” Jaime said, and James looked at him as if he wanted to rip his jaw off to prevent him from talking.

“We’re on the strip, and there are stores literally everywhere, Jaime. Listen, we can go in this hotel. I’ll clean her up, and you go scavenging for something to help her out, man. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do that for Tracy. She’s gonna be all right, right?”

“She’s a fighter. She won’t go unless there is absolutely no other option,” James said.

They kicked in the backdoor of a seedy motel and found a room on the second floor to call their own. They heard a few more people in the adjoining rooms but with the apocalypse upon them and owners abandoning their places left and right, anywhere was fair game. Having neighbors in an abandoned motel was pretty much par for the course.

Jaime took note of where the room was located and took off as James filled the bathtub with cold water. He then removed Tracy’s clothes and sat her in it. The cold brought her back to life almost instantly, but he held her down so that it could do the job and whispered words of encouragement into her ear. He washed her to the best of his ability, taking his time around the bites. He saw that she had many scars and he knew most of them were new, due to the creatures they had fought.

“I bet you were just a young, feisty officer that gave your coworkers hell, weren’t you Trace?” he said to her, squeezing the water over her head and grabbing the shampoo to wash her hair.

“It hurts so bad, Jimmy,” she managed to say. “You have to cut them to let it drain out. That thing put something in me; I know this is not from those old bites.”

He thought about what she was saying and looked closely at the three black and blue bruises. He thought about it for a while, and then went back to washing her hair quietly.

“Got you a bunch of stuff from the convenience store,” Jaime said as he came through the door. He slammed it shut and dropped a large paper bag next to Jimmy. “Whoa! That’s way more of Tracy than I would ever expect to see … man, she sure is built … wow, and those bruises look nasty!”

James closed his eyes to summon patience, and then eased his breathing to keep himself calm. “Jaime, can you give me a few minutes with her to do what I have to do? I don’t think she’d appreciate you gawking at her when she’s this vulnerable.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course, Mr. Knight. Was just thinking out loud is all. I’m gonna go back out, see if I can find us some guns. You know how it is. If a demon don’t get us, those spice heads next door probably will. You hear them in there? They must be shooting up to stay high during this whole thing; I can smell the burned glass through the damn door. We need to watch them close, they like to steal. You know how it is.”

When he was finished rambling he looked around awkwardly, then he snuck another peek at Tracy’s breasts and then exited the bathroom, closing the door.

“This is going to hurt worse than anything else you have ever felt, Tracy, but we—”

“Just do it, Jimmy, just do it,” she said without opening her eyes.

He reached over, grabbed one of the towels, and stuffed it into her mouth. She lifted her hand out of the water to help him get it in and then took a firm grip on the edge of the bathtub. James pulled out one of the razors from the package Jaime had brought him, and removed the blade. He brought out a lighter and used the fire to heat the edge and sterilize it, and then he made a small incision under the highest bruise mark. Black blood jumped out of it as if it needed to escape, then a stream of pus that came out thick and disgusting, followed by pure, red blood.

James sliced the other bruises in the same manner and let them drain, then pushed down on them as Tracy bit into the towel and pounded the bathtub to fight the pain. He made sure the pus was out and that only blood remained, then he applied peroxide to the wounds, and bandaged them to stop the bleeding.

“How do you feel?” James asked her after removing the towel from her mouth. Her head slumped to the side and she gave him a thumbs up. He then handed her a small bottle of rum and she threw it back as if her life depended on it. The water was a disgusting mix of dirt, soap, pus and blood, so he made her stand up and dried her off. She took the towel to dry herself and he released the catch in the bathtub and cut on the shower to wash the residue off the edges. “Let’s get you to bed,” he said.

“I promise you that I am not really this needy,” she joked, and he brought her in and planted a big kiss on her lips. “What’s that for?” she asked as she grabbed a robe and tied it on.

“That’s for coming through this alive, you hardheaded girl. We walked ten miles and you never stopped. A mere mortal would have probably died back in that tunnel.”

“Pah! You give me more credit than I deserve,” she said. “You dragged me for about seven of those miles because my mind was somewhere else. I feel a lot better after that minor bit of surgery back there. Thank you, baby. I really mean it.”

He took her to one of the twin beds and tucked her in, then sat with her and fed her one of the sleeping pills. “I need you to rest to get your strength back. We can eat later and talk about the plan to get my CeeCee back, but for now, I need to watch your condition. Make sure those wounds aren’t really infected.”

“I’m having a wicked bout of déjà vu here, Jimmy. Please tell me you feel it,” she said.

“What do you mean? The motel room?” he asked.

“No, I mean you taking care of me while your daughter is kidnapped out in the world.”

“I hope its déjà vu because the last time she ended up okay,” he said to her.

“Alysia is not the type of girl that needs rescuing,” Tracy said. “If anything, she will probably be the one coming to save us.”

~ * ~ * ~

“Dibolosa is very good,” Isobel said.

“Very good,” Jasmine repeated. They sat atop a hill in Yalem as Alysia went through the motions of her kata.

“I’m surprised that you all are still talking about her,” Alysia said. “A few days ago you were afraid to answer my questions.”

“This is because Dibolosa always spies on us. She keeps us where she can watch us, and so we don’t get close to Lord Chaos,” Jasmine said.

“So, Chaos was telling the truth about the duel being necessary for me to save my world. But, Dibolosa is in love with him and is not ready to give up the sword to me so that I can save my people,” Alysia said as she spun and thrust her sword one way, then spun again and thrust it in the opposite direction.

“Yes, that is the reason why you will not win,” Koko finally said. “Dibolosa is very good, and she will do everything she can—including cheating to keep her seat by the lord, Chaos.”

“She’s a pathetic wench and I know I can beat her,” Alysia said.

“You are a very arrogant warrior,” Koko said to her.

“Says the girl that let a blue-haired harpy come into her organization and manipulate her leader,” Alysia said, annoyed by Koko’s attitude.

“I don’t deserve that,” The girl said to her as she stood up and walked in front of Alysia to interrupt her motion. “You take that back and apologize, because I do not deserve to be blamed for Dibolosa.”

“Oh, come on Koko, she didn’t mean it,” Isobel whined.

“She sure didn’t Koko; we all know that you aren’t to blame. Don’t be upset. We’re here for Alysia,” Jasmine said.

Alysia looked around at them and stopped. “How did you all get here? At first I thought you were demons like Chaos, but the more I get to know you guys, I’m thinking that you’re more like me. Humans tainted and made to stay with that monster.”

“We’re exactly like you,” Koko said to her. She hadn’t budged since getting up to demand a challenge. “We are the failed warriors that have tried to save our worlds. Isobel is from Dibolosa’s world. She is the eldest of us all.”

Alysia looked over at Isobel. “But she’s so young,” she said with sadness in her heart. “So young and stuck here. There has to be a way to get you all home.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Alysia Knight,” Koko said as she stepped forward menacingly. “We came here because we were chosen and we accepted our fates as warriors to fight Dibolosa.”

“Wait! Dibolosa defeated you all?” Alysia asked, and they all stood up and revealed the areas where Dibolosa’s blade had struck its fatal blow.

“The cuts from the Twilight Sword leaves marks that will not heal,” Jasmine said. “For you to beat Dibolosa, you will be accomplishing the impossible. You will do what the warriors of two separate worlds haven’t been able to do.”

Alysia thought of her bedroom back at her parent’s house, and the countless trophies that she filed inside of her closet for kendo and kenjutsu. James Knight had sent her to the most exclusive of sword masters to perfect her technique, and she found it highly unlikely that an upstart demon queen would be able to defeat her.

“How does Chaos keep you tethered to the temple, girls?” Alysia asked, picking up where she had left off.

“He killed our families, and Dibolosa slaughtered our friends. We have nowhere to turn,” Isobel said.

“The Bloody Garot is our family now,” they all said in unison.

Creepy, Alysia thought but then she wondered about Dibolosa, and how good she really was. Part of her training had dealt with sparring sessions against the girls and she knew that Koko was extremely good. Was this information another part of the training, and would her encouragement be seen as treason and lead to her failing?

Chaos had told her that all demons shared a hive mind. This was how he knew that the demon huntress had uttered her name, and it was how he knew they were after her. Wouldn’t he be able to read what Isobel and company were saying? Maybe not. They had not started out like him and were probably more human than they were demon.

“I have a strange question,” Alysia said.

“What is it?” Isobel perked up.

“Does Lord Chaos love Dibolosa?” she asked, and all three of the girls shook their heads.

“The Lord has a wife that lives within this realm,” Koko said. “He loves her very much, but due to the nature of the war, they seldom get to see one another.”

“I see,” Alysia said and shook her head. “So how is it that you guys pull me into the demon realm?”

“Oh, we merely have to touch your palms when your mind is not resisting it, CeeCee,” Isobel said, and the other two agreed.

“Could you all do it to Dibolosa?” she asked, and they quickly exchanged glances as if they were worried that she could hear them.

“Yeah, I guess we could do it, but she could just step back out as soon as we did it,” Koko replied. “It would be a hilarious prank, but she would thwart it as soon as we tried.”

“Not if I was waiting on the other side to fight her,” Alysia said, and the girls began to whisper back and forth to one another so she couldn’t hear it.

“You want to have the duel here?” Isobel asked, and Alysia nodded. “But why, CeeCee?”

“The human realm allows her to use the gifted power of the Twilight Sword to gain an edge on her challengers. It is a spiritual blade from what you tell me, and it draws from the power of the Bloody Garot. With all of you there to witness the fight, she will be stronger than ever and will cut me down before we even start. If I can bring her here, it will even things out and my old sword will be lethal against her, since she will be a mere mortal here just like me. Like you said, she will blink back to the earth realm as soon as I am getting the upper hand, but if I can get Isobel to bring me back with her, I can finish her off in front of everyone.”

“But Dibolosa is so good,” Isobel said.

“So, so good,” Jasmine repeated and Alysia felt like shaking them both.

“Listen, tomorrow morning when she is taking her walk to harass the members that clean-up for her, I need one of you to grab her hand and bring her here.”

“I will do it,” Koko volunteered. “She won’t suspect me if I come close, since she likes to pick on me the most.”

“Great! So, I need you and Jasmine to return to the world of men. Whenever you are ready, send her here, and Isobel and I will handle the rest.”

~ * ~ * ~

It was during the early hours of the morning when Dibolosa felt the girl touch her hand, and she spun to chastise her for making contact with her. The touch was slight but sudden and as she spun she realized that the girl had taken her to the other realm. It was a prank and she didn’t like it, but out of instinct, she looked up to admire the dark yellow sky that was broken up by the dark clouds that moved slowly across its face.

“Dibolosa!” Alysia called, and the woman looked at her with fire in her eyes.

“So, this was your doing, I take it?” she said to her and then tied her long blue hair back into an elaborate ponytail. She turned on Koko and stared daggers into her. “Once I’ve committed this outsider to death, you will be locked in the tower for a month!” she screamed.

But Koko wasn’t fazed by her threat and spat back at her loudly in a foreign language.

“What did you say to me, you filthy girl?” Dibolosa asked her.

“I said that you will not see me again since you will be dead, you miserable animal,” she replied. Dibolosa started for her, but Koko clapped her hands to return to the other realm.

The blue-haired warrior shook her head, then drew the longsword from her hip and held it out towards Alysia. “It doesn’t matter where I fight you, earth girl. You are no match for the hero of the Hanyk realm.”

Alysia drew her sword and put her support hand on the base of the hilt, bringing it down to rest above her hip as she shifted her stance to a traditional Japanese one. “We should be sisters, the two of us. You saved your world and now mine is in trouble. Why couldn’t you have chosen to mentor me, to help me to be rid of these things that threaten my people, and hand me the sword with honor? You let love blind you into cruelty and pettiness, and have filled your halls with children that could barely fight you back when the time came.”

“What of it?” Dibolosa said, and she smiled cruelly to reveal the lengthy canines at the corner of her mouth. “I will have you as my handmaiden and we will watch your pathetic realm fall into ruin … together.” She threw her head back in a maniacal laugh, and Alysia used her sword to knock the tip of Dibolosa’s extended blade to the side to signal that she wanted to start.

Dibolosa performed a spinning flourish with the sword ending up over her head, and then as she brought it around to swing at Alysia’s throat, it was met by her own sword and they locked blades and began to circle one another. After they separated, Alysia pulled her sword down and around to try to cut at Dibolosa’s exposed arm, but the white woman was quick and she read the movement. She brought the Twilight Sword up and then down, cutting Alysia’s shoulder instead.

Alysia backed up with her blade before her, deflecting the blows that Dibolosa kept trying as she again brought the Twilight Sword up, and then down, several times as if it would strike home again.

The blood flowed onto the black kimono that Alysia wore and she shifted her stance to where she held the sword low, next to her rear leg, and pointing away from Dibolosa. The blue-haired warrior lifted the long sword above her head and pointed at Alysia, and the two women stood like that for a time. Their eyes were playing a game of poker with one another as they both refused to move until the other made a mistake. The wound stung from where Dibolosa had clipped her, but Alysia was healing, thanks to the melding of the blood that Isobel had afforded her.

Dibolosa grew impatient and thrust her longsword at Alysia’s chest, but she was ready, and parried hard, knocking the sword to the side and moving in for the kill. She held the blade low from the parry, and moved to do a thrust of her own, but Dibolosa dipped low, putting a hand to the ground and spinning away to rise with her guard reestablished.

“I didn’t expect you to be this good,” she said to Alysia, with a sound of annoyance in her voice.

“Serves you right for taking advantage of your position for this long,” Alysia said, wincing from the growing pain in her shoulder. “Did you honestly believe that you would only have to face off against unproven warriors, when the man you love wants the world to be free of the lost? Like I told you, you are a fool, blinded by love. I bet he doesn’t even feel the same way about you!”

Alysia advanced with her sword pointed at Dibolosa’s abdomen, and the woman backed up, swiping masterfully at the extended blade to try to knock it out of the way. But Alysia needed distance for what she intended on doing, and with the deadly blade coming towards her, Dibolosa couldn’t do anything outside of retreating.

From her vantage point in the trees, Isobel could barely breathe. The fight was exciting but she couldn’t enjoy it since the ramifications that would come to her sisters—should Alysia lose—would be both devastating and painful. She wished and wished for Alysia’s blade to strike true, but Dibolosa was still as good as she ever was, so the fight went on for a very long time.

The retreating Dibolosa gambled and swung at Alysia’s throat when the girl advanced and missed her target by an inch. This prompted Alysia to thrust again and this time the blade went in, just to the side of Dibolosa’s abdomen, missing all of her vitals but drawing blood that spilled out brightly all over her silky, white nightgown.

Alysia did not waste time in taking advantage of the cut, and pulled it out and swung it hard into Dibolosa’s hand, forcing her to release the longsword and retreat, holding her throbbing thumb. Alysia moved in to cut her down, but Dibolosa threw dust at her face and clapped her hands to vanish back into the other realm. Alysia sheathed her sword and motioned to Isobel, who hopped down from the tree and took her hand.

“Ready CeeCee?” she asked with a childish grin on her face, and Alysia winked at her, prompting her to take them back.

They appeared in front of the chairs with Dibolosa scrambling to get on the platform.

“Don’t you try it, Dibolosa!” Alysia screamed at her, and she rushed at her from across the room and jumped into a flying kick, which knocked them both to the ground.

The room full of warriors formed a circle around them, and as they fought, Lord Chaos walked from out of the back room to sit upon his throne. He noticed that Dibolosa had lost the Twilight Sword, and a look of annoyance crossed his handsome features.

“Why not draw your blade and kill her, Alysia?” His deep voice boomed across the hall.

“Because despite my dislike for Dibolosa, she is unarmed! To fight her otherwise is not my way!”

Chaos smiled at her sense of honor and sat back to cross his legs. If either woman won, he would still have a powerful warrior at his side, but he favored Alysia, since she would be the one to stop the horde and bring in his holy war. He motioned for the warriors to spread out farther, so that the women could have more room to fight.

Alysia got up and touched the hilt of her sword, waiting for Dibolosa to surrender. But the wounded warrior held up her hand and one of the spectators threw her another longsword. She grabbed it out of the air and charged at Alysia, hoping she could get her before she could draw her sword. It was a telegraphed move borne of desperation, so all Alysia had to do was move out of the way to avoid the thrust.

She circled Dibolosa with her hand on the hilt of her sword, determined not to draw it unless it was a sure thing. Dibolosa took it as an insult, that Alysia didn’t respect her enough to pull her blade, so she came at her with chops and thrusts, all avoided by the limber Alysia, who danced away from her blows.

Dibolosa grew tired as she swung her sword—which lacked the balance and weight of the Twilight Sword—and after a while, her precision strikes had become sloppy swipes that she hoped would strike home soon.

“You need to stop and admit defeat, Dibolosa,” Alysia said to her after the woman lowered her guard and stood in front of her, panting. “You have lost your sword, which is a shameful thing, and with this new one, you are not the warrior you were before I cut you. You’re getting weak from your wound and I do not want to kill you. Bow before me and surrender the sword, and I will spare your life so that you can return to your home world with honor.”

Dibolosa looked as if she wanted to vomit and she stared up at Alysia with fire in her eyes. “I BOW TO NO ONE!” she screamed, and raised her longsword while moving in to deliver what she thought would be a killing blow. Alysia moved so fast that only Chaos understood what happened when Dibolosa fell past her unto her knees, and her stomach opened up to spill out on the floor.

The room was flooded with gasps and screams; some were crying but most were in shock. Before them lay a woman they thought was invincible but the life was gone from her eyes. Alysia wiped her blade and sheathed it quickly. It was a technique she had always practiced, the art of drawing the blade while simultaneously killing your opponent. She had never meant to use it on anybody, but with the situation and the threat to her life, she had simply reacted.

She felt sick for having to kill the woman, but then the room erupted into cheers, which didn’t last long as hushed whispers began to spread and the crowd parted to let Isobel, Koko, and Jasmine through. They walked up to Alysia and handed her the Twilight Sword and as she grabbed it, a surge of power ran through her body.

“You are to take this and free your world, CeeCee,” Isobel said with a hint of sadness in her voice.

“Not till I free you first,” she said to her, and then spun to face Chaos who was on his feet applauding with the rest of his warriors.

“Am I free now, Chaos?” she asked boldly, and the big man nodded with a smile on his face.

“You are free to return to your damaged world, Alysia, but now you have a weapon that can help you remove all of the lost.”

“Must it stay this shape?” she asked, holding it up to examine its artistry. “It’s beautiful, but I still feel like it belongs to Dibolosa. I prefer a more elegant blade, and I would like it to be a single-sided weapon; it is what I am trained in.”

“We will turn it into any weapon you want, Alysia,” he said, “but you must promise me that you will join us when it’s time. To defeat the lost, in my home world. You must take Dibolosa’s place by my side, but only after you have freed your world. Will you do this?”

“Of course, Lord Chaos, but you still owe me a few things, too. Release my father and my friends from whatever prison you have them in. And there is one final request,” she said to him.

“What is it? What is this final request?”

“I want my handmaidens to accompany me back into the world to fight. I want them freed from whatever you have keeping them here, and I want them to be extended the same privileges that you have given me.”

Chaos looked at the handmaidens standing next to Alysia and surmised that he wouldn’t be losing much if he agreed. “You can have them,” he said to her. “But come the time of the war, with the lost, I expect that as members of the Bloody Garot, you will answer the call to come and fight alongside your brothers and sisters.”

“Of course,” Alysia said, and Isobel hugged her tightly.

BOOK 4

And Then All Was Lost

Tracy stared at herself in the mirror, wondering if she had dreamt the happenings of the last week, or if she was dreaming now. She lifted up her shirt and the bruises from the kreple bites were gone. Her skin appeared smooth and was flawless with the exception of the three tiny cuts that were healing.

“This is weird,” she said to herself. “Where did all my scars go?”

“Jimmy, baby, can you come in here?” she shouted through the bathroom door.

James Knight made a noise that sounded like he knocked something over and stepped in.

“What’s going on?” he asked, and looked in the mirror at the areas she was touching. He took her shoulders and maneuvered her around to stand in front of him, and then he started to touch her abdomen while scanning her face for any signs of pain. “How in the hell did you heal so fast?” he asked her. He knelt and applied real pressure to the old wounds to try and elicit some sort of response from her.

“That kinda tickles,” she said as he touched her, and then she wrapped her arms around his muscular neck. “I don’t know why it happened, or how I’m healed all of a sudden, but I’m not complaining.”

James lifted her up and seated her on the counter. He kissed her deeply and held her close, happy she was no longer suffering from her infection. “The two of us must’ve been high for a week because wounds don’t heal that fast, and I’m sure that your bullet wound should be right here.” He touched her shoulder and shook his head. “World keeps on getting stranger and stranger by the minute.”

“Let’s see you, now,” Tracy said. She pulled off his shirt and held him at arm’s length. “Apparently you didn’t get the healing miracle, baby. I’m so sorry,” she said as she touched the numerous scars that had come from the demon’s attack. “It really sucks what she did to you,” she started to say, but he shrugged and pulled his shirt down, looking as if the subject bothered him.

“Just let it be. We have more pressing business,” he said to her.

“Oh yeah, what’s going on?” she inquired, impressed at his patience with hearing her out first.

“I need to look a little lower to see how you’re healing,” he said with a smile.

“Oh, I forgot to check—“

“Mr. Knight, I think you better come see this,” Jaime announced from outside the bathroom.

James hesitated and sighed loudly. He looked into Tracy’s eyes, which seemed to beg him to stay and ignore everything, but he pulled away from her painfully and exited the bathroom.

“What is it?” he asked, and Jaime motioned for him to join him by the window.

When he walked over and peered outside, he felt his heart skip. There was his daughter, smiling from ear to ear, with three young girls standing next to her. She was dressed in red like the creature that had removed them from the house, and the girls were in all black. There was something different about her disposition, and it made him worry that what he was seeing was the result of a demon’s trick.

“Tracy, CeeCee is here!” he yelled as he ran out of the motel room and down the stairs to meet his daughter.

Alysia saw her father and ran to him. They hugged for a very long time before he released her.

“Where have you been, baby girl?” he asked her. The girls began to giggle when he said it. He looked at them curiously and noticed they were dressed in what appeared to be a uniform.

“It’s too long and too crazy to try to tell you now, Dad. There are parts of it that won’t make any sense, and parts that you are not going to like. Actually, you will want to change the reality of it, but—” She sighed and shook her head. “The fact that you all are safe, and I am able to be with you, makes it all worth it,” she said.

James Knight touched her chin and looked into her eyes, noticing a difference in them that frightened him. There was a slight reddening to her iris, and she bared her teeth to show him her short fangs.

He backed up from her with a look in his eyes that made her think he was about to cry. He seemed frightened and confused, but then he brought her in close and hugged her for what seemed like ages. Alysia could only imagine what was going through his head when he saw her like that. They had only ever killed the demons, some being freshly turned by the huntress. Now here was his beloved daughter – a woman who had gone missing for more than a week – surrounded by demon girls, and bearing features that were demon-like.

“I’m still me, Dad, you don’t have to make the face. I swear I’m me. You can ask me anything. I’m still your CeeCee,” she said, holding his hand and bringing it back to her face.

“You’re a vampire?” he asked her, and she smiled and shook her head.

“I guess you can say I’m part demon,” she said to him sadly, and they began to walk back to the motel. “I am still your CeeCee, Dad, so don’t be afraid. But there is something bigger that I have been made a part of, and that is what you will not like.”

James Knight didn’t say anything more as he led them up to the room. One of the drug addicts who lived in the room next to them was descending the stairs, and as he passed Isobel, he noticed she had a sword under her cloak. He began to laugh hysterically at it, because it was October, and he assumed that they were children coming back from trick or treating.

The group ignored him and piled into the room, where they removed their cloaks and sat on one of the beds. Jaime backed up and stood next to the guns he had stolen, and Tracy came out and took James’s hand and stared at Alysia.

“So, they finally got you?” Jaime asked as Alysia removed her cloak and handed it to Jasmine. “You’re here to tell us that you’re one of them now, and you need us to be your familiars,” he continued.

She looked at him, fanned the air, and then took a deep breath to calm herself. She then told them the entire story of her kidnapping. She spoke of her recruitment into the Bloody Garot, and the war between the factions of demons. She spared no detail as she told them about her fight with Dibolosa, the assumption of the power, and what awaited her when the world was free.

It took her half an hour to tell them everything and when she was finished, there was only silence and stares. Nobody dared to move or ask her anything, and Tracy turned to hug James and cry silently into his shoulder. Alysia drew her sword and handed it to her father; it was the one thing she could do to prove that her story was the truth. He held it up and observed the blade, then looked at the tsuba, the craftsmanship of it all, and the way it felt.

“Who made this for you, CeeCee?” he asked as he handed it back to her.

“Chaos. It was melted down and forged to suit my skillset, and as you saw from the design on the blade, it is now a Knight family sword, through and through.”

The sword had been fashioned into that of an old Japanese katana, but at the base of the blade was a bit of artwork that depicted an ethereal woman, reaching down to touch an armored warrior that looked very much like Alysia.

“I take it, that’s your mother?” James asked with a smile, and Alysia nodded and sheathed the sword.

“This is Isobel, Koko, and Jasmine,” she said, and each of the girls waved as she said their names. Tracy and Jaime were still in shock but they waved back to the girls. Tracy then went back into the bathroom, and Jaime sat down at the desk. “I know that this will take you all some time to process,” Alysia said. “But now we know why they have been coming for me, and why it has been more than luck keeping me alive. All that we love and cherish that was material to this world is gone, and all we have left is one another. I am still Alysia, still the girl who loves swords and video games. I would hate for you all to stop trusting me, or loving me, just because of what happened.”

“So, what kind of powers do you have now, CeeCee?” Jaime asked as he rubbed his head and stared at her with a look of excitement in his eyes. She noticed that he had shaved his hair off, and smiled to herself at the influence that her father had had on him. The baldhead made his green eyes stand out more than when he had a crop of hair, and she found that she liked it quite a bit.

“Well, I am faster in everything I do. I can make myself lighter when I jump; I have better balance, I can sense danger, and I can heal like the demons … it will take a lot for them to kill me,” she said.

“Could you, like, give me some of that power?” Jaime asked. “I want to be a badass half-demon too. Do you bite us and drink our blood, or is there a ritual we have to undergo?”

Alysia thought about his question and then looked at each one of the girls. They had been given the same sort of powers when they joined Chaos, but hers was enhanced by the Twilight Sword and the essence of Xatas. Was the power transferrable? Could they pull her father into the other realm to undergo the trials? She had no doubt that he could pass them and be on her level, but she didn’t know if she was allowed to recruit them into the order.

“Isobel, are we able to create more like me?” she asked the dark-haired girl, but she shook her in earnest.

“Only challengers to the champion are permitted the trials, CeeCee. Your friends would have to be chosen by Chaos, lord, and then brought to the underground chamber. That is the only access point to the world of Yalem, and the Bloody Garot trials.”

Alysia felt a wave of depression come over her when Isobel said this. She had always suspected that it would be this way, but a part of her hoped—albeit selfishly—that her father could be cursed to fight in the other world so that they would stay together once it was all over. She looked at Jaime, shrugged, and apologized.

“Oh, it’s all good, CeeCee, I figured I’d at least try. So, I have another question,” he said, this time getting up to sit next to her. “See, I’m not afraid of you, like Tracy over there.”

Tracy shot him a glance that could cut a diamond, then took a seat on the other side of her and hugged her close. “You can be a real pain in the ass, do you know that, Jaime?” she said. “I’m glad you’re back, CeeCee. You had us all worried.”

Alysia returned the hug and smelled her hair; it smelled of shampoo and something else she couldn’t put her finger on. The transformation had given her heightened senses, but she ignored it, letting her love and comfort pass through via the hug to a friend she had almost lost.

“So, CeeCee, how does this master demon expect you to save the world? Do you have to fight for 100 years to kill every last demon? Or do you convert people into demons, like the girl we fought? Seems like an impossible mission to me,” Jaime said.

“I would love to kill them all, Jaime, for what they did to my mother, but the truth, is we only need to take out their leaders. Six masters from the demon world will be summoned to the earth, and once we kill them the rest will return, and that will be the end of it,” she said.

“You make it all seem so easy,” Tracy said. “I imagine these masters will probably be a big deal.”

“They will most likely come with an army of demons and giants to protect them, plus a few other things that we haven’t run into yet,” Alysia said, smiling confidently.

“How do you know where these Generals are?” James asked. “I highly doubt they are all here in New York, much less the United States, for that matter.”

“With the change, I am connected to them,” Alysia said. “I can see them when they try to hide amongst us, I can hear them when they are close, and when Chaos learns of the location of a master, he will tell me, and then we can hunt it down.”

“At least we have some direction now,” Jaime said. He got up and bounced around happily. “We can help you, get more people on our side, and take back the earth from these things, and then we’ll be world heroes, or something like that.”

James Knight shook his head at Jaime’s shortsightedness, but he forced a smile in celebration of his daughter’s return. “You keep on getting lost, then returning to me,” he said to Alysia. “I’m just happy that you’re here. I don’t like that you made a deal with the devil, or whomever this Chaos is, but I am here for you, baby girl. Just promise me that you will never leave us behind again, if it is up to you.”

“I promise, Dad,” she said to him, and then got up to give him a hug.

~ * ~ * ~

Sleep did not come easily to the members of the Bloody Garot, and this was one of many side effects that Isobel had neglected to tell Alysia. She stood in the moonlight on the top of the motel roof and observed the lost demons running here and there along the streets. She found that she had a newfound hate for them, a growing ire that spawned from the tale her father had told her of how the demon huntress took over the young girl’s body.

“You do that quite a bit, you know?” Isobel said as she pulled herself up unto the rooftop and walked over to Alysia. It was still hard to accept that she wasn’t a child, and Alysia took her hand and stood with her, looking out on to the streets.

“What do I do ‘quite a bit,’ little one?” she asked.

“You like to stand by yourself, like this,” she said, and took on a pose where her hands rested on the hilt of her sword and a serious expression crossed on her face. She stood like that without moving for a time, and Alysia found it amusing.

“What? Nobody likes to meditate where you’re from?” she asked, and Isobel looked up at her and smiled.

“Of course we do. Just not as much as you, though. Every time Jasmine says, ‘Has anyone seen Alysia?’ I know that all I have to do is to find the most private area around and you will be there, standing the way you always do.”

“If you knew the weight that I have on my shoulders, you would be standing the same way too, Isobel,” Alysia said.

“We have all had our share of loss, Alysia Knight. We have all lost family, friends, our way of life … our souls. We know the weight you bear and I won’t pretend that it is any less than you make it. I just don’t like seeing you sad, so I do things to make you laugh,” Isobel said. She walked to the edge and sat down so that her feet were dangling off of it.

Alysia walked over and sat next to her, unfazed by the height of the building and the fall they would suffer if they weren’t careful.

“Chaos chose you to become one of us, CeeCee. You did not volunteer to become the champion of your world. Tell your friends and father that it was not up to you. We broke your form and made you into our image. They should not treat you differently for it,” Isobel said in her animated way, and Alysia touched her shoulder to keep her steady.

“Have there been many girls that you’ve had to train, Isobel?” she asked and the tiny girl nodded and sighed.

“Many trained, many died, and some became sisters,” she said.

“How do you keep your sanity?” Alysia asked, trying to imagine the emotional baggage that Isobel carried.

“Who is to say that I am sane?” she replied and smiled, showing her fanged teeth, which gleamed white beneath the hunter’s moon.

“We’re going to win—” Alysia started to say, but her voice was cut off by a blaring alarm that seemed to come from everywhere. Not knowing what to think, she rolled backwards and stood up in one motion, and then pulled Isobel up to join her. They hopped down onto the staircase that sat behind the building and then rushed inside to find the others.

“That alarm is a warning for something major!” James said. “We need to get underground, and we need to hurry.”

Without objecting or asking questions, they gathered their supplies and descended the stairs. James took point and began to sprint, and they followed closely behind, keeping an eye out for demons and kreples.

“The alarm is warning of something massive incoming. It could be the bomb that we were supposed to wait out in the bunker for.” he said.

“Why don’t we get to the closest one, now?” Tracy asked.

“The closest one is ten miles away,” he replied, and they all grew quiet once again, hoping he had a good plan.

When they reached the edge of the city, James took them into the subway underground and began running on the tracks. “Get to this level and keep your heads,” he ordered, and they all hopped down and followed him into the darkness.

They kept on running with no end in sight. Alysia, who would normally be frightened and in a slight panic over the bomb, was surprised by how calm she felt. Her legs were moving rapidly and she slowed down just enough to stay behind her father, but Koko, Isobel, and Jasmine were ahead of him, swapping places and playing around like children at recess.

“Demons are fast,” Jaime remarked between labored breaths, and Alysia looked at him and nodded her head in agreement. “Can you move that fast?” he asked and she once again nodded, causing him to laugh and shake his fist in approval.

The deeper they got into the tunnel, the darker it seemed to grow, and before long James had to use his watch to light the way. They stopped when they got to a parked subway train and James found a way to get the door open. He motioned for them to get inside. The train had seen better days, and like the system that ran below the city, it hadn’t seen much use since the invention of hover-tech.

“We need lights,” Tracy said, and they all made their own grunts of approval. “I wonder how long this has sat here,” she said after a while and James got up and switched on his watch.

“Hundreds of demons are on the other side of the train,” Alysia said. “We need to find somewhere else, just in case they decide to go for a walk and find us.”

Tracy was about to object when a high-pitched noise forced her to put her hands to her ears. They all had to do it in hopes of saving their eardrums, and then the sound of thunder replaced the ear-splitting screech. The world around Alysia’s party began to shake erratically, and the debris from the top of the tunnel rained down loudly onto the roof. The noises that came from all around them were alien and frightening, and James’s light went out, leaving them to experience it all in darkness.

A few seconds into the terror and it felt as if the train had become a part of a rollercoaster. To Tracy, it felt as if the earth gave out from below her and then collapsed to the floor. When she was airborne again, she grabbed onto one of the poles to keep from flying into a wall. Loud noises became their reality, and it went on for about ten minutes before it got quiet and the train settled down and stopped moving.

A cold mist settled over everything and drifted into the tunnels where the seven survivors tried their best to regain their composure. It made them sleepy and lethargic, and no matter what they tried, the sleep turned out to be stronger. Before long, all of them were on the ground, bruised, battered, asleep, but alive.

~ * ~ * ~

When Alysia opened her eyes, she noticed there was now light inside of the subway. She thought that it was part of her power—some untapped sight from becoming unconscious. She looked back at the other cab and there was a gaping hole in the ceiling. It wasn’t her power that allowed her to see; the light from the sky was peeking through a deluge of debris.

She got up and checked to make sure that everyone was okay. They all were asleep, with the exception of Jaime and Isobel.

“Are you two all right?” she asked, spitting the dust from out of her mouth.

“Yeah, but my head is spinning,” Jaime said. “What the hell was that? It felt like we got hit by another train.”

Alysia woke the rest of the party up and then walked over to the collapsed hole and peered up. There were screams and cries coming from the streets above, and the smell of sulfur was once again strong in the atmosphere.

“We need to get out, fast!” she yelled at her party, and she scurried through the hole and up the landslide to what turned into the ruins of what used to be the city. She helped to pull Isobel up, then Koko, then Jasmine, and finally Jaime. Tracy came out next, and then James, who looked mad enough to hit someone.

“That was a bombing,” James said. “But that wasn’t our technology. Somebody did that on their own, and I bet they killed a whole lot of innocent people in the city. Look at this mess!” he said, and spun around slowly with his arms outstretched. “Who thought this was a good idea? I mean, the entire city had to feel that impact and everybody who was above ground – I don’t even know. I can put money on it that the demons are still running around here too, alive and well. Count on one fool in the government to make a bad call like that and speed up the extinction of the human race.”

Alysia felt a deep wave of sadness overtake her, but when she looked around at the rubble, it seemed as if only a few buildings had fallen from the bomb’s impact. She didn’t see any fires, and the air, though thick with sulfur, was still breathable. They had been so worried in the past that there would be some sort of radiation, but she felt fine. The subway must have saved them from the worst of it.

“Was it always this chilly?” Jaime asked, and Alysia realized that the temperature had dropped significantly since the time when they’d run into the subway.

“It’s cold and the temperature is dropping,” she said. “Maybe that is what the bomb did. The demons are relatively naked and too stupid to cover up, so a harsh winter could freeze them out, along with the other things that don’t belong here. What do you think, Dad? Tracy?”

“I think it brings up another dilemma,” Tracy said. “We need to find warm clothes and shelter, fast.”

“Wait a second,” James said. Everyone looked back at him. “These buildings got rocked, old buildings that have been standing for years. We should be covered in dust, our lungs should be filled with the stuff, and the place should be absolute bananas.”

“That’s true,” Tracy said. “Then it wasn’t a bomb. Where the hell are we, and what was the noise and the destruction about, then?”

They walked around, taking note of the refuse and everything around them. Alysia scanned the skies to make sure they hadn’t accidentally triggered something to throw them into the demon world. Her father was right; it didn’t make any sense. The sky seemed overcast, but the sun was fighting to show its glory; she recognized a billboard that they had run past to make it to the tunnel.

“Do you guys see that?” she asked them, pointing at the billboard as her heart raced in anticipation.

“This is some seriously freaky sh—” Jaime started, but Alysia cut him off.

“See the rust, the fading of the paint, and the condition of that thing? It was new when we went down there. I’m not sure why a bomb could age it that quickly,” she said.

Tracy pulled out her phone and flipped through the screens. The interface had to do a quick update, but when it came back online, it showed them that thirty years had passed since they first went inside the subway. She showed it to everyone and they all looked confused; not even Isobel had witnessed the passage of time in that way before.

“So, we missed the last thirty years,” Tracy said, and there were tears falling from her eyes. “Time travel exists now? As if this mess can get any deeper. Thirty years is a lifetime! Look at this mess! New York is a wasteland now; I don’t even see demons running around. Is everyone dead? Are we the last survivors? Why are there buildings on the ground?” She was completely hysterical.

“Subway tunnels … it’s always subway tunnels,” Alysia said after a long silence. “I was captured and trained in a place that looked like an old subway tunnel and Dad, you said that when you woke up after Chaos attacked us, that you were in an old subway tunnel too. Why does everything seem to stem from the subway?”

“So, here’s the thing,” Jaime said suddenly, his face a mask of amusement. “No more subway tunnels, not until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

2

A loud screech split the heavens, and Alysia drew her sword in unison with the other three girls. James grabbed his rifle from their supply pack, and Tracy looked around for some cover.

“James, back here,” she said, and pulled him and Jaime back to where a mountain of rubble stood next to what used to be a gas station. She and the two men set up positions to take on whatever it was that was coming, and Alysia and the girls formed a half circle and waited.

The screech got louder as something that appeared to be a flying man broke through the clouds and flew towards them. Koko jumped to the side as it threw a crude lance at her, and then rolled to the side as James and Jaime started firing at it.

Jasmine ran one way while Isobel the other, but Alysia stood in place, watching the demon intently as it banked, soared up high into the sky, and then came at her with intent to crash. The Twilight Sword remained in its sheath but her fingers danced in anticipation on its hilt. The creature landed with its fist hitting the ground where Alysia stood, but she jumped backwards, whipping the blade free and catching its arm as she landed safely away with the sword raised above her head.

Blood gushed from the open wound where the sword cut, but the demon did not seem to notice as it threw rocks at Jaime and Tracy, forcing them to run and duck for further cover. James was on the move, taking precision shots at it, but the bullets were mere nuisances to the black beast, and it timed a rock perfectly to hit him in the chest and knock him out behind a park bench.

It was a giant, all black, smooth, and having the wings and visage of a bat. It wore black scale mail, with bracelets etched with jewels, and it was obvious that it was an intelligent, high-ranking demon, but they had never seen anything like it before.

Jasmine and Isobel finished their circling run to convene on the creature, and they both leapt and swung at its face with their swords. But the creature was too quick for their maneuver, and he flattened himself to the ground as their blades swung past his head, and then shot forward quickly, grabbing Alysia with talon feet as he did. In a matter of seconds, they were airborne. Alysia watched as the ground fell away from them as he climbed and she could see that the city, her beloved city, was now an icy ruin.

She kicked her legs and wiggled against his hold, but the creature had her locked in his grip. She reached for her sword, but he rolled mid-air, caught her arms and then tossed her away, flying off so that she could plummet to her death. Alysia felt the panic as she started to fall, but pulled the Twilight Sword free and flattened herself out, confident that Chaos would not allow her to die so easily.

The creature banked, and flew at Alysia with tremendous speed; he wanted to make sure she would die before hitting the ground. She timed him and brought the tip of the sword up to meet him, and then when it struck, she ripped it to one side, and then swung it to the other.

The creature screamed out in pain and then grabbed her by the waist. His grip was so sudden and powerful that she could feel her ribs breaking from his clutch. He rammed her into the side of a tall building, and then spun her and threw her through the window of another.

The pain was so intense, it was blinding, and as Alysia lay against a desk in what used to be an office, bleeding from every orifice in her body. She climbed to her feet and then hobbled over to the broken glass where she could see the demon flying around. It was throwing more debris at her friends, who fought back like heroes, dodging its projectiles and shooting up at it.

She thought about the period that had passed, of people in the bunker she had gotten to know. Were they still living there after all of these years, or was humanity all but lost, bunkers cleaned out to join the demon army? The wounds from the attack were slowly healing as she stood there in deep thought, and the sword pulsed, speeding it up as the energy returned to her limbs.

It was at that moment when disaster struck. Jasmine cut the creature when it flew too low, trying to snatch up Isobel. She lost her sword when she did, as it lodged inside the shoulder of his armor. So she decided to jump aboard on another flyby and the creature took her up into the sky in the same way that it did Alysia.

When it came back down she was missing, and Alysia panicked. She wished that part of her demon gift had given her wings. Where did it take Jasmine? She wondered when it came back hurling rocks, but after a few minutes she saw the broken body of the girl on top of one of the buildings. Her sword was next to her—she had managed to pull it free—and Alysia wiped her tears as she looked out at her helplessly, wondering how she could reach her to help her heal from her fall.

She took off down the stairs of the building to reach the floor. This time when I cut, it will die, she said to herself, and willed her limbs to heal faster as she made her way to the bottom.

~ * ~ * ~

James Knight woke with a start, his mouth full of dust. He coughed and blew his nose hard, then rolled over to see what was going on. There was no sign of Alysia, and Tracy and Jaime were ducking behind a broken down bus. In the distance, he could see two of Alysia’s friends with their swords out, waiting, bouncing in their fighting stance the way they all did.

The creature landed in front of them, and they took turns slashing at him as they fought back. James looked for his pulse rifle and couldn’t find it, so he picked up a piece of pipe that lay near him and checked its length.

“You won’t flex like a Bo will, but you will have to do,” he said as he ran towards the creature. It looked at him and screamed, then backhanded Koko into the side of a broken down car. James caught up to him and twirled the metal Bo masterfully over his head. He spun and jabbed it into the creature’s chest, then as it swung a long arm to counter, he jumped and brought it down on his head. This enraged the creature, who chose to ignore Isobel and come at James. It dashed an elbow into the big man, who brought the Bo up vertically to block, but was still knocked airborne from the impact.

“Jimmy, DROP!” Tracy screamed as she recognized what would be coming next for him. The creature’s wings began to flap and it rushed at him, trying to snatch him up and take him into the air.

James flattened out on the ground and rolled to the side as the talons barely missed, but little Isobel had hit an angle that it didn’t anticipate. She ran with her sword low to the ground and then swung it up, taking a piece of the wing off as she crashed into its side. She pushed off and then somersaulted away, helping Koko to her feet as the creature screamed out of frustration.

“Looks like you’re grounded,” Alysia said as she stepped from out of the building with her clothes in tatters. The Twilight Sword was free and she walked confidently across the rubble to the scene of the fight. “FACE ME!” she screamed, and her eyes glowed red as the full essence of the power took her over and fed on her anger.

James Knight motioned for Isobel and Koko and they joined him to retreat to where Jaime and Tracy stood.

“Now, look, CeeCee’s got this,” he said to them as they came together behind the building. “Let her fight him and kick his ass. We need to find your friend and make sure that she’s okay.”

“How do you know CeeCee will be okay?” Isobel asked, her face a mask of determination and anger.

“I just know that Alysia is a fighter, and we can’t leave your friend’s body in the middle of nowhere,” James said.

“Jasmine is alive and in the big blue building,” Koko said. “I can sense her even now, healing but unable to move. I saw her fall there when he took her, and we can retrieve her while the rest of you keep it distracted.”

They all nodded and Tracy handed James his pulse rifle.

“When you got struck earlier I feared the worst, but I kept it for you, just in case,” she said. He brought her in, kissed her hard on the lips, and then scrambled to the top of a mountain made from rubble. Jaime followed and then Tracy, and they began to fire on the creature once again.

Alysia tore her cloak off and stretched her arms out, one hand holding the sword and the other with her palm open. She walked slowly at the creature as it bounced around, trying in vain to fly and growing more and more frustrated with each failed attempt.

When she got closer, she gripped the hilt with both hands and then circled the creature, looking for an opening in which to get a clean cut in. It seemed frightened of her as she did this, unwilling to swing a claw or rush at her in fear of the Twilight Sword hitting home and taking its life. It kept on circling, the cruel red eyes dimming as it saw that Alysia was more than human.

A shot from James’s rifle struck its face and managed to distract it. Alysia dashed in and swung the sword vertically into an arc, cutting off its left arm and another piece of the wing. She ran past him and spun around with the sword in front of her. The fallen arm became even blacker, and then crumbled up like broken charcoal when it hit the ground.

With speed that defied its size and weight, the creature sprinted back into the city. Alysia decided against chasing it into the great unknown, but she had seen what reflected within its eyes. There was a fear that increased once it saw its own arm disintegrate. She wiped the blade and sheathed it smoothly, then brushed the hair from out of her face and looked around.

“Alysia!” Jasmine yelled at her from several floors up, inside of a building. She waved when the warrior looked up at her. Alysia forced a smile and waved back, and then surveyed the city for any signs of more incoming beasts. There was nothing from what she could see, but she kept her wits about her as she regrouped with her father and company.

“Well fought, CeeCee. Your swordplay gave me goose bumps,” James said as he brought her in and kissed the top of her head. “Is your girl okay? I saw her waving, but the way he rag dolled her on the top of that roof, I can’t really tell.”

“Jasmine should be okay once we get her somewhere to rest,” Alysia said, shifting the hug to Tracy and then to James. “We’re in a strange new world now. It’s ours, but it isn’t ours; thirty years is a really long time. We will need shelter, water, food, and heat. From what I’m seeing all around us, I may as well be asking for a million dollars.” She scanned the area again and then shook her head at their luck.

“Let’s split up and do some scouting of the buildings. We can take care of the shelter part at least, and heat can be done,” she said. “We’ll worry about the food and water once we have it, but we need a place first.”

They all agreed and separated to scope out the buildings that sat within a block of where they had fought. Alysia waited for the girls to make it down. She looked over Jasmine and noticed that she had multiple fractures. She would need more time than she’d originally anticipated.

“Almost got you, huh, kid?” she said softly to the tall, brown-skinned girl. She picked out some fragments of wood from her hair, and then sat on the ground to place her head in her lap.

“I fought to—I fought to stay with you, CeeCee,” she said, and tears formed in both girls’ eyes as she held her. “You have become like a big sister to us, and I don’t want you to fight alone.”

“Shh, shh, Jazz,” she said, choosing to abbreviate her name in that tender moment. “I want you to rest, so that you can be healthy. We want our bubbly Jasmine back, good and whole.”

The girl smiled wide, the way she always did when it was genuine, and then closed her eyes to sleep. Isobel sat next to Alysia and hugged her close, and Koko hovered, looking angrier than they had ever seen her before.

“I want to hunt it down and kill it. Let me hunt it down and kill it, CeeCee. It cannot get away with this, not with what it did to you and Jasmine. Flying around to use the unfair odds to beat us. The lost have no honor, so I should be free to find it and kill it where it sleeps,” she said.

“Come here, Koko, come here, sister. Come and sit with us so that Jazz can feel your warmth. I know that you are upset, but we shouldn’t be rash, especially when many people are relying on us.” Koko hesitated and then inhaled and twirled into a fall. It was a masterful move as she ended up in a seated position, close enough to Alysia’s side to make an embrace.

“You girls did well. I know that none of you have fought the lost. You probably didn’t expect to be up against them until Chaos makes the call, but you chose to come with me, to be my arms, to help me save my world. I just want you to know that I won’t take it for granted.”

They hugged each other close while Jasmine slept and before long they began to feel warm; the shared demon blood was doing something from the way they connected.

“How did you know, CeeCee?” Isobel asked, her eyes wide with surprise.

“I—I really didn’t know we could do this. I know that as humans we can use one another to stay warm, but this… this is just wonderful. It’s as if we are recharging one another, just by being so close,” she said. They all smiled, feeling the connection, the energy, and the warmth. After a time it moved from a physical comfort to a mental one, and Alysia felt the stress, the worry, and the nagging memories of her mother fall to the side to be replaced with blessed nothing. It was a small island of peace in a gigantic world of terror, and the girls held onto it, losing track of all space and time.

When Alysia opened her eyes it was getting dark, and Tracy was standing with her rifle at her side, staring at them.

“Tracy?” Alysia asked, groggy and confused as to where she was.

“I didn’t want to wake you girls,” Tracy replied in a hushed tone. “You all looked so peaceful, plus, I didn’t know whether it was some sort of ritual you all had to finish, or if you were doing something to resurrect that poor girl or something.”

“She isn’t dead, it’s okay,” Alysia said as she shifted her weight slightly to try to not wake the other girls. “We all can heal from the blood of the Dra’yr. But it’s a slow process, nothing like that demon we fought.”

“Look CeeCee, I—” she started, and Alysia wondered what she was about to say. “About me and James, I—I know that you don’t approve, and…” She sighed and shook her head. “I…I—”

“My mother’s corpse wasn’t even cold before you two decided to become a thing, Tracy. How in all the world of sense am I ever going to be cool with that? If you were in my place, and I yours … wait, no that’s gross and weird. You know what I mean, though. Not cool, man, not cool. I can’t even freaking look at you, or him, now. You were like a friend of mine, and you screwed me.”

“I know, I know, and Jimmy said—ugh, I don’t know what to say. Can we ever be friends again? Can you ever forgive us for, for, y’know?”

Alysia was about to shrug the girls off and tear into Tracy when she saw a light switch on in one of the standing buildings about fifteen floors up. She shook the girls awake and woke up Jasmine. They all stood and looked up in anticipation of something bad.

“We got shelter!” James Knight yelled from across the rubble, and Alysia thanked God for allowing them the good fortune of finding a place.

“That Jaime is annoying but he’s useful,” Tracy said, as if she had forgotten their conversation. She started trudging back towards the building, and the girls supported Jasmine and followed behind her as Alysia stewed.

They climbed the stairs to the floor where the light was showing, and they found Jaime and James, setting up the bed for Jasmine to rest.

“How is there light?” Alysia asked as they lay her down and began treating her open wounds.

“I found some bulb droids in a building downstairs. Most of them were busted up and out of juice, but a lot of them still work. Plus I got us these,” he said, and he held up a fist full of flares and fire-starters. “Some higher power is looking out for us. The only thing missing now out of your list of doom, CeeCee, is some actual food. The way everything looks, people set up here for a time. Some of these rooms are bound to have supplies, things we can use. I feel like there was a whole community surviving here at one time, hiding from the demons. Something drove them out. Maybe it was our demon friend, but they left in a hurry. That’s how I got the bulb droids.”

“Are there any other droids, or battery-operated devices around that are still functional?” Tracy asked.

Jaime shook his head and then shrugged slowly. “I only glanced in the rooms since I was just trying to make sure that we could be safe up here. If we have the time, we can all do some real digging. Kick down a few doors, grab some stores, and see if we can find anything else from the old world that still has power in it. What do you say, Knights? Sound like a plan?” Jaime asked, looking at the two of them as they exchanged glances.

“Where’d that demon go?” James asked. “There’s no point in us getting comfortable up here if he’ll be back looking to finish what he started.”

“As long as I have the Twilight Sword, he will avoid me at all costs,” Alysia said. “We are safe here; he won’t come back to fight us all on the same battleground … not unless he’s stupid, and he didn’t strike me as being stupid. Isobel and Koko are fast, deadly, and resourceful. They can go out tomorrow to see what they can find for food. The rest of us can go from room to room, salvaging what we can.”

They all nodded and then separated to set up camp, supply stashes, and make themselves comfortable. Alysia removed her tattered cloak and her boots, and then lay on the floor next to Jasmine, holding her close to try and generate the heat again. She didn’t know when it was that she passed out, but for the rest of her team and family, she was out the moment she lay down.

~ * ~ * ~

The next day they got up and went door to door, looking for anything that could be used by their group to eat, stay warm, or pass the time. The building was an old bank building, and they were in the offices that stood on the fifteenth floor. They used the cubicle partitions to set up rooms, and James and Tracy began to dismantle the old chairs and couches to set up beds for all of them.

The girls of the Bloody Garot took to the streets to scrounge for food. Isobel was left behind to take care of Jasmine, while Alysia and Koko tore New York apart, looking for hard rations. When they came back, they had cans of beans, salted meat, and a small deer. It took the entire day for them to make the floor into a proper camp, but by the time it was dark again their spirits were up.

“Whoever said that a couple of soft, city-bred Yankees could never survive the apocalypse was out of their mind,” Tracy joked, but half of them didn’t understand it, so they just laughed to make her feel better.

James created a fire inside of a metal bin that he found, and they gathered around it to talk and thaw out their frozen limbs from the day.

“How long do we plan to stay up here?” Tracy asked.

“I dunno,” James said, looking over at Alysia as if to urge her to speak up.

“I think this is it,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?” Tracy said.

“I think we need to make this place comfy, get situated, and make it into our home base for a while. We drove the demon out that was stationed here, and eventually the girls and I will have to find him and finish him off. If we keep moving around together, traversing into unknown territory and whatnot, then the same thing that happened to Jazz will happen to the rest of us.”

Tracy made to say something but Alysia shot her a glance to keep her quiet. “Hear me out; I’ve given this a lot of thought since we got here. If we can have a home base, we can become hunters instead of the hunted. This building has many floors, and it’s empty and we are high up. If we get attacked, we can defend ourselves here; and if we rescue people, they can be taken care of here too.”

“Yeah with all the tons of food and supplies that we have here, right CeeCee?” Jaime asked sarcastically.

“No, Jaime, I get it. We will have to keep stocking up and preparing for the weeks to come. Once we are good with supplies, living items, and Jasmine is healthy, then we can start working on finding the demons to destroy. We travel out, kill them, and then come back to rest and recuperate. If we’re constantly moving about, camping out in the open, and traveling together, they will seek us out and kill all of you. I couldn’t live with myself if that were to happen.”

They sat around the fire, letting her words sink in. Nobody had any objections. It sounded good to have a place to call home instead of the constant traveling they had been doing.

The next morning, James went with Koko to do the scavenging run, and Isobel assisted Tracy in working on the place. Alysia went up to the rooftop to make sure nothing was camping there, and Jaime began working on what he called a “heater” out of the frozen machinery that stood exposed on the first floor.

When they reconvened for lunch—roasted venison with a side of boiled kidney beans—Alysia walked into one of the offices and found a tall window to start looking out. Jaime got up and followed her inside, as he wanted to try and cheer her up.

“CeeCee, how come you’re so good at fighting? I know that your father put you in martial arts classes and all of that, but you’re ridiculous. How come you aren’t some sort of world champion kendo master or something?” Jaime asked as they stood by the window, watching the snow as it fell.

“I don’t know. I was kind of a natural when I started playing with swords. Dad thought it was some sort of amazing thing, so he got me a real tutor for private lessons. Funny thing is that I hated him for it; the lessons were hard and I thought that it was the most worthless thing to put time into.”

“You turned out pretty good for someone who half-assed her training,” he said with a smirk.

“I never said I half-assed anything. The training was my escape, and I used it to keep my mind off of many other things going on around me. I don’t mean that I hated my dad. Never that. What I mean is that I wished I could be like the other girls… back then. I was a bit of an outcast in my school, and I couldn’t ever share my personal life with them. What was I gonna say? ‘Hey I’m Alysia and I get to go home and punch a heavy bag tonight?’ Yeeeaaah.”

“Does your dad know that you had it hard?” he asked.

Alysia shrugged. “My dad did several tours as a Special Forces soldier. I’m not gonna go tell him that a bunch of little girls not wanting to play with me was hard. Plus, I know now that everything he has done was for my safety. If I hadn’t been trained to fight back when people pushed, I would have been dead that first night when the creatures came.” She stopped and looked at him, which made him uncomfortable since she never was one to give him eye contact. “I’ve noticed something,” she said.

“What, do I have something on my face?” Jaime asked while simultaneously touching his cheeks to see if anything was there.

“We’re always discussing me, and I don’t know the first thing about you. Same goes for Tracy, and my dad. Everyone here is a closed book, except for me. I just whined to you about being an outcast kid. I must be losing my mind.”

Jaime didn’t say anything, just rubbed his head and watched the snow. Alysia was expecting him to start his life story, but he merely stood there, watching the flakes fall.

“Do you not trust me?” she finally said.

He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, of course I trust you. What kind of group would we be if we didn’t have trust? I’m just private is all. Plus, women like to be the ones talking; all men know that. It’s why we shut the hell up and let you all have the microphone.”

Alysia’s brows knit together so hard that they looked like deep fissures in her forehead. She hated the generalization, especially when she wasn’t the standard mold of woman. “Hey, we’re not all like that. Tell me about yourself or I’ll keep on bringing it up until you do.”

“Jesus Christ, Alysia, you can’t ever back down, can you?” he asked and she batted her eyes and smiled at him. The sight of her tiny fangs reminded him of what she had been through and the fight with the demon stood out fresh in his mind. “Okay, fine, what do you want to know?” he finally said, and she pumped her fist happily at having won.

“Where were you born?”

“Jacksonville, Florida,” he said, in a way that indicated that he wasn’t proud of it.

“Where were you when this all began?” she asked.

“Here in New York with my girlfriend. We were at the theater when a giant decided to come through and kill a couple hundred people. What’s funny is that we thought it was part of the movie. Vorlak’s Last Ride. You seen that one?” Alysia shook her head. “Oh well, it was cheesy as hell, but yeah, there’s a scene where the mech pilot decides to land his ship in Centurion form, and it was in full 4DX, so we were confused when he came crashing through.”

“Where’s your girlfriend now?” Alysia asked.

“She died, but not in the theater. Man, we booked it out of there so fast and that silly girl wanted to stop and turn in her 4DX helmet. Can you believe that? That was Marlene though, lawful till it hurt. That’s how I know she’s in heaven.”

Alysia didn’t know what to say. She had always wondered where Jaime was from, and with him talking, she wanted to press him for more. But death was never an easy subject, even now when it was the end of the world. “I’m sorry.” She said.

“We all die, it was just her time. What’s funny is that old Debdan—remember him, my buddy?” Alysia nodded and he continued. “He was in the toilet when it happened. He came out to get his girl, but she had taken off without him. That boy never had the best of luck, especially when it came to women. But I remember how paranoid and scared he was when we finally got somewhere safe. He kept saying ‘Jaime, as long as I didn’t die on the toilet man, as long as I didn’t die on the toilet.’” Then he busted out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest thing to him and Alysia didn’t know whether it was okay for her to laugh as well, or if it was simply how he chose to deal with everything that had happened.

Tracy walked over to them and sat on a desk. She had cut her hair into a short bob, and with her neck exposed she looked beautiful. Jaime stared at her and forgot what he was saying to Alysia, and it was extremely evident that he was very attracted to her. “So, Tracy, you and Mr. Knight, huh? Seeding the barren earth? We haven’t seen the two of you all morning. Out ‘scouting’ again, or was he helping you to—”

“I swear to god, Jaime, if it wasn’t for the situation, I would throw your narrow ass out the window right now. Mind your own damn business, and have some respect!” she yelled at him and then stormed out of the room.

Alysia tried to hide at smile at their exchange because if there was anyone that could set Tracy McLeay off, it was Jaime.

“You like her, huh?” Alysia teased, and she watched the sarcastic smirk fall from his face.

“You do realize that she and your dad are … together, right?” he said to her. “Weren’t you going to kick her ass for that?”

Alysia thought about it and shrugged. “It’s very disrespectful, and I think she owes me a huge apology for taking advantage of him. But I’m leaving that up to her to do. I see the way she acts, how she refuses to look me in the eye, and I know she feels guilty for what she’s doing. We’ll have the talk when she’s ready. I’ve already given my dad a piece of my mind.”

“I did notice that the Knight bond has been a bit frayed since we arrived. You two gonna be all right—”

“He’s my father. We have to be!” Alysia spat, and shook her head at the situation. “You know, if there is a chance that we go back in time if we manage to beat the demons, Dad’s gonna feel really bad for this whole Tracy situation.”

“Is that what you think will happen, if we win?” Jaime asked, perking up at the chance that she would say yes.

“Lord Chaos didn’t answer me when I asked him, yet here we stand, thirty years after the fallout and you and I haven’t aged a day. That makes me think we were teleported forward, to this time, when the demons are comfortable and have their guard down. If Chaos can send us forward, why can’t he send us back?”

Jaime shook his head at her. “Because he could use his magic to stop us from aging, keep us buried in the rubble for thirty years, and then wake us up at the time that he did. I wouldn’t bet on the time travel, CeeCee. I don’t want to make you sad, but if he had that power, wouldn’t he use it to win his war?”

“Yeah, that would make sense,” Alysia said sadly, then turned to watch the snow mimic her hopes as they fell to their demise from the heavens. “I wonder if little Maria and her mom are okay,” she said after a while, and Jaime didn’t know how to answer.

“Where do you think that thing went?” Jaime asked.

“What thing?” Alysia asked, annoyed at the way he kept jumping from subject to subject.

“The demon. You won the fight but he ran off somewhere, no doubt healing. Do you think it will come back? To find you. I mean, like, it has to be enraged by what you did to it,” he said.

“He will keep running, I think. Actually, I’m quite sure of it. I could see the fear in his eyes when I cut him with the Twilight Sword, and when he realized that I was not quite human.”

“Come on CeeCee, you’re still human,” Jaime began.

“I—I know that, Jaime, thank you. But he sensed that I was different, and when he did, he took off.”

“What if—” Jaime began to say.

“Reinforcements?” Alysia cut him off and shrugged. “I’ve thought about that. If he shows up with a host of demons, we would be in trouble. Still, my mind is made up about all of them, Jaime. They must die. If he shows up with friends, then the girls and I will wipe them out. He can’t run from my sword forever. The next time I cut him or any of his kind, I’ll make sure that it is fatal.”

The way Alysia sounded gave Jaime pause, as her voice had deepened and he could see the glowing in her eyes from her rage. He let the silence settle in, and then cracked his knuckles and whistled. “Well I’m hungry,” he said suddenly. “Wanna go see what your girls brought back? We’ve been sitting here talking for quite some time.”

Alysia nodded and then got up to follow him out of the room. The world had become strange and unpredictable, but she still had the Twilight Sword, and that reassured her as she walked along behind him.

3

Every day the group added and upgraded things on the floor that they lived on; in time, it began to look like a real hideout. They had a cold area stacked with ice for storing meat, and Jaime’s “heater” was a barrel full of parts that could produce fire. This they placed in the central area, dubbed “the meeting room,” and they kept the fire alive, using it to cook and heat up the place.

With Alysia showing no interest in his jokes or subtle advances, Jaime started to find himself attracted to Koko. He found every excuse he could to talk with her, and was surprised at how receptive she was to it. The two became quick friends and it didn’t go unnoticed. They passed the days scavenging together, and she began to show him how to use a sword.

Isobel grew strangely quiet as the days went by, and Alysia worried for her since it wasn’t the way she knew her to be. When it was her turn to find a partner to scavenge, she would go alone, and when Alysia tried to talk to her, she would pretend to be happy. James and Tracy became more overt with their affections, and Jasmine slept.

Alysia watched the elements of their group dynamic and was happy that everyone had found a way to keep on living. She knew that in time Isobel would talk, and she could deal with her dad and Tracy, as long as she didn’t look at them.

The Jaime and Koko pairing gave her feelings she couldn’t understand. Jaime was a friend, albeit an attractive one, but she had no interest in going there with him. Still, he made Koko smile in a way she had never seen before, and she made him very happy. It brought up jealous feelings within her chest when she witnessed it, but she couldn’t understand why.

She was disappointed in herself and forced it from her mind, spending whole hours on the rooftop, absorbing the cold. She liked how it felt being so high above the New York streets; it made her feel safe, and bigger than the disaster.

It was on the second week of their time spent in the bank building when Jasmine’s wounds completely healed. She had stayed still during her whole recovery, moving only when the other girls fed her something or forced her to drink. She was weak, tired, and feeling depressed, but Isobel took her outside into the cold and worked on her.

“Will she be okay?” James asked, and Koko nodded affirmatively as they stood around the roaring fire.

“Now that Jazz is back with us, we will need to track the demon and finish him off,” Alysia said.

“We’ll be ready whenever you are,” her father said.

“A few of us should stay behind, secure the camp in case of anything,” she said. “I don’t know how far he’s dragged himself into the city, but we wouldn’t come back until I can verify that he’s dead.”

Jaime walked up behind her and touched her arm to get her attention. “CeeCee, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you think that was one of the six masters that you are supposed to kill?”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? For him to be here at the point where we woke up. But I won’t know until he’s dead or until Lord Chaos tells me. The masters are supposed to be powerful, and that beast sure was, but I expected more … so I won’t hold my breath,” she said.

Alysia walked away from the fire to get her supplies and Koko followed behind her silently.

“Uhm, CeeCee?” she asked, and Alysia turned around, surprised to find her alone.

“What’s up, Koko?” she said.

“May I have a word with you, in private?” she asked, and Alysia took her into the office and closed the door.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“The hunt today. Will it be the four of us? Do you plan to take Jasmine along now that she’s better?”

“What makes you ask, Koko? Are you okay? You’re always the first one ready to go on a run.” Alysia saw that the girl was staring at her feet and seemed embarrassed, and then she saw that Jaime was looming around outside. “Oh,” she said quietly. She rubbed her chin. “You want to volunteer to be one of the members staying this time, am I correct?”

“Not unless you need me, Alysia. I am for the cause first! Jasmine should stay with me to give her time to recuperate, and you will need no-one’s help, not with the state of the lost after your fight.” Koko said all of this without looking up.

“I remember when you didn’t like me, Koko, you remember that?” Koko shook her head at the accusation, but Alysia merely laughed. “No, I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Koko, it’s okay. I’m just so amazed by how far we’ve come in the span of time, and for you to care what I think. Look, you’re your own woman, and you can decide whatever you wish. I’m merely a sister of the Bloody Garot, a free warrior, just like you, Isobel, and Jazz.”

“How come Jazz gets a new name and not the rest of us?” Koko asked, finally looking up at Alysia. “Is it because she has the brown skin like you do, CeeCee? Do you feel a kinship with her beyond myself and Isobel?”

“Koko, if you weren’t an innocent, half-demon girl, I would be so mad at you for even suggesting that I am some sort of racist. I made up ‘Jazz’ because she was hurt and I wanted to be affectionate. But—wait a minute. Is that what Isobel is being so huffy about?” Alysia asked, crossing her arms defensively as she did.

“Yes. She knew you first. She is upset that you don’t love her enough to give her a name, but Jasmine was given one, and more of your attention.”

Alysia sighed and threw up her hands in frustration. She had wanted to dole out nicknames, but they were so weird and questioning of her human idiosyncrasies that she had delayed it in order to ease them into it.

“Alright, from now on Isobel is Izzy to us. She is our Izzy, you got it?”

“Izzy. I really, really like it! What’s mine?” Koko asked, and Alysia balked because what could be shorter than a four-letter name?

“Hmm, how about we call you Kay? Short for the first letter in your name.” She watched the girl’s face intently, to see if she would have to think of something else.

“Kay!” Koko repeated loudly, and it was so strange and awkward that Alysia felt embarrassed for her.

“Okay … Kay, you can be one of the people left behind to tend to camp. It will be me, Izzy, and probably my dad. We can go find the lost and send it home, and then we will come back and tell you all about it.”

The girl bowed deeply, spun around and then ran out of the room. Alysia watched as Jaime joined her from the corner where he was waiting, and he seemed overly excited when she told him the good news. Post-apocalyptic love, how sweet, Alysia thought to herself. Then she turned around and went back to packing her things for the long road ahead.

~ * ~ * ~

The world was so far gone that it looked like another planet. Alysia wondered if they went past New York harbor if she would find the Statue of Liberty, toppled over and desecrated. Why wouldn’t it be? It was the cliché symbol for the fall of humanity, wasn’t it? There would be the arm, still holding the torch as if it were the last glimmer of hope in their living hell, and the head would lay next to it, the body … missing.

She had taken Isobel with her to hunt the monster, but when they were a few blocks away from their hideout, James and Tracy caught up with them. With the full human couple bringing up the rear of their hunting party, they could only move a couple of hours before taking a break. Alysia was annoyed at her father for forcing himself on the hunt, but she couldn’t find a way to object respectfully.

When they had traveled for about four hours and stopped on a bridge, Tracy came over to her and sat down next to her.

“Where do you suppose everyone went?” she asked, and Alysia closed her eyes, annoyed.

“Heaven, hell, I don’t know, Tracy. Maybe they all got turned into demons and moved their party underground.”

“Yup, you’re still sore with me. Alysia, I am sorry, okay? I am sorry that I fell in love with your father during what had to be the most traumatic period of your life. I’m sorry. But, we’re here now, here at this juncture where we don’t even know if we’re the last human beings left on earth. So for the sake of survival, can you please just forgive us?” she asked.

Alysia opened up her eyes and stared at the redheaded beauty. She couldn’t believe that there was a time when she was a beat cop. Now she was a survivor. And a man-stealing victim at that, she thought. But she was right: they only had each other.

“There had better be more survivors out in the world than us,” Alysia said, pulling open a bottle of water and taking a drink before handing it to Tracy.

“Yeah, it would be sad if we’re all that’s left,” Tracy began.

“No, it’s not really that – I mean yeah, I’m concerned for humanity, that’s a given. But, if we’re all that’s left, that makes Jaime the only eligible bachelor for me to repopulate the earth,” she said.

“You could do much worse, girl,” Tracy said, winking at her and handing back the bottle while shifting a lock of hair out of her eye.

“I see. So you want to violate him next, huh?” Alysia quipped.

“Oh, oh, that— I see, so we’re back on that again, huh? Me and your dad. Look, make all the jokes you want if it makes things easier between us, but all I’m saying is that Jaime is a good guy. He’s extremely nice. Immature as hell and a total pain, but he’s nice, and he likes you. Sometimes I wonder if you stay blind on purpose in order to not acknowledge that you like him too.”

Alysia stared at Tracy for a time, unable to say how she really felt about her. She shook her head and got up to her feet, then stared out at the water as it drifted calmly below the bridge. “You don’t know anything,” she finally said. “You’re a good fighter, and an impressive chick, but you don’t know how I feel about Jaime. Plus, if I’m blind, I don’t know what to call you. Isn’t it obvious that he’s into something with Koko?”

Tracy chuckled and then stood up and walked up next to her. “Yeah, but how does that make you feel?” she asked.

“It makes me feel like, hmm, you know, Tracy. It makes me feel like I have much more important things to do than worry about who a boy has his eyes on. Can we drop the tired topic? If you’re trying to offer an olive branch, you sure have a strange way of going about it.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll drop it. My mistake. So, this wounded beasty that we’re hunting. How far could it have gone?”

“It’s close,” Alysia said. “Isobel ran ahead a few hours ago, and she saw it sleeping amidst the rubble on the other side. I want to catch it when it isn’t ready for me; that way I can just take care of it and we can go back.”

They hung out for another fifteen minutes before Tracy went back to retrieve James. He and Isobel had decided to run reconnaissance on a dark tunnel that they passed on the way to the bridge.

“Hi CeeCee!” Isobel said when she reunited with the party.

“Hey there, Izzy. Did you guys find anything interesting in the cave?” she replied, trying her best to match Isobel’s excitement.

Isobel lifted her sword to show the black ichor that stained its blade, and Alysia looked past her quickly to make sure that her father was all right.

“So the demons did move underground,” she said out loud, and Isobel shrugged while James nodded.

“Masses of them, hanging out in the dark as if they’re waiting on something,” he said, and Alysia felt uneasy when he said it.

“Isobel, you’ve been through something like this with the lost. Do they always behave this way when they invade?” she asked.

Isobel shrugged again. “When Chaos Lord took me, it was very early in their invasion, CeeCee. Dibolosa was able to stop the lost before it got to this point,” she said.

“Let us not forget that we lost thirty years in that subway tunnel,” Tracy added. Her voice had dropped to the point where it was almost a whisper and they all stood silent, reflecting on what it meant.

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Alysia said after a time. “Well, the most we can do is play it forward, so let’s go find this thing and put an end to its terror.”

They ran across the bridge at a brisk pace until they got to a roundabout bordered by high arches. The demon was seated beneath one of them. His back was turned and it looked as if he was asleep.

“It heals. It’s healing like we do, CeeCee,” Isobel whispered and Alysia could see that its severed wing was beginning to grow back in place.

“Like hell it will,” she spat and gripped the handle of the blade. “Please stay here and wait for us,” she said to James and Tracy, then nodded at Isobel to get ready.

The tiny girl hopped up on the railing of the bridge and began running. She skipped around and then when she was near where the creature slept, she somersaulted and landed on the top of one of the arches.

Alysia moved quickly and pulled the Twilight Sword free as she got closer to the beast. When she was close enough to touch it, she swung it into his shoulder, but he woke up with a violent start, knocking her and the blade into a nearby post.

James brought the pulse rifle up and began firing, but a loud noise from across the bridge forced him to glance at a host of demons rushing in at them. Tracy pulled her own gun and they began to fire into the mob, but there were too many and they were closing in, so they backed into the circle where the wounded demon was.

Alysia experienced pain she had never felt before, as the blow dealt to her small frame did more damage than she could imagine. She was seeing in doubles and she looked around for where she dropped the sword. She crawled to where she saw two of them. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs, then snatched it up with a rolling motion. Isobel leapt and drove her sword into its neck, only to have it spin acrobatically and grab her before slamming her into the ground.

“IZZY!” Alysia screamed as she saw her tiny body bend unnaturally and go limp from the impact. She scrambled to her feet and spat on the dusty stones. The blood from her injured tongue poured freely as she gripped the hilt, and she hoped and prayed that Isobel still had life.

She held up her palm and stood with her legs apart, daring him to touch her Isobel again, but he merely circled the plaza, smiling at her. It reminded her of a jackal on the walls of the Egyptian pyramids, a tall, black, winged jackal that walked upright on its hind legs.

“Izzy, Izzy can you hear me?” she spoke, keeping an eye on the demon as he got down on all fours and prepped to launch himself at her. The girl shuddered and opened her eyes. A faint smile crossed her lips.

The creature launched itself with the speed of a blitzing linebacker, and Alysia made to meet it with her sword but found that her injuries were more severe than she thought. She couldn’t move fast enough to bring the blade around, and was run over instantly. The world went black, and her head throbbed, but then her eyes were back open and she was spitting out blood.

In the blotches of vision that came to her between the spasms of pain, she could see Tracy, fighting like a cornered tiger. She had a pistol in one hand and her other clutched her leg, and all around her were fallen bodies, including her beloved James. Dad? Alysia thought, and she couldn’t believe it. Her father did not have the blood, the gift of healing that Chaos had given her, and he was older, with too many wounds to put a thought to.

They were overrun, and though she couldn’t see where the demon was, she could see that the only thing saving her was the stubborn redhead, enraged by what had happened to James and unwilling to fall without a fight.

She glanced up and saw that the main demon was on top of an arch, watching Tracy fight for her life. A calm came over her, and with her father seemingly dead, she simply stopped caring.

“GET UP ALYSIA! JAMES IS ALIVE!” Tracy said, when she glanced back and saw the look of surrender in Alysia’s eyes. “Don’t you dare give up on us, girl! Use your damn sword! Get up and fight!”

Alive, Alysia thought. My father is alive. The pain that had taken to her washed warmly along her limbs. She stood up and sheathed her sword, swaying on her feet as if a slight wind would blow her away. She clenched her fists and stomped on the ground, opening her mouth into a scream that came out loud and unnatural.

The scream reinvigorated her as she let the pain out, and then she was amidst the rushing demons, swinging the Twilight Sword like a scythe.

One by one she cut them down, letting the blade follow her path as she moved. When she had killed enough of them to cause the rest to retreat, her entire appearance was horrific, their blood and guts smeared on her sword, clothes and skin. It was then that the watching demon decided to rush her again to finish it. But the Twilight Blade had drunk the life force of twenty demons or more and it vibrated within her palm as if it were a living thing, drunk on the life that it had taken.

Alysia spun like a wheel in a vertical slash, catching the demon not once but thrice as every rotation cut deeper into him. On the fourth rotation, she shifted past him. Shifted, as if her form had become ethereal for just a moment. The blade grew black when she came to a stop and the big monster froze, unwilling to move out of fear that its limbs would fall apart if it did.

“Alysia Knight!” it roared, but it dared not turn to look at her.

“So you do talk,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut to stop the burning while simultaneously wiping the thick black blood off her blade.

“Why?” the beast asked. “Why do they help you?”

Alysia didn’t understand the question. She knelt and checked on Isobel, who hadn’t moved from where she had fallen. The little girl was brave and smiled up at Alysia, a smile that reflected a reverence borne of respect and awe rolled into one.

“You will heal for me, won’t you, my little Izzy? You’re my angel. I don’t want to do this alone, I just—I just can’t do it.” Isobel blinked so slowly that Alysia worried she would never open her eyes again, but when she did, she understood it as her way of nodding affirmatively.

“Why does the Turevila help you?” the demon asked again, but Alysia was not in the mood for a question and answer.

“Tell your leaders that they help us because your time grows short, V’kosha dog! The Twilight Sword will take your souls, and then you will be weakened, and forced to face us in the other realm!” she screamed.

The demon’s silence was one that reflected the fear and surprise that came with hearing what Alysia had said to him. She stood up and stared at him, his furry back dripping blood from the deep wounds her sword had made during their fight. She held the hilt with both hands tight, and then rushed in and jumped, twisting violently and removing his head in a fatal cut.

The original demons that had fled watched from across the bridge, but when they saw the head drop, they scattered back into the city.

“You are something else,” Tracy said, as she sat with James, cradling his head. She smiled up at Alysia with a look of pride, and then looked back at her father as if she wanted to make sure he was still there.

“Dad,” Alysia said in a meek tone as she knelt in front of him to make sure he could see her. A smile crossed his lips but nothing else and she got up quickly to wipe her tears. What could they possibly do to save him, now that he was so broken that he couldn’t even talk? Isobel would be back to form with time, and Alysia would be too. They would struggle to make it back to the base, but after a few weeks of laying low, eating, and sleeping, they would be ready to go back outside to find the next elite demon.

James Knight did not have this privilege; he would need a real doctor, a medical facility, and actual medicine; all the things they did not have. She closed her eyes and thought about it: what could she do to save her father?

“Isobel,” she called to the tiny girl as she walked over to where she laid. She had pulled herself up into a tiny ball and was on her side with her back turned to Tracy. Alysia sat on the ground next to her, and then lay down on her side so that the two of them were face to face. “Izzy, I need your help, girl. Are you awake? Do you think you can help me?”

“CeeCee?” the girl whispered with her eyes closed, wincing every minute or so from pain that Alysia could only imagine was unbearable.

“Yes, little one, it’s your CeeCee,” she said.

“You want to help your father, CeeCee. You want to know if I can help you know what heals your father.” she said between gasps as Alysia nodded repeatedly before realizing that she couldn’t see it.

“Yes. Is there a way? Can I save him?” she asked, hoping with all her heart that Isobel would say yes.

“Petition, Chaos Lord, CeeCee. He can heal – him, but … price …,” and she passed out after saying it.

Alysia got to her knees and meditated in the way that the girls had taught her to do when it was time to summon Chaos. She stayed like that for a very long time, and though Tracy called out to her several times, it did not register as she sat there, pushing through all of her human doubts to reach the master of the Turevilas.

When Alysia wouldn’t answer, Tracy assumed she was doing a demonic ritual to resurrect her fallen friend. She understood that James was out of luck since he was merely a human being. She didn’t know how bad his injuries were but he was no longer moving. There had to be some internal bleeding, and he needed to be properly diagnosed.

Tracy analyzed her own health as she sat with her man, trying to decide what to do next. She, too, had been beat up by the demons, but she had pushed them back, so there wasn’t anything major for her to be concerned with.

There was nothing she could see that would help them. If there was a vehicle, it was not close to them. She hoped that whatever it was that Alysia was doing would come with a way to take them home, but with the way their luck had been, she didn’t dare hold her breath.

~ * ~ * ~

“Alysia Knight.”

The deep voice spoke to her, and behind its tone was expectancy, as if he knew that she would reach out to him.

“Lord Chaos, I come with questions,” she began, but then the darkness dissipated from her mind and she found herself on the shores of the black lake, the sky a mustard color yellow, with black, demonic creatures flying around.

There was a gazebo on the left side of the lake away from where she stood, and within it sat Chaos with a beautiful, blonde-haired woman in a fancy red dress. Alysia looked around, confused, but walked over to where they were and stopped. She looked down at herself and saw that she was still in the tattered clothes she’d worn when she fought the demon.

“Alysia, this is Adrica, my wife. You interrupted me when we were having our time together,” he said.

Alysia forced a smile and bowed her head to the woman, who stood up—she was tall— and walked over and hugged her lovingly.

“I hate that you have to go through this, young Alysia, but you must not hate my husband. His heart is in the right place,” she said. Alysia returned the hug, though she didn’t know why. Adrica’s touch made her want to be nice to her, so Alysia’s hug was genuine, and the whole thing made her want to cry.

The woman backed up and used her gloved fingers to remove dirt from Alysia’s face. She kissed her on the forehead and then returned to her seat next to Chaos.

“Come, earth warrior, come and sit with us.” He beckoned to her. “I assure you that you have time. Let’s have a proper talk, and when we are finished, you will be very happy that we did.”

Alysia walked over and sat with them. A few of the warriors from the Bloody Garot materialized from the trees and brought them food on silver trays. There were four of them in all, two boys and two girls. When they placed the food down, Alysia expected them to keep their heads bowed like broken slaves, but they waved at her and smiled.

One of the girls—a leggy, dark-haired, waif, who seemed to be in her late teens—walked over and hugged her tightly as if they were old friends. “Thank you for humbling Dibolosa,” she whispered in her ear and then skipped off into the woods with the others trailing her.

“So your father is wanting to help, but is too weak to deal with the might of the lost?” Chaos asked, cutting a slice of bread and then smearing jam on one side before taking a large bite out of it.

“He’s dying,” Alysia replied, amazed that she could say it without her voice quivering.

“Why didn’t you stay with him, see him off with the loving face of a daughter?” he asked.

“I would have if I hadn’t thought that you could help. That you can go there, treat his wounds, and allow me to continue my mission without the burden of a broken heart,” Alysia said. “If I lose my father, I will lose all reason to live. This will affect your plans, so I came to beg you to help him, since it has bearings on everything you have invested to make me strong.”

Chaos looked angry and annoyed at Alysia when she said this, and he twisted and contorted his features in order to reason through what it was that he would say to her next.

“Foolish girl, have you not learned by now that there is no asking? There is simply exchange! Do you want your father to live? Then give to the afterlife someone else in exchange for him.”

Alysia thought about his words and whether or not it was true. Even if they were, she would never give up Tracy or Jaime to death in exchange for her father, and the girls were off-limits.

“I’m not asking you to resurrect my dead father, Chaos. I am asking you to heal his wounds. If you can’t or won’t do it then say so, but I have nothing else to give you,” Alysia said.

“What if I tell you that a part of healing him would be for him to get the same blood you got when you defeated the Dra’yr?” he asked, seeming to calm down as he did.

“What would be the cost of that? If he can be given the blood, then why not Jaime and Tracy too? They travel with me, and they will be assisting me to defeat the demons. As I said before, this is to our advantage, giving them this extra power. You should have seen how the demons took advantage of their vulnerable humanity,” Alysia replied in stern tone.

“My mention of the Dra’yr was simply that, Alysia Knight: a mention. The slaying of the beast and the melding of the blood is wrapped up in ritual. The ritual of the one that is chosen to save her world. We do not allow old men to start the ritual; it serves absolutely no purpose to the cause. I’ve already explained to you why you were chosen,” Chaos started.

“We are very sorry, Alysia, but even if we wanted to, we cannot give your father the blood,” his wife chimed in.

“So coming here was a waste of time then,” Alysia said, standing and taking a deep breath in frustration. “I left my dad to die while I came here on a gamble. My Isobel suffers and I’m not with her. We are miles away from help, so there is a chance that one of them will die.”

“It is hard for you, I know,” Chaos said, “but you are not without resources. You will find that as you become more successful at thinning their horde, your power will grow with time. Take the fruit back to your people as a gift from me and Adrica. You can contact me after your next victory.”

Alysia gathered up an armload of food, nodded at Adrica, and walked towards the forest. As she did, she felt herself getting light-headed, so she looked back to see what Chaos and his wife was doing. The gazebo was missing, but the serene view of the lake and the trees that bordered it made her smile. The leaves were red and there were tiny white flowers growing around it.

She really liked this world and its off-colored foliage, yellow sky, and strange people. It was a welcome change from the stark white rubble that was left of the earth and all the sadness that came along with it. If her father died, she would no longer have a place in that world. Who would fault her for returning to the demon world and helping their cause once her life was void of everything she loved?

She steeled herself and shook her head, letting the self-pity pass as she walked through the dark foliage of the trees. My life was forfeit from the day the demons attacked us, anyway, she thought. I will do what I can, and then when it is allowed of me, I will die to rejoin my mother in heaven.

4

The world grew dark and disorienting and then Alysia found herself no longer walking, but kneeling, with numbing pain running through her body. She opened her eyes and struggled to keep the food from falling, as she saw Isobel lying in front of her, clutching at her shirt as her eyes squeezed shut with dried tears running down her cheeks.

She looked around and saw her father. He was seated up against one of the posts and there were makeshift bandages wrapped around his abdomen. Tracy sat on the base of a statue, staring at her. She ran over when she realized that she had opened her eyes.

“Damn, CeeCee, I was hoping that you hadn’t gotten yourself in trouble with the demons,” she said, looking down at the fruit and dried meat cradled in Alysia’s arms.

“Here, Tracy, you eat. Give some to Dad. It’s special food; it should help,” she said, finding her throat dry and scratchy when she did. “How long was I out?” she asked as Tracy grabbed a number of items. She bit into a peach when she stood up, as if she hadn’t heard the question. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she bit it, and she glanced at Alysia wide-eyed and then ran over to James and forced him to bite into the rest of the fruit as she held his chin.

Alysia watched her do this with some curiosity and she whispered up a silent prayer when her father took it with his own hand and began to eat it voraciously. Tracy handed him a few apples and jerky, then stood up and walked over to where Alysia knelt, her steps seemingly stronger than before.

“You’ve been like that for about 24 hours, CeeCee. Isobel told me not to touch you, so I let you be. I tried to see if I could get some help, but as you can see we’re all alone out here,” Tracy said. She ate another peach and looked at it as if it was the best thing she had ever tasted. “What kind of magical fruit did you conjure up from meditating, girl?” she asked as she looked down at the rest of it that Alysia held in her hands.

“I made a deal with the demon lord to help get my father back to form. He sent me back with the food, but I’m still not sure what we’re going to lose for—” It was as if her own words made her realize what it might be, and she reached down and touched Isobel’s cheek to see if she was doing any better. The tiny girl stirred and opened her eyes, and Alysia drew her knife, cut a sliver of pear, and fed it to her. “Okay, so we’re all back,” she said to no one in particular. “This means that it’s me; he has taken something from me.”

She couldn’t reason through what it would be that Chaos had taken in exchange for the fruit, but she didn’t want to guess, since it would only lead to speculation and sadness. Whatever it was, she would deal with it when the time came. This was how she had handled everything, so it wouldn’t be anything new to face whatever it was that she had coming.

“CeeCee,” her father announced, and she looked over at him in a slow, deliberate way. “CeeCee, you need to eat too,” he said, and she realized that she hadn’t eaten anything since the moment she sat down to talk to Chaos and Adrica. She nodded and ate the other half of the pear that she fed Isobel, and then took the grapes and popped them into her mouth. The food seemed to accelerate her healing, and as bones set themselves and bruises took to healing, she bit down hard and closed her eyes in order to bear the pain that came with it.

James Knight stood up and retrieved his jacket. As he walked over to where his daughter stood, Tracy intercepted him to hand him his rifle. Alysia got to her feet and lifted up Isobel; she felt as light as a feather but she was strong enough to reach up and grab her neck.

“Dad, I know that you won’t like what I am about to ask you, but I need you to hear me out and agree with me,” Alysia said as they moved to walk back across the bridge.

“Doesn’t sound like it will be a question, then,” her father joked, but she picked up the pace, glancing down at her sword to make sure it was still there.

“On the next hunt, I will need for you, Tracy, and Jaime to stay behind. Please do not follow us again, even if you think it will be too much for me.”

“What sort of a father would allow his one and only daughter to go out into this mess alone, CeeCee? Don’t be silly. I know that you’re worried—”

“DAD!” Alysia shouted at him. She wheeled around to let him see the redness of her pupils and the anger in her features at his stubbornness. “Dad, this isn’t a request. If you knew what I would have to give up to save any of you if you die, you would just listen to me and stop at playing hero, especially when I don’t need it. This is not a human war where you can use motivation like love and honor to overcome crazy things. This is a war between realms, where human life is moot, and where I can heal from scars, burns, and broken bones, but you and Tracy will die!”

James Knight wanted to object but didn’t want to argue with his daughter, especially after coming so close to death a day before. She was right in what she was saying about the healing, but what did she expect them to do while she risked her life? He glanced at Tracy, who wouldn’t look back, and then at Alysia. She stared at him, waiting for him to acknowledge what she was asking.

“We won’t come after you again, CeeCee, not when you are going after one of these things,” he said in surrender after concluding that she would take no other answer.

“Thank you, Dad,” she said under her breath and continued her march across the bridge.

It felt as if every step brought with it new energy, as the blood and the food did their magic to heal them all as they moved. By the time it was late and they were forced to make camp, Isobel had her eyes open and was able to walk on her own.

They found a well-preserved movie theater and rigged the seats to serve as beds. It was a welcome change from the hard floor and open sky they’d had to deal with on the first half of the hunt, and with the theater having four exits and no other way inside, they could secure three of the doors and keep watch on one.

Alysia sat in the front row so that her feet could rest on the cushioned railing in front of her. She reached back, touched her hair, and flinched at how dirty and unkempt it had become. Isobel sat with her and had her head on her shoulder. The girl had refused to leave her side since the time she woke up and had felt well enough to stand on her own.

“What is this place, CeeCee?” she asked, and Alysia looked around and smiled with nostalgia. They had set fire to a few makeshift torches and their light illuminated the massive theater in a way that reminded her of the dimmed lights before a movie started.

“This is where we would come to watch movies, Izzy,” she replied and then thought about the fact that Isobel would not know what a movie was. “Moving, holographic pictures that put you into the mind of a character in a story, but played out in vivid detail to fool your brain that you are really there.”

“That sounds amazing,” Isobel said. “So, instead of hearing it and using your imagination, you could just see it?”

“And smell it, feel it, and experience enough of it to truly enjoy it,” Alysia said. “Though some of the movies were not meant to be enjoyed. Some were historic and showed us how harsh life was for our ancestors. The wars with crude weapons and lack of empathy for life, the harsh living situations that many endured, and then the death … some directors loved to make their audience experience death. I was never too fond of those.”

“I would imagine that some were very good, though, and that it would make you want to stay in the movie, away from your regular life,” Isobel said.

“You’re always so smart, Izzy,” Alysia said. “Those people were called Fantoms, which was a nasty slur that I think meant fantasy phantoms. They would sit in these theaters for hours at a time, watching the same movie over and over. I had a friend who became obsessed like that; her parents put her into therapy.” She sighed. “It all seems so trivial now as I tell you about it. We had bigger issues coming our way and we were caught up in judging people for overindulging in what they loved.”

“Movies sound absolutely wonderful,” Isobel said and then closed her eyes to sleep. “When we save your world and help Lord Chaos, CeeCee, we should go see a movie together.”

Alysia smiled at the thought and then closed her eyes to see if she could force the sleep that was owed to her from days of combat and traveling.

~ * ~ * ~

The next morning, the small group took to the road once more to reach the building that they had made into a home. Isobel seemed to be back to form, skipping along in front of them in her tattered white robes, her hair a black mess. James and Tracy were quiet, but they stayed close to one another and kept their heads low, biting their teeth against the chill wind that blew between the buildings, threatening to freeze them.

When they were near their building, she touched Tracy’s arm and said, “Get him some rest and proper food.” She ran upstairs to find her friends, and when Jasmine saw her, she rushed to hug her, followed by Koko and Jaime.

“If I knew that any of this would happen, CeeCee, I would have never volunteered to leave you behind,” Jaime said, looking her over to make sure she was okay.

“We should have been there, sister,” Jasmine said, and Koko nodded and gave her another hug without letting her go.

“You all are so kind,” Alysia said. She scanned the floor for anything amiss. “Anything happened while we were out?”

“No, nothing at all,” Jaime said.

“We’re going to need some time to heal and recover,” Alysia said. “My father especially, but all of us. No scavenging for a week, and no unnecessary trips outside. The demons were scouting for where we live, and we cannot let them find us while we’re taking a break.”

They all nodded in agreement and Alysia went to the office to think. She closed the door and locked it, and then took a deep breath and sat down.

A knock came at the door and she rose to answer it, and when she did Tracy came in and closed the door behind her.

“Hey, you okay?” she asked. She stared at Alysia, who shrugged her shoulders sadly and then nodded her head.

“I’m okay, Tracy. What’s going on?” Alysia asked.

“Nothing much. Just checking on you since we haven’t had a chance to catch our breath, let alone chat. I saw you come in here and close the door, and I thought to myself, you know, no one has bothered to see if Alysia is all right. So … are you all right, CeeCee? Like, really? You don’t talk much anymore, and your dad is worried about you,” she said.

“If Dad is so worried, how come he sent you to see about me?” she asked, pulling herself up on the desk and sitting so that her feet were dangling.

“He didn’t send me; he’s giving you space. Actually, he begged me not to come in here because he says that when you’re angry you like to sort it out on your own,” she said.

“Shows how much he knows about me. Heh, that makes me sad. He likes to sort things out on his own, and while he wishes that I were more of a chip off the old block, I’m not. I didn’t come in here to sulk or hit things or to ‘blow off steam.’ I came in here to think. Hard enough trying to do it when everyone is talking to you or asking questions, let alone Jaime’s childish games and suppositions or whatnot. So, I appreciate the gesture, Tracy, really, but I’m good. I just need some alone time to plot my next move.”

Tracy furrowed her brows and nodded at her. But as she made to leave, she thought about what Alysia had said. “You know, ever since we met, you’ve always held your dad to a really high standard. Come to think of it, he was a pretty big deal and it made me envy you because daughters have that with their dads and I always struggled to have that… feeling. Now, I dunno, there’s something about the way you talk about him that hints at a change. You’re disappointed in him and it comes through in both your words and your actions.”

“What do you mean, actions? I can be blunt with the things I say, but—”

“No, blunt is me, Alysia. I do blunt. Hell, I mastered the art of pissing people off with being blunt. You were a sweetheart, a respectful, impressive young woman who was brave, tough, without it affecting her character. I don’t know what they did to you when they captured you but you came back different. It wasn’t just the cool hair, the red eyes, or the vampire teeth. It’s like…your attitude towards us.” She said all this with her hands moving frantically and for some reason it really annoyed Alysia.

“Get out, Tracy, with your corny end-of-the-world love affair, and your stupid judgment of what the hell you think of me. I would love to see how you would end up if you knew half of what I knew, or if you’d been through half of what I’ve been through. How dare you,” Alysia growled. It took everything within her not to hop off the table and cut her in half with the Twilight Sword. She caught herself when she thought of this, and then touched her forehead, shocked by her thinking.

“Look, I’m sorry. Don’t take any of that seriously. I just need some time, okay? And then I’ll talk to dad, have girl chat with you or whatever, and be a good human being,” Alysia said, not fully aware of the cynical tone she had taken with Tracy. The older redhead exited the room and Alysia took a deep breath and then threw everything off the desk in frustration.

She laid on the empty surface of it and closed her eyes, praying to her mother to help her do a better job of dealing with everything. She cried and her thoughts turned to happier times. Not the family together, like her normal thoughts, but to her time in school. She had been so excited when Ellen Lok University had accepted her application. She was in a new world her first year, and new friends came easily, along with attention from boys.

She drifted off into a deep sleep and woke up with the sun beaming down on her through the tall glass window. She hopped off the desk, stretched her aching limbs, and then covered her mouth as she yawned, trying to figure out what time it was. When she walked outside the room, the floor looked empty. Jasmine and Isobel were still asleep near the fire, but everyone else was gone.

She saw a note tacked on the office door, so she pulled it down. Her heart skipped when she saw ‘for Alysia’ written at the top.

The note read:

To my light, my life, and the reason I kept on, CeeCee,

I feel foolish for not coming to you in person to discuss this decision, but I couldn’t stand looking at your disappointment in me. You’ve been made to do things that no young woman should have to do, and you have stayed strong for all of us. It gives me a deep reverence, one that I cannot put into words, but if I had to sum it up, I guess you can call it pride. I am proud of you.

This morning I made up my mind that I wanted to stop being a liability to you and your mission, and that I should get to some place where I can cheer you on from a distance. I’m old, baby girl, and I still hurt from when the demon in the woods tried to kill me. I guess it took me being foolish and trying to help you in this last fight for me to see just how worthless I am against the demons.

Tracy and I are going to check up on the old bunkers to see if we can figure out what happened to our people there. We have plenty of ammunition, and the best protection in Jaime and Koko. They aim to walk us to the bunker in case we need the backup, but they should be back to you by the time you’re healed and ready to strike out again.

It goes without saying that I will miss you, Alysia, but since I lack the capability to protect you the way a father should, I think that I ought to stay out of your way and let you save this world the way you were meant to.

Come see me and Trace whenever you’re ready. Thanks for being patient with me. You will always be my cute, little warrior.

- Love, Dad

Alysia took the note, walked back inside of the office, and wept. It was one thing to lose the people you love to the monsters that you fought, but she had managed to push her father away.

She cried and cried until the tears would no longer come, and she fought with herself internally over whether to find them and bring them back, or keep focused on her mission.

“You did it. You lost them,” she mumbled to herself, and then read the note one more time. She sat for an hour and then got up to retrieve the girls to see about chasing down her father to stop him.

~ * ~ * ~

They whisked through the trees like squirrels, unobstructed by petty forces like gravity, danger, and reality. They were the Bloody Garot, and they were weapons of Chaos, stationed on earth to remove the demon threat that had come from the world of Yalem.

They came to the open field that Alysia recognized from the night when she fought the first giant, and time seemed to stand still around her as she slowed down. Isobel smiled as she walked up and took her hand, and Jasmine looked frightened as she came up and took the other.

“What’s going on, girls?” she asked them. But neither answered as they stood with her and it became increasingly difficult to move.

Paralysis took over, the world became void of color, and a man walked out in front of them in a royal blue cloak that barely concealed armor that was silver and bright. He was tall and wide, with a bodybuilder’s frame and on his back was strapped a massive bastard sword. He removed his hood to show his slender, handsome face, and Alysia was shocked because she recognized him. He looked like the man that her mother had revealed as her biological father.

She made to move and fell forward as the spell was broken. The world was still a grayscale replica of itself and Jasmine and Isobel were still statues, but she could move and so could the mysterious man with her father’s face.

“What is this?” she asked, and the large man smiled. He was a lighter complexion than her father but still dark, and the shiny armor contrasted his skin and cloak with much effect.

“This is a rare moment, Alysia. It will be our only time during this war, so let’s not waste it on speculation, anger, and suppositions.” His voice reminded her of Chaos and she began to wonder whether it was him, coming to play a trick on her in a different form.

“Who are you? How are you able to stop time like this?” she asked.

“I am the knight, Lancert. You probably know me as Lancert Bell … your father.” He paused to let his words sink in and Alysia flinched, knitting her eyebrows into hard lines.

She shook her head in disbelief. “My, my freaking father is—is a demon, like them?” she asked him, looking as if she wanted to cry. “When is this going to stop? When is this slow process of turning my life into pain and loss going to stop? You aren’t my father; you can’t be. My—my father is on his way to the bunker. You’re just a guy in armor that I’m probably dreaming about.”

“Alysia, I met and loved your mother forty-nine years ago when she stayed in a small apartment near the school she attended. She didn’t know what I was, and I was sent to her on a mission,” he said.

She pulled the Twilight Sword and held it up towards him and shook her head defiantly at what she was hearing.

“Alysia, you are mine. I lay with your mother to make sure that you would be in place to help the world when Chaos attacked. My daughter, we don’t have much time so please listen to me. You are of the blood, the blood of the Turevila, just like he is.”

“What does that mean? That I’m some sort of demon spawn? Are you saying that I am like Chaos, that I belong to Yalem?” she asked, pushing back her feelings to entertain the man, just in case he let his guard down and gave her an opening.

“Yes, my daughter, you are of Yalem. I was tasked in making sure that you were in place when—” Alysia saw an opening when the man looked down to gather his thoughts. She swung the blade at his exposed neck, but he threw up a forearm to block the swing and his silver armor deflected it, causing her to stumble.

He pulled out the bastard sword that was on his back and then squared off against her within the grey, grassy field. “You are more like Chaos now that he has tainted you,” he spat at her. She ignored his words as she circled with him, ready for anything that would come.

He swung the sword several times; he was so fast that it defied his size and weight, but Alysia was quick and avoided its swing as she darted this way and that, trying to cut him down.

“He made you commit murder, tainted your soul, and then gave you a cursed sword as a reward,” he preached as he spun and connected with her guard, causing her to slide across the grass and roll head over heels from the strength of his swing. “Like him, you think that strength is the answer towards attaining peace. You attack what you don’t understand, and use tricks to win at your fights.”

Alysia ran towards the trees where she hoped he would lose her. Then, when he put his sword down, she dashed back at him using the demonic speed gifted to her from Chaos. She moved so fast that she didn’t know whether her blade had cut through him, but when she stopped on the far side from where she had cut across him, she noticed that he led the bastard sword up from where he had countered.

“Tricks, all tricks. Oh daughter, oh savior of the world of man, you are better than him, yet you let him manipulate you with lies and deceit,” he said as he lowered his sword. He shook his head as if disappointed. “Alysia Bell, you’re on a foolish mission to prove to the Chaos demon that you are worthy of being the captain of his army. I cannot allow this, since you will most likely succeed, and the second of the Greater V’Kosha’s has revealed himself to me,” he said, his deep voice sounding like thunder.

She ran at him stubbornly with the Twilight Sword behind her, but the large man parried, and spun her one way, then another. He then used the hilt of the massive bastard sword and smashed it into her wrists, forcing her to drop the Twilight Sword.

“Separate yourself from that accursed tool of Chaos, girl. It is through it that he sees you, and controls your every move. He will sweep away the love that has made you into the woman that you are, and he’ll take away your family, your friends, and your humanity. As a part of us it will be easy to turn you dark, and by the time you remove the last of the great generals, you will be his, just like Dibolosa!”

He swung and slammed his sword into the Twilight Sword and it shattered like glass. Alysia felt her body weaken, as if a part of her had been removed. She screamed and scrambled for the blade. She was sure that all hope was lost now that he had taken the weapon needed to free the earth.

“BASTARD!” she screamed and scrambled for the pieces, but the warrior merely sheathed his sword and paced the field as if he was thinking of what to say.

“Alysia, my child. I haven’t been there, and I wasn’t there for your poor mother or the struggles you faced in this harsh human world. It was forbidden. Our war has rules, but you must believe me that I have watched you with love for all of your years, and this is why I’ve come.” He swallowed hard and took a deep breath, then unlatched the sword and set it on the ground. “The Twilight Sword, accompanied with lies, is the reason why Chaos’s army is unstoppable.”

Alysia looked at him. She got to her feet and walked over to where he knelt and picked up the sword. She was surprised at how light it was to the touch, and as she held it, a euphoric feeling came over her. Something about it felt right, and she gripped it with both hands and closed her eyes. It shuddered and popped audibly as spikes ejected from its hilt, into Alysia’s hands.

She screamed loudly as it mixed with her blood and when she was so out of energy that she couldn’t stand, she fell to the ground and passed out. When she awoke, the sword was a replica of the Twilight Sword but instead of the image of her mother reaching down, it now bore a symbol of a knight handing a sword to a kneeling woman. She looked over at the man who claimed to be her father, and he looked weak, as if he was dying.

“I have to go, Alysia. It is unnatural for me to be here. I just needed you to know the truth of your role, and to give you a weapon that Chaos cannot corrupt,” he said.

“What is my role? Who is Chaos, really?” she asked, and he looked around as if he was trying to determine how much time he really had.

“Chaos is a warmonger, a world conqueror, and a tyrant. He has invaded many realms throughout the centuries in order to grow an army strong enough to take over the world of Yalem,” he replied.

“But how, if he’s having me kill them? How is he growing an army when he’s influencing us to help him kill all of them?” Alysia asked.

“Chaos plays the long game; an immortal has no use for time. He sends in savages to ruin the lands. This is the first step towards finding the ones that are strong enough to resist when their worlds fall to ruin. He then indoctrinates them, gives them lies about a greater good, and then he uses the warriors of that very world to join his Bloody Garot, his usurper corps,” the big man said as he stood up and gestured with his hands. “I have to go,” he said finally, and the world began to become colorized once again.

“Lancert! One more question,” Alysia said as the silver knight began to fade with the change. “What am I supposed to do ... about Chaos Lord?”

“Follow your heart, my beloved daughter. Follow it and save your world. He has already taken thirty years from you. Do not let him take any—” and he was gone before he could finish.

Isobel and Jasmine looked at Alysia and nodded. They seemed unaware of what had transpired and were eager to pick up the pace to find her father.

“Wait,” Alysia said. “Not so fast. I need time to think before we catch up, so let’s slow down and enjoy the walk.”

“Okay, CeeCee,” Isobel said, but kept staring at her as they walked. “CeeCee is free,” she said under her breath and Jasmine turned pale and refused to look at her. “I am happy that it is you,” Isobel kept on. “You are strong enough to save us, and I know that you will.”

“How, Izzy, how can I save you?” Alysia asked, and Isobel shrugged and skipped on ahead.

BOOK 5

And Then There Was Hope

The bunker was empty; they didn’t know what they expected to find when they pulled open the heavy lid, but there was nothing inside but the stench of the dead. James Knight looked into the deep recesses of the blackness and wondered how long the inhabitants had been without power.

He powered on his watch and descended the stairs, and Tracy stayed close to him with a watchful eye for anything that could be considered hostile. Jaime and Koko had been left on guard duty, so there would be no immediate help if they were to get jumped by a horde of demons.

They got to the bottom floor and James waved the light around. There were red eyes peering out at them from numerous places around the building. It seemed that the entire community had been converted into demons, and the thought of it brought James to an extreme sadness.

“We need to back out, Trace. Move out now!” he whispered, as he turned to sprint up the steps. He cleared the entrance and backed away with his gun out. “We got us a fight, people!” he shouted and Jaime ran up with a shotgun drawn.

The demons poured from the entrance like uncorked wine, and James and company began to fire at them, forming a wedge to strike out at three angles. Koko unlatched her silver sword and dashed past them into the fray. She slashed and thrusted like a viper provoked and when her blade touched the demons, they exploded into ashes. After a while it became worthless to fire in on the horde. Koko was amongst them with little care for her life, and James and Tracy didn’t want their bullets to hit her.

When the last of the demons rushed out to get killed, Koko walked to the far side of the lid, flipped it shut, and looked at the group as if she were disappointed.

“What did we expect to find in there?” she asked, sheathing her blade and stepping over the rocks that bordered the bunker.

“Our friends,” Jaime said, sad at the thought of Angelica and Maria being turned into demons. “I’m sorry, Tracy,” he said, and walked over to Koko. “I hope they made it out okay. There’s no proof that those things are the people we knew.”

Tracy nodded her head and fought back the urge to lash out and cry. She didn’t agree when James said that he wanted to come back to the bunker, knowing that it would only be pain and hopelessness there, but he had insisted. Now with the sight of the demons that littered the bunker, it made her feel low, like she had betrayed them by leaving when she did.

“We could have taken them with us, Jimmy. Out here, to survive. But we left them alone, and now… well, you saw it. We lost ‘em all. We lost … oh my god,” she said and then fell to her knees crying.

James bent down to comfort her and she grew quiet. A chill wind blew in from the tall, bordering trees and with it came a song that was produced by old leaves, positioned in such a way that they whistled a tune. It was an ominous sound to go along with the death, and while Koko thought it foolish for them to hang around the bunker, she kept this to herself, letting the red-haired woman get her crying done.

Isobel and Jasmine stepped out from the trees and walked over to them with their faces looking long. Koko ran up and hugged them as they spoke in hushed tones and Jaime looked back at the forest, wondering where Alysia was.

“You guys left CeeCee?” he asked in surprise.

Jasmine walked over to them. “Something new has come up,” she announced to them, and Tracy stood up, dusted herself off, and stepped in closer to hear what it was. “She got your letter, Mr. Knight, and it made her very sad. She made to chase you but she was stopped by a powerful Ert.”

“What the hell is an Ert?” Tracy asked, and James held his hand up for her to be quiet.

“An Ert is similar to your armored warriors. Knights? Is that what you call them? Well, they’re dressed like that, and this Ert happened to be CeeCee’s father—” she began, which made James Knight grunt with frustration.

“Jimmy is Alysia’s father. What do you mean?” Tracy said.

“James Knight is Alysia’s father, yes, but she was born from an Ert. It is why Chaos chose her … why we must protect her. She is to be a general in the war for Yalem.”

“The hell she is,” James said. He looked around. “Where is she now?” he asked.

Isobel touched Jasmine’s shoulder as if to signal that it was her turn to talk. “A major V’Kosha, a lost one, showed up on the other side of the world and Alysia went to go and destroy it,” Isobel said proudly.

“All by herself? Are you nuts?” James Knight said, but the girls didn’t seem concerned by it.

“Alysia Knight is no longer with the lord of Chaos. He cannot see her now that the Twilight Sword has been destroyed. She must hunt on her own to close the gate, and then she can face him to get the answers that she seeks,” she said.

Tracy rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair in frustration. “I don’t know about you guys but I’m kind of over it with the helpless, bystander act. Alysia’s on a suicide mission, humanity is dead, like – what’s even the point anymore? Can any of you tell me?” She looked around with a look of exasperation on her face but nobody answered her.

“Well we found what we came looking for,” James said. “Death, desolation, and all of our friends lost to the demons.”

“So what now, Mr. Knight?” Jamie asked.

“The bunkers are bound to have supplies left over from the time when we were there. Hard rations, heat, shelter. The only thing preventing us from getting it is the demons we saw down there. If we can clear out enough of them to get below, we can be good for a few days, at least until CeeCee returns. What do y’all think?” he said.

“I think I am ready to stop standing by the wayside in this messed up reality of ours,” Tracy said.

“We should go back to the shelter,” Jaime said finally. “Alysia had the right thing in mind when she had us camp out there. It was safe, too high for us to get jumped, and we had lots of supplies there, heat—”

“And beds!” Koko chimed in with an uncharacteristic smile as she glanced at Jaime.

Tracy looked at them, nodded, and then took James by his arm and walked him back towards the trees. “He makes sense,” she said. “Plus … you know I can’t keep moving around. I’m gonna eventually have to prepare for …” She sighed and James took her hands into his own and kissed her.

“For the baby?” he said, and Tracy nodded and touched her stomach out of habit.

“I know you wanted to wait to tell the rest of the gang, but with me getting sick in the morning and…well, y’know. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure it out, Jimmy,” she said, appearing as if she wanted to cry.

“We’ll go back, Trace, back to the camp. I was thinking we could try to use that old house again. It was fine until Chaos came in and wrecked the place, but we could clean—”

“Jimmy, you’re forgetting that we just lost thirty years. The city is in ruins; that house is not going to be there. Let’s just grab what we can and make the trip back. It was only a couple of days, and when we’re there, we can wait for CeeCee to finish her missions and then come home to be with us,” Tracy said.

James wanted to do everything he could to keep Tracy healthy, and though he hated the idea of making the long march back through the ruins of the city, he knew she was right about their safety. He took her hand and led her back to the rest of the company.

“Look everyone,” he began, “Tracy is pregnant. It has become my number one priority to get her to a place where she can get ample food, rest, and fluids so that she and the baby can remain healthy throughout her term.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Knight,” Jaime announced with a smile, and when Tracy looked at him questioningly, he winked at her and nodded his head.

“Oh, shut up Jaime!” she snapped at him. “Keep going the way you’ve been going and I’m sure that Koko will be right behind,” she said to him and Koko dropped her bag, glanced around quickly to see if Isobel and Jasmine had heard, and then ran back into the barracks when they stared at her.

“Damn it, Tracy! Why’d you have to do that?” he whined and then chased after Koko to rectify the situation.

Tracy shot James a wicked grin when Jaime was out of sight.

“You play too much,” he said to her. “Let’s prepare a camp over there in the barracks and we can head out tomorrow to reach the city.”

They cleared out the main area of the barracks and began to set up the necessary traps and weapons needed to keep them safe. Tracy found a room with a large gaping hole in the roof and she started a bonfire in the middle of it.

She set up chairs around the fire while James and Isobel covered the windows with tarp they found rolled up near a corner of the wall. When Jaime and Koko returned an hour later, they helped with securing the perimeter. Then they rolled out the rest of the tarp, cut it into squares, and made makeshift beds for everyone. It would be cold and uncomfortable when they slept that night but they were all used to it, having had to make do as they traveled.

~ * ~ * ~

The company of survivors slept soundly and stiffly on their tarps while Jaime, who had taken first watch, paced the rooms, peeking outside of the windows periodically to make sure nothing approached them. He thought about what Tracy had said to set Koko off and it upset him. He walked over to where everyone slept and saw that she was sleeping next to James, securely protected by his big arms and positioning.

He shook his head and walked past their bodies, observing the unique quirks they all had. Koko lay with her sword unsheathed, though she slept so deeply it didn’t matter at all. Isobel, whose entire being seemed to be about staying cute, curled up like a cat in the corner, and Jasmine snored loudly, which contradicted everything assumed when he first met her.

Are we the last of the living in the world? he thought. Wouldn’t that be something if we were?

Jaime walked out of the room and into one of the outer areas of the barracks. He shifted the tarp to the side and peered out. A dark tree line was visible, silhouetted beneath the moonlight, but there was nothing else. He wanted to sit down and relax, but experience told him that doing so would put all of their lives in danger. He stepped over the tripwire at the front door, pushed it open slowly, and then walked out into the night air with his gun ready. A little stroll around the barracks will cure my boredom, he thought, and stepped over another tripwire as he started to make his rounds.

“Human?” a voice whispered, and as he spun to raise his gun at whatever it was, he heard the clicking of safeties being taken off multiple weapons.

In front of him was a muscular, brown-skinned woman, who looked like the stereotype of every female lead he knew from action movies. She had long, black, curly hair, pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a red bandana to hold it back.

Her vascular arms were sweaty and slick and she stood confidently in a black tank top, baggy black cargo pants, and military-issue combat boots. The weapon she held pointed at him was similar to the one that James Knight used. It was a massive magnum pistol, the kind that would take his head off completely if she squeezed the trigger.

Behind her were men and women dressed in the black uniforms he recognized from the bunker when they first defended it against the demons. There were eight of them, but she was the only one unmasked. He dropped his weapon and held his hands up and she walked forward, placed the magnum on his chest, and shoved him back towards the barracks wall. There was something strangely familiar about her but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

She was older, hard to tell her age, but she could have been forty. She wore sunglasses, which made no sense since it was nighttime, and her skin held numerous scars from what must have been a lifetime of hardship.

“How many?” she grunted at him. “HOW MANY?”

“Wh-what? How many, what?” he stammered as she gripped his collar tightly and moved the gun up to his forehead. Her mannerisms indicated to Jaime that it took a lot of effort for her not to shoot him.

She knocked his leg to the side, spun at an angle, and slammed him so hard into the grass that he thought his windpipe would never open up as he struggled for breath. While he fought to regain his breathing, she turned him over and placed her knee in the middle of his back.

“So-sorry, I’m sorry,” he gasped as she put the gun to his head. He could feel the loose strands of her curly mass of hair on the side of his face as she loomed close to him.

“How many of you are in there?” she asked, and he could hear the hint of an accent in her voice.

“There’s si-six of—”

“Six of us in here, but only one matters if I pull this trigger, right?” a voice said from some distance away. “How about you let the man go, drop the gun, and act like a human being?” As Jaime looked back at where it came from, he could see a small red light dancing around – a light that he knew came from James Knight’s rifle.

The woman got up off him and stood up as her men shifted their focus out to the light. Jaime got up and placed his hands on his knees, coughing helplessly as he recovered. A sudden movement came from behind them as Koko flew into their midst. She grabbed the woman by her hair and placed her sword at her throat. It was so fast that Jaime made an audible gasp, and to a man, the darkly clad soldiers began to lower their weapons.

“Okay, okay, okay, you all made your point,” the woman said. “We don’t need to kill one another. We’re all human here, right? We were just being cautious. Come into the light, my friend. Let’s talk it out, okay?”

James Knight appeared and shone the light of his watch on the woman and her troops. He walked over, took her gun, and examined it. He looked up at her with surprise, then snatched her collar and pulled her in close.

“Where did you get this gun?” he asked.

She opened her mouth in response but no words came out.

One of the men in black tried to raise his gun to catch James off guard, but a gunshot rang out from one of the windows and struck him in the head, killing him instantly.

“I SAID STAND DOWN!” the woman lashed out, and then raised her hands to urge James to loosen his grip on her.

“I-I’m your little soldier, remember?” she whispered to him and James released his grip.

~ * ~ * ~

Alysia stood amidst a trio of fallen palm trees staring out at the brute as it walked along the shores of the emerald beach, bordered on all sides by tall, black demons. It was an odd mix, this company of twisted, dark, creatures and the beautiful backdrop of the tropical Haitian beach in the twilight. She watched him intently, paying close attention to his movements, his gait, and the large spear that he held in his fist as he barked commands at his army.

He reminded her of a large cat, a black lion or panther, standing on its hind legs, walking around as if it wanted to emulate a human being. His skin was blackish blue with boney spikes jutting from his extremities. He was definitely the stuff of nightmares—they all were—but fear was not a luxury that Alysia could afford, so she replaced her horror with anger and anticipation.

She looked down at the sword that the knight had given her. It still felt foreign and stolen in her hands, unlike the Twilight Sword, which had felt very much like a part of her. She gripped the handle and held it in front of her, then closed her eyes to recall the words that Lancert, her supposed father, had said to her when he shattered the Twilight Sword. “A weapon that Chaos cannot corrupt.” She sheathed it and inhaled as she thought about her next move, and then stepped out onto the sand and bellowed out a battle cry.

“Aargh!” she screamed, letting it bolster her courage.

“ALYSIA KNIGHT!” the big demon bellowed, and he pointed at her as his horde of followers ran in her direction.

She gripped the hilt of the sword as they came at her and as the first one reached her, she pulled it out with deadly results. Her arms were a weaving propeller of death as she moved into the midst of them, cutting deeply wherever she connected. When the blade’s strike was fatal, it caused the demons to explode into ashes. Her strikes began to increase in their effectiveness, and before long she was walking through hills of ashes as she cut into the demons that ran at her.

When the last of their number had run to its death, she began to feel the effects of her new sword. Unlike the Twilight Sword that would pulse with the hunger of killing demons, this new blade transferred their life into energy. She felt stronger and more agile in her movements, the sword having leeched their life force to empower its master.

She stopped amidst the ashes and held her arms out to either side. She slowly brought them together to grip the hilt, and then lifted the sword to hover over her head as she focused her eyes on the giant cat-like demon.

He was onto her before she could manage a reaction, snatching her waist with his giant paw and spinning to throw her into the wake. Alysia flew through the air towards the dark waters but twisted herself so she would land on her feet.

She splashed down but kept her sword high, and then walked back out onto the shore where the demon was sprinting to catch her again. This time he didn’t grab her but slid on the sand in an attempt to knock her down. Alysia jumped and spun with the blade, but her attack missed the giant beast as he nimbly sprang up and landed in the water, facing her.

She was liking the energizing feeling of the new sword, and as she stared out at the demon that was calculating its next move, she realized that Lancert had not given it a name. The cat demon tore through the sand to gain momentum in his charge towards her, and threw a punch that was meant to remove her head. Alysia dodged his fist with a spin and thrust the blade to her rear, feeling it strike home as she expected. The creature screamed in agony as it entered his body, and when he spun to backhand her away from him, she dropped to her knees and lay back on the sand, bringing the sword up to protect her body.

The demon scrambled away from her, wracked by the pain that her sword had wrought. His eyes were so red that she thought he would cry blood, and it was then that she knew that something bad was about to happen. He bellowed a deep, guttural roar that shook the earth, and it was so loud and deafening that she was forced to cover her ears. He grabbed a canoe that had been left discarded on the beach and hurled it into her body, causing it to shatter and leaving her bloodied on the sand.

Alysia’s ears were ringing and her bones felt weak. The impact of the boat had knocked the wind out of her, and from what she could see through the blurred daze of her vision, the demon was bearing down on her to finish the job. She climbed to her feet and jumped out of the way, causing him to whiff his grab as he threw his body at her.

When he scrambled to get back to his feet she struck, swinging the sword upwards, then spinning and swinging it upwards again. Her two slashes cut into the haunches of the demon and it screamed, but this time she placed her foot in his side and climbed him, thrusting the blade into his neck when she gained his shoulders.

The demon spun, trying in vain to tear her off as she continued to hack away at his vulnerable neck. When he spun violently in a last desperate move, he finally managed to throw her off and then took off running before she could recover.

“Why do you guys always have to run?” she muttered under her breath as she stood up with her hand on her sore ribs.

Alysia ran onto his back to pin him down as she drove her blade into the base of his neck. The demon didn’t even have a chance to scream when she stabbed him, and as the life poured from his body, he exploded into ashes and she was struck with a new sensation.

It felt as if she had stuck a knife into an electrical socket; the world grew black and her limbs grew numb. The overload of energy that came from the demon’s passing found its way into her, and she floated over the ashes with her limbs outstretched as it took her through a transformation she couldn’t explain.

When it was all over and she could open her eyes, she looked down at her arms and saw that she had grown stronger. There was a sinewy look to her limbs that had not been there before, and the sword felt lighter and more in tune with her blood. As she felt her heart beating, too loudly to ignore, she saw that the blade pulsed in tune with it. The demon’s blood had sealed her to the sword, and she lifted it above her head and grinned despite herself because it felt so good.

“Euphoria!” She yelled the blade’s new name as if she commanded the world to recognize it for the first time. “Euphoria, the Soul Eater!” She finished its name, and the blade took on a new brilliance as if it accepted its moniker.

Once back on the ground, Alysia sheathed the sword and then inhaled the night air. She was happy with herself for a successful hunt. She walked down from the mountain to the beach and then sat on the sand to enjoy the moonlight. She couldn’t recall the last time she had allowed herself to sit, and to just simply enjoy life.

In Yalem, she would always look up at the mustard sky to admire its negative mirroring of her own world. While on earth, in her own world, she had never taken the time to appreciate the beauty of her surroundings. She sat there for hours, feeling the pulse of the sword’s energy and letting her mind roam to happy memories: when her mother was alive, and her father was filled with stories.

No demons came out to harass her as she sat, and when the dawn finally broke and the memories faded, she stood up, clasped her hands together, and slipped into a meditative state. The world grew dark around her form, and she appeared in a bizarre field of orange grass, blue flowers, and a bright yellow sky where two suns hovered brilliantly above. She walked through the tall grass, letting her hands touch the tops of their long, fuzzy stalks.

She always liked it here, the setting being a peaceful escape from her deadly world and the things that invaded. Her walk took her onto a golden highway that cut through the grass and flowed endlessly into the horizon. As her bare feet touched its metallic surface, she closed her eyes, imagining Asia, the Great Wall of China, and the trees that surrounded it. She kept on walking, letting her toes enjoy the coolness of the road, until she no longer felt anything and her world was dark once again.

~ * ~ * ~

“Maria, little Maria?” Jaime asked as they sat around the table inside of the barracks talking. “You were going to kill me! How do you recognize Mr. Knight and not the rest of us?”

“It’s been a long time since I saw you. The only faces I could remember were James and Tracy’s. I thought you were a team of looters that stole one of my guns a few months ago,” Maria said as she kept her eyes on Tracy. “Hi, Auntie,” she said suddenly, as if she had just noticed Tracy for the first time. “You haven’t said one word to me since I came in. You, more than anyone else, should have something to say. Are you okay?”

Tracy walked forward and sat next to her, touching her hair and brushing it back to look at the lines of age and struggle that ran the length of her face. “Maria,” she said finally. “I missed your entire life. It makes me sad; it really does. Where’s your mom? Angelica?”

“Mom died not too long after you all left to find whatever fountain of youth you did to stay so soft and good-looking. Really, what’s with that, anyway? Why do you look so young? Tell me your secret, Auntie. Why are you so young?” Maria asked as she leaned in and touched Tracy’s face.

“Just go on ahead and tell her,” James said when Tracy flashed him a look of desperation. “It’s bad enough that we have all sorts of craziness killing people all over. Adding in our own brand of crazy to Maria’s reality shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”

“No doubt,” Maria said. “Just tell me. I assure you, I’ve seen it all.”

“After we left the bunker, Maria—which we did to keep the demons hunting Alysia away from the rest of you,” Tracy explained, trying to gather her thoughts and make sense of what she was about to say. “We went into the city, found ourselves lost and missing Alysia. Then we found her and sort of went forward in time. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, we went down into an old subway tunnel where an explosion happened and we all passed out and woke up thirty years later.”

Maria looked as if she was in deep thought. She had put her shades back on, and was leaning back in her chair as if she were the coolest person alive. “Well there WAS a bomb,” she said in response. “One of our so-called allies overseas thought they would do us all a favor and drop a bomb on us to kill the demons. It was supposed to have chemicals that would only hurt them, but a lot of people got messed up from the payload. Buildings fell, cars exploded … yeah, the bomb itself was cool, but it was a bad idea. Plus, the demons merely went underground when it hit. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. The chemical is still in the air so they don’t hang out aboveground anymore, but they’re still here.”

“Where are all the humans?” James asked as he eyed the dark figures that stood at attention near the door. He noticed that they kept Maria in their masked sights at all times.

“Scattered about. There are still plenty of people alive, don’t get me wrong, but the thirty years you missed were survival of the fittest. Robbing, killing, raping, you name it. Whatever a human being could do to another to get over, he did it. Some of us just turned out to be a lot stronger than others … I guess I can thank you two for that” Maria said, with a sad smile. “Mom was a domesticated kitten from the old world, and without Auntie there to protect her, or a big bad soldier like you, Mr. Knight, well, they did her something dirty and left us for dead. The queen demon down there turned her, and I just ran my young ass up to the surface and never stopped running.”

She laughed and then leaned down and knocked a tuft of grass out of her boot.

“How did you come by the doom squad?” Jaime asked, and she looked him up and down before answering.

“You first,” she said. “Where did you get the sword wielding brat pack? They look like they could be little demons, or half-breeds or something. The way that little one keeps looking at me, I’m beginning to wonder about them.”

“Be nice,” Tracy said. “They’re Alysia’s friends and a part of our team. They’re human enough and they aren’t things, so you could ask them yourself if you’re that wary.”

Maria looked down at her hands and shook her head. “Nah, no need. As for the team back there, they’re mine. That’s all you need to know – for now.” She stood up and spoke to the masked men in Spanish, telling them to go back into the woods and wait for her. They marched outside of the door and she sat down and yawned, looking at each of them with a slight smile on her face. “It’s good to be with you all again … with family, y’know? Just when I thought that every human being was a piece of crap, here you are. Maybe there is a God.”

As Tracy began to talk to Maria, Koko touched Jaime on the hand and pulled him back into the next room.

“Hey, Koko, you okay?” he said when they got inside. Jasmine and Isobel slipped in behind him to face her.

“I can’t be the only one who feels frightened by that woman,” Koko said suddenly. “Without CeeCee here, I feel so vulnerable in this world, but there is something about that woman that makes me uneasy.”

Isobel spoke up. “She has the glow of a huntress, but no huntress can go undetected by us. Maybe it’s because she’s killed so many of the lost that the stink is on her.” She shrugged her tiny shoulders and looked at Jasmine for answers.

“It’s all so frightening,” the tall girl said, as she wrung her hands and unconsciously touched the hilt of her sword. “I wish CeeCee was here; she would know what to do.”

“I miss her too,” Jaime said. “Maybe Maria’s blatant meanness to you guys is what is setting off your demon radars. She hasn’t really been nice to anybody outside of Tracy and Mr. Knight, so I definitely understand. She was a little cute thing the last time I saw her, riding on Mr. Knight’s shoulders and trying hard to be like CeeCee. Now she’s Sarah Connor, the Terminator’s mother...”

“The who?” Koko asked.

“Never mind. It’s an old movie—I mean, story—that I liked as a kid. Come on girls, she’s cool; just a little, hard, you know? She’s been through a lot; a whole lot, you can tell. When she brought up her mom turning, she didn’t even flinch. So you just got to, like, understand where she’s coming from, okay?”

They all nodded with the exception of Koko, who looked at the doorway uneasily. “Whatever you say, Jaime, but I have to trust my instincts. As long as that woman is around here, I will not be sleeping.”

2

Alysia knelt down and touched the ground. The slight tremors told her that a giant was close, but experience told her that it could very well be the demon himself. She missed the powers from Chaos that Lancert had cleansed.

With his blood she could feel the lost, hear their whisperings, and track them easily. Now she was limited in her reach. She knew which countries and areas held the V’Kosha that she was meant to kill, but she had no idea what to expect when she encountered them.

Chaos had told her that with every killing would come a change, something added to her physiology or mental capacity to prepare her for the Great War. The first demon had hurt Jasmine, and when she finally killed it, she was granted the ability to travel great distances through meditation.

The gift from the second had taken some time for her to figure out. It was a defensive gift: armor would shoot up her arms from the sword, wrapping them in a decorative silver metal. It only went up to her biceps, but danger triggered it, and when she felt the tremors the silver cobwebs climbed her dark arms and wrapped them securely in ethereal gauntlets and vambraces.

She stood on the outside of the Great Wall of China, or what was the Great Wall, and looked around for the source. A few people had seen her walk out from the woods with her sword at the ready, and had run from her as if she were a demon herself. She paid them no mind when she approached the wall, keeping her senses sharp for the thing that she hunted.

When was the last time I ate or slept? I haven’t eaten, slept, or gone to the bathroom in about a week. Have I completely turned into a freak, or am I losing my mind? Her mind went to the letter her father had written, and the sad reality that he was willing to let her go so easily.

She thought of Jaime’s relationship with Koko. In a weaker state sometime in the past, she had decided that she liked him. She had thought that with their travels perhaps something would have developed between the two of them, but she had pushed him away, just like her father, and he had found someone nicer to love.

They could never understand what I have given up to save our world, she thought, but how is that fair? I haven’t told them, I haven’t explained it to them, yet here I am feeling sorry for myself when they don’t know. She played her tongue across the top row of teeth to feel the sharpened canines that were a result of the Turevila blood. She smiled to force strength back into her presence. The dwelling on things lost would do her no good in the upcoming fight.

“Fight or flight, CeeCee,” she said out loud. “You had the chance to run several times and you always fought, so here we are. I’m a big girl, and it’s hunting time; moping time can come when it’s all over.”

She found a demolished area of the wall and climbed it masterfully. Upon arriving at the top, she looked around for the source of the shaking.

A woman in a soldier’s uniform was on the wall, looking out at a mass of demons that were wading through the trees surrounding the wall. She seemed calm and when Alysia approached her, she merely regarded her as if she expected her and then returned to staring out at the trees.

“They wait for you to come and challenge their master,” she said evenly, with a thick accent.

Alysia stopped and stared at her with her hand on the Soul Stealer. “How do you know who I am?” she asked, staring at her to see if there were any signs of her being a V’Kosha like one of the lost.

“We are legion,” the soldier said and laughed. “We know that you hunt us to fulfill Chaos’s prophecy. We also know that you are more dangerous than you were before. You broke the spell that Chaos had on you to bind you to the realm of Yalem. Now you are deemed dangerous by everyone, including the ones who would be your allies. A rogue member of the Bloody Garot, one whose head comes at the price of property, slaves, and immortality in the yellow realm.”

Alysia looked around to make sure she wasn’t being tricked into an ambush of some kind. She looked at the woman and decided that she was pretty; she was not an outsider but a Chinese woman that had been converted. Converted to what though, Alysia wondered as she thought about what the woman had said. Legion. The word indicated that she was indeed one of the six.

“So let me get this straight. Chaos knows that I am no longer his and has put a bounty on my head. Easy enough, though it makes me wonder why he hasn’t just come out to get me, unless he himself is afraid of me. Now what confuses me is your timing … you are magically here in the same place as one of the other elites, where you somehow knew I would be.”

She raised a silver gauntlet up to touch her lip. “So, then you are some sort of demon bounty hunter, which makes no sense since Chaos controls all who he has contact with. So, you were once a sister of the Bloody Garot then, that odd name that I never got the meaning of. What is a Garot, sister?” she asked, smiling at her as she did.

She continued. “On Yalem it means hive, Alysia Knight, like a hive of bees. Bl’dee is our word for Chaos, the usurper king to be. We are Bl’dee G’rowt, you see, and do not call me sister – traitor. You have been tainted, and I must find a way to rub you out.”

Alysia shifted her stance to her rear leg and let her sword hang in anticipation of the woman’s next move.

“You can relax; there will be plenty of time for us to fight. Chaos lied to you about Dibolosa, by the way. She was a glorified babysitter to his brood of hatchlings that you thought represented the G’rowt. Chaos has many groups just like them, led by one of the chosen—one like you and me. Future generals that will lead his little bees into battle with him once the lost are in full retreat back to Yalem. You took over for Dibolosa; I took over for the spear-wielding, Darisa.” She smiled, and shifted her stance to show the pistol resting on her right hip.

“This is all so confusing,” Alysia said. “Chaos sent you for me, but you are one of the six that I’m meant to kill to rid the world of the V’Kosha. I guess it makes sense being that Chaos is behind all of this, but why are you so forthcoming? It’s like you want me to win.”

“Words mean nothing to a dead woman,” the soldier said and nodded towards the pistol with a smile. “Silver bullets,” she whispered with a wink, and then eyed Alysia’s sword as if she wasn’t impressed.

“I bet you expected me to have some sort of old, edged weapon like Dibolosa, didn’t you?” she said. “We would lock swords like ancient swashbucklers, and you would best me with your gifted speed and sword mastery. Not today, traitor girl. Whenever you are ready, we can begin your punishment and eventual death to honor lord Chaos.”

“Wait,” Alysia said.

“Well, this is a surprise. Is the slayer of the lost, Alysia Knight, about to beg for her life?” she said, a mocking look of shock on her face.

“I’d sooner fall on my own sword than bow to any of you,” Alysia replied. “I had a question about Chaos. Answer it for me and we can begin the duel.”

“Hmm, I can’t guarantee that I will answer it, whatever it is, but you can ask me, dead girl.”

“You said that Chaos had many sects, but he sent me to kill six major demons of the lost. Did he give you the same mission … to kill the six? And if so, how many have you killed, and how many other women like you and I are out there hunting them?” she asked, hoping that the sarcastic woman would answer her honestly.

“Only Chaos knows that so I can only speak for myself. My mission to crossover is to eliminate you, not six demons, not saving this pathetic world. It is to kill you—that is it. Now, the other women; I have no idea about their missions, but as you can see, I need you dead. So, how do you say? No hard feelings.”

And she drew her pistol with blinding speed and shot at Alysia’s chest. The Chinese soldier had telegraphed her intent, and Alysia had thrown her arms up to guard as soon as she saw the sudden movement. The bullet wedged itself into one of her gauntlets and the silver material simply absorbed it and kept Alysia safe.

The soldier began to run backwards, firing erratically when she saw that her shot had missed its mark, but Alysia’s hands were like machine-operated shields, deflecting the bullets that managed to get anywhere near her body.

“Chaos warned that with every lost you felled, your power would grow!” she yelled back at her, and then with a frustrated grunt she threw the gun, snatched up a spear she had kept hidden on the wall, and then whipped her top off and spun to face Alysia.

The movement was so acrobatic and splendid that Alysia immediately knew she was going to be a problem. She charged in and slashed, but the soldier was quick, dancing out of the way of the blade and running back along the wall. She left the spear out so that Alysia would impale herself on pursuit, but the trick was one that Alysia recalled herself trying on Dibolosa. Seeing the intent, she ran and jumped, then cut the exposed spear in half.

The woman looked back at her with a look of shock and horror, then put up her hands as if she wished to fight her without a weapon.

“Give it up, girl, you’re beaten,” Alysia said, with the sword held out in front of her.

“You’re good, but I am not so quick to call you my conqueror!” the woman screamed as she rolled forward, picking up the half of the spear that had the blade and stabbing at Alysia’s abdomen. Alysia jumped back when she did this and whipped the sword down in the same motion. The edge caught the woman’s hand and cut her deep between her right thumb and forefinger. She seemed to ignore the pain as she came at her thrusting, trying her best to stab her with the spear.

Alysia was forced to retreat due to her advances and after a while she found that she was back at the area where the wall had been demolished. She was at risk of being forced back into the rubble, where she would fall to her demise. The woman was strong, her offense impressive, and there was little that Alysia could do but block in hopes that she would reveal a weakness.

When the pattern of the spear jabs had become repetitious, Alysia stepped into a particularly deadly thrust, and bashed the pommel of her sword against the woman’s head.

The sudden advance stunned the soldier she sank to her knees, holding the bloody gash that was now on her forehead. Alysia kicked her spear hand so hard that she was forced to let it go. As the soldier scrambled to recollect her weapon, Alysia kicked her in the face and then stood over her with the tip of Euphoria on her neck.

“You’re human like me, aren’t you?” Alysia asked.

“Yes, once … human, but now … much more,” the soldier said. She winced from the pain but dared not move for fear of the sword being driven into her neck.

“Why do you fight for Chaos? Tell me the truth!” Alysia shouted.

“Hu-husband. He has my husband,” she replied, relaxing in her defeat.

“Do you know where he is? Your husband, I mean? When you passed his test, where did he tell you your husband would be?”

The soldier shook her head. She had no clue, and Alysia understood her dilemma.

“Get up,” Alysia said, and she kept her sword close to the soldier as she stood up gingerly. “I want to try something.”

Before the woman could react, she slipped behind her and drove the blade into her back, letting it stay there despite her screams as she held her steady to let Euphoria do its work.

The energy from the sword made Alysia smile as it robbed the soldier’s blood of all its demonic essence and transferred it into Alysia as renewed life. It felt so good that she didn’t want it to stop but unlike the demons in New York, Brazil, and Haiti, the woman stayed alive and after a few minutes she slumped forward, tired and wounded, but still alive.

“That’s what I thought,” Alysia said. “Euphoria takes only what is borne of Yalem. Your humanity remains, even though I killed the thing that gave you your power. If I come across your husband, I will let him know that his wife loves him and that she waits for him,” she said.

She wiped the blood from her sword, sheathed it, and then knelt next to the woman to bind her wounds. When she was finished she laid her down, and then looked around to see if she could still sense the demon she had originally been sent to kill.

There was a tugging sensation leading her into the woods and she knew that her answer would be amongst the trees. After the fight that she just had, she would expect to be both winded and jittery—like she’d been when she defeated Dibolosa—but the sword Euphoria had made her strong, so she leaped from the wall to the trees below, and landed amidst a crowd of freshly turned Chinese demons.

She cut a path through them towards the energy that she felt, and they came at her from all angles. But they were nothing compared to her speed and skill as she took heads and impaled bodies while Euphoria, the Soul Eater, drank deep of their blood, making her stronger with every kill.

~ * ~ * ~

It was noon at the barracks and James Knight’s company was still there. Maria had spent the rest of the night with them talking and reminiscing, and by the time it was morning they were all too tired to head out. Jaime took his turn at sleeping and lay next to Koko, but the rest of the group sat at the table telling Maria about Alysia’s change.

“So, she’s some sort of chosen one? That’s what you’re telling me?” Maria asked them once they had finished, and Isobel nodded while maintaining an uncharacteristic frown on her face. “Thirty years. They robbed me—us—of thirty years before giving us something, someone that can fight back against this. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about it. Being able to keep my mother alive would have been nice,” she said.

“CeeCee lost her mother, too,” James said, his massive forearms on the table, his chin resting on top of them.

“What about you, little girl? Who did you lose?” Maria asked, jabbing her finger at Isobel.

“I lost my world, and everyone that was once dear to me. My parents are tiny sprinkles of memory on a mind too old to hold unto them. CeeCee is my family now. CeeCee, Jasmine, and of course, Koko,” she replied.

“Too old? I knew there was something funny about the three of you and your pretty sword cases or whatever. Are you demons, too? Something like these damn things we keep having to kill?” Maria asked.

“Something like that,” Isobel replied, staring at her with a smirk as if she dared her to try something.

“You know, you two could be related, you look so much alike,” James Knight cut in. “If I didn’t know either of you, and came upon our camp here, I would assume that Isobel was your daughter.”

Isobel turned to face him and lowered her eyelids, and then pouted her lips to let him know that she didn’t agree.

“I’m being serious,” James said. “It’s freaking me out. When I first met Izzy I almost asked Alysia if it was you, Maria, turned into something like she was.”

Maria forced a smile upon her hard, scarred up face, and then stood up suddenly.

“I kept you all up for too long with the drama and the ‘blast from the past’ chat. It’s good to see you, Mr. Knight, alive and young. If it’s any consolation, I know that I come off as bitter but I want to thank you for everything that you did for me and my mom. I took your words seriously about running when there was danger, and it saved my life until I was strong enough to fight back,” she said.

“I’m betting that it wasn’t demons that hurt you up though was it, baby girl?” James asked, adding a touch of tenderness to his voice when he called her ‘baby girl.’ He saw that it affected her, softened her enough to reveal some emotion, and she stopped and inhaled to stop the tears that tried to work themselves through hard, unused ducts.

“The race of man deserves everything that is happening to this world. You better believe it,” she said, her chin held high and a look of bravado crossing her features. “We hurt our weak,” she said finally, and then grabbed her gun—James’s old magnum—and holstered it on her leg. “We’ll be back in the woods, looking out for you, watching your back at all times. If you need me, just shout my name.”

James stood up and hugged her, but he could feel that she didn’t want to allow herself the sentiment. She had shown too much tenderness already.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m no longer Maria. The Hidden Heroes call me Hope.” She couldn’t help but smile when she said it, and James noticed that her eyeteeth were like Isobel’s, long and sharp.

She’s been in survival mode for a long time; maybe she filed them into that, he thought. And she stared at him and put on her shades, noticing that he had seen something.

“My teeth scare you?” she asked suddenly, and he looked around to make sure she was addressing him.

“They’re a little crazy, yeah,” he replied.

“When you’re tiny, and vulnerable, and you’ve been taken advantage of a few times … sometimes you have to do things in order to protect yourself,” she said. “Teeth are a little ugly, that they are, yeah, but if a man ever grabs me, he will feel it.” She smiled wide this time, showing fangs and a pierced tongue.

“I’m sorry Mar—I mean Hope. If I could rewind time and take you and your mom—”

“Meh, everybody wants a wishing dragon. It’s nothing, Mr. Knight, just a little ugliness is all. Scream Hope if you need me, or better yet, send one of your demon pixies to come collect. I won’t leave you all if they start swarming. I got a small army of killers in the woods, and we’d be happy for the action.”

She punched his chest playfully and made a mock salute at Isobel, then walked out and jogged towards the trees until she had disappeared.

A large knot of guilt and disappointment took to his stomach, and as he thought back to the cute little girl that he’d called his “little soldier,” he realized that he had not thought about her when they left. Why had they not taken Angelica with them? The trip was dangerous, yes, they had acknowledged that, but both he and Tracy had enough weapons to arm a small tribe when they’d left. Couldn’t they have protected the little family as they travelled out to help Alysia?

Little Maria had gone through the worst of atrocities when she was left alone once her mother turned. He couldn’t avoid the blame in that. He sat with his head inside his hands, feeling sick with guilt, anger, and worst of all helplessness.

“Go get some rest, Izzy. You, too, Jasmine. We did a lot yesterday only to get no sleep. Go on in the back and lie down. I’ll stay up here for a few hours, just in case Maria ain’t telling us everything,” he said.

“You don’t trust her either,” Isobel said, hopping up and leaning on her sword. She wore a large white t-shirt that they had scavenged, hanging over tight black leather pants, tiny black boots, and a red cloak that had seen better days. Her appearance made him think of little red riding hood, and it almost made him smile despite his dark mood.

“Oh, I trust her. I have to trust her. But thirty years is a very long time. Maybe not to you, but it is to me. I don’t know who she works for, who may have her on some sort of leash, or even the motivation going on inside that head of hers. To her, I’m this old man she knew back when she was a baby. She don’t owe me anything despite all that ‘little soldier’ stuff she remembers.” He looked around and then touched his temples, trying to will away the headache that was starting to surface there. “Where are you, Alysia? I wish I had you here to tell me that I’m right.”

Isobel took the hand of the always-quiet Jasmine and walked her back into one of the rooms. Tracy had moved their bed tarps into the room in order to shut out the now bright sun that shone through the hole in the roof. They found a corner where Koko slept and both lay with her to recharge themselves. Back in the main room, James grabbed his gun and went outside to patrol the grounds.

~ * ~ * ~

Deep inside the woods, now littered with the ashes of the lost that had come in contact with Alysia’s blade, a woman in a beautiful, royal blue dress stood inside a clearing. Alysia watched as the shadows coalesced around her, swirling and growing as she went, and she recalled the first demon she had fought. This was a girl just like the one in the barracks, but seasoned, having turned so many people within the area that she pulsed with power as the shadows moved like misty snakes, restless and mischievous.

Alysia examined her features and saw that her ears had points. She looked like a pretty wolf, or maybe it was a fox, complete with tiny, sharp rows of teeth that shone in contrast to the blackness that she wrapped herself in.

“Runaway warrior of Chaos, Alysia Knight,” she said with what sounded like numerous voices, all coated in that same thick accent that the soldier had.

“So you’re considered an elite,” Alysia said, “That’s a surprise. You look just like the girl I killed so many years ago.”

The demon seemed annoyed by her words and the smile dropped and her eyes grew wide. “Interesting outfit for an American girl. Is that a Japanese uniform?”

“It is MY uniform. Japan is its origin, yes, but don’t you worry your evil little head about it,” Alysia replied, confused at the creature’s concern with her Hakama.

“I hate your outfit,” the demon said, “And I hate your ugly Japanese sword.”

“The sword isn’t Japanese,” Alysia said.

“Looks Japanese; that’s all that matters to me. When we kill you and pull out your soul, we will be sure to burn your stupid Japanese outfit. That and the ones who love you, Alysia Knight.”

“The Japanese thing really bothers you, doesn’t it?” Alysia asked, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “Wait, but if you’re a lost from Yalem; what does it matter the origins of my earth outfit or weapons? How are you prejudiced one way here, when it really should be … oh never mind.”

“The vessel that houses us hates the Japanese. You offend us with your presence. Black skin, wild hair, and a Japanese costume. You are a pathetic combination that infuriates us,” the demon said with a cruel snarl.

“You’re one to talk,” Alysia said. She pulled out Euphoria and whipped the air before bringing it up in front of her face. “I learned numerous styles as a girl, some originating here, and yes, some from other countries. The sword I learned was from Japan. Your disrespectful demon tongue will apologize for the insult by the time I’m through!”

She dashed in on the demon, who reacted by sending the shadows into her at full blast. It was like a freezing tornado of blackness as it lifted her airborne, smashing her into the trees as it did. It took everything within her power to keep hold of the sword as she twisted with the mist, and below her the demon was laughing, building on the cycle as it went, until Alysia was feeling a full sense of vertigo.

She wondered how she would get out, but it was hard to think as the cold and the damage from striking the trees was getting worse as she spun. She fought to place both hands on Euphoria as she squeezed her eyes shut against the stinging blackness.

“Euphoria … help!” she muttered.

The sword reacted and the spikes shot out from the handle as they did before when she first took hold of it. She felt herself dying as the tornado beat her like she had never been beaten before. Blood flew from her enclosed hands as the spikes pushed through, and then the armor wrapped itself around her arms, pushing further that it had ever did before. It formed pauldrons, tearing away her top in places to build itself into a bit of a breastplate. As the spikes retreated so did her pain and she began to reorient herself with her position.

She was still aloft in the darkness of the tornado, but the strikes from the trees and debris no longer hurt. She needed the demon’s blood in order to heal, but for the time the deadly shadow spiral was no longer killing her.

When the demon thought that Alysia Knight had been reduced to pulp, she pulled in the darkness to allow the lifeless body to fall. What she saw instead was an armored Alysia, falling towards her, sword pointed down. The blade impaled her through the shoulder as she crumbled to the ground beneath the weight of Alysia’s fall. Euphoria lit up with power once the blood poured from the wound; it healed Alysia’s battered body and reinvigorated her as she bounced back from the demon’s fallen body.

“Like my new outfit?” Alysia said as she stood up. “This one seems more European, like one of the knights. Is it a more pleasing costume to your demonic tastes?”

The demon rushed back into the woods, pulling the shadows with her to heal her shoulder. Alysia Knight was a lot stronger than she had imagined, and with the energy that she had expelled in the tornado attack, she didn’t have enough to put up a suitable fight.

“Of course, there wouldn’t be a demon fight without a chase,” Alysia muttered as she held the sword aloft and ran after the shadowy beauty.

From out of nowhere demons began to appear. They moved to block her as she picked up speed in pursuit of the woman. It was then that Alysia realized that the shadows themselves were actually demons. It was why her voice seemed to come from several places, and why she referred to herself as ‘we.’ These shadowy demons wanted nothing but to protect their host from the cruel blade of Euphoria, and as they popped up in front of her, Alysia cut and their bodies exploded into cold, black, water-like droplets.

She chased the demon for about a mile before catching her in front of another section of the Great Wall. She looked weak and defeated as she stood, the shadows dancing around her shoulder, repairing her wound. This time Alysia did not hesitate as she dashed in, but out of nowhere the demon produced a beautiful broadsword and parried the strike that was meant for her head. She pulled the demons in so tight that her skin appeared like sooty stone. The other demons hadn’t shown this form, and Alysia assumed that it would act as armor against her strikes.

The two women circled, swords high, eyes locked on one another, looking for an opening. The demon dipped low and backwards, and spun with the tip of the blade thrust at Alysia, who merely stepped back to avoid it. She stepped in quickly and struck high twice. The first was blocked, but the second, unexpected and quick, tapped her on the shoulder, causing some of the black mist to explode into a fountain-like splash. Yes, Alysia thought when she connected, it is definitely her armor.

The demon twirled gracefully, backing away, the fabric hanging from the pommel of her sword spiraling like a dancing blue spirit. She must have been very good back when she was human, Alysia thought, saddened at the prospect that they could have been friends or friendly rivals. She poked and prodded at the demon’s dance, but every time her blade would get near, the broadsword would parry it back with unbelievable strength.

I didn’t expect her to be a sword fighter, Alysia thought, reassessing her situation as she tried in vain to find an opening.

“Screw this,” she said out loud and then sheathed the sword and held her armored fists up in a boxing guard.

The demon spun and dashed in with a speedy slash that should have disemboweled Alysia instantly. Alysia blocked it with her arm and used the other to grab her under the shoulder. She stepped in to the side and shifted her weight, causing the demon to lose her footing and fall on her back, hard. She sprang up instantly and swung the broadsword in retaliation. As she did it cut Alysia on the leg, and it stung like lemon juice fell into the wound.

It had been ages since Alysia had been beaten in a duel, let alone cut by an actual sword. She wanted to dwell on it, look into herself, and figure out how it was that she had allowed a demon to get a cut in. But there was no time; this was the real thing, and dwelling on her mistake would mean death. She ignored the cut and socked the demon in the jaw, slamming one fist and then another before snatching her under the arm once again, spinning away and then slamming her into the ground again.

The demon sprang up, but this time Alysia blocked the sword. She blocked it in a way that allowed her to spin outward, and upon completing her spin, drew Euphoria and cut, deep and true, into the demon’s breast. The shadows exploded and vanished from the demon’s body and she stood up, revealed, beautiful and almost human. The shadows that stuck to her shoulder however, refused to leave their place, trying to speed along the healing as she shifted into a Fu Hu Bu stance, the broadsword high, ready for Alysia.

“It’s kind of sad that you’re fully V’Kosha,” Alysia said, as she held her sword up high and cat-walked backwards away from the coiled demon. “It means that there is no saving you, and I want to save you so bad.”

The demon growled at her in one hundred voices, and she was back on the attack, spinning and thrusting the sword as Alysia violently deflected it. They did this deadly dance for quite some time as the sun settled. It was growing dark and Alysia began to worry that even without the shadows, the woman was better than her in a swordfight.

The armor held its place along her limbs and she realized that it was slowing her down. When the demon came in for a violent yet graceful cut towards her neck, Alysia shoved her sword into the ground. The loss of proximity to her body caused the armor to retreat, leaving her vulnerable, but when the demon dashed in and took advantage, she pulled the sword free and knocked the broadsword back.

“Get out of my world,” Alysia said to her, and shifted her stance forward as she changed her technique. She was no longer traditional in her swings, choosing a more circular, fluid style of fighting that was akin to the Kung Fu that the demon was disciplined in. Circular swings were no longer parried but were made to miss as Alysia spun into a similar dance, cutting when there was an opening and swinging masterfully to force a mistake.

The demon grew annoyed at her mockery and changed her rhythm too abruptly. It was in this moment that Alysia reeled back on one leg, like a flexible stick in the ground bent back to pop someone in the face, then thrust forward with blinding speed, pushing her sword through the demon’s upper thigh, She screamed out and collapsed to one knee.

The victorious Alysia feinted backwards to watch the shadows to see if they could heal her, but there was not enough to finish her shoulder and attend to the knee of her useless leg. Alysia sheathed her sword and exhaled a long, steady sigh of relief.

“My dad, James, would tell me about fights like the one we just had. Those legendary duels where masters of respect would fight one another to the death. Normally a grave wound like the one you suffered is enough for one like me to bow, give you a ‘good fight,’ and walk into the moonlight knowing that you will go on, get stronger, but remember me as being the better. It would be a mutual respect between warriors that have given their all on the battlefield,” she said and hung her head to examine her own leg wound which was now healing itself slowly.

“You are not my equal, Alysia Knight. Your entire existence and bastardized sword style offends me immensely,” the demon said, her voice taking on a feminine edge and her accent thicker than it was before. “Still, it would be untrue to say that you are not impressive, I—we …” She began to retch and shake as if something was taking her over, and from the shadows of the looming night sky, more demons seemed to enter into her frame and she suddenly stopped talking.

“I understand, sister. It was good to at least see some of the real person behind the vessel, and to cross swords with you by this spectacular wall,” Alysia said, and she stood up and used her thumb to open the blade from its guard about an inch. The demon made to stand but her leg buckled and she fell. As she stumbled and used the broadsword to catch herself in the grass, Alysia stepped in and cut her neck with a motion so quick that her head was off before her body could hit the ground.

Ashes and water like droplets of black splattered across Alysia’s face and Euphoria drew the essence in like a powerful vacuum. It lifted Alysia off the ground. The power consumed her, wracking her limbs and breaking her bones to make them stronger. The mixture of pain and healing, equally shared throughout her floating body, forced tears from her eyes as the spikes sprung out. New armor ran the length of her body, from fingers to toes, decorative in its appearance, bright and silver. It became a part of her, digging into her flesh and absorbing into her skin.

The pain was so immense that Alysia wanted to black out, but she held on, watching her transformation so that she could understand the gift that the demon’s life had given her.

When it was all over she fell to the ground, healthy, strong, and still very much human in appearance. She sheathed Euphoria, dug a hole, and buried the demon’s broadsword. She looked down at the ragged garment that had once been her Hakama, and shrugged apathetically at her appearance. Who will ever be here to judge how I look as I hunt these demons? she thought to herself.

3

“Have you seen Koko?” Jaime asked a sleepy James Knight as he sat up by the wall.

“No, haven’t seen any of those girls all day,” he replied.

“Why would they up and leave like that?” Jaime asked.

“They were here most of the morning,” James said. “We ate, I had a nice talk with the little one about CeeCee, and, well they probably went off looking for her.”

Jaime walked outside and looked around again, he had done this several times already and an hour before he had searched the grounds, calling Koko’s name as he did. They had been in the barracks for three days longer than they had expected. James wanted to make sure that Tracy was okay to travel, and he was under the illusion that he could convince Maria (now Hope) to come with them.

The rough, brown warrior would check in on them every day, normally around 2:00 pm. She would sit with James for long hours, talking, and then disappear back into the woods before 5:00 pm. It was now 3:15 pm and she hadn’t shown up, so Jaime’s mind began to work at different theories, one of them being that an elite demon had killed Maria, caught up to the three girls, and killed them, too.

Without thinking better of it, he marched towards the area of the trees where Maria would go in the afternoon. He passed the old bones of people who had died sometime in the thirty years after they left the bunker, and he pressed on into the thick woods that surrounded their barracks home.

He walked around the edge of the clearing, looking for anything that was out of place. Once he finally found a trail, it was far away from where he had originally looked, but there was enough evidence to let him know that people had used it recently.

He walked back into the woods, keeping his hand on the butt of his pistol and looking around to catch anything that would try to ambush him. He thought back to the day that they had all left the bunker, thinking that it was the right move since that demon had screamed out Alysia’s name. They were so close back then, but now Alysia was something that he couldn’t understand, and to make it even worse, she was even colder to him.

Koko had become his new target for joking and playing around. She looked Asian, and was pretty; not end of the world and there is no one to compare pretty, but pretty by anyone’s standards. She was young—a point Alysia had taken extra care to remind him of whenever she could—but she was from a different realm; if she was of his world she would be about seventeen. He didn’t see a problem with that, but for whatever reason Tracy thought it was funny, and James Knight, as usual, was a mystery.

He thought about the night when Alysia left with Isobel. He and Koko had kissed for the first time. He had kissed girls before, much more than that, actually, but no other girl had been like Koko. She was different, from her strange bashfulness to the times when she was angry and broke past it to be blunt. He thought—no, he knew—that he loved her, and she was causing him the biggest turmoil on the inside that he had ever faced in his life.

When Debdan turned, which was pretty much the equivalent of death in his eyes, he didn’t know what he would do. They were close; not that close, but Debdan was the reminder of the old world that kept Jaime grounded. Without him, he had given that symbolism over to CeeCee. She was a lot more hostile than Debdan could have ever been, but she was near his age and smart.

When she became “Alysia, the half-demon, savior of the world,” he lost her as his avatar of humanity. Life began to lose meaning and hope, the hope of getting something back of the life that he had loved so many years ago. His life had become without hope.

But then in came Koko, the girl of his dreams, during a time when billions were dead, the survivors were so deep into hiding that he felt alone, and the world had gone to hell. It twisted him up. Should he applaud the fate of humanity because it gave him a chance to meet his Koko, or should he wish for the old days, for Debdan to be alive, so that he could be Jaime the bullied loser once again?

He put it out of his mind and pressed on. The woods were beginning to grow darker, and he felt a fear creep into his bones that he could not shake, no matter how much he told himself that it was nothing.

“Go back,” a voice whispered, but he could not tell its source. It sounded like Isobel, except deeper. “Go back Jaime, please go back,” it said, and every ounce of his being wanted to comply. If Koko was in trouble—and that voice very well could have been Koko’s—he wanted to help her.

He pulled out his gun, looking frantically to the left and right as he marched ahead. He could feel the blood pumping into his ears; it was loud, too loud for him to hear the demons or whatever it was that were there. How does Maria walk through this every day? he thought. If she can do it, I can do it, too. He pushed on with more determination, knowing that at any moment he would break through the trees and stumble upon her encampment.

When he pushed into the darkest part of the woods where the voice was cautioning him to stop, he realized his mistake. He had his eyes wide open and was ready for anything, but he had not been thinking clearly. Koko, his beautiful young warrior, and her tiny frame had occupied every inch of his mind. The cold was what hit him first, and then the pain, as several black figures slammed into him from every angle, bruising him and cutting him until all he knew was pain.

He saw the mangled body of Koko, inverted and tied to a tree limb, swaying in the near blackness of the clearing. He felt his life passing, and he knew he was in trouble when the love of his life, this young, brave, warrior of the Garot, screamed his name with a blood curdling finality.

~ * ~ * ~

A kick in the gut. That was what it felt like to Alysia Knight as she faced down a tall thin man in the ruins of a castle of what used to be Ireland. The man was a zombie if appearances said anything. His skin barely stretched across his big bones, and the tattered clothing he wore would have been an expensive suit, treasured by a businessperson, back in the days before supernatural creatures ransacked their world.

She slipped behind a pillar of stone as his bullet rang out, and then used her thumb to open the blade from its scabbard the way she always did. She felt the kick again, this time stronger, and she knew instinctively that one of the girls was in trouble. They needed to end this fight, so that she could get back to Isobel, Koko, and Jasmine. She peeked her head out to see what the old redheaded corpse was planning to do, and he fired another shot, barely missing her face as the bullet lodged itself within the rock.

Alysia squeezed the hilt and allowed herself a moment of panic, causing the armor to react and encase her body in its silvery steel. The demon wasn’t expecting this when she popped back out and he began firing immediately. The bullets from his small handgun merely bounced off the armor as Alysia closed in on him. She took his hand off with the swing of her sword as she sped past him, turning as she did to see what kind of damage the cut had done.

He held the bloody stump, smiling in the way a skeleton does out of no fault of its own. The skin that would have covered his mouth was long gone, and the jagged row of teeth that ran from ear to ear chattered as he looked down at his wound and then back up at her. She waited for him to speak. She was expecting a threat, some kind of warning, or perhaps a loud boast, telling her which friend or family member she had lost in the last few hours.

He did neither. Instead, he showed her the stump of his hand, which oozed a disgustingly thick, yellow substance that plopped out as if something from within the wound was pushing it out. She watched the ooze as it solidified and reformed into a hand to replace the former one.

That’s different, she thought. This one has some sort of accelerated healing power and is able to shoot guns. He leaned down to recover the fallen pistol and Alysia dashed forward and took his head off, screaming, “KIYAH!” loudly, catching herself as she did this because the noise had come from out of nowhere.

She bounced back and lifted Euphoria above her head to see if the demon would explode into ashes. The headless corpse fell to the ground, not far from the area where the head had rolled and it lay there twitching as Alysia Knight looked to make sure no other creatures were sneaking up on her. She wished t she could still hear them; it was the one gift of Chaos’s that she would have kept if given a choice.

The yellow goop dripped from out of his neck just like the arm had done before it and sure enough, a head grew from out of it to replace the former. Alysia rolled her eyes and looked down at the blade. There was no trace of blood, pus or slime from the cuts she had made, and she surmised that the creature in front of her was not a demon like the rest. It was an elite, that was for sure, and her fifth mark for Chaos that would supposedly save the world—though she wasn’t convinced this was true.

She wondered why this demon was so different from the rest, having no shadowy, monstrous body, or misty cold blackness to terrorize its enemies with. It was slimy and zombie-like, though zombies of lore would die once you sever the spine or pierce the brain, she thought. Pierce the brain. She ran in and thrust the tip of the sword into the soft, developing head of the downed demon and pulled it out, hoping to see it explode or give some sort of sign that her hunch was correct. He merely looked up at her and stood, bringing the gun up with him, ready to resume firing.

Think, CeeCee, think! Looking around for something that could clue her in on how to defeat her opponent, she focused her eyes on the figure of the demon and it’s sickly, taut skin that barely covered the bones. He had an awkward anatomy that betrayed his attempt at appearing human to her. The midsection was too round for the skeletal arms and legs, and he could barely move due to it, outside of standing and aiming the weapon.

She timed the bullet, letting the speed of her newfound powers spin her past it. But instead of chopping at the neck like she wanted to do, she disemboweled the demon and then brought the blade back around to cut through his legs.

The sound that she had wanted to come from him when she struck his head now emitted from his abdominal as he was split open, revealing a miniature demon on the inside. It looked like a cross between a vampire bat and a large serpent, and it uncoiled itself and took to the air to get away from her as she raised the blade for a killing strike.

Alysia jumped and slashed at the creature as it beat wet wings to escape her deadly stroke, and she barely missed as it got higher and higher. She scooped up the pistol from the discarded corpse and began to fire at it. Her aim was terrible and the weapon was heavy but she kept on firing until it was overheated.

One of the bullets caught the wing of the creature and it crashed into the woods beyond the ruins. Alysia sheathed her sword and chanced a glance at the corpse. It was quickly decaying as it lay without its host and she wondered how long it had been used for it to be in the useless state that it now was. She took to her heels and ran to where the creature had fallen.

There were bushes all over, and the late hour made it hard to see, but she knew it was still in the vicinity, that telltale pulse coming back to her. She stopped and held her breath to listen to her surroundings. There was an eerie silence that made the air seem thick, but she stood like a statue in anticipation of the wounded creature trying to flee.

When the large wolf came crashing through the woods at her, she wasn’t quite ready for it, as she expected it to be the demon. It was massive, and when it crashed into her she thought that perhaps it was a bear. She placed her armored hand up around its maw to stop the gnashing teeth from finding her face as it brought her to the ground. As she lay beneath its heavy body, she could feel its enormous gut pushing down on her painfully, making it hard to breathe.

He was like a big, shaggy dog with the exception of his eyes. Where there was once the sad, curious life of a wild animal within those sockets, there now was deep blackness. The demon was within it and Alysia knew. She struggled to get from beneath it and close a good grip around Euphoria, but the way the wolf lie, gnashing and gnashing at her exposed face, she was not able to feel her sword.

After a time she gave up on the sword and closed both gauntleted hands around its muzzle, squeezing it shut and digging her fingers into its flesh. The wolf felt the pain and backed up off of her, shaking its head to free its mouth from her grip.

Once her hands were free she found her sword and then thrust it through the stomach of the creature. That audible scream that had come out when the bat flew now came from the mouth of the gigantic wolf. She scrambled to her knees and stabbed it again, stabbing and stabbing in hopes of killing the demon. It was after the fifth stab that the blade struck home, and the wolf’s body tore open as the demon climbed out to try and escape.

“No, you don’t!” Alysia screamed and then cut it in half as it took to the air. The creature became like oil, splashing thickly from her cut, and then the familiar rush of its life energy took her over. There was nothing special about this rush like the one she experienced with the Chinese demon. She wasn’t lifted into the air, and her body didn’t damage itself in order to grow back stronger. What she felt instead was a feeling of release, as if a great weight had finally been lifted.

What was that gift? she wondered to herself as she walked over to the large wolf’s corpse and sat down next to its massive head.

“I wish he hadn’t corrupted you, you majestic creature.” She spoke to it, stroking its fur and feeling remorseful. “They take, and take, and take. That is all that they do; they corrupt our kind, ruin the land, and force us to join their number. Do not hold it against me that I had to run you through. Understand my intent and know that I would never had done that if you were you.”

She stood up and whispered a prayer for the animal, and then jogged back into the ruins of the castle. She climbed the fallen stones to the top of the highest remaining tower, and once there sat down and waited for the moon to rise.

~ * ~ * ~

“JAIME!” Tracy yelled as she walked behind James, who was using Jaime’s tracks to try and find him. Isobel and Jasmine hung back behind them, saddened and sickly in some strange new state that had come over them since Koko had disappeared. They pushed into the dark woods, the trail telling a tale of Jaime’s quest a few days before when he had disappeared.

“Have we considered that he and the girl may have eloped?” Tracy asked, glancing back at Isobel to see what she had to say.

“I can no longer feel Koko,” the tiny girl said, and wiped a tear.

Tracy looked away quickly, knowing it meant bad things for Jaime’s fate.

“Jimmy, stop,” Tracy announced suddenly. “I’m not safe here. None of us are, and we need to turn back.”

“What about Jaime? We can’t leave him behind,” the big man said, but the three girls didn’t look as enthused as he was to find their friend. “Izzy, Jazz?” he called at them, using the pet names he knew they liked. The two girls looked up with tear-streaked eyes and stared at him as if awaiting instruction. “Take Tracy back to the barracks and wait for me,” he said. “Try to contact CeeCee. Let her know that we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Jimmy, you can’t—” Tracy began, but he touched her face reassuringly and kissed her lips. “I can’t leave our people behind, Trace. It’s not right. I know how to find them, trust me on that, but I need you to be safe, so you can’t come with me.”

Tracy wanted to object and argue to go with him, but she knew it wouldn’t work and would only delay him further. She held the kiss for a long time, and then when she was certain she could handle the separation, she broke away and jogged behind the two girls.

James Knight held his pistol up and pushed forward through the woods. He glanced back to see the last of the girls as they exited the woods and he pushed on into the area that seemed as if it shunned sunlight. When he got to the shadows, he stopped and closed his eyes, letting them adjust so that he could make out the trees and anything strange that might pop out of them. He twisted his watch one click to the right, forcing it to emit a fluorescent light in hopes of picking up on Jaime’s clothes if he was lying nearby.

He followed the path for the better part of an hour until he came to a clearing that was so alien in its appearance that he lowered his gun. It looked as if a bomb had exploded in the woods and left a perfect circle of flattened trees where he stood. It was empty but stunk of rotted flesh, and as he walked out toward the flattened branches, the ground felt soft and made a whistling sound with every step he made.

“What in the hell?” he said out loud, and then glanced around to see if there was an answer to his question.

A number of black figures began to step out of the woods from the far side and he realized it was Maria’s team of men. He eyed them curiously, wondering why it was that they wore masks even though everyone knew that the chemicals that permeated the air were meant to hurt demons and not human beings. Next came Maria; her hair was out and it draped loosely over her shoulders. She was still in the clothes she wore on the first day and every day afterwards, and he wondered where it was that she had her camp.

“Hey, Hope,” he announced as she walked into the clearing.

“Hey, Mr. Knight,” she replied, showing her fanged teeth in a sort of smile.

He could feel the presence of more of her soldiers walking up from behind him. They seemed to be coming from everywhere, pouring out of the woods like freshly strained coffee through a filter. He didn’t bother to look at them, knowing they were there, and he felt a familiar calm come over him.

“Have you seen Jaime?” he asked her, pretending that the numerous masked men that surrounded him threateningly were not there.

“Jaime? Is that the young guy with the Asian girlfriend?” Maria asked, pretending to think about it as she played along with James’s aloofness.

“Yea, that would be him. He came in here looking for her a while ago, but we haven’t seen him and I know that he came in this direction,” James said.

Maria licked her forefinger and kept her smile as she did it. “Mhm, he may have come this way. But as you know, Mr. Knight, these woods are very dangerous. With all the demons running around and whatever else, I think he may not have reached our camp.”

“Where is your camp?” James asked, keeping his eyes locked on hers and refusing to move a muscle.

“We’re set up back here,” she said, indicating with her thumb the area behind her.

“Nice sword,” James said finally, looking at the decorative scabbard that hung at her waist and recognizing it as Koko’s, a weapon she would never willingly separate herself from.

Maria looked down at the sword as if it was the first time she had noticed it. She cocked her head and looked at James Knight as if she was sizing him up.

“One last question,” James said as he kept on staring at Maria with the masked men looming ever closer to where he stood.

“What?” Maria asked, her patience seemingly gone, along with her smile.

“Was that sweet, innocent girl whose name you claim ever inside that wicked body I’m about to burn?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer as he raised the pistol and shot her between the eyes. The men hesitated for a second when it happened and it was all the time he needed to jump, roll, and rob Maria’s fallen body of the sword.

The men came in at him, unable to open fire due to their proximity with one another, and James Knight used the opportunity to cut them down one after another.

He caught the first man rushing in by the throat and shifted his leg to go between his as he pulled him violently forward, snapping his leg across his own and then thrusting him backwards into two more. He spun and swung the sword down in an arc, cutting into the hand of one man reaching for him, and catching the face of another who had gotten in too close from the side.

He was a maelstrom of fury, and while his moves were not as crisp and impressive as his disciplined daughter, they were strong and effective, and his attackers fell in droves.

The masked men rushed in from all corners, threatening to swarm him, but Koko’s sword was of Yalem and its edge stayed true, helping James Knight keep them off him. While the fighting went on, the form of Maria climbed to her feet and retreated back into the woods.

There were tears of pain pouring from her eyes as the bullet pushed further and further into her head. The wound would heal; it always did, but it didn’t make the pain any easier to deal with.

She beat a path through the trees to get to the area of the clearing James Knight had come through. She found the trail and walked its length, heading towards the barracks and away from the dangerous warrior and the demons that were under her control.

The bullet had stopped its burying and the healing was pushing it out, so she quickened her pace to reach the outside of the woods, hoping she would be there before her demons finished off James Knight.

~ * ~ * ~

The moon was large, full, and bright amidst the blackish blue of the night above the tower. Alysia Knight crossed her legs, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands, letting her mind go through the ritual that would bring her into the realm of Yalem. The familiar blackness took her over and the feeling of weariness and ultimately sleep made her drift within her own thoughts.

She thought back to a time when her mother was with her. They were in a kitchen, and from her tiny hands she could tell that she was about fifteen. It was Thanksgiving, and she was seasoning the turkey. Her mother, ever the professional, was near the sink, cutting up vegetables and talking to her about doing better in school.

“You will want to transcend me and your father,” she was saying, and Alysia recognized the lecture as the reoccurring one that she would hear whenever she got a grade that was lower than a B.

“Okay, Mom,” she replied, and as she reached for the turkey, it grew translucent. Her hand passed through it and she was back in the blackness, feeling around for something solid. This was the part of the travel between realms that she hated most. When she prodded the air with her hands, there was nothing there, and when she stomped down to feel the ground, there was nothing there, either. It was just the darkness and it would stay for a time before making her unconscious.

Alysia went to sleep after a few minutes and then woke up in the familiar field of flowers in Yalem. Blue lilies were everywhere, so tall that it appeared as a vast blue ocean, broken only by a bright yellow path.

“Okay, gotta get to the girls … and Dad,” Alysia mumbled as she stood up and dusted off her hands.

She looked up into the yellow sky and then the mountains in the distance. It was always so peaceful there that she wished that she had time to stay and enjoy the scenery. She wondered if access to Yalem would still be open once she killed the sixth demon elite. She hadn’t felt the demon after killing the last one and she didn’t feel it now, which she found odd. I wonder if there even is a sixth demon, she thought as she walked towards the yellow pathway.

When she got to the path, she clasped her hands, focusing everything on the idea of the barracks and the feelings she had for her father. It was always an effort to put other thoughts aside in order to focus, but the worry she had for her friends made it easy and the path began to shimmer the way it did whenever she was returning to the world. The path went from shimmering to writhing and bucking, like a wave of gold, moving as if it meant to throw her from its surface, and before long it did and everything was black.

The darkness appeared again, but this time there was the sensation of floating. Alysia readied herself for what she would appear into and after a few minutes, she was standing in front of a battered stone building—the barracks. It was late evening, and she saw that Jasmine was walking around with her sword out.

“Jazz!” Alysia shouted, and the tall girl glanced at her wickedly before recognizing who it was and running over to give her a hug.

“They killed Koko, CeeCee! She went to go spy on Hope and they killed her. Now your father is there and is in trouble, too. Isobel went to go help him but she hasn’t been back in an hour. I can still feel her, CeeCee, but if I leave Tracy and the baby…” Jasmine said in such a fast bout of rambling that it took Alysia a few seconds to absorb what she was saying and break it down into meaningful information.

“So my dad’s in the woods, captured or in trouble, Isobel went to help him but has been gone for a long time, and Koko is dead,” Alysia said, trying to see if she got it all or if something was missing.

“Yes, we are in a lot of trouble. I tried to call lord Chaos, because Hope seems to be very powerful. He doesn’t respond, CeeCee. I think we are all alone.”

“He will not answer because we have betrayed him,” Alysia said. She ignored the part about the baby; her intuition had told her as much when she saw that her father had chosen to run, looking for safety instead of staying to help her fight. “So you’re guarding Tracy and Izzy’s gone hunting?” she asked and Jasmine nodded. “I can feel her. Wait for me, Jasmine.”

She took off sprinting towards the area of the woods where Isobel’s life force had screamed out to her for help. She came upon the path that led back into the blackness, and she saw traces of blood, Isobel’s blood, splattered across the tree trunks that bordered the path leading back. She pulled out Euphoria and took to the branches, skipping across them with light steps, the way Isobel had taught her to do, a technique mastered by the lord of Chaos.

She increased her speed, following her senses while pushing aside any feelings of doubt that threatened to slow her pace or loosen her resolve. She came upon an area where the trees had seen combat. There were nicks in the bark, and footprints scattered about the ground. Beneath a mound of fallen leaves lie a red cloak and white dress, and out of one part of the dress was the pale, twitching hand of Isobel.

Alysia fought back against the need to jump down and save her, knowing it was a trap. It would be Hope, this man or woman named Hope that Jasmine had warned her about. She slowed her breathing and probed the air, looking for a demon. It would have to be a powerful warrior since it had managed to kill Koko and wound Isobel in a way that rendered her helpless. She felt nothing in the air as she waited, and could see nothing below her branch. She activated the armor, jumped down to Isobel, and pulled the leaves back to uncover her body.

Since the time when the giants fought outside of her school and brought in the lunacy that was this demon invasion, Alysia had seen her fair share of terrible things. The state that Isobel, her tiny, innocent Isobel was in defied anything she had seen, even in her worst nightmares. It made her heart skip and tightened the already tight armor, and a new pain came forth from her eyes. Hot tears pushed out as she stared down at the mangled, bloody mess that was her friend.

She looked down at the blood-streaked face of Isobel, and the bullet-ridden holes that stayed open in her face. She leaned in close and kissed her forehead.

“You brave little sprite, you will be all right. We will get you better, I promise you we will, and then we can go somewhere where you no longer have to drag your heavy sword around.”

“Cee …. Cee?” the girl whispered, and more tears fell from Alysia’s eyes as she nodded her head, sat up, and took her hand.

“It’s me,” she whispered to Isobel.

“Gotcha!” a woman’s deep voice said from somewhere behind her and a shot rang out, catching Alysia in the back of her head and sending her spiraling into darkness.

4

The bodies of the black-clad warriors who had poured into the clearing to kill James Knight were strewn about in a variety of positions. Some were crawling to get into a better position to die, and others merely looked at him, wondering when it was that he would finish them off.

The big man was on a knee in the center, staring up into the dark evening sky trying to suck in air. His lungs were on fire, and his muscles burned from overuse. He leaned against Koko’s blade, trying his best not to topple over.

They had come at him at all angles, but he wasn’t going to die without seeing the face of his children once again—both children. CeeCee would be back and he wanted to hug her, kiss her, and apologize for running. He also wanted to see Tracy give birth to the new girl or boy. No demon would take that privilege away from him, and that was why he fought and won.

James stood up and stepped over the fallen bodies, sinking the sword into the spine of a wretch that reached out to him in one last desperate attempt. He made to walk back down the path that had led him to the clearing, but he paused, swaying in that drunken-like stupor of tiredness like a tree about to fall. He had seen the area where Maria had emerged from, and he was curious as to what the camp of someone wicked like her would look like.

He stomped across the bodies, back through the two trees that bordered the pathway from which Maria had emerged. He twisted the bezel on his watch as far as it could go, and he could hear the creatures of the night flinch back from the bright light that shone from his wrist.

He took the arm with the watch and grabbed his own collar like he always did whenever he used it as a flashlight. His right hand gripped the sword that had once been Koko’s and he held it backwards, ready for anything as he stepped over fallen logs and pushed through the brush.

A stench hit him, the wind bringing the full force of it through the trees and it was so ripe and powerful in its warm, foul odor that he was reduced to fits of coughing as his lungs begged him to find better air.

He had only walked for a minute before he came upon what could only be described as a shrine. Well, it was a shrine from the worst horror stories since it looked to be a mountain of naked, rotted corpses.

James Knight removed his watch and clipped it to his chest so that he could hold the sword with two hands. The mountain was an abomination, and he found that despite its horrible makeup, he could not look away. He examined the bodies and noticed that they were not merely thrown on top of one another to form the mountain. Instead, their limbs were interlocked, legs bending in ways they shouldn’t, and arms hooked into other arms to create an object that seemed to be as solid as it was offensive. He looked closer at it and began to recognize some of the clothing. These were innocents pulled from the bunker and murdered to create whatever this was.

His eyes climbed up to the top, where a woman was tied to a black obelisk with strange glyphs dancing on its surface. James shook his head and climbed the smooth slant of the corpse mountain, wincing internally as flesh broke away easily beneath his weight, and the texture of the foundation beneath his steps keeping it evident that he was stepping on dead people.

When he reached the obelisk he almost fell down. The appalling structure had outdone itself with an even more appalling symbol. Chained to the obelisk, Angelica, the woman he had known as Maria’s mother, had been kept alive somehow. Her eyes revealed the type of ferocity one might see in a rabid animal, wracked with disease. Her dress, the jewelry, and the presence read Angelica, but what was in front of him was a deadly ghoul.

He tried to make sense of it. If that was indeed Maria down there, commanding demons and killing her friends, this could be her mother. Maybe the young girl had lost her mind and was being controlled by her mother’s vengeful spirit … yeah, if this was a comic book, he thought to himself, then flashed his light around to get more clues.

At the base of the mountain he saw the naked, emaciated body of Koko. He jumped down, his landing producing the gooey snapping of what he assumed were bones, and ran over to her to see if she was truly dead. Her eyes were black, completely black, like bulbs that had been burned out. He felt for a pulse, touched her skin, but Koko was gone and it brought him a deep sadness.

He lifted her up and was about to walk out when he saw Jaime. They had started to intertwine his limbs into the base of the mountain but had stopped prematurely, leaving half of his body clothed and hanging out.

The big man flashed the light around to see what else was in the small clearing. From what he saw, there were only trees and whatever evil feared his light. So he made a decision that he knew would not be wise, but he could not allow the desecration to be left the way it was. He sheathed the sword and began the chore of finding dry branches and leaves.

He didn’t care if it took him all night, because something inside of him knew that the mountain and the ghoul would need to be removed before he went after Maria.

~ * ~ * ~

Tracy McLeay walked out of the barracks dressed as if she were about to go to war. She had the large rifle that James coveted in her arms, and an assortment of smaller weapons strapped to her legs and arms. She saw Jasmine near the line of the woods, staring into its blackness. The whole situation gave her pause, but when James set out and hadn’t returned for several hours, she knew he was either hurt or worse.

“Everything okay out here, Jasmine?” she asked, and the tall girl threw up her hand quickly to tell her to be quiet.

“Go back into the house, Tracy. Please go back quickly. It’s about to be bad,” she rambled, her hand on her sword and her legs locked into a stance of preparation.

“The hell I will,” Tracy announced, and slipped to the side of the barracks where she had the wall for cover and could still see Jasmine. She lay on her side and flipped the stand on the rifle. If anything came out of those woods to attack the girl, she would be ready for them in an instant.

Maria slipped through the crack of the woods to face Jasmine, and fired a single round at the young girl’s face. Tracy fired back with a few shots of her own, but she noticed that Jasmine had somehow moved before the demon could fire her gun.

A noise brought Tracy around as the door to the bunker flew open, and all of the horrors that had sealed themselves away for who knows how long were pouring out to join the fun. She hoped that Jasmine would be enough to hold Maria and spun around to focus her fire on the demons that were hobbling out of the bunker. She got up after they stopped coming for a time and ran into the barracks, locking doors, securing windows and piling up more guns near a window.

Once she was sure that it was secure enough to prevent any nasty surprises, Tracy sat on a chair, secured her elbow, and began firing again on the demons coming out.

“Not my baby,” she mumbled as she shot round after round into them. They were only coming out one at a time so it was easy to pick them off, but after a time she risked a glance to where Jasmine was fighting to make sure she was okay. The tall girl never seemed extremely graceful, but Maria was now fighting her with her own sword, and Jasmine was dodging and attacking in a way that made her seem like a natural dancer.

“Fight, Jazzy, fight!” Tracy screamed, and kept on dropping the demons that were meaning to take advantage of them.

Jasmine parried strokes, moved around in circles, and darted in and out like a seasoned Tomcat that had seen over a hundred battles. It was impressive, especially since she seemed like the weakest of their group, at least to Tracy.

There was more noise from the surrounding forest as two kreples broke through and threw themselves at Maria and Jasmine. The two women answered with quick cuts, killing the creatures instantly, but even more broke through, along with demons, and they were forced to put their battle to the side.

“What the hell is this?” Maria screamed, keeping her sword pointed at Jasmine as she directed the questions to the approaching demons. They all stopped within their tracks and bowed to her as more came through beneath the moonlight, forming a crowd of red and black bodies that knelt to bow as soon as they were close enough.

Tracy had managed to overheat her rifle, but as she looked out, she saw that there were too many for her to realistically deal with. Jasmine and Maria were in the only patch of green free of demons, and they were bowing to her as if she was some sort of newly crowned queen.

Maria was smiling, and she held her other arm out as if to embrace the power. Some of the demons began howling and turning into black dust, the dust blew in towards Maria, who absorbed it while laughing as it took to her easily.

Somewhere off to the side, a pair of demons had managed to grab Jasmine. They held her still while Maria underwent the transformation, and without thinking much about the repercussions, Tracy aimed the now-cool rifle at Maria’s head and fired a single round. Almost simultaneously, an explosion went off, and a tall fire appeared in the woods.

Maria spun to look up at the flames, despite the shadows that were whipping everywhere, and screamed loudly out of frustration and pain. The bullet hadn’t killed her, and it would heal in time, but the fire was what did damage to her now that she saw it.

James Knight, burst through the trees with a shout, carrying Koko’s corpse. He began to fire round after round into the suppressed demons as he moved towards the barracks with much intent. Tracy ran over to the door and let him in, and then locked it behind him as he lay Koko down on the ground.

“I think this is it,” Tracy said to him sadly, trying to keep her tears at bay as she thought of the life her baby would never see, and the pain and the loss that would be for nothing now that their friends were all dead.

“I didn’t see Isobel when I ran back through to try and catch you before that demon did,” he said, bringing her in to hug her and kiss her forehead. “I’m tired, my limbs hurt, and I’ve been burned pretty badly. But I’m not stopping tonight until Alysia finishes whatever it is she has to do.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see Isobel? What if she’s dead like Koko, or just run off?” Tracy said as she got back to the window and grabbed the rifle.

“You see Jasmine running? No! You ever see Isobel act disloyal to CeeCee? No! Those girls are fighters, and if she’s missing, it means we need to buy her some time to go and find CeeCee!”

He burst through the door with a shotgun in his hands and Koko’s sword at his hips. The demons began to rise and rush to him to protect Maria. It became a struggle of strength and determination as the two of them fought back against the horde.

Maria, who had received the gift to become stronger, spread new leather wings and took to the air to hover above them. She focused on the fire and flew towards it, leaving the demons to destroy James Knight, the woman who carried his child, and the last of Alysia’s Bloody Garot.

~ * ~ * ~

Yalem, I’m back in Yalem, Alysia thought when she realized she was back within the food hall that belonged to Chaos. Numerous young warriors stared at her as she stood with Isobel in the center. She looked down at her tiny friend, who seemed healthy and ready as she always did. Alysia wondered how long she had been out from the bullet, and whether or not she had really died and crossed the realms in order to fulfill the promise she had once made.

“Alysia Knight,” a deep voice boomed from the front of the hall. “My greatest warrior and ultimately my greatest disappointment.” It was the lord, Chaos, as he approached them, and in his hand was the familiar shape of the Twilight Sword.

“I see you recognize it, the gift that you allowed a filthy Ert to destroy,” he said. “Have you wondered, dear Alysia, which one of these swords will ultimately save your family, and your world?”

“Can’t say I have,” Alysia replied. She drew out Euphoria and looked it over as Chaos stood in front of her. “Did you bring me here to punish me? To cut me down in front of your Garot and show them that nobody can cross the mighty Chaos, lord?”

“Everything I did for you, I did to help us both, Alysia Knight. I cannot interfere with your world once the lost have taken it; I told you the truth. I trained you to destroy the six champions of the lost, and I told you that it would force them into a state of retreat. That too was true. Yet you listened to an Ert, a champion of Yalem’s oppressive elite, one of the reasons why the lost are the lost!” he snapped, then closed his eyes to compose himself. “You took everything that we taught you, everything that we warned you about, and you threw it away all because a man claiming to be your father told you that I am the bad one.”

Alysia listened to his words and felt ashamed because it was true. She weighed the pros and cons of the Twilight Sword and the help that Chaos had given her. She had become stronger with the Twilight Sword, and Chaos had saved her family with the foods he had given her. Since her alliance with the Ert, she had become even stronger, but she had seen her friends killed, become gravely wounded, and she lost the feeling, the hunter’s sense to track down the lost.

What if Chaos was right and she had allowed herself to fall into a trap planted by the enemy? She thought on how Euphoria had healed the Chinese soldier, the way it healed her when she cut into the lost, and the way it armored her body when faced with too much danger.

“Isobel, I don’t know what to do,” she whispered to the girl, who in turn looked up at her, wide-eyed and helpless with her mouth slightly agape. But Alysia saw a slight shifting of her pupils moving left to right and that was all the indication that she needed however.

“Chaos, enough games. The last major demon is revealed and you grabbed me right before I was about kill it. You have helped but you helped to push your own agenda, to help yourself and your war. You care nothing about my world, my family, or me. You also pretended that I was the sole wielder of the Twilight Sword, that it was some sort of special heirloom, one that would drive the lost back to Yalem.” She laughed and threw her head back in frustration. “The truth is, there are plenty of magical weapons that can make humans like me into something much more, aren’t there?”

Chaos didn’t respond but gave her a slight smile that reminded her of a child being caught doing something naughty.

“You captured these poor kids, gave them a test they could never pass, and you lie to them that they are your chosen, your special corps that will do the greatest good in your home world. Answer me this, Lord. If the home world was so terrible, how is it that your wife lives so luxuriously there while you travel to other realms playing warrior? Shouldn’t she be seeing some sort of desperate situation for you to rectify through this recruitment?

“Don’t answer that; I know. Yalem is actually a peaceful, happy place. You’re probably some secondary prince who thinks he’s owed a throne, and in order to usurp it, you need an army. But of course your army cannot come from Yalem because your brother, cousin, or whomever holds the throne will know what you’re doing and crush you before you have a chance to start your glorious coup!”

“Stop it! Shut up!” he yelled at her, and then drew the Twilight Sword and held it at her threateningly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t need you corrupting the Garot anymore than you have done to Isobel!”

The room made a rumbling as the warriors began to discuss what was going on between their lord and Alysia. Some had drawn their weapons and inched close, but as they did this Isobel leapt forward with her own sword out, disarming the closest boy and bounced back in a defensive stance, daring him to come forward.

Alysia focused on Chaos. She thought about what he was capable of, and as she drew Euphoria, the silver armor ran the length of her limbs, all the way up to her face. The warriors saw the armor and backed off quickly. Some scurried out of the room and some hid under the table.

“Ert! You’ve become a bloody Ert!” Chaos screamed at her, dismayed at her appearance and Euphoria, which pulsed brightly as its point neared the Twilight Sword. “I thought there was time to save you and have you rejoin our cause, but you have betrayed us, Alysia Knight. You’ve taken three of my warriors, indoctrinated them with the lies of the Erts, and now you stand before me, armored in their uniform, and savage!”

He pulled back his sword and sheathed it, then waved his hand to clear the room. The young warriors rushed out, and before long, the place was empty except for Chaos and the armed women who faced him.

“You’re not completely off with the assertion that I started a coup,” Chaos said.

He paced the hallway, picking up fallen cups, fruits and plates that his warriors had knocked over as they beat a hasty retreat.

“Yalem may seem peaceful and quiet, and yes my wife does live a life of luxury there. But resources there are sparse. Millions of people are starving and made to live off the land, and I know I can give them these things if I was able to take the throne.”

He spun on his heels and faced Alysia. “You have to believe me that no matter what choice you make today, I intend to continue with my plans. Yes, it involves going into worlds and pulling out their greatest warriors, and yes, it involves telling half-truths whenever I need to. There are things at play here that are much bigger than you and I, Alysia Knight. But you will always make it about you, your parents, and your stupid friends, won’t you? Consider the fact that these so-called major demons that you’ve been killing were once very much like you: warriors, chosen, but transformed into something stronger, something that would be able to lead others in a much bigger war. You are here, challenging me now because you are the strongest, despite having an Ert blade and wearing an Ert costume.”

“Izzy,” Alysia said suddenly, as if she wasn’t listening to him. The small girl looked at her and nodded. “Could you go back to my world and protect my family? Jasmine is all by herself against that thing, and while I sit here discussing things with Chaos, I fear they are getting closer and closer to their doom.”

Isobel looked doubtful, as if her place was there with Alysia, facing down the lord of Chaos. But she knew Alysia needed her to help keep her family alive more than she needed her to play bodyguard, so she nodded, sheathed her sword, and touched her hands together to leave the realm.

“Thank you,” Chaos said suddenly, and then motioned Alysia over to sit with him at one of the bigger tables.

She wondered why she should trust him. He could snatch her life with two quick moves, but she wondered about their rules. Maybe Chaos is disallowed from hurting us while we are in this limbo. It could be why he kept a Dibolosa-type around, to do the dirty work for him, she thought. She sat across from him and looked down at her hands. The constant fighting, climbing, and shooting had turned her hands into unsightly shadows of their former selves. She had always kept a manicure, moisturized her hands, and kept them presentable, yet now they looked as if she did construction, or constant yard work without any gloves.

She retracted the armor that covered her face, but left it just below her chin in case the lord chanced a swing at her exposed neck.

“I have a serious question for you, and I want you to answer it candidly, Chaos,” she said suddenly, biting into a plum and ignoring its delicious taste to keep her eyes looking forward. “If you lie to me, I will stay with the Erts and will force you into kumite right here and now. From the way you’ve been acting since I pulled on this armor, you don’t want that, and I can undo many hundred years of work for you and your kind. Am I right?”

“What is your question?” Chaos asked.

“Oh, well, it’s like this,” she began. “You robbed us of thirty years—”

“Your people robbed you of thirty years,” he corrected her.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that the earth fought back, and the lost couldn’t evolve. We kept you all frozen until the major demons were in place, but that took thirty years. Thirty years of war and destruction to break the human spirit, thirty years of recruiting more like you to make sure that your world could be saved,” Chaos replied with a sad expression on his face.

“Maria, the little girl who was with us; I know you know who I’m talking about. Is she one of yours? Is she like me? A girl trying to right the world under the illusion that she is our only hope?”

“Yes,” he said finally and took a long drink from a wine glass as if he wanted to drown the memory. “But Maria, or Hope as we named her, was filled with much hurt, pain, and anger. You fell to the Erts because they planted one of their own into the life of your mother so many years ago. They knew my pattern well, and prepared for me through you.” He sighed and drank again. “But Maria was different; she was taken by the lost.”

“What happens when I kill her?” Alysia asked.

“The lost will return to Yalem,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Leaving our world decimated, with people dead and everything wasted? How in the hell is that even fair? We were so advanced … the things we were doing with technology, medical, transportation. We advanced for thousands of years only for a bunch of infighting demons to run us over in their crap. No, that cannot be it. God would not do this to us. This can’t be it. You have to tell me that you can take it back, that you can … I don’t know, reverse time or something and put things back where they were before.”

“Time travel?” Chaos chuckled.

“That’s not funny. How is it far-fetched when you can move between realms, heal wounds through creature blood, and magic up some armor to protect yourself? Don’t act like what I’m asking is far-fetched! The whole world, and this whole lost thing, is far-fetched! So tell me, what’s the big prize in the end for me, for slaying the last master and proving myself the best? Offer up a real reward, or I won’t do it. I swear to God, I won’t!”

Chaos stared at her and clasped his hands. He sat like that for an extremely long time, considering his options and thinking on what to do.

“Silly girl, think about what you’re asking. If I were allowed to manipulate time, I would simply go back and steer you away from the Ert who changed you. There is no time travel; the wheel only spins one way and if it can be reversed, well, that would be the gift of gods, now wouldn’t it?” Chaos said.

“So we’re stuck, then? Is that what you’re telling me? Stuck in a broken world, brought on by your stupid war and your stupid ambition. How is that even fair? Why can’t we humans go to Yalem and destroy the place then? How would you like that?” Alysia replied, raising her voice without fully realizing it.

“Alysia, the lost were coming regardless of anything me or your Ert father could do. It was written in your destiny. You got far in your advancements as human beings, but so have other races. Whenever this occurs, the powers greater than all of us find a way to reset things. You will not lose everything, since people like you and your father will remember, but it will be difficult.” He stood up and walked over to his throne. “New monsters will appear once the lost have left, but they won’t be as vicious or as plentiful. You will rise as a hero to humanity, but your Kingdom will be built out of rubble and bones.”

“What of the war, your war? Will you lose now that you don’t have me?”

“This is where I ask you to rejoin me, Alysia Knight, because our interests do align. See, I aim to destroy the lost, to prevent any more worlds from being destroyed like yours. You could join me, become my warrior, and once I’ve won, you would become a hero of Yalem. You could bring your family there and live a rich, bountiful life.”

Alysia smiled at the thought, “You sound like the devil, making promises you’re barely intent on keeping. Did you make the same promise to all your generals?” she asked, and he stared at her, wondering if her question was serious.

“Anyway,” Alysia said, “I need to get back and complete the circle. The sixth demon has my people held hostage and they need me.”

“Will you think on it?” Chaos asked, “Yalem needs you more than you know.”

“I will think on it,” Alysia said and then pressed her hands together to bring on the blackness.

~ * ~ * ~

The pyre of corpses was covered in orange flames that climbed so high, they nicked the wings Maria used to fly over them. Everything was ablaze: the bodies she had meticulously collected to make the sacrifice, the corrupted corpse that at one point had been her mother, and the trees that bordered it, those sacred trees. The fire would eventually reach the clearing. It would burn up the lost soldiers that had followed her and move on to the barracks, the bunker, and even more.

She landed on a treetop and wept for a time. She had sold her soul to the dark one in exchange for her mother’s soul, but now it was lost; James Knight had seen to that. She retracted her singed wings and walked back through the trees towards the barracks. She would make him pay for what he had done, and then she would take his baby and bring it before the dark one. Maybe there was another way to get her mother back, and a brand new human child might be it.

5

Alysia Knight opened her eyes to find herself back in the forest where she had been shot as she knelt down next to Isobel’s dying body.

Bearing down on her was the dark-haired woman who Isobel called Hope. She shifted her position to hide behind a tree and the woman marched past her as if she hadn’t seen.

Alysia moved quickly to get behind her and applied a chokehold, pulling her back. The demon was strong and before long they were crashing into trees and rolling on the ground as Alysia kept it locked and Maria fought to pull her off.

When she finally pulled away, Maria rolled to her feet. She dug out a handgun, which she then leveled at Alysia as she, too stood up from their scuffle. But Alysia rose with her hand on the hilt of Euphoria, and the armor slid up her arms rapidly and covered her entire body, including her face. The bullet from Maria’s gun ricocheted off its surface, and Alysia brought her sword up, then down, knocking the gun into the air and cutting Maria on the wrist.

Maria recoiled from the cut and pulled out a crimson sword. It looked like an Egyptian Khopesh, its half-moon blade ending in a straight line that met the hilt, giving it the appearance of a question mark. She spun with blinding speed and hooked the back end behind Alysia’s leg, causing her to lose her balance. But Alysia bounced back up when she fell, raising her sword above her head, and then walking in a circle to use the trees as extra cover.

They feinted in and out between the trees as they moved back and forth, trying to cut one another. Maria got frustrated, being used to fighting opponents that would stand toe with her, while Alysia used her environment and various other tricks to make things more difficult.

She dashed in at one point, swinging her sword as she aimed to remove Alysia’s head, but she met air as the limber girl hopped backwards, dove past her body, and left a cut in her side that she hadn’t anticipated when she swung.

She reeled and swung low, then high, each being countered by Alysia’s blade. She was being outclassed in their swordfight, so she spread her wings and made to take to the air to find Tracy and James Knight.

Alysia saw what she was doing and dashed in to feint a thrust, Maria swung low and Alysia spun behind her while swinging, and managed to cut one of her wings off. Maria screamed and fell to her knees and Alysia hacked the other one off with one swing of her sword.

Maria swung the hooked blade to get Alysia to back off, and stood up to face her as the blood poured from her wingless back. Her eyes grew red with anger and she rushed in on Alysia, pressing her attack with brutal strength. Alysia avoided her attacks by stepping behind the trees and jumping clear; she decided against using her armor in order to keep herself fast and loose. Maria pressed for several moments, and Alysia kept herself defensive, waiting for an opening to present itself.

When Maria fell victim to a well-timed feint and swung prematurely, Alysia brought her sword down with everything she could muster. It shattered the blade and caught Maria’s shoulder. The woman fell backwards, holding her wound, too exhausted to stand again.

Alysia looked down at her. It would take a single blow from Euphoria to drive her from the world. The lost would be routed and they would take their leave immediately; at least that was what Chaos wanted her to believe.

“I want to kill you, Maria. I want to take your head for killing Jaime and Koko the way you did. Every ounce of me wants to cut you right now, but I need to know why. Why did you turn into this?”

Maria sank back down into the brush, feeling her strength fade with every passing minute. “I did it for my mother,” she finally said. “They promised me I could have my mother if I did this.”

“You’re a fool,” Alysia said in reply. “You murdered innocents and betrayed your friends all because a demon told you that it would bring your mother back.”

Maria didn’t say anything for a time and then looked up at Alysia angrily. “I’m not the only fool being led around like a puppet by a demon. Look at you, adorned from head to toe in their gifts. Do you think you have those toys for free? Do you think your hands are clean?”

“I don’t fool myself for a second that my hands are clean, Hope—isn’t that the name they gave you? Maybe I should call you Hopeless. I know what I am, and I know who and what I have killed. But the difference between me and you is that I did this for humanity. You did it for a selfish dream, and the blood on your hands will never dry.”

She stepped forward and drove Euphoria into her chest and held it there, letting the blade absorb the darkness and the shadow that had given Maria the strength and power to lead an army of demons. Maria screamed, and fought to remove the blade, even going so far as to touch its naked edge to try and pull it out of her. But Euphoria was like a vacuum for the darkness as it cleansed Maria’s body and nothing she did could remove it as it drained her quickly of her power.

“WHY DON’T YOU KILL ME?” Maria screamed, so loudly that everyone within their vicinity heard it. Alysia could feel the heat of the forest fire getting close as she held the blade firm, wedging its tip into the ground to disallow Maria from escaping it.

When the cleansing was over, she withdrew Euphoria and wiped the edge. She flicked the blade around, then touched the tip of her sheath, ran the back of the blade against it to feel things out, and leaned forward to sheath it fully with an audible ‘click.’ She then stood up and offered a hand to Maria.

“Why did you save me?” the tired woman asked as Alysia led her down to the barracks where a loud raucous could be heard.

“I saved you because you could be saved. I’m not a murderer, and I am no longer a puppet to Chaos and his games.”

They broke through the trees to quite a sight. There were demons exiting the bunker and walking back into the trees towards what used to be the city. In the sky, the bat-things were flying in that direction also, and as dawn broke through the sky, Alysia could see that Chaos had not lied about the departure of the lost once the sixth of the major V’Kosha—who turned out to be Maria—was no more. She closed her eyes in a silent prayer, thanking God for granting her the strength to carry it through.

When she opened her eyes and looked around, she noticed that her father was with Tracy by the barracks wall, and Isobel was looking after Jasmine. Isobel saw them approaching, squealed, and ran over, hugging Alysia tightly as if she refused to let go. She flashed a surprised look at Maria, bounced back and drew her sword, but Alysia stopped her and turned to face Maria.

“The demon that was Hope is dead. Izzy, this is our Maria. She was corrupted for a long time, with a noble mission to save her mother, but it turned her into the thing that killed our Koko. I made her human again, despite my anger, so we must forgive her, Izzy. Chaos is the one to blame for Koko,” Alysia said while looking into Maria’s eyes.

“You can do that, CeeCee? You can turn back the lost?” Isobel asked.

Alysia pulled out Euphoria and showed Isobel the blade. “With this sword, an Ert sword, I am able to drain away the darkness, and if a person is still alive beneath all of it, then yes, I can turn them back.”

Isobel nodded and then touched her own sword reassuringly. Alysia noticed she had shrunk back from the blade of Euphoria and she wondered what it would do to her friends if she tried to turn them.

“Maria, I think that you should go,” Alysia said suddenly. “It will be hard enough convincing Isobel here that you deserve your life, but my friends and family may not be convinced so easily. Go, and get your life back together, and do what you can for anybody you can find. When things settle down perhaps I will find you. I have plans you will be able to help me with, but that will be much later on.”

The women clasped hands and nodded at one another, and then Maria turned towards the forest and walked back through the trees, away from the fire. As if on cue, it began to rain, a thick, heavy, downpour that came with a wind that threatened to blow everything away. Alysia and Isobel ran inside the barracks where James Knight held the door open for them, and then locked it once they were in.

He walked over to Alysia and hugged her tightly, noticing for the first time the changes that had been done to her body. She was muscular, more than she was before she left, and she had a confidence he could feel just by being around her. Jasmine came up and got her hug and Alysia could see that she was healing from a deep cut.

She looked over at Tracy, who hung back as if she were embarrassed, so she crossed over to her and hugged her close, feeling the tiny bump that was her stomach when she did.

“I know that I have a brother or sister growing inside of you, Tracy. You don’t have to worry about it,” Alysia said. “I haven’t been the biggest supporter of your union, for obvious reasons, but it’s the biggest sign of hope that there is a baby being born out of so much death and destruction,” she said.

“Hope,” Tracy spat, and then turned her head. “So many lives lost to this mess. I saw the demons were in full retreat; does that mean that it’s over?” she asked, looking at Alysia with big blue, hopeful eyes.

“It is over for our world in terms of the invasion, but I was told that other things will spawn so we’re not totally out of the woods yet. The positive thing is that demons turning us into them and corrupting our loved ones are a thing of the past. Mankind as a whole can start the process of healing and rebuilding, and we have become one of the realms that survived the demon invasion.”

“What about you, CeeCee? What does this mean for you?” Tracy asked, and Alysia looked at her father and wondered if she should tell the truth or give them a palatable lie.

“You all won’t like this, but it was my choice, something I committed to do in order to save our world. There is a war about to take place on Yalem, the realm of the demons, and I must return there to fulfill my duty as a warrior.” She kept on looking at her father to see his reaction but James Knight merely smiled.

“I wish that you could take me with you, CeeCee. Take all of us, to stay together as a family. Things won’t be the same without your face, and life will be empty knowing that during my peace time, my daughter will be in another world fighting for a bunch of strangers,” he said.

“I won’t be fighting for a bunch of strangers. I will be fighting for Isobel and Jasmine’s freedom. I will be fighting to avenge the death of Koko, and I will be fighting to make sure that no other woman or man has to have their life destroyed by the raiding force of Chaos’s lost.” She looked at Isobel to let the words sink in.

“It was him, Izzy and Jazz. It was your lord Chaos that brought the lost here to my world. He did this to recruit survivors like me and Maria, to pit us against one another to see who would be strongest. It is why we must go back and destroy him. The Knights of Ert have given me their power and I want to use it to eliminate this would-be usurper to the throne.”

Isobel looked at Jasmine and then at Alysia. “But CeeCee, we are not free; he can pull us to his side at any time. It would be better for you to kill us, or chain us up during your attack. I don’t want to betray you but the blood of Chaos flows through me and I am his slave.”

The winds blew the tarp from the window and through the glass they could see the trees dancing from the thunderstorm. The fires that threatened to consume them all had been reduced to thick black smoke, and Alysia wondered if Maria had found shelter during it all.

“Come here Izzy, Jazz, come stand next to me,” Alysia said.

The girls stood next to her, and she pulled out Euphoria, ran her palm down the edge cutting her hand open, and then motioned for them to grab the hilt with her.

“Whatever happens, Dad, Tracy, let us suffer. And girls, no matter how much the Chaos blood fights back, hold on to the blade and don’t let go,” she said.

The two girls gripped the long hilt of the sword and Alysia’s blood coated their hands. The sword vibrated, confused by the touch of enemy hands and the evidence of pain within its true master. The spikes shot out into the three hands. Alysia was used to it so she merely closed her eyes, but Isobel squealed and Jasmine tried to yank her hand back. But the spikes were in and she could not take her hand away.

The fire of the transformation burned Isobel and Jasmine internally and they wailed a cry of pain and suffering that was almost unbearable as James Knight and Tracy looked on in horror. It looked as if Isobel’s brown complexion had turned blue; Jasmine was a pretty purple, and Alysia was all silver from the armor that had taken to her body.

“That is wild,” James Knight said as he hugged Tracy close. She couldn’t talk as she observed what she could only describe as magic come over the young girls as the sword grew black from whatever it was that was being drawn out of it.

When the ritual was finished and the black sword turned silver, the two girls released the blade and collapsed to the ground. Alysia opened her eyes as the armor retracted. She sheathed the sword and knelt to help them up.

“How do you feel?” she asked Jasmine, and the girl held her hand out in front of her and wiggled her fingers.

Isobel grabbed a mirror and looked at her eyes. The reddish glow was gone and her smile spoke volumes.

“We—we are free, Jasmine. We are free,” she said. The tall black girl looked around in wonderment, her face a mask of uncertainty and fear.

“He will come for us!” she exclaimed suddenly.

“I would like to see him try!” Alysia snapped, whipping out the sword so they could see the blade shine. “I faced down Chaos lord in his own hall with Euphoria. Isobel was there to see the fear in his eyes when it came to this sword making contact with him. He promised me your freedom back when I told him that I would fight in the war for Yalem. I am keeping to my promise and my honor, but Chaos knows no honor. He let you go, but he kept us all as his connected prisoners. What I have done now is to sever the ties. You can be your own people and make your own choices.”

She sheathed the sword and brushed back her curls roughly, then inhaled to calm herself. She looked down at her hand where the spikes had gone through. “Do not fear, Jasmine. Chaos has bigger problems than you and Isobel to worry about right now.”

“Thank you CeeCee,” the tall girl said, and bowed to her before walking back into the bedroom to lie down.

Isobel joined her, followed by Tracy, and Alysia grabbed a chair and handed it to her father. She grabbed one for herself and sat down, their silence broken only by the raindrops that pounded into the glass windows as if they meant to break them.

“I was told that once I finish my duty in Yalem, I would be given status and can move you all there to live out your lives. It could be a lie, since it came from Chaos, but I won’t be fighting for him when I go back,” she said as she took her father’s hand. “With the dangers of the wild, the limited resources, and the constant death that this world presents, I don’t know if you and Tracy want to remain here any longer, Dad. I can ask the head Ert, or whoever is in charge, to put you up while the conflict happens. Yalem is beautiful and peaceful; you can settle down there, rest those old warrior bones, and start protecting our new family.”

James Knight smiled at the thought and looked around as if to weigh his choices.

“You know, when you called me asking for help the day that creature had you on the roof, you were still my little CeeCee. Boy, it took everything within me to ask you to handle it, and your mother was giving me so much hell for babying you. She wanted you to grow up, to be strong like me. College was supposed to do that but for some reason you stayed sweet, adorable, and dependent. I liked it that way; you were always my little girl.”

He bounced her hands and looked around before looking at her with a new intensity in his eye.

“This craziness, this storm that hit us while you were still a young girl in college, it forced you to grow up, baby girl. Even calling you that seems odd to me now because you are the woman we had hoped that you would be. You’re mature, you’re taking charge, and you’re so strong that you told me all that mess about fighting in the demon world. And even though on the surface I want to resist, deep down I know that you’ll be okay.

“Look, CeeCee, we will survive wherever we go, so you don’t have to worry about any of it. The decision to go with you; well, I need to talk that over with Tracy. She has her own feelings about it and we have to respect that. The sort of damage those demons did to the world will take thousands of years to fix, and heat and cold will definitely be a problem. She knows all of this, but your demon world is an unknown. We have to weigh our odds, make a decision, and then we will let you know.”

Alysia nodded and looked outside at the rain. It was starting to flood certain areas and she wondered how long it would continue to pour.

“Go get some rest, Dad. You’ve been fighting forever, your eyes are bloodshot, and you’re struggling to breathe,” she said.

“Where are you going?” James Knight asked.

Alysia got up and unbuckled her sword. “I am going to take in the last bit of humanity that I will be seeing for quite some time,” she said.

Her father didn’t understand but he nodded and walked back into the bedroom to find his bed. Alysia waited for him to leave and then removed her pants and ragged tank top, and the boots from her feet. She walked out into the storm, feeling the water, like magical bullets pinging against her skin. She had always liked the rain, but this felt like heaven, and she ran around the barracks, feeling the wet grass in between her toes.

She thought of Koko, her strongest handmaiden, and of Jaime, who had passed before she could apologize. She remembered their talks and his conspiracy theories, how they assumed it was a manmade thing that produced the demons, giants and kreples. Jaime, her friend, the guy who could have been more. Tears burst from her eyes when she remembered how cruel she had been to the two of them before that fateful day when her father left her the note.

She fell to her knees, crying loudly. Then she lay on her back, letting the water wash away the tears, the pain, and the memory of everyone that was lost.

THE END

Visit Greg’s website at gregdragon.com

Massacre at Lonesome Ridge

(Lonesome Ridge Series Book #1)

By

Samantha Warren

Chapter 1

“Did you have lessons with your grandfather today?”

Little Bear’s nose wrinkled as he followed Summer Rain back from the river and he kicked at the dirt beneath his feet. “Yes,” he mumbled through his frown.

A tinkling laugh danced across the prairie and the young woman grinned at him. “It’s a good thing you don’t have to be the tribe’s shaman just yet. We would be in a lot of trouble.”

Little Bear ignored the comment and jogged up in front of her to stop her on the path. He brushed a strand of hair back from Summer Rain’s face and her cheeks colored slightly as she lowered her head and raised her dark eyes to him. Her raven black hair was done up in matching braids and she carried a full pot of water under one arm.

“I spoke with your father yesterday,” said Little Bear as he slipped the pot from her grasp and led her down the path away from the river.

“Oh?” Summer Rain plucked a daisy from the edge of the worn path and tucked it into one of her braids. “What about?”

The young man glanced back. She stood a few feet from him with her fingers clasped in front of her. The corner of her lips quivered as she fought back a smile. Little Bear took a step toward her, then another, until he was looking down at her. His knuckles brushed along her jawline. “You know what we were talking about.”

Summer Rain lost the battle against her smile and her lips broke into a grin. “What did he say?”

Little Bear tilted toward her and slipped his fingers around the back of her neck. “We will be wed at the next full moon.”

Before she could respond, he pressed his lips against hers. They were warm and sweet, exactly as he had always imagined. She leaned into him and returned the kiss briefly, but with a slight gasp, she pushed her hands against his chest to break their embrace.

“Not yet, Little Bear. We must wait.”

“Summer...” Little Bear reached for her, but she had already turned and started walking back toward the village. Water splashed onto the dusty ground as he trotted to catch up.

She rounded a curve in the path and disappeared behind the tall grasses for a moment. She was staring at the valley below with her hands pressed against her cheeks. Below them, their small village sprawled across the dip where three hills met.

He cocked his head to the side and slipped his free arm around her waist. “What—“

Summer Rain held up a hand. He followed her outstretched finger across the valley to the hill opposite them. Dozens of men on horseback were pouring into the village with their weapons drawn, mowing down anyone they encountered. The screams began, echoing to them, tearing into them.

Summer Rain took a step toward the chaos below as she screamed her mother’s name. Little Bear dropped the pot to the hard ground. He ignored the shards of clay that pelted the back of his legs and ripped small, jagged holes into his skin.

“No, Summer Rain.” He grabbed her and pulled her back to him, wrapping his arms around her tightly to keep her from pushing away.

“My family!” she cried as tears streamed down her face. She jerked against him and pounded his chest with her fists. “Let me go.”

“We will do them no good if we are dead!” He gripped her so tight that the skin on her arms went white around his fingers.

Little Bear glanced from the face of his beloved toward the village. Their shouts had drawn the attention of a small band of men wearing the ragged uniform of Confederate cavalry. The horses were plowing up the hill in their direction.

“Hide!” he hissed as he pushed Summer Rain toward the tall grass. They could make a run for it if they stayed low and used the grass for cover.

Instead, she tripped over a rock and fell to her knees in the dirt. He leaned over and grabbed her arm, hauling her to her feet.

“Little Bear!” she cried, but he heard the thundering hooves racing up behind them a half a second before she did and was already reaching for a weapon. He swooped to the ground and snatched up a rock that fit nicely in the palm on his hand. He spun in a circle, using his momentum to whip the rock through the air. It cracked into the skull of the soldier on the lead horse. He didn’t stop to watch the man fall. He reached for Summer Rain and shoved her in front of him as they ran at top speed through the grass toward the treeline. It was their only chance at survival.

They reached the first group of trees just ahead of the horses. Summer Rain ducked behind a large pine as Little Bear ran toward a thick branch laying on the ground. His fingers closed around it and he started to swing it up and back when something bit into his side. With a howl, he fell to one knee. Spittle covered him as a horse blew past him and prepared to swing around. Its rider was looking back with vicious glee in his eyes and the sword in his hand was dripping with blood.

Little Bear pressed his free hand to his side. His fingers came away dark and sticky. Summer Rain was cowering beside him, her back to the tree and her terrified eyes locked on the soldier that advanced on them.

“Run,” Little Bear commanded as he forced himself to his feet. The branch shook in his hand as he stepped out to put himself between his wife-to-be and the approaching killer.

“But Little Bear—“

“Go, please.” His voice was calm and soft, but she did not argue. He heard her light footsteps disappear into the woods behind him, taking his heart with her.

The soldier approached on the horse. His sword bounced in his hand and flicked droplets of blood onto the grass beneath him. He spoke foreign words that Little Bear could not understand, but he didn’t need to know what the man said. He knew they were a threat. Both his and Summer Rain’s lives depended on this miniature battle.

The soldier grinned and smashed his spurs into the horse’s flanks. The beast snorted as it launched itself forward. Little Bear swung, not at the soldier, but at the horse. The branch connected with the horse’s front leg with a sickening crunch and the animal plunged nose-first into the dirt with an ear-shattering screech. The thick branch snapped with the impact, but Little Bear had expected it. He threw himself over the thrashing animal onto the soldier. The man was flailing on the ground with one leg pinned under the wounded beast. His screams were cut short as the sharpened branch punched through his throat and burrowed into the ground beneath.

Little Bear pushed himself to his feet. He leaned his hands on his knees and took several deep breaths. A glint of metal just underneath the horse caught his eye. It was the soldier’s sword. When the beast once again tried fruitlessly to rise, Little Bear darted in and grabbed the weapon before he could be crushed. He ran into the woods as the screams of the horse continued behind him. He kept his eyes on the ground as he moved among the trees. Summer Rain’s footprints were barely visible but, like all the men in his tribe, he was trained to hunt. She ran an erratic path, darting around and between trees, heading back toward the village. He silently cursed her thoughtlessness. She should have run to the river, to safety, not back to find a family that was already lost.

The tree line loomed ahead. Deerskin and black braids cowered between two trees, surrounded by a handful of mounted men. As his heart sank into the pit of his stomach, Little Bear’s hunter instincts kicked in. He moved quickly and quietly toward the love of his life. The handle of the sword was heavy in his sweaty palm and he gripped it so tight that his fingers turned white.

He circled around a copse of thin trees as he edged toward the small gathering. Voices echoed toward him, but he was not close enough to understand any of them. One of the men dismounted, swaggering as he sheathed his pistol. He wasn’t one of the soldiers. His white shirt was dirty and stained, and he looked like he hadn’t washed in weeks. He spoke to Summer Rain with a cruel sneer on his lips. She backed away until a large tree stopped her retreat. She was hemmed in; there was no escape.

Little Bear was close enough now that her fear was overpowering. The horses danced and snorted and he knew they could smell it, too. He was within reach of the nearest horse, but his attention remained on the dismounted man. With a swift flick of his arm, he sent the sword flying. It tumbled through the air with little grace, but it hit its mark anyway. The man stopped in his tracks with an odd jerking motion. One hand came up, scrabbling at his back awkwardly as he twisted his body. His fingers closed around the hilt of the sword and pulled it from his body, but it was too late. Little Bear had buried it between his shoulder blades and pierced his lungs. Blood bubbled from his lips as he fell to the ground, the sword dropping uselessly beside him.

The rider nearest Little Bear, another of the former Confederate soldiers, spun his horse as he looked for his leader’s attacker. Little Bear launched himself from his hiding spot and sailed through the air. He wrapped his arms around the man and dragged him to the ground. His fist burned with briefly pain as it connected with the soldier’s nose, but adrenaline pumped through his veins and pushed away any thought but vengeance. His fist drew back and slammed down without his command, smashing again and again into the man’s already pulped face.

“Little Bear!”

His head jerked toward the sound. Summer Rain was being dragged toward a horse by one man as another rode toward him with his pistol drawn. The weapon was between him and Summer Rain. Little Bear’s legs carried him toward his love, the gun, and certain death. The man raised the weapon and pulled back the hammer, ready to bring an end to Little Bear. Time slowed as Little Bear ran past the horse. The gun fired, the man’s arm jerked, smoke left the barrel. Little Bear waited for the bullet to pierce him, for the inevitable pain, but it did not come. He pulled up short as the man on the horse tumbled to the ground with an arrow buried in his back.

Little Bear grabbed a knife from the man’s belt and raced toward Summer Rain. She was screaming and struggling against her captor. When the man saw Little Bear, he pulled his own knife and settled it against Summer Rain’s throat. He spoke to Little Bear, wiggling the blade a little to send rivulets of blood coursing down Summer Rain’s throat.

Little Bear knew what he wanted. He wanted the young man to stop advancing, to let him take Summer Rain as his slave, or worse. Little Bear would rather see her die. He kept moving and the man began shouting. The man raised the knife, ready to stab Summer Rain and end her life. Her eyes met Little Bear’s. She would die with honor. She would not be a slave or a whore. She would end it herself before that happened. She moved toward the blade, ready to impale herself, but it tumbled from the man’s hand. He blinked repeatedly, his arms dropping to his sides. His mouth worked ceaselessly, unable to form any words as he sank to his knees. Several seconds passed in surreal silence until he tumbled to the side and lay still.

“Come, quickly.” An older warrior that Little Bear recognized only by reputation was on a painted steed, a nocked bow in his hands. Little Bear grabbed Summer Rain and ran toward the nearest horse. He leapt on and pulled her up behind him. As they followed the warrior away from the village, she wrapped her arms around his waist and cried silent tears onto his back.

Chapter 2

Charity Thomas glanced at the clock ticking on the wall as she shoved the needle through the thin fabric she held in her hands. “Ouch!”

“Charity?” Her mother looked up from the dress she was adorning with tiny, glittering white beads. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah.” Charity grumbled as she sucked on her throbbing thumb and set the unfinished dress on the table. “I have to go. We’re picking out flowers today.”

Her mother looked at her with tired eyes. “Do you have to? The Engels need these by the end of the week. Please, Charity.” Charity’s father had died years before when a train car derailed while he was on a business trip. The poor woman had been struggling to raise her children on a seamstress’s wage ever since. It made Charity sick. After her father’s death, they were put out of their house and had to live on the streets for some time. It was a dark, cold night when Charity decided she would never end up in her mother’s shoes. She worked hard alongside her mother to put food on the table and keep her and her sister from starving, but her dreams were bigger than that. She wanted to do more than just survive. She wanted to thrive. Her dreams were starting to fade, though, with every setback and struggle. Then she met David.

“I can’t, I’m sorry. His mother is expecting me and she isn’t kind when I’m late. I have to go.” Charity gave her mother a quick hug and kissed her on the cheek. Guilt threatened to bubble up in her gut, but she pushed it down. She would soon be moving out of the small shop/apartment and into high society. And then her mother wouldn’t have to worry so much about making ends meet.

Charity stepped out the door and bounced along the sidewalk, flouncing her skirts as she walked. They weren’t fancy, but they weren’t the worst she’d seen, and she made them herself. That was more than most women could say. She was still certain that David’s mother would look at her clothing with contempt, as she always did. But soon, very soon, Charity would be married into that family and be able to afford dresses that she had only dreamed of.

She rounded the corner onto Sixth Street. The shopping district was her favorite place in the whole world. When she was younger, she would spend hours on end strolling along the sidewalks, staring at all of the beautiful clothes displayed in the windows, dreaming of how they would look on her as she spun in the mirror. And then her dreams came true. The greatest day of her life was when David surprised her with a shopping spree in R.H. Macy & Co. She had felt like a princess then. And now she was going to look like one, too.

Charity smiled at the harried pedestrians as they passed her on the sidewalk. They returned her smile with frowns of annoyance. But some day soon, they would no longer look at her like she was a waif. They would see her and immediately know she was Charity Banks, daughter-in-law to one of the richest men in New York City. She would walk into a store and the employees would flock to her. The manager would fawn about her, treating her like she was royalty.

She was so caught up in her daydreams that she almost walked right past the little boutique tucked away between two larger buildings. It was an exclusive shop with no sign out front to mark its existence. Only the best of the best were admitted. David’s mother knew the owner, of course, and a little over two months ago, Charity had first set foot into a shop that far exceeded anything her mother had ever known. The girl’s nerves had been tied into such tight knots that she almost vomited on the seamstress who was taking her measurements. But this time, she walked up to the door and pulled the string for the bell firmly, determined to hold onto her confidence. A pleasant tinkle echoed through the wood seconds before a narrow rectangular window opened beside the door.

“Yes?” Shadowed eyes peered at her with suspicion through the small gap.

“Hello. I’m Charity Banks. I’m here to try on my dress for my wedding.”

The eyes disappeared and papers shuffled inside for several minutes before the face returned. “You mean Charity Thomas?” The voice was snotty and knowing, emphasizing her last name with thinly veiled disgust.

Charity clenched her teeth and bit back her own snide comment. “It will be Banks soon enough. My mother-in-law is already inside. Let me in.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Please.”

Another long moment of silence stretched out, but she eventually heard the click of the lock. She grabbed the handle and yanked the door open. She took a deep breath to still her growing agitation and stepped into the shadowy interior. The attendant just inside the door smirked at her before showing her to the main room.

It was stifling inside, no cooler than the sweltering heat out on the sidewalk, but fresh bouquets of flowers lined the walls and gave the little sitting room a pleasant floral aroma. It was a nice change from the smell of sewage and horse dung that was the typical odor of the city.

David’s mother, Catherine, relaxed on a velvet chaise in the middle of the room. She held a glass that was half full of wine in one hand and waved an intricately painted fan in the other. “Charity, darling, you’ve finally arrived. We’ve been waiting,” she oozed in that voice that Charity could barely tolerate. “Please, take a seat.”

Opposite the chaise was a matching loveseat. Catherine’s daughter, Melody, stretched across it like a pin-up model posing for her first shot. She also had a glass of wine in her hand, but it was empty save a few drops in the bottom. An overstuffed leather chair rounded out the trio of seats arranged in the middle of the room. It was occupied by Rebecca, the heavily pregnant wife of David’s older brother, Marcus.

Charity glanced around. Four small kitchen chairs were arranged along one wall. Three of them were occupied by the attendants of the three ladies lounging around. The only remaining seat was with them. Charity forced a smile and bowed her head toward Catherine slightly.

“Thank you, but I will stand for now. I must keep my figure for the wedding, you know.” The comment was meant to garner a laugh, as Charity was already too thin from lack of proper nutrition, but the only positive reaction she received was a small titter from Rebecca’s attendant, Sarah.

Catherine’s smile flickered and a dangerous light entered her eyes. It was gone in an instant, but Charity had not missed it. “Of course, my dear,” Catherine said as mock concern bled into her voice. “It must be difficult to do so, being stuck in front of a sewing machine all day. How tedious.”

Charity barely stopped herself from growling out loud at the woman who had treated her like dirt since they first met. Her future mother-in-law didn’t need to know that, until David came along, her family never had enough to eat. She didn’t need to know that her mother barely made rent every week. Charity narrowed her eyes at the spiteful, arrogant woman and almost laughed. Knowing Catherine, she already knew all that anyway. She was the queen of gossip. As much as Charity despised her and as many times as she wanted to smack her, she almost envied the social queen.

Charity’s forced smile grew bigger and became real. Oh no, she didn’t envy her. One day, Charity vowed, she would show Catherine Banks what it really meant to be high society. Charity would treat the people she met with respect and they would all love her. Everyone would look to her, Charity Banks, for advice on the best places to eat, the most reliable help, what dresses were in fashion. No, Catherine could have her moment now. Charity would wait patiently. She just needed that ring on her finger and then she could change things. She could show the world what Catherine was really like and prove that she wasn’t just David’s latest mistake.

A door behind the chaise opened and the owner of the boutique entered the room. She wore a simple pantsuit and had her black hair pulled up into a severe bun. She knelt beside David’s mother and kissed her on both cheeks. “Catherine, my darling, so good to see you. How are you feeling? Is this heat getting to you?” Her accent was thick and very French.

“No, no, not at all,” Catherine responded.

Charity knew the woman was lying. David had little sense for when to keep a secret and he had already told her that the heat always did a number on his mother. She would lay in bed with servants waving large fans over her, complaining about the horrible stickiness of the city and begging her husband to move them to the country. But whenever he suggested they visit their manor in upstate New York, she would come up with some excuse to not leave the city. Whether the woman was afraid of travel or just didn’t want to be out of the spotlight, Charity did not know.

The French woman, Victoire, greeted the other women in turn before finally focusing on Charity. “Ah, the future Mrs. Banks.” She beamed at the young woman in front of her and clasped Charity’s shoulders in her hands. “Come, my darling, see what I have come up with for you.”

Charity followed her from the room, thankful when the door closed on the watchful hawks behind her. They entered a large room that Charity had never been in before. It was filled with some of the most magnificent dresses she had ever seen in varying stages of completion. The skill and costly materials were far beyond anything her mother had ever handled.

Victoire walked up to a row of lilac dresses that would have been pretty if not for the color. “These,” she said as she waved her hand over one, “are for your bridesmaids. What do you think?”

Charity forced herself to smile. “They’re lovely. But I thought we discussed using black. Who ordered them?”

The woman cocked her head to the side. “Why, Catherine, of course. She said your colors were lilac and violet.”

Charity couldn’t hold back her snorting laugh.

Victoire sighed and gave Charity a knowing look. “Those aren’t your colors, are they?”

“No. I made the mistake of telling her purple was my least favorite color.”

“Typical Catherine. She did the same to Rebecca, you know.” The seamstress plucked at a dress. “Oh dear. With the wedding so close, I’m not sure I can redo them in this style.”

Charity thought about the work the woman would have to do to remake all the dresses in time. Her own mother was scrambling to finish the gowns for an entire wedding party even as they spoke. “No, don’t worry about it. It’s all right. I don’t want you to do have to do more work than necessary. It’s not important.” Charity gave her a winning smile.

Victoire returned it two-fold. “Thank you, dear. I really am very sorry. Now let’s take a look at your dress.” She ducked between two of the bridesmaids dresses. On the other side, Charity found the most beautiful gown she had ever seen. It truly was made for a princess. Tiny diamonds were stitched into the bodice and lace adorned the neckline. The train wrapped around the base of the stand and glittered with matching jewels scattered along its length.

Charity was in heaven. She walked around the dress, brushing her fingers lightly against the smooth fabric. “It’s so beautiful,” she cooed as tears welled up in her eyes.

Victoire beamed. “I am so glad you approve, my darling. I hope it makes up for the bridesmaids dresses.”

The young woman nodded emphatically. “Oh, absolutely. It’s more than I ever could have hoped for. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Victoire grinned and clapped her hands. “Fabuleux. Let us get you into it so we can make the final adjustments.”

When all the adjustments were noted, Victoire herded Charity back out into the main room, still wearing the wedding gown. As the young woman waltzed through the door, all heads turned in her direction. The two younger ladies rose, proclaiming their love for the dress in happy squeals. Catherine, however, remained seated. Her lips held an icy smile, but she sent a stinging glare in Victoire’s direction. Her eyes held clear disappointment. Victoire intentionally avoided her the entire time Charity was showing off the dress.

When they were done and Charity had changed back into her boring, common outfit, Catherine finally rose from the chaise. “Rebecca, Melody, why don’t you ladies take Charity to the flower boutique? I will be along briefly. I just need to speak with Victoire for a moment.”

As they left, Charity shot Victoire a glance. The woman smiled at her and nodded. She knew what was coming and she was ready for it. Charity returned the smile warmly, a silent thank you to the woman who had wanted her to be happy in spite of the inevitable blow-back.

She followed the other ladies down the streets until they found the flower shop that would be supplying the flowers for the wedding. Charity let the others pick the arrangements, having already lost her choice in colors anyway. She had her dress. That was all she needed. She would sleep well that night.

Chapter 3

“Gray Wolf, set up a perimeter.” North Wind pulled the small band of survivors to a stop at the edge of a river, just inside a circle of trees. Aside from Summer Rain and Little Bear, the only others who had escaped the massacre were part of North Wind’s band of warriors.

The young woman slid from the horse and sank onto a fallen tree trunk as tears poured down her face once again. Little Bear dismounted and sat down beside her. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her close. She rested her head on his shoulder.

“What will we do?” Her voice was soft and barely reached his ears.

He watched as the warriors set up a small camp with practiced efficiency. “I don’t know,” he said, and he truly meant it.

Summer Rain sat up quickly and dropped to her knees before him. Her fingers twined through his and gripped them so tight they turned white. Her dark eyes glistened as she pleaded with him. “You can do something, Little Bear. You can call on the spirits, speak to them. They can help us.”

“Boy, come.” North Wind stood behind Summer Rain with his arms crossed. His long dark hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail to reveal an ugly scar that ran from his ear, down his neck, and across his chest, stopping just before his rib cage. It was a mark of pride and he refused to hide it.

Little Bear rose, jerking his hands from Summer Rain’s, and followed the warrior deeper into the woods and out of earshot of Summer Rain. The older man stopped and stared at him hard for several seconds before speaking.

“Why were you not in the village when the men came?” His tone wasn’t accusatory, merely questioning.

Little Bear glanced back to where Summer Rain sat on the log with her head in her hands. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed. “I was helping her gather water.”

The warrior snorted, but a small smile played across his lips. “Yes, gather water. I used to help the young women of our village gather water, as well.” He paused and looked around, watching his men for several seconds before he continued. “Our village is gone, Little Bear. Your grandfather and father are both dead. I saw them die trying to protect your mother and sisters. We are all that is left. One woman, a son of a shaman, and half a band of warriors. We are finished. We will roam the land without a home. You and your woman may conceive a child, but it will have no family, no place to be raised the way it should.” When North Wind looked at him, the warrior’s eyes glistened with unshed tears. “She is right, you know. We must give ourselves over to the spirits and ask for their help. We must avenge this wrongdoing, as best we can. Will you help us? Will you stand with us?”

Little Bear stared at the warrior with his mouth open. “I am no shaman. I don’t have the proper training. I cannot do what my grandfather could.”

North Wind gripped the younger man’s shoulder gently and bowed his head so he could look Little Bear in the eye. “We need you. We have nothing left. This is the only way.”

Little Bear sighed and walked a few paces away from North Wind. He ran a hand through his hair and looked at Summer Rain sitting by the log. She cried for her lost family, for friends she would never see again, for a life that was ripped from her without warning. “Very well. I will do what I can.”

“Good. We will go back to the village once we have rested. We will track the men to their homes. We will slaughter them and their families the way they slaughtered ours.”

Little Bear’s hands shook with excitement and fear. “What do you need me to do?”

North Wind looked at him once more. His face was grim. “Call upon the spirits. Ask them for help. We need them.”

The young shaman fought to keep his hands from shaking. “I will do it tonight. I need to gather some materials first.”

“Go. I will have a fire ready when you return. And Little Bear...”

Little Bear looked back as he turned to leave.

“Thank you.”

The young man paused for a moment before nodding. His heart pounded in his chest and fear coursed through his veins. He didn’t have the proper training to call on the spirits without his grandfather’s help. It could go terribly wrong. But what else could he do? He was not a warrior. He could shoot a bow well enough, but he was trained to hunt, not for combat. He would be useless to the group, little better than a woman. He had no choice.

Little Bear walked slowly back to where Summer Rain sat on the log. He rested a hand on her shoulder. “I am going to gather wood for a fire and food for us to eat. You stay here. The warriors will take care of you.”

Summer Rain narrowed her eyes at him. Did she know what he was planning? What would she say? But she just nodded and put her head back in her hands.

He stood up and walked into the woods. His eyes scanned the ground as he stepped carefully through the forest. Every so often, he found something he was looking for and would stoop to gather moss, flowers, or some other essential ingredient for his ceremony. He needed an eagle’s feather, but he did not know where to find one, so he settled on a turkey’s feather instead. He hoped the spirits would not notice the lack of salt, either.

When he had all the items he could find, he found his way back to the little clearing they were calling home. North Wind was stoking a fire in the middle of a dirt patch. Summer Rain was sitting on the ground next to it, plucking apart a piece of grass. Little Bear piled the items behind a tree and joined them. Summer Rain’s eyebrows twitched when he came back empty-handed, but again she said nothing. North Wind gave him a nod and stood up as two of his warriors entered the small clearing. They carried skins full of water and several small dead animals. One of the men thrust the animals toward the young woman with a grunt. She gave him a baleful look as she took them from the warrior, but she cleaned and skewered them before laying them over the fire.

While she tended to dinner, Little Bear went over and over the ceremony in his head. He was forgetting parts of it, he was sure of that. But he hoped the spirits would heed his call and forgive his missteps in favor of righting the many wrongs done to his family. His grandfather was a favorite of theirs, according to many. They would want to avenge him, to see his grandson cared for and protected. The young man was lost deep in thought when Summer Rain called to him.

“Little Bear, dinner is ready.”

He glanced up. The sun had fallen far below the trees and the sky had turned a deep, dark blue. The young shaman sat down with North Wind and several of the warriors as they shared the small meal. When it was finished and the sentries were fed, Summer Rain curled up behind the log away from the rest of them.

Little Bear sat beside her and waited, listening to her breathing as it slowed. When he was sure she was fast asleep, he rose and gathered all his ingredients. He knelt near the fire and sorted through the pile. With as much care as he could manage, he arranged the collection the way his grandfather had taught him. He surveyed his handiwork and nodded with satisfaction. The spirits should be pleased well enough. He hoped.

Next, he walked down to the river and slathered mud on his face and arms, then he returned to the fire. Raising his arms above him, Little Bear took several deep breaths and closed his eyes. He rehearsed the ceremony once more in his mind, going over each detail as best he could. Fear settled into his gut. He grew up hearing stories of clan members who had tried to call on the spirits without first earning their respect. What would happen to him if they did not accept his offerings?

He opened his eyes. North Wind watched nearby from the shadows of the trees. It was time.

Little Bear stared into the fire and began softly chanting the words his grandfather had made him repeat over and over. The young man had never actually performed this ceremony before. He had only ever watched as it was done. He remembered his grandfather going into a trance, speaking to the air, to creatures that were not there. The old man would sway and call out their names, asking them to come to him.

The young shaman rocked on his heels and waved his arms over his head as the words flowed from his lips. He stumbled over several of them as his tongue tangled in his mouth. If his grandfather were still here, the ancient man would admonish him for not practicing enough, for being disrespectful. Deep in Little Bear’s heart, he felt the dull ache grow. His grandfather wasn’t here. He would never be here again. He was all alone.

He called to the spirits with renewed force, with renewed fury. “Oh powerful ones, I call you. Come before me and hear my request.”

He danced to the side in an intricate pattern and picked up a feather from where it lay. A turkey feather, not the required eagle feather. He waved it around over his head. “I offer you this token as a sign of my obedience and faith. Come to me. Come heed my words.”

He repeated the gesture again and again until all the items around the fire had been offered. Then he stood in his original spot and waited, chanting continually with his arms over his head. He could see North Wind out of the corner of his eye. The warrior waited with him, his face a mask of stone.

Then the man was gone. The area around Little Bear’s periphery vision disappeared, fading into pure, impenetrable blackness. The fire in front of him sparked and sputtered, then it exploded into a roaring orange and black tornado.

The young man stumbled backward and tripped over a rock. His chanting came to a halt as landed hard on his backside. He stared into the flames with wide, disbelieving eyes.

A woman stepped toward him through the smoke. Her body was created from the swirling black mist, her hair a wall of flame that floated behind and around her. She towered over him. Her red eyes burned into him, through him.

“Who dares to call my brethren forth from the abyss?” Her voice reverberated through his bones and set his teeth chattering against his will. An ache spread throughout his body, giving him the strong urge to curl into a ball and hide until she disappeared.

Instead, he scrambled to his knees and prostrated himself before her. “I... I do. I call upon you,” he mumbled into the wind and roar of the fire. “I need your help.”

The woman’s foot stopped a mere inch from his face and she leaned over. He could feel her heat burning the hair from the back of his neck, but he did not look up. He couldn’t. He was frozen with fear.

“And what gives you the right? What gives you, a scrawny little nothing of a child, the nerve to demand my presence?”

Her words tore through him, setting his insides aflame.

He gritted his teeth and spoke. “I am the grandson of the Great Flying Eagle. I am his successor. He taught me the ways of the shaman. I was to take his place.”

She snorted and small drops of fire landed on Little Bear’s back. He bit down on a scream, refusing to show the smallest sign of weakness. “You are not a descendent of the Great Flying Eagle. He is a man of honor, a man who understands our ways. He would never insult us like this.”

Fear surged through Little Bear and he rose to his knees despite every instinct that told him not to. “No, you don’t understand,” he cried. He dragged his eyes up to meet hers and immediately regretted it. His face was on fire. His insides were melting. He was sure everything would soon come pouring out of his body, leaving him to die in a puddle of his own blood.

He pressed on. He had no choice. “My grandfather is dead. The Great Flying Eagle is dead. All my people are dead. I call on the spirits, on you, for help. I need to avenge them. I need to make it right. Please, help me hunt down the men who murdered my village and make them beg for mercy before I peel the skin from their bones.”

A slow smile grew on the gray woman’s face. Her mouth was a pit of flame. “Avenge? I do not hear vengeance in your voice, boy. I hear ‘I’ in your every word. You do not call upon us for the greater good of mankind. You call on us to protect your pitiful pride.”

“No!” Little Bear found himself standing. He took a step toward the woman. She was still taller than him by a full head and shoulders, but he would not back down. “I need your help. You must give it to me. You cannot deny me this request.”

Her smile blossomed into a cheerful grin that made Little Bear shiver despite the overwhelming heat coming off of her. Her laughter boomed across the forest. “Very well. You want my help?”

He pressed his lips together and nodded, hoping that his luck would hold.

She reached out for him and trailed a finger across his cheek. It throbbed with a pain he had never before known and he gritted his teeth together to stifle the scream that was burbling in his throat. “You shall have my help, little one,” she cooed as her eyes blazed. “I will give you everything you need to seek revenge on those who harmed your people. You will be almost unstoppable.”

Little Bear’s entire body was shaking uncontrollably. “Thank you,” he forced out through chattering teeth.

The woman snickered. “You are most welcome, boy. Have fun.” She chuckled heartily as she walked back into the flames and disappeared.

The black around Little Bear faded and the clearing became visible once again. His eyesight was blurry, but he could see North Wind was still standing on the edge of his vision. The young shaman shivered and collapsed to his knees. He took several deep breaths to steady himself before he stood up to face the warrior.

“It is done.”

***

North Wind watched as Little Bear met with the spirit. The warrior could not see into Little Bear’s vision, but he looked on as the weak boy convulsed on the ground and vomited up blood before collapsing into a heap. The shaman lay very still for a very long time. North Wind was certain Little Bear was dead, but when he took a step forward, the boy stirred.

Then Little Bear rose and faced the older man. North Wind’s hand went to his blade and his jaw dropped. The boy’s eyes were gone, replaced by black pits of nothingness. Blood streamed down his face from the open holes, burning dark trails across his face, neck, and chest. His normally tan skin held the gray pallor of death. His teeth were stained with blood when he spoke. Even the air around the young shaman felt wrong, like a sickness had been cast upon him.

As Little Bear walked toward him, North Wind drew his knife and prepared for the worst.

Chapter 4

Sheriff Connor McClane yawned as he leaned one shoulder against the post outside his jailhouse. His eyes felt gritty from a severe lack of good, solid sleep, but the rising sun refused to let him crawl back into bed. Not that he’d want to, anyway. His recurring dreams were not a place he wanted to revisit. Connor pushed himself away from the post and buried the heel of one hand in an eye as he stomped back into the jailhouse.

Ed Finch dozed on the floor near the bars of one of three small cells, sleeping off the excess drink from the night before. Connor was sure he spent more nights in the cell than out of it, but Finch was harmless otherwise. He was loud and obnoxious when he had a little too much whiskey, but he would never hurt anyone.

McClane glanced back out the door. It was still quiet that early in the morning. Only a couple people wandered the street. He watched as Lily Sacks shut the door to the newspaper office and then he walked over to his desk. Plopping down in the chair, he glanced at the door one more time before reaching for the bottom drawer. Several bottles clanked together as the drawer slid open. He picked one that was half empty and pulled it out.

“Eh! Give us a sip, would ya?”

Connor turned to glare at Finch. “Go back to sleep. You’ve had enough.”

With a grumble and several insults slung at Connor’s long-dead mother, Finch rolled over in the mess he had left on the floor. Connor waited until he heard the telltale snore before he propped his feet up on the table and leaned back in his chair. He pulled a long swig from the bottle, then tilted his hat down over his eyes.

“Might as well move his stuff in.”

Connor jerked awake and nearly sent his chair flying backward. He just saved the bottle in his hand from tipping over and righted himself with several muttered curses. The bottle thudded heavily on the desk as he pushed his hat up away from his eyes. He squinted toward the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the bright sun as it streamed around the shadowy figure standing there.

“Cora,” he mumbled as he took in the shape of flouncy skirts and the round face. Her dress was a bright cerulean blue and the sleeves hung off the shoulders seductively.

The dancing girl trounced into the room and propped a hip on the corner of his desk. “You sound so happy to see me,” she teased. With a practiced deftness, she moved the bottle well out of his reach as she placed the basket she carried onto the desk. “I brought you breakfast. You look like you need it. Rough night?”

Connor grunted and yawned. Cora laughed as she pulled a metal cup and a carafe full of coffee from the basket. She poured a cup of hot black liquid into the mug and pushed it toward the sheriff. “Drink up, little brother.”

As he sipped the coffee, Cora pulled out a tin plate and began arranging other items on it. Cornbread, a couple hard boiled eggs, some fried sausage. Connor picked up a piece of sausage and munched it between sips of coffee. Cora pulled out another package and unwrapped more cornbread as she walked over to the occupied cell.

“Finch,” she called sweetly through the bars. “Wakey wakey.”

The old man didn’t move. She reached a booted foot through the bars and prodded him in the ribs. He grunted and rolled over, but didn’t wake up. With an exasperated sigh, Cora walked to the bucket sitting next to the cells and drew out some water. She carefully maneuvered the dripping scoop over Finch’s trousers and tipped it up. He sputtered and swore as he swatted at his crotch, but eventually pulled himself into a sitting position.

“Bah, it’s just you.” He glared at her with mock dislike, but he happily accepted the cornbread she tossed to him.

She propped a hand her hip and affected a mock pout. “What do you mean ‘just me’? You seemed awful happy to see me last night, Mr. Finch.”

Ed grumbled. “ ‘Cause o’ you, I always end up with less money ‘n I start out with. Yer a devil woman.”

Cora leaned over and tweaked his cheek through the bars. “My dear Mr. Finch, you never complain about parting with your money when you’re doing it.”

She tossed him a wink and sauntered back over to the desk, her heels clicking soundly on the wooden floor the entire way.

“Why do you have to do that?” Connor sighed at his older sister and shook his head.

Cora’s grin fell and she crossed her arms as she narrowed her eyes at Connor. “Do what, dear brother?” It was a challenge to start an argument they had had too many times before and he couldn’t help but rise to the bait.

He waved a hand at her dress. “That. Wearin’ that getup. It’s too damn early in the morning to be doin’ that whorin’ stuff.”

Cora’s lips pulled into a snarl and her nostrils flared. Her hands balled into fists and shook as she fought the urge to slap him. “I am not a whore, Connor McClane, and you would do well to never call me that again.”

Connor held up a hand in surrender. “Calm down. I wasn’t calling you a whore. I just meant...” He sighed and changed tactics. “I just worry about you is all. You’re my sister, Cora. I almost lost you once. I don’t want to do it again.”

She forced a smile onto her face and settled back onto the desk. “I know, and I appreciate all you’ve done for me. After Michael left for the war, I don’t know what I would have done without your help. And when I got sick, and the kids, when I lost them... if you hadn’t been there for me, I would have died. I’m sure of it.” She reached out a hand and he gripped her fingers gently.

Silence fell over them for a moment as they both remembered the day Connor went to check on Cora. She lived miles outside of Lonesome Ridge on a ranch owned by her and her husband. Michael Monroe had left her to run it alone when he went off to fight for the South in the Civil War. She was six months pregnant at the time with her third child and had been against slavery since she was a child. She had begged him not to go, but he ignored her pleas.

Two years later, sickness came to the ranch fast and furious. When Connor finally came for his weekly check-in, two of her three children were already dead, taken by the fever, and she and her eldest daughter were not faring much better. He found them huddled together in a corner, shivering as sweat poured down their bodies. The sheriff brought them to town, but it was too late for the little girl. She died on the trip in. The animals had suffered greatly with Cora out of commission and the ranch fell into disrepair. When Cora was healthy again, she took up dancing at the saloon to make enough money to support herself until her husband came home. When he did, he was a different man, a broken man.

“I’m a grown woman,” Cora said to break the sadness that threatened to overwhelm them. “And I can take care of myself, Connor. I need to take care of myself. I make good money at the saloon and Neil Avery takes good care of me. He makes sure nothing bad happens and I help him sell more drink.”

“Ain’t that the truth of it.”

Cora shot a glare at Ed Finch to silence him before she continued. “Look, you’re the only family I have left, and I know you worry about me, but I worry about you, too.” She picked up the nearly empty bottle and wiggled it in front of his face.

The sheriff rolled his eyes in irritation, but refused to cave to Cora’s taunting. He had his vices, just like everyone else. At least, that’s what he tried to tell himself when he wasn’t deep in the bottle.

“Amos and I are headin’ over to the Gaines’ place today,” he said to change the subject as he tore his eyes away from the sloshing liquid in front of him.

Cora stiffened and set the bottle down. “Just the two of you? Are you sure that’s a good idea? I don’t trust those boys as far as I can throw ‘em. Especially that darned Jedidiah.”

Connor snorted a laugh. “I remember a day when you thought Jed was the greatest guy in the west.”

His sister’s lips tightened into a thin white line. “Yes, well, we all change. And he did not change for the better. As much as I hate to say it, it’s a good thing we went to live with Aunt Ivy after Ma and Pa died, to get away from them. I can’t imagine what would have happened to you had you boys stayed friends.”

Connor bit his lip. Jed Gaines was yet another subject he didn’t like discussing. The morning was not starting out very well for him. His eyes roved his desk until they found the bottle. It was on the other side of Cora, just out of his reach. He wouldn’t be able to get to it before she did. He was contemplating the risk of pulling another bottle out of his desk when the door opened again.

“Morning, Amos,” Cora sang as she rose from the desk. “How are you, darlin’?”

The young deputy blushed from the collar of his shirt all the way up to the tips of his ears. He doffed his hat and offered the dancing girl a little bow of the head. “Mornin’, Miss Cora. I’m doing’ all right. I hope you’re well.” He shuffled his feet like a school boy with a serious crush, but didn’t step further into the office.

“I’m doing just fine. You’re so sweet for askin’.” She gave him a winning grin that upped the pink in his cheeks by several degrees.

Amos coughed. “I’ll, uh, I’ll wait for you outside, sheriff.”

The sheriff fought back a grin. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

The deputy left and Cora clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggle.

“You’re so mean to him.”

She scoffed. “How am I mean? He loves it.”

Connor rose and adjusted his rumpled trousers. “He loves you, you mean. And you’re never going to feel the same.”

“I’m never going to feel that way about any man. Not after Michael. Not after what he did.” She shrugged. “By the way, it’s almost noon, not early morning. You were sleeping, so I waited awhile outside. You better get a move on if you want to hit up the Gaines’ place before dark.”

Connor strapped on his gun belt and grabbed the ring of keys off the hook on the desk. “Come on, Finch. Time to leave.”

The old man grunted and groaned, but somehow managed to push himself to his feet and stumble out into the sunlight. “See ya tomorra,” he mumbled as he left.

“I hope not,” Connor called after him as he watched the man trip down the stairs into the street. The sheriff turned from the door just in time to see Cora stuff his bottle of whiskey into the basket. He gritted his teeth, but said nothing.

She turned around with a smile on her face. “I should be going,” she said. She harbored no guilt over taking away his bottles. It wasn’t the first time, and it would not be the last. She walked over to the door. “Be careful, little brother.” She stood on her tiptoes for a moment to kiss him on the cheek. “And keep an eye on Amos, please. I want him to return in one piece.”

Amos was leaning on a post near the door, within earshot, and his cheeks brightened to a deep rouge.

“Go on, get outta here,” Connor said with a laugh.

Cora gave him a wink before sauntering off down the walk toward the hotel to return the breakfast basket to the cook who provided the sheriff’s meals.

Connor walked up beside Amos and nudged him in the side. “Stop staring at my sister.”

“Sorry,” Amos stuttered in embarrassment.

The sheriff laughed. “I’m joking. If she wasn’t family, I’d probably watch, too. Ready to go get in some trouble?”

Amos crammed his hat onto his head. “Yeah, boss. Let’s ride.”

Chapter 5

Charity woke up early on the day of her wedding. She had slept little the night before and felt it in her eyes and face. She yawned wide as she walked down the stairs. Her mother was already up and about, putting the finishing touches on the dresses for the wedding she was in charge of.

She looked up from the intricate stitching and smiled at her daughter. “You better get going, dear. We don’t want you to be late for your own wedding.”

The young woman smiled and hugged her mother. “No, we don’t. Try not to be too late either, please.”

“I’ll do my best, dear. Now, scoot.”

Charity met the other women at Victoire’s boutique. The attendant was waiting for her when she arrived and ushered her through the main room to a door on the left. A room she had never been in before was set up with chairs and mirrors. All of the chairs were filled except one. Several attendants fluttered about, applying makeup and hair before they slipped the bridal party into their dresses.

“Come, come here, darling.” Victoire beckoned Charity over to the largest, most comfortable chair set in front of a beautiful vanity. “Sit, please.”

Charity let herself be pulled about and prodded at while they curled her hair and turned her into a princess. As she watched herself in the mirror, she couldn’t keep the smile off her face. Her dreams were finally coming true. She was going to be married to the greatest man in the world and she would be the happiest girl to ever live. Even Catherine’s glaring countenance could do nothing to dampen her mood.

When she was finally ready, the whole group was shuffled out the back door into a string of waiting carriages. Whether it was bad luck or awful planning, Charity found herself alone in a carriage with Catherine, her soon-to-be wicked mother-in-law.

For several uncomfortable minutes, the only sound was the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the roar of the wheels on the cobblestone. Charity looked intently out the window at nothing in particular, trying her damnedest to avoid the deadly glare she was receiving from the bench across the way. Finally, Charity could take no more.

“What?” she snapped as she glared at Catherine.

The aging woman’s hard face broke into a grin, a deceptively sweet smile. “I just wanted to tell you that you look lovely, my dear.”

Charity stared at her and waited for the other shoe to fall.

Catherine looked her up and down. Her lip pulled up into a sneer as she spoke. “But you are still not good enough for my son, you know. You never have been and you never will be.”

Charity clenched her teeth and flared her nostrils. Her small hands balled into fists. “David seems to think I am all he needs.”

The older woman laughed. “David is stupid. He is a darling boy, but he is several eggs short of a full dozen.”

Charity kept quiet and avoided Catherine’s stare. She couldn’t dispute that. He definitely wasn’t the smartest man she had ever known. But he was the sweetest, and he loved her, and for her, that was enough.

Catherine leaned over and placed a hand on the bench next to Charity. “You think you’ve won, little girl, but you have no idea what kind of game you are playing. And you’re going to lose.”

“I—“

Catherine held up a hand. “No, I don’t want to hear it. I know your type.” She laughed. “I am your type. But I was smart enough to find a husband of my caliber. I didn’t prey on the weak-minded. Be careful, Charity. Your deviousness will come back to haunt you. I’ll make sure of it.”

The carriage pulled up in front of the church and the door was opened by a footman. Catherine’s smile grew as she turned away from Charity’s baffled face and stepped out into the sun.

The door closed behind her. Charity was to wait until the others were out and in the church before she exited the carriage. It gave her plenty of time to fret. The woman had something planned. She was sure of it. The tone of the woman’s voice was enough to tell her that.

The door opened as Charity fretted. “Ma’am, it’s time to go.” The footman held out his hand. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She slipped her gloved hand into his and stepped out into the sun. A red carpet was laid from the carriage all the way across the sidewalk and into the church. A photographer was set up at the end with a camera at the ready. Several men in black suits lined the carpet, blocking pedestrians from crossing. The trilling sounds of the piano echoed out from the open doorway.

The oohs and aahs from the women standing along the carpet waiting to pass were music to Charity’s ears. Two young girls in matching lilac dresses came down the steps and swept around behind her to pick up her train. They followed her up the carpet to the stairs where two dapper young men were holding the doors open. They bowed to her and she beamed at them.

The wedding coordinator stopped her just inside, before she walked through the large doors into the nave. “Two minutes, miss.”

Charity watched as the last of her bridesmaids, Melody, disappeared through the door. Catherine had talked her out of having her own sister in the wedding and she started fuming, but she pushed aside the anger as she caught a brief glimpse of the crowd inside. The pews were packed and there were people standing in the space behind them and along the walls. David was a favorite amongst the young ladies of New York City’s high society, and their nuptials had drawn quite the crowd. Charity bit back a grin. She was the envy of women everywhere for the moment. She was dressed in the finest gown she would ever wear, and she was about to marry the man of her dreams. It was the best feeling in the world, and Catherine couldn’t ruin her good mood no matter how hard she tried.

The rest of the day swept by in a blur. Charity said her vows and became Mrs. David Banks. Then together they were bundled into a white open-topped carriage for the ride to Central Park. It was drawn by six snow white horses and roses lined the bridles and carriage. Dozens of tables had been arranged in the park around a central wooden dance floor laid over the grass in an open area. Charity danced until her feet hurt and drank champagne until her head swam, all with the biggest grin her aching cheeks could manage. By the time she and David entered the carriage that would take them to the hotel where they would spend their first night as a married couple, the moon had risen and a hundred lanterns were lit so the rest of the party-goers could keep dancing long into the night.

Chapter 6

Summer Rain crouched behind the log while Little Bear met with the spirit. She watched with horror as he twitched on the ground. She stared wide-eyed when he rose and walked into the woods toward North Wind. When the screams echoed across the clearing, she clapped her hands over her mouth and curled into a ball, hiding herself from sight. She remained huddled there behind the log for hours, waiting until the shouts and cries dwindled into a stark silence. The night stretched long and lonely. She waited for someone to come for her, to kill her or rescue her, but they never did. Gathering what little courage she had left, she pushed herself back to her knees and peered over the log.

The fire had dwindled to mere coals, but it offered just enough light for her to see the carnage. Blood was splattered across the grass, but no bodies were visible from her position. Where was Little Bear? Where were the warriors? Leaning over the rock, she saw a black braid poking out from behind a large tree. She stood and crept toward it. Had the soldiers found them? Was that the screaming? She refused to think of the other option. Her hands shook and she took deep breaths to calm herself. She wished she had a knife but none lay nearby.

As she drew closer to the tree, feet became visible in the shadows. They were bent at impossible angles. It was not a good sign. She steeled herself against what she was about to find. Nothing could have prepared her for the sight that greeted her.

One of the warriors lay on the ground, his body twitching with the throes of death. North Wind crouched over him, tearing chunks of flesh from the dying man’s throat.

Summer Rain clasped her hand to her mouth, but it was too late. A strangled scream escaped her lips and North Wind’s head jerked in her direction. The warrior’s face and chest were covered in blood. His eyes were a dull gray as he stared at her. He rose, still gnawing on the fleshy tendrils hanging from his mouth. As he took a step toward her, his eyes blazed with hunger. She matched his advance with a step backward. He took another, and so did she.

“No, North Wind.” Little Bear’s voice came from behind her. “She is mine.”

Summer Rain spun. The young shaman stood behind her, so close she could touch him. He was covered head to toe in blood, too. He stared at Summer Rain with bloody, black eye sockets. She tried to reverse again, but North Wind was there. His hands brushed her shoulders and she twitched away.

Little Bear watched her as she edged around the warrior, trying for the safety of the trees. A smile broke across his gray face. “Run,” he hissed.

Summer Rain’s heart froze in her chest. He sounded so different, so cruel. His voice wasn’t the voice of the kind young man she had known, the man she was going to marry. She stared at him for a second, a long, painful second. Then she spun as fast as she could and darted toward the trees.

She made it two steps before fingers tangled themselves in her messy braids. She screamed as she was jerked backward. Her left foot caught on her right and she stumbled. But she didn’t fall. Little Bear held her upright by her hair and spun her around to face him. He yanked her head back, forcing her to look up at him from an awkward, uncomfortable position.

“What happened to you?” she whispered.

His grin grew. “I became a god.”

She gasped as pieces of hair ripped from her head. “I don’t understand.”

Little Bear jerked her head once, pulling a scream from her. “Of course you don’t. Not yet. But you will. I will make you a god, too. And we will be together, forever.”

She fought against him, beating his face and chest with her tiny fists, scratching him with her sharp nails, but his strength was beyond anything she could have imagined. He pulled her to him, gripping her tight. Her screams echoed off the trees as his teeth tore through the flesh in her chest.

Chapter 7

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Sheriff?” Deputy Barnett’s hat twitched as he tried to look every which way at once. He held the reins so tight that his horse danced sideways every few steps as it fed off his nervous energy.

Connor McClane glanced at the young man and fought back a smile. “It’s fine, Amos. We’re just here to talk. Nothing more, nothing less.” Despite his assurances, his eyes darted to the shotgun holstered on his saddle and he focused on the comforting weight of the twin Peacemakers on his belt. Cora was right. It wasn’t the smartest idea riding out to the Gaines’s ranch without backup, but he saw no other way around it. Arriving with a cavalry at his back would have put them on the defensive immediately and may have resulted in a shootout. He really did just want to talk, and he hoped they did, too.

The wind whipped through the small canyon that led to the Gaines homestead. The sides were about twice the height of a man, great to hide on and still short enough to jump from when needed. It was the perfect place to set up an ambush. Connor had trouble with just such an issue before when he needed to bring Jed in for questioning on a stage coach robbery. It had almost cost him his life.

Dust and dried brambles blew across their path. Amos coughed and pulled his bandana up over his nose and mouth.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Amos. The boys might not take too kindly to you tryin’ to look like one of them.” Connor grinned at his deputy, even as he himself longed to pull his own bandana around his face. He blinked rapidly to clear the dust from his eyes and lowered his head to let his hat take the brunt of the next dust swirl.

“What’s talking gonna do anyway?” Amos relaxed just a smidge and one hand settled onto the gun at his side.

Connor shifted in his seat and shrugged. “Not sure, to be honest. Mr. Richards has no proof o’ the crime, just his word. And the man’s a bit of a cheat himself. I wouldn’t trust him far as I could throw him. That’s why I want to talk to Jeremiah, give him the benefit of the doubt. You know the saying, ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ and all that.”

Amos laughed. “The Gaines brothers were born guilty, sheriff. I’ve never once known them to be innocent of anything they were accused of. There was just a lack of evidence is all.”

Connor smiled. “True, Amos, very true. But still, try not to ruffle any feathers just yet. Not unless we have to.”

The horses rounded the last curve in the road and the small cliffs dropped off sharply on either side to reveal a wide open area nestled deep within the hills. Richard Gaines had stumbled across the canyon and accompanying meadow two generations ago, when Lonesome Ridge was still barely an outpost with just a dirt track running through the middle of it. He claimed it immediately, making his home in the safety of the valley. The town had been built up since then and now proudly claimed itself as one of the biggest towns in the area. That wasn’t saying much, but it had a saloon and a hotel, a post office, and even a railroad station. It was the perfect place for someone new to the frontier to make their home in relative comfort, and it was also the perfect place for a family of outlaws to make their living. New homesteads were popping up all over the land outside of Lonesome Ridge, and the Gaines family wasted no time helping themselves to whatever they felt they were due at the time.

The little farm was almost as the sheriff remembered it. The small two-story cabin sat nearer to the entrance of the valley. A barn with room for four horses and two cows was behind it and to the right, accompanied by a large chicken coop that had seen better days. Several small fields grew along the cliff wall on the left, providing just enough food for the families who had lived there for nearly a hundred years.

But things weren’t quite the same as when Connor was a boy. He frowned as he looked around. The fields were overgrown and crops had not been planted, probably for several years. Boards were falling off the barn and the chicken coop listed dangerously to one side. His eyes roved over to the house again. Weeds were doing battle with flowers trying to thrive along the front of the porch. One window was busted out and the rest were covered in dust. The fence between the barn and the house had holes in it big enough to let a bull through. No animals were visible in the enclosure or anywhere else. Connor used to visit the place frequently as a child and, despite their less than reputable nature, Ma and Pa Gaines always made sure their home was in top shape. They must have been rolling in their graves knowing it was in such a terrible state.

“The place looks pretty run down.” Amos’s voice was right in his ear. The young deputy had pulled his horse so close to Connor’s that they were almost touching.

Out of the corner of his eye, the sheriff glimpsed a small white fence built around an apple tree. Richard Gaines had planted the tree when his first son was born. Six crosses dotted the area inside. Two of them were newer than the rest and Connor felt a sadness grow in his chest.

“Yep,” he said as he steered his horse toward the house. “The boys need a good woman around this place to keep them in line.”

Even as he spoke, the door to the porch opened and a man stepped out. He was about Connor’s height, but more wiry. His dark hair wasn’t long, just to his chin, but what was there was dirty and matted. He carried a half empty bottle of whiskey in his hand and a big bunch of tobacco in his lower lip. He spat on the porch when his eyes met the sheriff’s.

Connor kept his disgust hidden and walked his horse right up to the porch. He pulled her to a stop just in front of the steps and leaned over to rest a forearm on the horn of his saddle. Then the sheriff stared at the outlaw in front of him, waiting.

“McClane.” The man spoke and gave a small bob of his head. Grudging respect, which was more than Connor had hoped for. The man turned his attention to Amos. “Dog.” A small sneer tugged at the corner of his lips.

The deputy bristled and his hand went to his gun. “Now you listen here, you—“

Connor didn’t move and didn’t take his eyes off the man in front of him. “Barnett.”

The deputy froze. His eyes darted between his boss and the outlaw. With the speed of molasses on a cold winter’s day, he pulled his fingers off his gun and settled back onto his horse. Connor gave him a small nod.

“Jed,” he said, turning his attention back to the outlaw. “The place is looking mighty untidy. You boys fallen on hard times lately?”

The man’s nose curled and he spat again. “Nawp. Doin’ just fine, sheriff. No need for frilly bullshit an’ whatnot when I can get all I need elsewhere. Ain’t worth workin’ m’self to the bone when I ain’t gotta.”

Connor’s eyebrow twitched upward momentarily. “I see.” He paused and glanced around. A face was peering at him in the upper windows, but it darted away when he made eye contact. “Speaking of... where is Jeremiah these days?”

For a very telling moment, Jed Gaines’s eyes darted to the side, then he spit some more. He leaned against the post at the top of the small flight of stairs and crossed his arms. Teeth as brown as cow dung stretched across his face when he smiled. “Yer guess is good as mine, sheriff.” The last word shot from his mouth with more force than the chew juice had.

McClane was unmoved. “We just want to talk.” And to have a sip of that whiskey, Connor thought.

Jed shrugged a shoulder. “Go ahead an’ talk, then. I ain’t seen him for days now. No ideer where he is.”

Connor snorted and straightened in his saddle. “Don’t try to fool me, Jedidiah Gaines. I know you better’n most. You can’t get one of your lies past me and you know it.”

The sheriff caught the look his deputy gave him, but he ignored it. “Where’s Jeremiah?” he asked again. “And you best be straight with me.”

Jed spit his whole wad of chew to the side. It splatted on the edge of the porch in an ever-growing pile of dried masticated tobacco. “Why? What’s he done this time?” Annoyance bled into his voice.

Connor relaxed and fought back a smile. The Gaines brothers may be outlaws, but they usually had some semblance of honor. They would steal anything they wanted and kill any man to do it, but Jed held his brothers to high standards when it came to most other matters.

“Ol’ Man Richards filed a complaint with me yesterday morning. Seems Jeremiah was over at his place the other day, insisting that he pay you boys a protection fee or his cattle’ll go missing. Said Jeremiah shot his dog, a brand new pup. His daughter was mighty unhappy about the whole thing.”

Jed laughed. “Richards? He’s as crooked as I—“ He snapped his mouth shut for a moment, then continued as if nothing had happened. “—as a bent penny.”

Connor nodded in agreement. “Yep, that he is, but he did have a dead dog and a crying kid. That’s why we’re here to talk, to get Jeremiah’s side of the story. No layin’ blame if there’s none to be laid.”

Jed took his hat off and slapped it against his leg. A cloud of dust billowed off it and settled onto his pants. “Well, shit. A’right then.” He turned around and hollered inside. “Jeremiah, get yer lyin’ ass out here, ya filthy cur.”

For a moment everything was silent. Then cursing and banging erupted inside the house. In short order, another man appeared in the doorway. He was about Jed’s height but younger, with shoulder-length natty hair and a scruffy, matted beard. He was covered in filth and when he smiled, his teeth were rotten and brown like Jed’s. He stumbled onto the porch behind his older brother.

Jed turned around and smacked him in the back of the head, then he grabbed Jeremiah’s shirt and jerked him forward so they were face to face. “You been over at Old Man Richards’s place lately? When I told you not to?”

“What? Naw, I ain’t done nothin’.”

Connor narrowed his eyes at Jeremiah. “He says you shot his dog.”

Jeremiah sputtered. “I ain’t never shot no dog. No women, no kids, no animals. That’s what Jed always says. He’d whoop my ass if I did.”

Jed shook him again and let him go. “Yer damn right. I’ve half a mind to whoop it right now.”

Connor held up a hand. “Now, now. Let’s not get hasty. Where were you three days ago, Jeremiah?”

The shaggy haired man glanced at his brother. “I didn’t shoot no dog, I swear.” His voice was that of a little boy who had been caught in half a lie and wanted to belay whatever punishment awaited him.

“Were you at the Richards place?”

He shuffled his feet and kicked at the dust. “Maybe for a bit.”

“Did you threaten Mr. Richards at all?”

He glanced at his brother again. “Maybe some. But it was just fer fun. An’ I didn’t shoot no dog! Honest. There was a li’l puppy there, cute damn thing, too. But that whoremonger was kicking it and hollering at it the whole time. I bet he shot the darn thing himself.”

Connor nodded and scratched the scruff on his chin as he eyed Jeremiah. “Yeah, you might be right about that.”

“He has a temper,” said a voice from inside. The door to the house opened and a young man stepped out. Jasper was the youngest of the Gaines brothers, a full fifteen years younger than Jed. Connor liked the kid. He was more reserved than his brothers and rarely got into any trouble that wasn’t instigated by the other two. He had his mother’s quiet demeanor and kept himself clean. When he smiled, which didn’t happen very often, his teeth were white, not stained from years of tobacco use, and he kept his hair trimmed and his clothes washed.

“How are you today, Jasper?” Connor tipped his hat to the young man and received a nod in return.

“All right, Connor. And yourself?” His lips twitched into a small smile as he greeted the sheriff.

“Not too shabby. A fine day for a ride. Figured I’d bring Amos out to the old homestead and have a chat with you boys. Haven’t seen you in awhile and I like to check in now and then, ya know, catch up on old times.” He winked at the young man and Jasper laughed. It wasn’t a harsh laugh like Jed’s. It was softer and genuine.

“Want me to put the kettle on?” His blue eyes twinkled brightly even as he earned matching glares from his brothers.

“Nah,” Connor said. “We should be getting back. It’s getting dark. And the train’s coming through tonight. Be best if Amos and I were there to steer the rabble in the right direction.” He gave Jasper another wink and tipped his hat to the other brothers. “You fellas behave yourselves, all right?”

Jeremiah opened his mouth to respond, earning himself a hard smack on the back of the head by Jed. The oldest brother spoke up instead. “We always do, sheriff.”

Connor snorted and turned his horse around. Amos trotted beside him, glancing behind them every few seconds to make sure the Gaines boys weren’t trying to shoot them in the back.

***

The three brothers stood on the porch as they watched the sheriff and his deputy round the turn into the gulley. When they were out of sight and out of earshot, Jeremiah turned and smacked Jasper upside the head.

“No fraternizin’ with the enemy, you idjit!”

Jasper was ready for it, though, and ducked out of the way so that the slap only slid off the side of his skull instead of giving him its full force. He was so used to it that it didn’t really hurt, but he cringed appropriately and rubbed his hair. “Ow,” he said, without feeling. “I was just being nice. Connor isn’t a bad guy. He’s just doing his job.”

“His job, little boy,” said Jed, stepping up beside Jeremiah to get in his youngest brother’s face. “Is to make our lives more difficult. That don’t sound like a very good job to me.”

“Well, maybe if we—“ Jasper was cut off as Jed grabbed his shirt and yanked him close. The boy could smell the rancid stench of rotten tobacco coming from Jed’s mouth. He bit down on his tongue to keep himself from gagging and tried not to breathe.

“Maybe if we what? Got real jobs, like the good townsfolk? Planted some crops? Raised a family?” Jed’s tone was anything but sincere. He shoved Jasper back against the post Jed had been leaning on earlier. “Shut your hole and go gather that straw I told you to get.”

Jasper hunched his shoulders, making himself as small as possible. His elbow had hit the post hard and he rubbed it to try to stop the burst of pain as Jeremiah put his arm around Jed’s shoulders.

“Now, now, Jed, don’t be too hard on him. You know he ain’t right in the head. Let’s go get drink.” He tossed Jasper a glare behind Jed’s back as he steered them both into the house. Jasper waited until the door shut before slumping down on the steps. He stared at the path Connor and Amos had taken, wishing he’d gone with them.

Chapter 8

“The devil take this place!” Charity slapped at her skirts as she mounted the steps, sending clouds of dust billowing around her. She sighed and looked out across the brown grass toward the corral. David leaned against the fence chatting with the hired men about some ranch nonsense or other. His already blond hair was bleached nearly white from the heat of the summer sun and his once soft hands were rough from days of hard labor.

Six months. She cringed at the thought. It had been six months since she foolishly allowed herself to be pulled into his web. It had been six months since she had become a Banks, a member of the richest family in New York City. And it had been six months since her father- and mother-in-law had packed her and her new husband onto a one-way train headed west, with David’s full consent.

The wealth was still there. She could buy anything she wanted, and she was by far the best dressed woman in that tiny little frontier town. She could order anything she wanted from her catalogs that she had shipped in from back east. But society? Charity snorted and crossed her arms tightly across her chest as she flopped into one of the wooden rocking chairs on the porch. The closest thing Dixonville came to society was the monthly social the local church ladies held, and those women treated her as if she were the scum of the earth. A transplant know-nothing who wasn’t worth their time.

Her heart fell even further in her chest as she stared at her husband. He barely acknowledged her existence anymore. His time was consumed with the ranch. They had not spoken two words to each other in days.

Her lips pressed together in a tight frown. She did not deserve to be treated like that. She wasn’t just an ornament that could be tossed aside when its owner had finished with it. And she did not deserve to be schlepped away to some backwater dirt hole in the middle of nowhere.

Charity pushed herself to her feet. “David!” She mustered all the sweetness she could and plastered on a smile as she leaned against the railing. When he didn’t turn, she called his name again. “David!” This time she put a little force behind the word, using a tone that she was quickly gaining practice with.

He glanced over his shoulder and raised a hand. “I’ll be in a little later, darlin’,” he shouted back before returning his attention to the ranch hands.

Charity’s nostrils flared. The anger that was quickly becoming her only friend seethed in her chest and made her insides churn. She clenched her teeth tightly and closed her eyes. After several deep breaths, she opened them in time to see a light blue skirt disappear behind a door to her right.

A snarl pulled at Charity’s lips. The kitchen maid was a weaselly, sniveling young woman who was always after David’s affections. When they first arrived, the girl had been the closest thing to a friend Charity had, but as the months wore on and Charity needed a confidant, it became clear where the maid’s loyalties lay.

“Isabelle!”

The young woman squeaked as she turned. She almost dropped the plate she was holding. It was filled with food.

The anger in Charity’s gut churned and roiled. She took a step toward the girl. “Where are you going with that plate?” she asked as she forced a tight smile to her lips. She already knew the answer, though. They both knew Isabelle wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Mr. David asked me to bring it out. He wants to eat in the barn so he can keep working.” The girl refused to meet her eyes. She found the cracks in the floorboards infinitely more interesting than Charity’s bright red face.

“Did he now?” David had been eating out in the barn nearly every night for the last two weeks. He was avoiding Charity, and she was at the end of her rope.

Charity snatched the plate from the girl. “I will take it to him. Thank you.”

The maid bowed quickly and darted into the small pantry. There was nowhere for her to go in there, but she shut the door behind her and hid until Charity left.

Charity slammed out the kitchen door. The porch wrapped around the whole house and she stomped soundly the whole way with her boots thudding on the wood. David was still leaning against the fence, chatting and laughing with the hired hands.

Charity sauntered up to them and smiled sweetly. The ranch hands nodded politely and mumbled a greeting even as their eyes glittered with amusement. They knew what was coming and couldn’t wait for the show. She would give them what they wanted.

She sidled up next to David and held out the plate. “For you, my darling.” She batted her lashes and held her smile firmly in place. He stared at her for a moment before reaching out to take it. Her fingers opened and the plate tumbled to the ground, spilling its contents everywhere..

“Oops,” she said, the smile never leaving her face. With a not-so-apologetic shrug, she turned and walked back to the house with her head held high. The hearty chuckles of the ranch hands followed her all the way to the steps.

Isabelle was out of the cupboard when Charity came back in the house. “I’ll take my supper now, Isabelle.”

She heard some banging and scampering in the kitchen as she settled into her chair in the dining room. The setting sun streamed onto the table. Charity gazed out the window and curled her nose. Fields as far as the eye could see. The nearest neighbor was more than an hour’s carriage ride away. Not that she would ever visit them by choice. The woman was a breeding factory. They had six children already and another on the way. She fawned over her husband, who adored her just the same, and it was the picture perfect family. David hadn’t touched Charity in months. Every child reminded her of her failed marriage. She would just as soon stay away from everyone as subject herself to that again.

“M’lady.” Isabelle kept her eyes on the table as she set the plate in front of Charity.

Charity picked up her fork and knife as she examined the plate. Roasted chicken, corn, and some green stuff that she didn’t recognize. She poked at it with her fork.

“It’s greens, m’lady.”

Charity curled her nose. “I know what it is. And you know I don’t like them.”

“Yes, m’lady. Mr. David asked for them.”

Charity’s teeth clenched so hard they ground audibly. Isabelle had put them on her plate on purpose, out of pure spite. The anger boiled over and got the better of her. “Hold out your hand.”

Isabelle hesitated. “I’m sorry, ma’am?”

Charity turned her head slowly and caught the maid in her glare. “I said... Hold... Out... Your... Hand.”

She stared the girl down as a shaking hand slowly made its way toward the table. Charity snatched it and jerked it over so it was facing palm up. Then she scooped the greens off her plate with her fork and plopped them right onto Isabelle’s waiting hand.

The young woman gasped as the hot food scalded her skin. The look of sheer horror on her face cooled Charity’s anger a bit, but she forced back the guilt that was rising in her chest. She let the woman stand there with the burning pain for another thirty seconds before she waved at her with her fork.

“Well?”

Isabelle’s mouth snapped shut and she scampered out of the dining room into the kitchen. Charity allowed herself a small, bitter smile. It felt good to have power, even if it was just over someone like Isabelle. She was sure she’d hear about it from David in the morning, but at least it would force him to talk to her.

Charity finished her dinner and left the plate for Isabelle to clean up. In the sitting room, she wandered around, looking at the few books on the sparse shelves. She loved the sight of them, but she had already read the ones she could read and David wouldn’t help her with the others. She trailed her fingers along their spines. She pulled out one book and thumbed through it before putting it back. David had refused to buy her more that she could read, instead holding to his father’s claims that women didn’t need to read. She decided she didn’t care what he thought. On their next trip into town, she was going to buy more, regardless of his wishes.

With a small sense of satisfaction at her rebellious decision, she sat in her chair and picked up her sewing. She stared at the half-finished piece for awhile and set it back down. Then she went to the back window and watched the wheat sway gently to the horizon. She wandered to the front window and watched one of the hired men working with the new colt David had purchased from a neighbor.

The sun went down and the night grew dark. Charity sighed. She missed the constant light of the city. The night here was so dark, so quiet. She would wake in the middle of the night to nothing, the sound of absolute silence. She had never been a fearful child, but as she stared out into the blackness surrounding them, her heart sped up. Anything could lurk in the dark, waiting to prey on someone as innocent as she was.

She shuddered and turned from the window. Soft sounds echoed from the kitchen. Isabelle was cleaning up and preparing for the next day. David had not yet returned to the house. With a snort of irritation, Charity stomped upstairs. She got her nightclothes on and let her hair down, then she climbed into bed and snuggled down under the covers.

Her thoughts and dreams swirled together in a confusing mess that alternately left her with feelings of fear, anger, and hate. She woke sometime later in blackness. David was still gone. Voices floated to her from outside. Her room was on the side of the house near the barns, so she crawled from bed and looked out. Torches blazed over near the corral. She saw shadows moving around. A lot of them.

She pulled on a shawl and padded carefully downstairs. Isabelle was there, crouched behind the door. She jumped and squeaked as Charity came up behind her. Her eyes were wide and the light from the torches flickered in them.

The young woman pressed a finger to her lips. “I think it’s bandits, m’lady.”

“Bandits?” Charity leaned against the window frame and peered out into the shadows. Bodies milled about, but there was no yelling or gunfire. “They don’t look like bandits. I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

“No, miss, don’t!” Isabelle grabbed her arm and tried to pull her back, but Charity swatted at her hand and narrowed her eyes until the hand released its grip.

She yanked open the door and stepped onto the porch. Her heart sped up and tried to jump into her throat, but she forced herself to move forward. A shadow broke away from the area near the corral and walked quickly toward her.

It was David. “Go back into the house, Charity.” His face was pale in the limited light. Something dark stained his shirt but she couldn’t see what it was from that distance.

“David—“

“Go back in the house.” He didn’t shout, but his voice carried a commanding tone that Charity had never heard before.

Hurt and shame flooded over her. Her mouth worked for a few seconds before she turned and ran back to the house. She slammed the door open and Isabelle jumped back just in time.

“Go to bed,” Charity snarled as she stomped to the stairs. She ripped the shawl off her shoulders and threw it in the corner. She climbed back into bed and fumed while trying to fight back the tears that threatened to overtake her. She fell asleep listening to the voices outside.

She woke hours later. A lantern burned on a table in the corner, casting an eerie glow around the room. Charity stretched and rolled over.

David sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her. He was still dressed in the clothes he had been wearing the day before and smelled terrible.

“David?”

He didn’t move. In the dark, she couldn’t even see him breathe. Her own breath quickened along with her heart as she leaned forward. She placed her hand on his arm and squeezed gently.

“David, darling, are you all right?”

He finally moved as she pulled at him. His head tilted to the side to stare at her hand, then he slowly spun it around. His eyes were dull, not the vibrant blue they normally were. Something black and shiny marred his beautiful face and stained his lips. She raised her hand to his cheek and brushed at it. Her fingers came away wet and in the candlelight, she saw they were dark red. The color of blood.

She jerked her hand away and scooted toward the other side of the bed. “David? What’s going on,” she whispered in a voice that was tight and terrified.

His mouth worked slowly as he stared at her, as if he were trying to form words that would not come. A strange gurgling groan rumbled up from his throat and his tongue lolled out to lick the black goo on his lips. He blinked at her, in slow motion. She didn’t even have time to scream as he lunged for her throat.

Chapter 9

Charity’s entire body ached. She opened her eyes and blinked into the sunlight that was streaming through the window. It hurt. A lot. She threw her arm over her eyes to shield them from the painful rays. “Ugh.” She grimaced. Even her throat hurt. It ached as if she’d been screaming for hours on end with no respite and a deep pain throbbed near her shoulder.

She groaned and pressed the back of her free hand to her cheek. What was she doing last night? She thought back to the weird nightmares that had haunted her sleep. She laughed at her silliness. She was mad at David, and for what? Because of a stupid dream? He would never really bite her, would he? Of course not.

Her hand trailed down her face to find her throat. Tiny shocks of pain radiated out from the deep, ragged holes her fingers found there. Her hand dropped and she sat up straight, the pain in her head all but forgotten.

She was still in her bedroom, alone. The candle that had been burning on the dresser had melted into a hard pool of wax. Dark, shiny spots marred the normally spotless floor. Her nostrils flared as a coppery scent assaulted her. Her stomach rumbled at the same time.

With great effort, she moved to the edge of the bed and set her feet on the floor. It took two tries, but she finally pushed herself to her feet. She was unsteady and wobbled for a moment before regaining her balance. It felt like years since she had used her legs. She was weak, like a toddler just learning to walk. With a flash of annoyance, she took a tentative step forward. Her bare toes landed in one of the dark pools on the floor. She moved them experimentally. It was sticky and thick.

“Disgusting,” she whispered as her stomach rumbled once more.

She stopped and stared at her naked foot. Since moving out west, her skin had darkened considerably to an unpleasant tan color that she grew to loathe. But her foot wasn’t that dark tan. It was sickly gray in the morning light. She raised her hand. It had the same pale gray hue, too. Charity walked across the room to the mirror. Her scream lodged in her throat. Her hair was a matted mess and her face and upper body were covered in drying blood. A chunk of flesh was missing from her neck and every piece of visible skin was a shade of gray that she had only seen on her dead grandmother. Even her eyes were missing their usual blue sparkle.

She gripped the dresser and gasped for air. She felt sick, and hungry. Her eyes roved around the room and landed on the open doorway. Only then did she notice the bloody footprints retreating out into the hallway. The boot prints matched David’s. Fear hovered in her stomach as faint voices echoed up to her from below. She cupped her hands over her mouth and thought frantically.

“What is going on?” she whispered to herself. “This is crazy.” She looked in the mirror again and ran a hand through her tangled hair. She stared at herself for several seconds. Then she straightened her shoulders. “Stop this,” she said. “You’re a grown woman. Act like it.”

She picked up the pitcher on the stand under the mirror and poured some water into the basin. With a cloth she pulled from the drawer, she washed herself up as best she could in the small space, then she straightened her hair and put on a clean dress. When she was finished, she looked in the mirror again.

She still felt like walking death and didn’t look much better. Her fingers poked at her cheeks as she stared at her horrific visage. Was it the plague? She didn’t feel sick. She felt hungry, voraciously hungry. She wanted to vomit, but it was more from looking at herself than from actually feeling sick. With an annoyed sigh, she pulled at the high collar on the dress. It covered most of the wound on her neck, which was at least something. She prodded the holes again. The pain there had disappeared. She shrugged her shoulders and wiggled her hips. All traces of pain were gone. She had woken up stiff and horribly sore, but nothing hurt anymore. Even more confused than before, she stared at the holes.

“It wasn’t David,” she whispered at herself in the mirror. Her image was as unconvinced as she was. Charity bit her lip. “Am I dreaming?” She bit her lip again, harder. Her teeth pierced the skin, bit all the way through, but that was it. She pulled her lip out and looked at it in the mirror. There was definitely a hole, but something was missing. She had bitten her lip before, many times. It always bled. She could imagine the coppery tang on her tongue even now. The thought of blood in her mouth made her hungrier.

“Ugh, gross.” She shook her head and gave herself a scalding look before deciding she needed to go downstairs and find out what was going on.

Charity tiptoed around the blood on the floor and pulled the door open again. The voices were gone and it was all quiet downstairs. She had been in the house for six months, long enough to know where all the squeaky boards were. She made it to the bottom of the stairs without making a sound.

“Come in.”

Charity froze with her foot hanging off the last step. She leaned over and looked into the sitting room. Someone with long black hair occupied David’s chair. It faced the fireplace, away from the door. On the floor beside the chair sat a man. He was dressed in a ragged Confederate uniform that had dark brown stains on the sleeves and pant legs. He stared at her with dull eyes. His skin was gray, like hers.

“Come.” The voice came from the man in the chair. It was thick with an accent Charity could not place.

She stepped down onto the floor. “Where’s David?” She kept her hand on the banister and balanced on her toes, ready to bolt back up the stairs.

“Here,” said the hidden speaker.

Charity heard a light scuffing sound before David’s head appeared from in front of the chair. He looked terrible, much like she did before she cleaned up. Gray skin, lifeless eyes. He stared at her with his mouth hanging half open, like her grandfather after his stroke when she was just a child.

“Sit.” David flopped out of sight.

Charity narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like the idea of someone else treating her husband like a dog. Sure, he hadn’t been kind to her lately, but he was still her husband. She stomped across the floor to the chair, a scathing retort on her lips. It died before it left her mouth.

Sitting in the chair was a young man. His long black hair flowed around his shoulders, but chunks were missing from the sides and back. His skin was a grayish brown. Wounds covered his body, but they did not bleed.

He turned his head to look at her. Where his eyes used to be were gaping red holes. His face was cracked like the ground in the middle of summer.

He spoke in slow, labored English. His voice was hoarse and low. “Hello, child. Welcome to a new world.”

Charity stared at the man in the chair, shocked into silence.

The man in the chair spoke again. “My name is Little Bear. You are Charity?”

Charity nodded. “Wh...” She stopped herself and glanced around the room. It was just the three of them. Outside the window, the world was still. She couldn’t even hear the usual snorting of the horses and cattle. “What are you?”

Little Bear smiled. His teeth were stained a dark brown. “Death,” he said.

Charity cut a look at David. He sat on the floor in front of the empty fireplace staring out into nothing. From this angle she could see his blond hair was matted in the back with dried blood. The lower part of his shirt was torn and stained.

“What do you mean?” Charity kept David in her peripheral vision and looked back at Little Bear.

The smile had not left his face. He spoke again. “In due time. You must be starving.” He raised a hand and waved it toward the back.

The soldier rose and disappeared from the room. The front door slammed shut behind him. A minute later it creaked opened.

The smell hit Charity like a brick wall. It was Christmas dinner, the freshest baked bread, and the stench of fear, all rolled into one. Her body vibrated with a hunger so intense, it made her insides hurt. She could feel it in every part of her body, from her stomach all the way out to her fingers and toes. Her teeth rattled with anticipation of sweet, delicious food.

The soldier came into view. Behind him stumbled the kitchen maid, Isabelle. Her hands were tied and a rag was stuffed into her mouth to keep her from talking. Her eyes were huge and glistened brightly above tear-stained cheeks. She was being pushed by a big brute of a man with the same gray skin and dead eyes as everyone but Isabelle.

Isabelle was very much alive. Charity imagined she could hear the blood pulsing through the girl’s veins. Warm, wonderful blood. A growl tore up Charity’s throat and escaped before she could stop it. At the same time, David rose. The same hunger she felt burned in his eyes.

“Down,” Little Bear commanded.

David hesitated as he stepped forward. He wobbled for a moment, his eyes shifting between Little Bear and Isabelle. Then with obvious reluctance he sank to the floor and scooted around so he could continue to stare at Isabelle.

Little Bear watched her as he spoke. “Go ahead, Charity.”

Charity tried to look at him, she wanted to, but she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the girl. “I don’t understand.” The words were forced through clenched teeth. She knew exactly what he meant. Isabelle’s fear sweated out through her delicate skin. The wide doe eyes swelled with tears that spilled down her face. Charity knew they would season her cheeks with a delicious saltiness. She could almost taste the tender flesh on her tongue and it made her weak in the knees.

Charity jerked her head to the side, forcing herself to look away. Her nostrils flared as she glared at Little Bear. “What are you?”

Little Bear smiled again. “What are we, you mean. We are vengeance. We are revenge. We are death.”

Charity shook her head. She still didn’t understand. He was babbling.

Little Bear raised his hand and beckoned. The big brute brought Isabelle forward until she was standing right in front of Charity.

“Eat,” he said.

Charity shook as she fought back the hunger that threatened to envelop her. Her hands clenched in tight balls that she used to beat upon her thighs. She berated herself for her stupidity. This was just a dream. Just a dream. She would wake up soon and David would be lying next to her in their bed upstairs.

But the hunger was very real, and she could no longer fight it. She took a step toward Isabelle. She was right in front of the girl now. The maid whimpered around the gag as she gazed at Charity. Her eyes pleaded with her mistress and she tried to speak. Charity didn’t hear her. Her ears buzzed with Isabelle’s pulse. She took another step forward. Isabelle tried to take a step back, but the big man was directly behind her and she couldn’t move. Charity reached out a hand and trailed a finger down the soft skin of the girl’s neck. She pulled the finger back and licked it.

Her legs nearly buckled at the intense flavor. It tasted so delicious. All her resolve evaporated in an instant. Before she knew what she was doing, her hand darted out and tangled itself into Isabelle’s hair. The girl screamed around the cloth shoved into her mouth. Charity snarled and a vicious grin pulled at her lips. She ripped the cloth away to let Isabelle’s screams pierce the air in full force. The sound sent shivers of ecstasy through Charity’s body. Riding the high of the screams, she tipped the girl’s head back and pressed her nose to the throbbing vein. She inhaled deeply and moaned.

The continued screams vibrated against her lips as they trailed along the salty skin and she savored the moment. Then Charity’s teeth pierced the skin, tiny drops of blood ran over her tongue, she shook with a pleasure she had never before known. It was heaven. Nothing she had ever eaten or experienced, not during her childhood or even during her wedding, could match the explosion of flavor and joy that started in her mouth and coursed through her entire body. It was too much and not enough, all at the same time.

Charity’s teeth snapped closed and she yanked her head back. As a chunk of flesh ripped from Isabelle’s throat, the girl’s screams became burbling gags. The meat tasted even better than the blood. She chewed slowly, making the moment last as long as she could.

Isabelle sagged against her as the last bit of life left her weak body. Charity forgot about everyone else in the room. It was just her and the girl, the girl she hated, the girl she now loved. She pulled Isabelle’s head back again and trailed a finger down her throat. This time she took a bite from the shoulder. It was tougher than the flesh at the throat, not as tender. But it had its own unique flavor and it was still beyond anything she could have imagined.

For several blissful minutes, Charity ate, taking bites from various parts of the body, testing their delicacy, comparing their flavors, discovering her favorite bits. Finally, her hunger was sated and she let the dead maid slide to the floor. Charity sank down with her, feeling weak and spent.

“Take her outside.” Little Bear’s voice broke through the strange wall of happiness that surrounded her.

As the big man hefted Isabelle’s body over his shoulder, Charity looked up at him. She was in a fog, confused by what just happened, by what she felt. She still floated in a dream world, but it had taken on an all too real hue. A small piece of her was appalled at what she had just done and it clawed its way out from under the animal urges that were threatening to take over. She shook as she realized what she had done. She was a cannibal, devouring the flesh of her very own kitchen maid. She wiped her arm across her mouth. The back of her hand came away streaked with blood.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered.

Little Bear leaned over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Welcome to the fold, my little one.”

Chapter 10

Jeremiah Gaines wandered over to the barn, grumbling the whole way. “Stupid Jed. What’s he know anyway?” Jeremiah continued to mumble for several minutes in a nonsense language he had invented as a child to express his anger toward his older brother. He threw open the door to the barn and stomped through. The wind slammed it shut behind him as he made his way past the mostly empty stalls. The large barn was falling apart after years of disuse. Animals of every sort used to ramble all over the farm when his parents were alive. Now they just had three horses, one for each of the three remaining brothers.

Jeremiah stopped in front of his horse’s stall. “Howdy, Nelly,” he said as he opened the door. The mare nuzzled his pocket when he closed it behind him. “Here ya go, my lovely lady.” He reached into his pocket and took out a stick of peppermint candy he had swiped from the general store earlier in the month. He snapped one stick into several pieces and held them in his hand for her to take. She rested her head on his shoulder as she munched and he scratched her along the jaw. “That’s my girl. Least someone loves me.”

He glanced over at Jed’s horse, Saddle, who stood looking through the bars longingly. Jeremiah narrowed his eyes at the horse. “Stupid name for a stupid horse,” he mumbled even as he reached into his pocket with his free hand. Using his leg for leverage, he broke one of the remaining candies into several pieces and pulled them out. Then he stuck his hand through the bars and let Saddle lap the pieces up. He scratched the old horse on the nose even as he continued to grumble.

When his fingers started to ache, he pulled away from Saddle and pushed Nelly off his shoulder. Nelly’s reins were hanging just outside the stall and he reached through the bars to pull them off the hook. After slipping them over the horse’s head, he led her out into the walk way.

A young stallion stood with his head over the door on the other side of Saddle’s stall. Drool dripped from his lips as he stared at Jeremiah. The big man dropped Nelly’s reins and took two giant steps to reach the door. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget you, ya big dummy.” After doling out a quick scratch and the last couple pieces of peppermint, he grabbed his saddle from the saddle rack and threw it over Nelly’s back. He cinched it tight and led her out into the sunshine.

“Hey! Where you think yer going?” Jed called to him from the porch where he sat on the steps whittling a stick. There was a pile of old shavings on the side of the stairs and an enormous collection of hideous wooden figures cluttered up nearly every surface in the house.

Jeremiah pulled Nelly around to face Jed. “Lonesome Ridge. What’s it to ya?”

Jed raised an eyebrow at him. Jeremiah had a weakness for the saloon girls. Especially one in particular, one who had no interest in him and who could get him in a whole mess of trouble with the sheriff. “You keep yer nose clean, ya hear me?” Jed waggled his knife at his younger brother. “I don’t need you bringin’ McClane down on us again. We don’t need him stickin’ his nose around here any more than he already does. In fact...” He stood up and hollered into the house. “Jasper, get yer ass out here. Yer headin’ to town.”

The young man came out onto the porch. “Why do I have to go? Jer can handle himself.” But he was already strapping on his belt. It was a futile argument that he never won.

“Don’t go givin’ me no lip. Move. Jeremiah’s ready to go already and yer gonna make him late.”

Jasper jumped off the edge of the porch to avoid his oldest brother arm as it made a beeline for Jasper’s head, then he trotted to the barn as Jeremiah began to protest behind him. “Aw, com’on, Jed. I don’t need no nanny goat. I can look after myself.”

Jed grunted and went back to his whittling, effectively ending any potential conversation before it began. Jeremiah grumbled atop Nelly until Jasper returned with Dynamite a few minutes later.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Jasper said as he nodded toward the path through the hills.

Jeremiah glared at him for a full thirty seconds before he spat on the ground, aiming in Jed’s direction. The older Gaines brother pretended not to notice, even though his eyes narrowed and his face darkened. With a growl, Jeremiah spun Nelly around and spurred her into a trot. She felt his irritation and snorted as she kicked up dust in her wake. Jasper sighed and followed at a slower pace. This was a regular occurrence and he knew Jeremiah would eventually slow down and wait for him. No matter what his brother said, he liked having Jasper along for the ride whenever he went into town. Jasper kept him out of serious trouble... usually.

As he expected, Jeremiah was waiting where the hills split apart to go their separate ways. He spat again and a fat glob of brown juice pooled on the hard dirt.

Jasper’s nose curled and he fought against his gag reflex. He glanced at his older brother. “You should wash up before we get to town if you don’t want Ms. Cora to dump a bucket on you.”

Jeremiah glared at him again. “That only happened once. She never dare do it again. I’d whoop her and she knows it.”

Jasper laughed. “She did it twice, Jeremiah. And I have no doubt she would do it again if she thought it was necessary. That girl is afraid of no one, especially not you.”

Jeremiah snorted. “Whatever. That little whore needs someone to teach her a lesson. She’d do right to listen to us menfolk.”

The younger man shook his head. His brother was all bark and no bite. “Why would she do that? She has you boys wrapped around her finger. And she’s not a whore, she’s just a dancing girl. She gets you all riled up, then sends you off to one of the real whores. You’re just mad because she won’t take you to her bed.”

The older Gaines brother growled. “She will. Just you wait. One of these days, she will.”

They rode in silence to the river. “Stop here.” Jeremiah jumped off Nelly and draped her reins over a tree branch near the water before he stripped down to nothing.

Jasper pressed his lips tightly together to stifle the know-it-all smirk that would surely get him a good beating. He tethered Dynamite near Nelly so they could both drink and wandered down the river a short distance to give his brother some privacy. Not that Jeremiah had a modicum of humility anyway. He would strip down in the middle of town and bath in a horse trough if he thought the sheriff wouldn’t arrest him for it.

As Jasper sank down onto a log to get lost in his own thoughts, Jeremiah splashed about in the cold water. It hadn’t rained for awhile, so the river was low. The mud he kicked up made it brown and ugly and didn’t help him getting clean much, but he didn’t notice. He always felt like a kid whenever he bathed in the river. It was the only place he would bathe, and he didn’t do it often enough. But it was fun when he did.

A flicker of light caught his eye and he dove toward it. The fish slipped through his fingers by barely an inch. “Lucky bastard,” he grumbled as he stood up and surveyed the water again. It took him several tries, but he caught the fish and soon after that, he snagged another one.

“Jasper, get over here.”

The young man looked up in time to see his brother emerge from the river, stark naked, dripping wet, and carrying two large fish. He grinned and grabbed some of the fallen twigs that littered the ground around the trees.

“I thought you wanted to get to town,” he said as he piled the wood up and got a fire started.

“Eh.” Jeremiah shrugged and looked to the sky. “Sun’s still high yet. We got time. Don’t wanna get there too early or the good whores is still sleepin’.”

Jasper snorted and rolled his eyes. He took the fish from his brother and skewered them on two longer sticks. Then he propped them over the fire using several stones. Jeremiah lay back on the ground to air dry, heedless of the dirt that was now covering his backside. Jasper rolled his eyes and pulled a small book from Dynamite’s saddle bag.

He settled himself on the other side of the fire. He opened the book very carefully. It was called Frankenstein, written by a young woman named Mary Shelley. The shopkeeper’s wife, Emma Jones, had let him borrow it. She had lots of books, books she had brought with her from back east. Rumor had it she was a librarian before moving out west. Why someone would give up that life to come out west and toil in the hot sun and dirt all day, Jasper would never understand.

Jasper found the page where he left off and began reading. It was a good book. They always were. He had to be careful with them, though. Jeremiah mocked him for reading, but he never did anything cruel to him. Jed, on the other hand, would snatch the books from his hands and throw them in the fire hard enough to send the coals flying. Mrs. Jones had been very upset when that had happened to one of hers. Jasper thought she would never lend him another book again, but she forgave him and now he took great care with the books. Jed never saw one and Jeremiah never said anything about it to Jed.

Jasper glanced at his brother. Jeremiah was rough and uncouth, a bull in a china shop as the saying goes, but he wasn’t Jed. There was a stupid innocence to Jeremiah. He did what he was told and didn’t think much about right and wrong. He just went with the way life flowed. Unlike Jed. Jed went out of his way to hurt people. Sure, on the face of things he pretended to have morals. No shooting women or children, no shooting the animals. But that didn’t mean he didn’t find other ways to do damage, to hurt people as much as he could. Even those he claimed to care about weren’t immune to his vileness. Ma and Pa were afraid of him toward the end. She died before Pa, which was a stroke of luck for her. Pa didn’t make it to a natural end. Jasper was there the day Jed decided to “put the ol’ man outta his misery.” He had tried to stop his oldest brother, but he was too weak. All he did was earn himself a broken arm, a black eye, and several bruised ribs.

Jasper inhaled to chase the memories away before he turned the fish over and stoked the fire. Jeremiah groaned and sat up. He saw the book sitting beside Jasper and grunted, but didn’t say anything. They both stared out over the river for a few minutes until Jasper pulled the fish from the coals. He handed one to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah ripped a steaming piece off and popped it in his mouth, heedless of the pain. “Ya know, I’m not as dumb as you think I am.”

Jasper glanced sideways at him. He ate a piece of fish before responding. “What do you mean?”

He nodded at the book. “You and Jed act all high and mighty around me, like I’m a moron. I may not be as learned as you, or as good at plottin’ as Jed, but I’m not an idjit either. I know these lands, I know how to navigate them. If it weren’t for me, you fellas woulda starved after Pa croaked.”

Jasper gritted his teeth. Jeremiah had been in town when Jed shot Pa. He didn’t know the truth. The old man was buried six feet in the ground long before he even got home. “I know. You’re the best hunter of us.”

Jeremiah grunted. “That ain’t all. I can read an’ do math an’ all that borin’ stuff, too.”

Jasper looked at his brother and raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never seen you with a book.”

The scruffy man shrugged a shoulder. “Well, naw, not since Ma’s gone. But when we was younger I used to read all the time. She taught me. Said she wanted me to be one of them liars in New York City. Said she wanted me to go places, be somebody. But then she got sick. You was just a little baby then. She couldn’t help out no more an’ Pa said I couldn’t leave. So I stuck around, helped out. Jed wasn’t no good. He was always gettin’ into trouble. Him an’ that gang of his. You remember them?”

Jasper nodded. “Bobby Blake and Jimmy Two Fingers. I hated them.”

“Yep, me, too. Everyone thinks I’m the trouble maker, but I only have fun. I don’t mean to hurt nobody. Jed, he likes to hurt people. You know he an’ the sheriff were best friends when we was kids growin’ up?”

Jasper half shrugged, half nodded. “I remember Connor and Cora coming to the house a couple times when I was really young, but I didn’t know they were that close.”

Jeremiah tossed the nearly empty skeleton into the river. He watched as the other fish swarmed around, picking the bones clean. “Mmhmm. Afore the McClanes died, they were real close with Ma and Pa. Used to come to the house all the time. Cora was a spitfire even then.” He grinned at a memory from long ago until his face fell. “Then her folks died in that fire. She was at a friend’s house. Somehow Connor got out alive. They say he was burned pretty bad. They moved to town with their aunt, Elizabeth. You couldn’ta been more’n five then. She was a real piece of work, that one. A real stickler for rules and all. After awhile, she wouldn’t let him come over anymore. Said we was a bad influence. We wasn’t. Jed was. But that didn’t make no matter.”

He picked a piece of bone from his teeth. “You remember Lydia Prince?”

Jasper thought for a minute. “I think so. She and her parents died in that attack on the stage coach, right?”

“Yep. Musta been more’n ten years ago now. Did you know she was engaged to McClane at the time?”

Jasper’s jaw dropped. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yep. Nearly broke him. He thinks Jed did it.”

“Did he?”

Jeremiah shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe. Maybe not. I wasn’t there, but I don’t know where he was at the time. Don’t matter none, though. Can’t change it. Connor was too upstandin’ to go after Jed without proof, but it killed what little friendship they had left.”

He stood and unzipped his pants. The story continued as the fire sizzled. “He did get revenge on Jed’s gang, though. Bobby bit it out in desert. No one saw it, but everyone knows who did it. He was left out there to get ate by the buzzards. It was a revenge killin’, no doubt about it, but he deserved it. And Jimmy Two Fingers hanged a few years later for the rape and murder of a town girl, all legal like. Jed, though... the sheriff couldn’t pin nothing on him. Never could in all these years. He’s too smart.”

Jeremiah reached for Nelly’s reins and climbed into the saddle. Jasper followed suit. “Why are you telling me all this?”

Jeremiah shrugged. “Dunno. Just felt like the time. You’s a smart boy. I never made nothin’ a myself, not like Ma wanted me to. Maybe you can. Maybe you can get outta this hell hole an’ make a life someplace nice. Someplace like New York City or Phillydelfya. Be a liar or a newspaper man or something.”

Jasper laughed. “I think you mean lawyer.”

Jeremiah grinned a big, brown grin. “Nope. I mean a liar. They always telling lies, Ma said. That’s how they make they money. Lying. You gotta read them books so you know which lies to tell.”

Jasper’s laugh came out as a snort. “Well, if Ma said so, then it must be true.” He thought for a moment. “Nah, I think I’d rather be a professor at a college or something, though. No lying involved there.”

Jeremiah nodded. “That’d be good, too.” He appraised Jasper as the horses plodded along the path to town. “You know, little brother, I may be mean to ya, but it ain’t to be mean. It’s to make you tough. Someday, yer gonna be out there on your own. I won’t be around no more. An’ you’ll need to take care of yerself.”

Jasper opened his mouth, but closed it again when he couldn’t think of a thing to say to Jeremiah’s strange behavior. His older brother ignored him and continued on anyway. “When you was born, I was nine, Jed was eleven. Even then, Ma didn’t trust him. She pulled me aside the night you was born. You was laying there on the bed, all swaddled up and sleepin’. ‘You protect him, Jeremiah,’ Ma says to me. She looked me in the eyes and gripped my arm so tight it hurt. She was a’skeered, I could see that well enough. ‘You keep your little brother safe.’ I knew she wasn’t talkin’ about protecting ya from wolves and stuff. She was talkin’ about him, about Jed.”

Jeremiah pulled his horse to a stop and looked Jasper in the eyes. His face was dead serious. “I’m doing my best, little brother. No matter what it takes, I’ll protect you from him. I promise.”

Chapter 11

“Mad, Abby, bring the vegetables, please.” Ma Crawford nodded toward the kitchen.

Her oldest daughters, Madeleine and Abigail rose from the game of checkers they played on the floor in the corner and walked to the side of the room that served as a kitchen.

“Did you see Amos the other day?” Madeleine gushed as they picked up two wooden bowls full of vegetables from the work table under the window.

Abigail rolled her eyes. Ever since their former schoolmate had been deputized barely a year ago, Madeleine had had her sights set on him. It didn’t matter that the man was obviously in love with one of the saloon girls.

“What about Cora?” Abby pressed her lips together to hide her smile as Maddy set off into a rant. She just loved teasing her younger sister.

“I don’t know what he sees in her. She’s a saloon girl, after all.” Madeleine put all the venom she could muster into the words “saloon girl”, as if it was the worst profession anyone could possibly choose. To her, it was. “Amos is a good man. He needs a good woman. He needs someone who will take care of the house and keep her knickers on around other men.”

Abby laughed. “You mean like you?”

“Yes,” Maddy spat. “Of course like me. Can you get better than a teacher? I’m smart, I want lots of children, I am good at keeping house.”

“I beg to differ on that last part.” Ma smiled as she took the bowl from Madeleine. “Every time I ask you to sweep, it’s like I’m asking you to chop off your hand.”

Maddy scoffed. “I just don’t like sweeping is all.”

Ma winked at Abby as they set the bowls on the table. “Sweeping is a large part of living out here, my dear. Between you kids and your pa, if I didn’t sweep twice a day, we would be living in a foot of dust.”

“Anyway,” Maddy said in an attempt to turn the conversation back to where she wanted it to go. “He needs a good woman.”

“Bow your heads.” Pa ignored Maddy’s glare as the rest of the family bowed their heads and clasped hands.

There were six of them around the small table. Ma, Pa, Abigail, Madeleine, Wyatt, and Hannah. Ma and Pa had moved out west when Abby was two and Maddy was a newborn. Over nearly two decades, they built a nice little homestead away from the corruption and craziness of the east coast. They were half a day’s ride from Lonesome Ridge. Madeleine worked as a teacher at the school. It was too far to travel every day, so she rented a room in town. On Saturdays, she borrowed a horse from the stable and rode out to the homestead to spend the weekend with her family.

“Did you see Eva yesterday?” Hannah, the youngest of the four at barely seventeen, asked her older brother.

Wyatt stuffed a carrot in his mouth. “Yup. Mrs. Zane is making her dress, she said.”

Hannah sighed and stared off into space. “I can’t wait to be a bridesmaid. It’s going to be great.”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Isn’t that how the saying goes, Abby?” Maddy’s wicked grin had her older sister blushing.

“I’ve only been a bridesmaid twice, and I’m not in any hurry to get married, thank you.”

“Abby was thinking about going into teaching,” Ma Crawford cut in as she passed the bowl of steamed green beans around the table.

Abigail rolled her eyes. “No, Ma. You want me to go into teaching.”

Ma Crawford gave the exasperated sigh she had mastered years ago. “You have to do something, Abby. You can’t stay around here all your life.”

“Why not?” Pa gave Abby a small smile as they spoke over each other. She was his best helper and everyone knew it. Without her around, he would have struggled to manage all the chores.

“Don’t encourage her, Abraham. She needs to start a family of her own before it’s too late.”

“Ma, do we have to have this conversation every time we eat?”

“Fine, fine. We’ll talk about something else.” Ma lapsed into silence with a scowl on her face, clearly uninterested in talking about anything else.

Silence fell over them for several minutes, broken only by the clanking of forks and cups.

“Mr. Bell says he saw a dead buffalo the other day.” Wyatt poked at the beans his mother had forced him to take, but didn’t eat any of them. “He says it was ripped apart, probably by lions.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “There are no lions in the west, Wyatt.”

“How do you know? Maybe one escaped from that traveling circus that came through here a couple years ago.”

“I doubt it.”

His argument was cut off by a sharp scream from outside. Everyone froze until Pa cried out. “The cattle!”

He rose from the table so fast that his chair toppled over behind him. He snatched the rifle from beside the door and raced out into the dark. Abby was right behind him, grabbing her own rifle. She stopped at the door. “Get into the bedroom, Ma. Just in case.” Then she was gone.

Ma rose and shuffled the other kids into the bedroom. They huddled together in the corner between the wall and the bed, away from the window.

“Lions,” whispered Wyatt as he gave Hannah a knowing nod.

“Shut up,” she hissed back as she reached over Maddy to smack his arm.

Outside, Abby and her father were creeping toward the barn. Pa carried his shotgun in one hand and a lantern in the other. The lantern bobbed as they walked, casting strange jumping shadows over the ground. Pained screams still echoed out through the night, mingled with snarls and growls that were unfamiliar.

Pa held up his hand as they reached the door. Abby crouched beside it and held her shotgun at the ready.

The screams stopped short, but they could hear muffled grunts from inside. “What is that?” Abby whispered.

Pa scrunched his face up and shook his head. “I don’t know. Stay here.”

He pushed the door open and peeked inside. “Oh my God...”

The grunts stopped instantly as he spoke out loud.

“Shit.” Pa took a step back. “Run, Abigail.”

Abby rose and stumbled away from the barn. “What is it?” She raised her shotgun toward the door.

Her father stepped in front of her. “Go, Abby. Just go. Don’t stop until you reach the house.”

She took several stuttering steps and turned back toward the barn. A growling moan echoed from just inside the door.

Pa turned and saw Abby standing just behind him. He ran to her and gave her a rough shove. “Don’t look back! Just run!”

The terror in his eyes got her moving. She took off at a run. Behind her, the shotgun barked once, twice. Then Pa screamed.

Abigail tripped over her feet as she tried to simultaneously move forward toward the house and turn back toward her father. The shotgun spun out of her hands and landed in the bushes next to the stairs.

The lantern flew from her father’s hand and crashed onto the dry grass. Flames licked across the ground toward the barn. The growing flames silhouetted two men. At least, Abby thought they were men. Their skin was ashy gray in the orange light.

For a brief moment, Abby watched in horror as they bent over her father and tore chunks of flesh from his body. His screams pierced deep into her soul.

Then one of the men looked up. Her eyes met his. He snarled and rose from his crouched position with her father’s blood dripping down his chin. He stared at her long and hard. Time froze as her heart stopped beating and her breath hitched in her chest. Then he took a step toward her.

That was all the urging she needed. She climbed to her feet and raced up the stairs, slamming the door closed behind her. She stumbled across the room and yanked open the door to the bedroom. Her sisters screamed as they scrambled over each other to try not to be in front.

“It’s me. Shhh, it’s just me.” Abby whispered. She pressed her ear against the door. Slow steps thudded across the porch and the door to the house crashed open so hard the windows rattled on their frames. “Out the window.” She urged her family up and to the small window.

Wyatt hoisted Hannah up onto the sill. Her eyes met Abby’s briefly before she disappeared out into the growing night. Madeleine was already climbing up on Wyatt’s knee before she was on the ground.

“Wyatt, go.” Abby’s eyes darted between the window and the door as her brother hefted himself up and out. She heard him grunt as he hit the ground.

The bedroom door rattled. “Abby.”

Abigail turned from the window. Her mother stood with her back pressed against the door. She held a broomstick in her hands. “Go,” she said.

Abby shook her head. “No, Ma. I won’t leave you.”

“You have to. Save them, Abby. Please. No one else can.” Tears welled in her eyes as the door slammed against her back again and again, trying to shove her away from it. “I love you. Go.” Then she turned her back and threw the door open. With a scream, she launched herself at the man.

“No!” Abby stared in abject horror as her mother grappled with the intruder, torn between helping her mother and protecting the rest of her family. For one intense moment, he looked away from her mother and his eyes met Abby’s. She gasped. His eyes were the dull emptiness of death.

“Abby, go!”

Her mother’s cry snapped Abby out of her daze. She threw herself over the window sill. Her brother and sisters were huddled outside, waiting. Maddy was sobbing and Hannah was shaking with fear.

“Around the house. To the horses.” The three horses were in a corral on the side of the house, away from the barn where the cattle had been. Pa’s horse, the Crawford’s old plow horse, and the horse Madeleine had borrowed from the stables were all snorting and shuffling in annoyed confusion when they arrived.

“Hurry.” Abby vaulted over the fence and led Pa’s horse back to it so Hannah could climb on as Madeleine got on her own horse. Wyatt mounted the plow horse and they were ready to go. She opened the gate and then swung up behind Hannah.

Madeleine led the way out of the corral, but in her heightened state of panic, she steered the horse toward the barn. The other man who had attacked Pa saw them as they exited and made a beeline toward them. His gait was slow and halting, but Madeleine’s horse fed off her fear. She had such a tight grip on the reins that the poor creature didn’t know which way to turn. His instincts collided with his training and in the confusion, he reared back and threw her to the ground.

Madeleine’s screams rent the air, but they were cut short as she hit the ground. Her neck was bent at an uncomfortable angle and her eyes stared into the night.

“Maddy!” Abby shouted for her sister as more men swarmed out of the barn, drawn by the noise. They descended upon the still warm body like a horde of dogs.

With tears threatening her vision, Abby steered her horse away from the barn toward the road. “Wyatt! This way!”

The boy made to follow, but his horse was slow and scared. The man who had been angling for Maddy was nearly at his flank. He lunged at Wyatt and latched onto his leg with a death grip. Wyatt shouted and kicked, but the man’s teeth sank into his ankle.

Abby spun her horse around and raced at the man. As she rode by, she drove her foot into his head. He released his grip on Wyatt and fell to the ground. Wyatt kicked his horse into gear and they fled to the road. The men fell further and further behind until they were out of sight. Abby kept them running until the horses were slathered in sweating and breathing so hard she thought they might collapse. Only then did they slow down. Hannah sank against Abby’s back and wept. Tears streamed down Wyatt’s face. Abby buried her pain deep beneath the hate and anger that was growing in her heart.

Chapter 12

Little Bear beckoned for Charity to move next to David. Her body was still weak and shaking, but she dragged herself across the floor until she was next to her husband. He stared at her. Not at her, but at the blood covering her mouth and dress. The strange hunger in his eyes both excited and terrified her. It was the same hunger she felt when she saw Isabelle.

“You are not like the others.” The translator settled back onto the floor by Little Bear’s side and relayed his words.

Charity looked up at the young man’s empty eyes. “What others?”

He waved a hand at David and the soldier. “The others like us. The other turned ones.”

She shook her head. “I don’t...” Her brain was clouded, like she had been drinking too much wine.

Little Bear reached out and brushed a hand over her hair to smooth some of the knots. “Do not worry, my dear child. You will understand all soon enough.”

Charity felt sluggish and confused, but a little worm of thought niggled at the back of her mind, forcing its way forward. He had called her a child. He was patronizing her. She was pretty sure she was older than him by several years, yet he spoke to her as if he was her elder, a grandfather coddling his young ignorant granddaughter. It was the way Catherine had, the way David began to after they moved out west, and she hated it with every fiber of her being.

She stiffened and pulled her head away so he couldn’t touch her without stretching. “Please explain to me what is going on.” Her voice had dropped an octave and she put a sharp edge on it.

He sat back in the chair and steepled his fingers. He didn’t seem to notice her change in demeanor. “Very well, my child. It is a long story, with much pain. Are you sure you want to hear all of it?”

“We have time.” She rose and pulled her chair over. She would not sit on the floor like a dog. She took her time arranging her skirts before turning her attention to him.

The corners of Little Bear’s mouth flickered. Was it a smile? A frown? She couldn’t tell without the expression in his eyes to guide her.

“It started several months ago,” he began. At times he spoke in his own language and Walton, the soldier sitting on the floor beside him, had to translate. “I don’t know exactly how long. A band of men came while I was away from my village. They were mostly soldiers who ran away during the war. They were disgraced, and what little mercy they had was torn away by the harsh life they led. The men killed everyone in my village, my whole family. It was all gone, burned to the ground. Barely a dozen of us remained, mostly those who had not been there when it began.”

He paused as his voice cracked. Charity waited for him to continue. “My grandfather was the village shaman. I was to follow in his footsteps, and he had taught me how to contact the spirits. I used what knowledge I could remember and attempted a ceremony. I called upon them for help, to make those awful men pay for what they had done. The spirits did answer, but not in the way I expected. Their gift was both a blessing and a curse. They gave me the ability to seek my revenge, but at a horrible price.”

He was silent for awhile. His nostrils flared and his jaw was set in a tight line. “What you see, the gray skin, the dull eyes, it is both a tool for vengeance and the cruelest form of torture.”

“What are we?”

He smiled sadly. “I do not know, to be honest. We are beyond the living. We are greater than them. We do not feel much pain, unless it is very intense. We do not feel cold, though it makes us slower. We are stronger, and at night when the sun has gone down, we are faster. But we must eat.”

“We feed on people? The living?”

He nodded. “We feed on living flesh. It sustains us. People, animals, anything will do. We have discovered that humans taste the best and provide the most energy. But I prefer animal flesh.”

Charity stared at him. Their conversation was so surreal, so impossible. Her eyes darted to David. “Are you the leader? Is that why they listen to you, why they act like trained dogs?”

Little Bear laughed. It was a hollow, low sound that sent shivers up Charity’s spine. “You are a very inquisitive one. Yes, I am the leader. I was the first to be given this... gift, if you will. Unlike the others, I have retained all my abilities, all my memories. My mind is clear, it is sharp.”

The young woman shot a glance at her husband. “And what of the others? How are they different?”

“They are...” He paused, searching for the right words. “Few of those who have been turned are fully themselves. They lack memories. They are listless and slow to respond unless there is fresh meat around. Many do not know who they are or where they came from. They are simply beasts who wander in search of food. Unless they have direction. They follow directions very well. They obey without question. Only twice have I had to kill a creature who did not respond, who let the power of hunger overtake them. The others seemed to understand that and they feared me even more. The fear works to my advantage.”

“David?” Charity called her husband’s name. He was still staring at her, at the blood on her face and neck, but he did not immediately respond to her call. “David,” she said again, more firmly. She waved a hand in front of his face and he lifted his head slowly until his dull eyes met hers.

“He did not know his name. Your maid told us. He is like a newborn pup, untrained, confused. I had to stop him from doing to you what you did to your maidservant.”

Charity shook her head as pictures of her past life flashed in front of her eyes. Sitting on her father’s knee as a child, crying at her mother’s side at his death, the pain and anger she felt, the embarrassment. Meeting David for the first time, the joy of finally being released from the poverty, at finally becoming part of the society she adored, and the devastation when she realized it was all being taken away again. She remembered David’s betrayal as he slowly turned against her, treating her like she was inferior instead of his wife and equal. She remembered the shock and fear of the night before when she awoke to find him at her bedside, when he lunged at her, when he attacked her and turned her into whatever it was that they were.

A hand went unbidden to the wound on her neck. She brushed it gently with her fingers. “Are we dead?”

Little Bear cocked his head. “We are turned.”

Charity frowned at him for a moment as she remembered an article she read a few months back in one of the newspapers she subscribed to that was shipped out regularly on the train. It was about a woman in some jungle in some far off place Charity had never heard of who was dead and came back to life. She snorted now as she had then. “Impossible,” she said, shaking her head.

She could feel Little Bear’s curiosity as he stared at her with those empty, soulless eyes. He was looking at her in his own way. Judging her, appraising her. It made her skin crawl and she had an almost unstoppable urge to hide behind her chair. Instead, she lifted her chin and stared back into the big red pits in the middle of his face.

The corners of his lips twitched again. This time it was definitely a smile. “What is impossible, my dear child, is you. You seem to have suffered none of the effects of this... disease, we will call it.”

His continued hesitation at naming what had happened to them gave Charity an idea. “You’ve never had to explain this to anyone before, have you?”

Little Bear folded his hands in his lap. “No. I have not. I have thought about it often, pondered through the effects with each new convert, but I have not had the opportunity to discuss it with another person.”

“Until now.”

He nodded once. “Until now.”

Charity pressed her lips together. Her mind was working furiously. Her fear and confusion were receding rapidly, pushed back by the cool and intelligent side of her brain. She was in a very interesting position. A very interesting position indeed. “How many of us are there?”

Little Bear smiled. “A good number. Not too many to feed, but enough so that we do not have to worry about being overrun. I choose my targets carefully, and I am even more careful with those who we allow to turn.”

“Why? Why not just turn everyone? If they’re all like David, why do we need to worry?”

The man laughed again. “We cannot turn everyone. We need to eat. Some are injured in such a way that they cannot be turned. If their neck or back is broken or their skull crushed, they will not turn. And a smaller band can travel easier without worrying about being spotted or attacked.”

Charity raised an eyebrow at him. “Attacked? You said we were stronger and faster. We should not fear being attacked. We should not fear anyone.”

Little Bear’s lips pressed into a line for a moment before he spoke. “You are still young, my child. You do not understand. It is better this way. Trust me.”

He said ‘trust me’ like a father would tell his child to trust him, basically scolding her for questioning his leadership. Irritation and rebellion boiled up into Charity’s throat, but she forced it back down. Instead, she forced a puppy-dog smile to her face. “You are right. I am still young and I do not understand all of this yet. Will you teach me?”

His hard face broke into a grin. “Of course. You will be my student, I will be your teacher. Together we will run this ragtag band of converts.” He rose from his chair and held out his hand. “Come, I will show you the herd.”

Charity slipped her hand into his and let him lead her out onto the porch. “Come, David, Walton.” Her husband and the soldier rose from their positions and shuffled along behind the pair. Little Bear pushed open the screen door and beckoned for Charity to walk through.

It was quiet outside. Not even the wind stirred. The sun was hot and in the sky. Charity took Little Bear’s offered arm and together they stepped off the porch. Her skin immediately began to sting. The intense heat pulled the moisture from her skin as they walked. She now understood the cracks she had seen on Walton and Little Bear’s faces and hands. She lowered her head and let her hair fall around her face to offer a little protection.

“Ah, yes. The sun does not like us. We must move around when it is weakest or it sucks our energy. I have had more than one man fall from its vicious heat.”

Charity cut a glance at Little Bear, but said nothing. Her lips were already starting to burn as she hurried along. Her eyes went wide as they passed the corral. It was empty of horses, but pools of sticky blood seeped into the cracked earth. She tried not to think of the animals she had cared for and allowed him to lead her to the closest barn. As they approached, she could hear noises from inside. The shuffling and moaning grew louder when Walton opened the door.

There was a large group of men and women just inside the barn, but they moved aside as the doors opened, crowding out of the rays of sun that burst through the opening. Walton closed the doors behind them, but the others stayed where they were, leaving a gap of several feet between the crowd and the newcomers. The stairs to the hay loft were to the right and Little Bear led Charity toward them. Others shuffled out of the way. Two large men who looked much like Little Bear were standing at the base of the stairs, blocking it. When Little Bear and Charity reached them, he nodded to them,

“Gray Wolf, North Wind, please step aside.”

The men immediately moved off the stairs to let them pass. Walton followed them up to the loft, but David stayed below with the rest of the crowd.

Little Bear led Charity to the edge of the platform. She gasped as she looked out over the barn. There must have been nearly thirty of the creatures. The barn had once been home to their numerous horses, but all she could see now were occasional bones among the crowd. “Are there more in the other barns?” she asked as she surveyed the crowd below. They were all staring up at her. It didn’t make her nervous as she would have expected. It made her excited.

“No. They have been barricaded for the moment, to protect the animals.”

She turned to him. “Why?”

“To prolong the food supply. We will stay here for awhile to regroup and plan. We will need to eat during that time.”

Charity nodded. “I see.”

Little Bear smiled at her. “Give me your hand.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Trust me,” he said.

She took his offered hand and he held it up. The shuffling and moans from below stopped. “Heed my words,” he bellowed to the masses below. “Today dawns a new era. Behold, your new queen!”

And just like that, Charity’s hope for her future renewed and her new life began.

Chapter 13

Connor McClane’s shoulders drooped with relief as he pushed open the swinging doors to the saloon. It had been a long, stressful day full of robbery accusations, street brawls, and dead horses. On days like these, he almost wished he had forsaken a life in the west and gone east after the death of his bride-to-be. The only things that kept him in Lonesome Ridge were the convincing pleas of his older sister.

“Evenin’, sheriff.” Neil Avery inclined his head as Connor settled onto his typical seat at the bar. It was like a second home to him and he reveled in its comfort. A glass half full of amber liquid waited for him and he knocked it back in one quick gulp. Avery had it filled again before it even hit the wood. “Rough day, Connor?”

McClane grunted. “The worst.” He threw back the next shot and closed his eyes as it burned its way down his throat. He should have been a bartender, he thought. All day access to free booze and free women.

“Ah, it ain’t all bad,” Avery was saying. “You’ve had harder days, sheriff. Like with your sister, and Lydia.”

Connor’s nostrils flared. Leave it to Neil to make a bad day worse. The sheriff was convinced that the man did it just so Connor would drink more. Not like he didn’t drink enough as it was already. He was pretty sure he could have bought the saloon by now. “Yeah, I have.” He tapped the empty glass on the bar. “You’re slow today.”

The bartender flashed him a grin and poured another shot into the glass. “Been busy.”

“So I figured. My jail is filled with drunkards who decided to mess up my streets earlier today. Thanks for that.”

Avery winked at him as he filled another patron’s glass. “My pleasure. Wouldn’t want ya to be out of a job, now would I?”

Connor grunted again and wrapped his hands around his drink. He was half a bottle in when Avery leaned against the bar in front of him. “The Gaines boys were in the other day.”

The sheriff raised an eyebrow at the bartender in warning before purposefully ignoring him and focusing on his favorite pastime. Neil wasn’t deterred. “It was just Jeremiah and Jasper. Jed wasn’t with them. Pro’lly out causin’ all sorts o’ trouble, that one. Jedidiah always was a right devil. His mama couldn’t keep him in check, no matter how hard she tried. He was the death o’ her, I’m sure of it.”

Connor clenched his teeth together so tightly they creaked. His hands shook as he gripped the glass. The liquid inside splashed onto his fingers and he forced himself to relax. It would do no good to cut himself on a broken glass.

“Di’n he kill yer woman all them years ago?” Old Man Richards plopped himself down on the stool next to Connor. A vile stench wafted over the area, so strong it made the sheriff nearly gag.

“You have an aversion to water, Richards?” Connor parried the question with one of his own.

The old man tossed the sheriff a look as dirty as he was before raising his arm to sniff under it. Connor immediately regretted asking the question. The smell intensified to the point of nearly being intolerable.

“What you talkin’ ‘bout? I smell dandy.” Richards snatched the bottle from the bartender’s hand and took a swig. “Them Gaines boys, though. Them boys’ll stink the right stink outta ye. That Jer... Jerma... Jermamiah. At’s ‘is name. Jermamiah. The ugly’n. Course’n ‘e’s better’n ‘at kid. Whatsisname. The little one. Jester? Jister?”

“Jasper.” Connor beckoned to Avery and the bartender pulled another bottle from a shelf underneath. The liquid was slightly darker in color and Connor’s mouth watered just looking at it.

“Yeah, Jaster. Lil’ know-it-all, anyway. Thinkin’ ‘e’s better’n me, better’n ever’ne. Stupid kid.” Richards made a swipe for the new bottle, but Connor jerked it out of reach before his grubby fingers could even brush the glass. “Aww, dun’ be like that, sher’f. ‘At’s th’ good stuff. Share ‘n share alike, they say. Be a good fella and pours us a little here, sher’f.” He shoved his empty glass toward Connor and grinned a toothless grin.

McClane sighed as he poured a sip into the glass. “How long have you been in here?”

“Uh...” The old man scratched his head in thought. Dirt drifted from his scalp onto his shoulder. “Dunno. Couple hours, I reckon. Not long.”

He listed to the side as he pulled his glass back to him. The dirt toppled off his shoulder onto Connor’s jacket. The sheriff shook it off as his nose curled involuntarily and he scooted to the far side of his stool.

“Neil, he’s done. No more.”

Avery tipped his nonexistent hat and pulled the nearly empty bottle away from the old man, along with his completely empty glass.

“Aww, c’mon, sher’f. ‘At ain’t fair! I’m jus’ try’n’ t’ ’ave a little fun, s’all.” He leaned off his stool and rested his arm on the sheriff’s shoulder, putting his mouth dangerously close to Connor’s ear. “You un’erstand, doncha?. Fellas like you ‘n me, we’re the same, ya see? We both... life’s shit on us but good, sher’f. I got me a no good woman who ain’t worth no good. An’ you, you ain’t got no woman ‘t’all. ‘At no good Jedi... Jebi... ‘At no good Gaines boy, he done take her from ya, jus’ like the other’n took my damn dog. Them boys, they no good. Not worth a damn bit o’ good, I tells ya.”

The door to the saloon opened and the young deputy walked in. Connor breathed a sigh of relief. He wished he hadn’t when he got a lungful of the old man’s stench.

“Amos,” he called as he raised a hand.

The young man trotted over. “Yeah, sheriff?”

“Why don’t you escort Mr. Richards here back to the jailhouse? Tuck him up all nice and cozy in the empty cell and let him get some rest.”

The man rolled off the sheriff’s arm and almost off the back of the bar stool. “Aww, but sher’f, we was havin’ such a good talk. We was bondin’ an’ all ‘at.”

“Come on, Mr. Richards,” Amos said as he tucked his arm underneath the old man’s. He had to turn his head away and coughed a couple times as he pulled him from the stool. “Let’s get you rested up.”

Connor watched as Amos led the old man from the bar and the doors closed behind them. Then he turned back to his bottle. Just you and me now, he thought as he wrapped his hands around it. This was the good stuff, not the typical cheap swill he drank. He needed something strong after that conversation. Images played through his head, memories that weren’t real, nightmares that had haunted him for so many years.

Lydia Prince was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. He loved her from the moment he laid eyes on her, and she quickly became his world. When he was promoted to deputy, he’d spent every last penny he had to buy her the nicest engagement ring he could afford. He was just nineteen, still young and stupid, and he had his entire life planned out ahead of him. Sheriff Anders was getting on in years and soon he would retire. Connor would become sheriff and together he and Lydia would raise a beautiful, happy family. Six kids. Three boys, three girls, just like she wanted. They would grow old gracefully and he would pass on the star and spend the rest of his days rocking on the front porch with his gorgeous wife, watching his grandkids race around the yard.

The bottle moved from his hands. “Avery’s special whiskey? Uh oh.” Connor’s head rolled to the side to glare at the intruder. Cora grinned at him. “Bad day, little brother?”

He shrugged as he took in her appearance. Emerald dress that fell off the shoulders, way too much paint on her face. He blinked at her and his eyelids felt heavy. His eyes trailed to the bottle she held in her hand. It was nearly gone. Only a few sips were left in the bottom.

“Hey,” he complained as he reached for it. “ ‘At’s mine. You drank too much.” His lips were fat and his tongue stuck in his mouth as he spoke.

Cora’s laugh held no humor as she pulled the bottle further out of his reach. He propped himself against the bar and tried to grab it from her. His hands felt like lead. She swatted his arm playfully. “That was all you, dear boy.”

He tried to protest as she put the bottle to her lips and drank down what was left, but his teeth collided with his tongue and he couldn’t get the words out. His finger wiggled in a feeble attempt to scold her.

She grinned at him, but her eyes didn’t twinkle like they usually did. “Oops, sorry. All gone.” She was mad, and he knew it. She slid the bottle to the bartender and fixed the man with a glare that Connor was sure he wasn’t supposed to see. Avery took the bottle and avoided Cora’s gaze like it was a viper’s bite. He scooted as far down the bar as he could and busied himself with wiping a spot that was already clean. “Come on,” Cora said to her brother. “Let’s get you home.”

The world didn’t want to stay upright as Connor let Cora lead him out into the night. It took them three times as long as it should have to get to the jailhouse and Cora’s beautiful shoes were scuffed with marks from Connor’s boots, but they made it one piece. She took off his coat and gun belt and hung them by the door as he lay on the stairs and waited for her to finish. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to help him home, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Next, she pulled his hat off his head. He didn’t have the energy to hold his head up and his skull banged into the stairs behind him.

He groaned and rubbed the quickly growing lump behind his ear. “Ow,” he moaned as she pulled him into a standing position. She hefted him up and they stumbled up the stairs. Snores could be heard from the closed door on the right. “Amos is such a good boy,” Connor muttered as the door tried to turn sideways.

“Yes, he is.” Cora turned him around so he was facing the open door to his bedroom. She half dragged him across the floor and dropped him unceremoniously onto the bed. He was snoring before she had his boots off.

***

Hours later, Connor snorted and jerked awake. The dream he had every night pulled him from a deep sleep and ruined any chance he had at going back there. It was always the same.

A cloud of dust billowed up from the trail that curved around the hill. Connor stood up and the grin plastered on his face grew bigger. Lydia was coming home. She had been gone for over a month visiting her dying grandfather in a town far away. Now he was gone and she was coming home. To him, to Connor.

The stage coach came into view. The top was laden with trunks and bags. Two men sat in front, one driving, one carrying a loaded shotgun. Connor looked around. Where was his horse? He was sure it had been right there. He shrugged and started down the hill on foot. He was halfway to the trail when several horses broke from the trees on the other side of the road.

Connor reached for his gun, but all he found was empty air. He stopped and stared at his waist. His belt was gone. He glanced back up the hill, but didn’t see it anywhere. It had just disappeared.

A shot echoed off the hills behind him. He turned back toward the stage coach in time to see the man holding the shotgun tumble from the seat. He landed on the ground in front of the wheel and it ran him over as he screamed. The driver pulled the horses to a stop and the attackers surrounded the stage coach. Connor tried to shout at the men. He tried to run toward them, to draw their attention, to make them stop, but he was rooted in place. His feet were chunks of immovable stone and his throat was sealed shut. He waved his arms, but no one paid any attention to him.

He watched as the passengers were pulled from inside the stage coach. Lydia, her mother, and her father stood in a line beside the stage coach. Her father’s change purse was taken from him, as was her mother’s jewelry. The trunks were dropped to the ground and searched for valuables. Then one of the men stepped up to Lydia. He put his hands on her and pulled her to him. She resisted. She beat against him with her fists. The man backhanded her. She fell to the ground and he kicked her in the ribs.

Connor screamed, but the scream was inside his head. No sound left his mouth.

The man kicked her again and again until she was spitting up blood. Her mother and father were screaming. Connor could hear their cries from where he stood. But they weren’t moving, either. They couldn’t stop the man. He turned and looked up at the hill behind him, at Connor.

Jed Gaines grinned as their eyes met. It was a vicious, evil grin, full of sick joy and hate. Connor had seen that grin before, when they were boys. They were playing down by the river and found an injured doe. She had a broken leg and couldn’t walk. Connor pulled his knife and was going to put her out of her misery, but Jed stopped him. He wanted to play with her. He had that same grin then. Connor could only watch for a few minutes before he had to leave. He left Jed there by the river with the doe. He heard her cries halfway back to town.

And now Lydia was the doe. She was lying broken on the ground and her cries ripped through Connor’s head. Jed waved at him and pulled his gun. He pointed it at Lydia. Connor clenched his teeth and waited for what was to come, what always came. But instead, Jed’s gun slipped from his hand and drool dribbled from his mouth. He didn’t shoot the girl like he always had in previous dreams. This time, he snarled and turned on her. His teeth sank into the soft flesh at her throat even as his companions threw themselves at her parents. Blood sprayed into the air in thick columns.

“No!” Connor shot up in bed. He was drenched in sweat and breathing heavy. He sank back onto the pillow and sighed. “Shit,” he said as he ran a hand through his sopping wet hair.

With a groan, he rolled to a seated position and rested his head in his hands. It had been years since he had had a solid night’s sleep, and that wasn’t all because Amos was snoring like a steam engine in the room across the hall. The dream was always the same, ever since he heard rumors that Jed Gaines and his brothers were involved in the attack on the stage coach that killed Lydia and her parents. But this time...

Connor grunted and shoved himself to his feet. “No more drinking before bed,” he grumbled as he reached for his boots.

Cora had left his pants on, but she had removed his outer shirt for him. He grabbed it off the hook by the door and buttoned it as he clomped down the stairs. He left his coat where it was hanging on the hook but popped his hat on his head. Last but not least, he grabbed his belt and hooked it around his waist. He only felt whole with his gun by his side and his hat on his head.

He walked around back and relieved himself before he trudged inside. Instead of going back upstairs, he opened the door to the jailhouse and lit the lantern on his desk. He had some paperwork he still had to do from the brawl earlier, some legal mumbo-jumbo that was required back east on one of the men, so he kicked back in his chair at his desk and picked up the letter he had been working on. He stared at the page, but the words blurred into black squiggles. He put in a valiant effort, but his mind was still reeling from the dream. He tossed the paper back on the desk.

“Balls,” he mumbled as he stood up. He walked out onto the porch. The torches up and down the street were lit, but it was late enough at night that everyone was in bed. Loud snores echoed from across the street and down two houses. Robert Zane, the butcher, was the noisiest man Connor had ever known. He was loud and boisterous, his laugh could be heard across town, and he was an even louder drunk. The man had spent more than one night in the jailhouse and Connor received complaints on a weekly basis from citizens who wanted his snoring to stop. But besides all that, Robert was a good man that Connor would trust with his life. He treated his wife and kids well and he was always willing to lend a hand whenever anyone needed it. He gave deep discounts to the poorer residents in town, often earning a rebuke and complaint from the richer folk.

Connor’s lips twitched into a brief smile as he stepped down onto the street. He walked up the street a ways, checking that his town was safe and sound, then he turned around and wandered back the other way. Not a thing moved. A few dogs lay on porches guarding their domain, but they were used to his late night ramblings and most didn’t even open an eye to look at him. For a good half hour, Connor leaned against the post by the jailhouse. He listened to the night noises and chewed his lip as thoughts ran through his head.

A snort drew his attention. He glanced up. A horse was barely visible in the black on the edge of how far he could see. He pushed himself from the post and walked back inside to get his jacket. He slipped it on and tightened his belt. He drew his pistols and double-checked that they were loaded. Then he went out onto the porch to see what was going on.

Chapter 14

“We can’t stay here.” Charity paced in front of the cold fireplace. She was alone in the living room with Little Bear and Walton. It annoyed her to have to speak through a translator, but Little Bear’s English was very minimal and she had no clue what language he even spoke. She had no interest in learning, either.

“What would you have us do? We cannot just attack towns like rogue bandits on the run.”

She stopped and placed her fists on her hips. Standing in front of the chair, she could see the stain on the floor where Isabelle had died. Where she killed her. Charity’s mouth watered just thinking of the delicious flesh.

“Charity.”

Little Bear’s voice snapped her back to the present and she angled herself so she could no longer see the dried blood. “We are running out of food,” she continued. “We will not last here much longer. They are already getting restless. They want to hunt, they want to move. And besides, the cattle are disgusting. The meat doesn’t taste right. It doesn’t satisfy our hunger.”

Little Bear laughed, but it held no humor, just annoyance. “No, it does not taste as good, but it supplies what we need. That is enough.”

Charity growled. “Enough? What do you think we are? Animals? Lowly creatures who don’t deserve to thrive? We have the power. Why don’t we just go take a town? What can they do to us? Why do we sit here and suffer when—“

He smiled and cut her off with an upheld hand. “Have patience, my queen. We—“

“I know, I know. We will have our vengeance.” Her tone was mocking. She scoffed at him. “It’s not my vengeance. It’s yours. And you’ve had it. You killed the men who killed your family and destroyed your village. You turned them into worthless creatures just like you. Good for you. Congratulations. Now what? You just want to wander all over the desert, afraid of everything, attacking little piddly farms and feeding on livestock?” She waved her arms in the air and began pacing again. “You were given a great gift! The chance to be better, to be more than what you were before. Why won’t you use it? Why do you hide in shame instead of ruling the world like you’re meant to?”

Little Bear’s black hair floated in front of his face as he shook his head. “It was not meant for that, my queen.”

“Stop calling me your queen. We don’t have an empire to rule, so I can’t be a queen and you can’t be a king.”

Little Bear stared at her for a long time before he spoke. “No, we do not have an empire. But we have a clan. We have people who are counting on us to lead them, to keep them alive.”

Charity laughed. “They’re mindless monsters. You’re not keeping them alive. You’re not leading them at all. All you’re doing is keeping them penned up like animals. Like hungry, starving lions. They are turning on each other. There are too many and not enough food.”

“We will move on shortly. My scouts are out looking for a new farmhouse, for a new place for us. We will leave when they return.”

Charity shook her head and growled. “We need more than a farmhouse. We need a town! We need a good supply of food and more people to turn.” She dropped to her knees in front of him and gripped his hands tightly in hers. “How do you not see what we can do? The possibilities are endless. We are powerful, more powerful than mere people. We can take over the West, we can make it our own. We can rule and be true royalty. Make me your queen for real.”

Charity stared up into the red pits in the middle of Little Bear’s face. She pleaded with him, she begged him. But he would not yield. “We are not an army, Charity. We will not become an army. We are creatures of vengeance, sent to mete out punishment on those who deserve it. We will not attack towns and villages that have done no wrong.”

Charity clenched her teeth together and stood. “You are a fool and a hypocrite,” she said. With one last glare, she turned from him and stomped out of the house into the darkness.

David sat on the porch, staring blankly into nothingness. Charity sat down beside him. “You agree with me, don’t you, David?”

He grunted. That was the most he ever said anymore. He was never much of a talker, but now speaking to him was like having a conversation with a pig. But even a pig was more interesting. David just did what he was told and ate. He never moved aside from that. He was the perfect husband, exactly what any woman would want, obedient to the core, but now she realized she wanted something more. She needed a man who could stand beside her, someone who could stand up to her, but also someone who would share her vision for the future. Someone to fight the battles she started. She needed a warrior.

Little Bear was not a warrior. He sat in his chair pretending to rule over a horde of mindless beasts. He was a false king, nothing more. Charity needed a knight. She needed someone like herself. Someone who retained their intelligence after being bitten, someone who could think for themselves and actually do something worthwhile. She wouldn’t find them here, not among the chattel of Little Bear’s “clan”.

Little Bear was so shortsighted. He couldn’t see the future ahead of them. He couldn’t plan for anything but their next meal. Charity wasn’t at all like him. She had plans. She had always had plans, but now her plans were bigger. Much bigger. The moment she saw the horde of mindless creatures in the barn, the gears began to turn. He had called her his queen. She wouldn’t be his queen. Not ever. She would be her own queen, the ruler of her very own nation.

She leaned back in her chair and smiled at David. “Thank you,” she said.

He grunted again, but he didn’t look at her. She smirked. He hadn’t given her what she wanted, but he had inadvertently given her what she needed. She laughed as she thought of his parents back in New York, unaware of the fate of their son. Should she send them a letter? Advise them of his death? She shook her head. No. They didn’t deserve it. Not after the way they treated her. The ranch would be deserted when Little Bear’s group left. The weekly letters he wrote to his mother had already stopped. His family would go weeks, maybe months, without word from their youngest, dearest son. Then someday his father would send someone to check on them. But they would be gone. All of them. All that would be left behind would be blood and bones. She laughed. They would have no clue what happened to David. They would never even be able to guess.

Charity stifled a cackle. She had her revenge on his parents. Now she just needed to figure out how to handle Little Bear, how to usurp him and take over his small army, to make it her own. They would listen to her, she was sure. She was a better speaker than him and they already obeyed her instantly. But Little Bear was stronger than her physically. She had seen him snap the neck of one of the men without so much as straining a muscle. She needed to figure out how to catch him off guard, how to take him unawares.

She was pondering that when the scouts returned. It was dark and they shuffled along like the other mindless beasts. She heard the door open behind her. Little Bear came out, followed as always by Walton.

“Did you find anything?”

One of the men shuffled up to the bottom of the steps. He wasn’t smart like she was, but he wasn’t totally stupid, either. He had retained a few of his memories and was good at following commands. She might make him one of her captains when she formed her army for real.

The man nodded. “A farmhouse. Two days from here. That way.” He pointed behind the house.

“Were there people there?”

The man nodded again. “Two men. Four women.”

Charity noticed the hesitation as the man spoke. Little Bear did, too. “And?”

“One boy and two women...” He paused and fidgeted.

“Well?”

“They escaped.”

Little Bear’s growl echoed across the flat land. “You let someone get away?”

“The boy was bitten.” The man shrugged as if it made a difference.

Little Bear snarled and leapt off the porch. He grabbed the man and tore his head halfway off before tossing his body away. Charity sighed inwardly as she watched the body twitch on the ground. He would have made a good captain, she thought.

Little Bear turned to the others who stood behind the fallen man. “We never leave witnesses! Ever! They cannot know we exist. Go find them. Find the survivors and kill them.”

The men shuffled away and Charity stood up. “It doesn’t matter. The one who was bitten will turn. Then he will kill the others.”

Little Bear turned on her. “And if he does not? If he turns them instead? Or if they reach town before he turns? Can you imagine what will happen then? No, you cannot. I thought you were smart, but you are very small-minded. You do not see beyond your own desires. You do not see what could befall us should we be discovered.”

He shook his head at her and walked back into the house, slamming the door shut before Walton could follow him in. The soldier hesitated on the porch for several minutes. He would put his hand on the door handle for a moment, then take it off again. He was trained to follow Little Bear, but his master’s actions had left him without direction. Charity rolled her eyes and sighed. “I am surrounded by morons.”

She walked off the porch into the darkness. She used to be afraid of the dark before she was turned. She used to hate going outside the light where the animals prowled. Now she loved the middle of the night. She was strong and powerful, greater than any living creature. No person and no beast could touch her. She was a predator, the most powerful predator alive. Or dead. She wasn’t quite sure yet. Either way, she was in charge. Or she would be. Soon. She walked out past the fields and stared at the moon in the sky. It was big and bold and beautiful, just like she was.

Chapter 15

Hannah’s forehead rested against Abigail’s shoulder as they plodded along the dirt track that served as the main road into Lonesome Ridge. Wyatt slouched against the neck of the plow horse. His fingers were tangled in the creature’s mane and he listed dangerously to the side as the old beast trudged along. Both creatures were exhausted, but they kept moving faithfully down the familiar road.

That was one of the few things Abby could be thankful for. She stared at the dark road ahead as memories of her mother, father, and sister played through her mind. She tried to focus on the good times, on Christmases and summer socials, on laughter and happiness. It wasn’t working. Every time she pictured one of their faces, it was the last time she saw them. Dying, dead. Gone. And then the image would be replaced by the men who attacked them...

Abby shuddered and shook her head to clear the image. There was something very wrong with those men. They were not normal. They were not human. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were dead, but that was ridiculous. How could they be dead? They were clearly alive enough to kill her family.

When she was sure none of the creatures were following them, she pulled the horses to a stop beside a small stream. As she helped Hannah slide off, Wyatt’s horse found its own way to the stream and began drinking. She walked over to him and gently shook his arm. He groaned, but didn’t make any effort to get down.

“Wyatt?”

He turned his head on the horse’s neck and looked at her with sad, tired eyes. He made no other effort to move, so she pulled up his pant leg to look at the wound. It was swollen around the edges and still bleeding. His skin was pale and hot. She patted his knee before turning to her little sister.

“Hannah, can you help me get him down, please? We need to get his leg cleaned so it doesn’t get infected.”

The younger woman’s blond hair was matted and scraggly from the night’s stress. She ran a hand through it as she crossed the short distance. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she approached and her eyes went wide with horror.

“That smells awful.”

Wyatt’s voice was so low they could barely hear it, but he finally spoke. “Thanks, sis.” He gave her a weak smile.

Hannah grinned at him, but she avoided his eyes. She took his leg carefully in her hands as Abby gripped his waist.

“Okay, lean into me, Wyatt.” As he slid toward her, Abby let her hands slide up until they were under his arms, then she gently pulled him off the horse. Together, the sisters half carried, half dragged their brother to the stream.

Abby ripped his pant leg so she could see the wound better. The full moon gave her plenty of light to see by and she cleaned the wound as best she could.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” she said as she pressed the cloth to the hole. Frowning, she ripped a strip from her shirt and bound Wyatt’s leg. Blood continued to seep through, but there was nothing more she could do. “We have to get him to the doctor soon.”

Hannah bit her lip as she looked back at the horse. “How do we get him back up?”

It took both of them all their strength and a lot of creativity, but they managed to hoist him back onto the horse. Soon they were on their way again.

As they settled back into the quiet of the ride, Abby longed for another distraction. Her mind raced and her eyes burned with unshed tears. She tried to will them away, but they ignored her and broke over her eyelashes to stream down her face. They tumbled unbidden down her cheeks and onto the horse’s dusty coat.

They flowed unchecked until Lonesome Ridge came into blurry view on the horizon. Abby blinked rapidly and took several deep breaths to regain her composure. Her heart lightened a mere fraction as hope grew with the buildings. The town was seated on a ridge overlooking the river below. It used to be one of Abby’s favorite sights. As much as she loved living on the farm with her family, the monthly visits to town were a treat. The ride was long, but she had loved every minute of it. The ride would hold no joy for her now, though.

Abby bit her lip as they entered the town. The torches were still lit, but it was very late. Even the drunkards and saloon girls were sleeping. She decided to go straight to Doc Whitman’s instead of waking the sheriff. She had known the doctor most of her life. He came to Lonesome Ridge just before Hannah was born. He had saved her mother during a very difficult childbirth. There was nothing the sheriff could do for her family anyway. Doc Whitman would patch Wyatt up and give them a place to sleep for the rest of the night. Then tomorrow she could figure out a plan and talk to Sheriff McClane.

The horses plodded down the middle of the street, bone tired and as much in need of rest as their passengers. Their hooves made hollow sounds as they thudded against dry dirt packed solid from years of near constant use.

Abby’s jumped as a door to her right creaked open. She blinked into the torch hanging on the post nearby. The bars on the window told her it was the jail before she recognized the man standing in the darkened doorway. The sheriff stepped out into the light and tipped his hat toward her as she stopped the horses. Hannah roused herself behind Abby. Her grip on Abby’s stomach increased almost to the point where Abby couldn’t breathe.

“Ladies,” the sheriff said as he came off the steps toward them. His eyes were shadowed but his hand was on the pistol at his side. Not for the first time on that long trip Abby berated herself for losing her shotgun. She could have made a stand, she could have saved her family.

“It’s awful late for you kids to be out and about. Something happen back home?”

Abby clenched her teeth together and nodded. She started to shake so badly she could barely hold onto the horse’s mane. Tears rushed down her cheeks in torrents. Her chest seized and she bent over, sobbing.

“Shhh,” Hannah whispered behind her as she stroked her oldest sister’s hair. “We’re safe now. The sheriff will take care of us.”

Sheriff McClane stepped closer and put his hand on the horse’s neck. Concern was heavy on his face now that the girls could see it in the light. “What happened? Where’s your ma and pa? Madeleine?”

Abby shook her head, unable to speak. Hannah squeezed her shoulder and tried to explain. “They...,” she whispered, but her voice trailed off into tears.

When Wyatt coughed behind them, Abby’s eyes shot wide and her crying came to a sudden halt. In her grief, she had forgotten his leg. She pulled herself out of the pit of despair she had been sinking into and spun around on the horse. “Wyatt’s been bit, sheriff. He needs help bad.” Her voice cracked with the sob that still sat in her chest

With a nod, the sheriff walked over to the boy. He pulled away the bandage to look at the wound in the flickering light of a nearby torch. As the stench hit the air, he sucked in a breath through his teeth and jerked away. The movement threw Wyatt off balance and the boy canted dangerously sideways. He was so weak, his fingers slipped through the horse’s mane without making an attempt to hold on. As he toppled off the horse, the sheriff grabbed for him and managed to slow his fall.

With a grunt, the older man hefted the boy into his arms. He stomped up the steps to the door to the jailhouse and kicked it open with a foot. “Amos,” he called in a voice barely louder than a whisper as the door banged against the wall. In short time, the deputy trotted out the door, pulling his pants on as he went. He pulled up short when he saw Sheriff McClane and the girls. “What’s happened?”

“Take the horses to the stable and get them cared for, then meet me at Doc Whitman’s.”

Amos glanced quickly at the horses, then nodded and disappeared inside. He returned in the blink of an eye with two lengths of rope. As the girls slid off their horse, the deputy tied the ropes around the animals’ necks. He led them off toward the far end of town to the public stables.

“Come on. This way.”

The girls knew the way to Doc Whitman’s by heart, but they followed the sheriff like lost puppies who were far from home. When they reached the doctor’s house, Connor laid the boy on a bench just outside the door. His knocks were heavy. They thundered out across the street and echoed off the buildings. Hannah jumped and stepped closer to Abby. The older girl slipped her arm around her younger sister and pulled her close.

A light came on in the doctor’s house and in several houses down the street. The sheriff picked the boy back up and stood in front of the door. It swung open to reveal a disheveled Doctor Jacob Whitman in his night clothes. Behind him stood his nurse, Eva, Wyatt’s bride-to-be. She held a candle high so that it shined on the visitors. When she realized who it was, her eyes went wide and her lip began to quiver. The doctor gave Connor and the boy a quick once over and stepped aside without a word.

The girls followed Connor into the house. The sheriff broke to the left and laid Wyatt on the table in the doctor’s office. Eva pushed her way past the doctor and grabbed the boy’s hand. “Wyatt? Wyatt, can you hear me?”

Doc Whitman gripped her shoulders gently and pulled her away. “Eva, I need you to focus. We need light, and you need to bring me some boiling water and my tools.”

Eva stood staring at Wyatt for several seconds before she shook her head and ran off to follow the doctor’s orders. She put a kettle over the fire to boil and laid out his tools, then she scurried around the house lighting candles and lanterns.

“He was bitten,” the sheriff said as Doc Whitman pulled the small tool tray over.

Doc Whitman grabbed a pair of shears and cut away Wyatt’s pant leg. The smell began to permeate the room as he pulled the bandage off. He pressed the back of his hand to his nose and made the same noise the sheriff had. The wound was dripping with blood and pus.

“Bitten? By what? It almost...” He paused and grabbed a magnifying glass from the table.

Abby watched him as he inspected her brother’s leg. The confusion and doubt on his face mingled with her own tiredness. She felt like she was going crazy. She felt like she was dreaming, lost in a strange world. She began to question everything she had seen, all that had happened.

“It looks... But it can’t be. Not like this.” Disbelief flooded the doctor’s voice as he blinked twice at Wyatt’s leg, then raised his eyes to stare at Abby.

She nodded slowly as Hannah slid behind her to hide from the doctor’s appalled expression.

Connor’s narrowed eyes darted between Abby and the doctor. “What is it, doc?”

Doc Whitman shook his head. “Well,” he said as he bent over to examine the wound again. “It looks like he was bitten by a man, but it’s too dark around the bite. And the skin is starting to rot. It’s impossible. I would believe that of a snake bite, sure, but this is clearly not. There are no animals that I know of that can do this. It’s already infected and just by the look of him... Well, it doesn’t look good. How long ago was he attacked? If you’d brought him in right when it happened—“

Abby glanced at Eva. The girl’s hands shook as she placed a bowl of steaming water on the table. Droplets splashed onto her fair skin, but she didn’t even flinch. Her attention was completely on Wyatt. “We were eating dinner,” Abby said.

The doctor’s hand dropped to the table. “Dinner... just a few hours ago?”

Abby nodded as she fought against another bout of tears.

“No, that’s completely impossible. This type of infection would take days to set in, at least, if a man could even do that to another man. It just makes no sense.” He mumbled to himself for a few moments as he poked at the wound. “Give me some time to look him over and see what I can do. Eva, take care of the girls, please.”

The terrified young nurse led Abby, Hannah, and Sheriff McClane from the room and shut the door behind her. Her voice was soft and monotone when she spoke, mere habit rather than true hospitality. “Would you like some tea? I’ll refill the kettle.” Without waiting for an answer, she wandered into the kitchen.

The others followed her. As the girls sank into chairs around the table, Connor leaned against the doorway. “Abby, what happened?”

He had his hat in one hand and his arms were crossed. His eyes bore into her. She shook her head. It was all too strange. How could she explain it? The face of the man who killed her father swam in front of her. Her heart pounded in her chest so hard it hurt. “I don’t... It doesn’t make sense. They were dead.”

The sheriff straightened and raised an eyebrow. He hung his hat on a peg by the door and pulled the chair out from the end of the table. He swung it around in front of Abby and straddled it backward. “What do you mean ‘they were dead’?”

Abby raised her eyes, but she didn’t look at the sheriff. She looked at Hannah. Her younger sister’s eyes were wide. Even though Hannah was nearly seventeen, she looked about five in the light from the flickering candles.

The sheriff caught her stare. “Eva, why don’t you take Hannah upstairs and get her cleaned up and into a bed?”

The nurse hesitated for the briefest of moments before she scuttled over to the girl and gently took her by the arm. Hannah resisted until Abigail nodded. “It’s all right. I’ll be right here. Go get some sleep.”

Hannah allowed herself to be led out of the room. Abby was silent until she heard their steps disappear up the stairs.

“We were eating supper,” she began, not looking at the sheriff. She stared into the murky grayness outside the window. “The sun was nearly set. Maddy was there. She always comes home on Saturday.” Her voice broke as she thought about her older sister, her best friend, dead eyes staring up at her from a slack face.

“It’s all right. Take your time.” It was clear that the sheriff had dealt with tragedy before. He was calm and patient, giving Abby time to compose herself. He didn’t push for details, but let them flow.

“We were almost done when we heard a scream, an animal. It came from the barn. Pa said it was the cattle. I thought maybe some coyotes had broke into the barn or something. They’ve taken the calves before. We grabbed the shotguns and ran out there. Ma took the others into the bedroom just in case in was bandits.”

She stopped as the scene at the barn played out in her mind. Connor prodded her to continue, so she did. “Pa opened the door... It wasn’t a coyote. It was a man, a couple men. They were... they weren’t...” She took a deep breath and described the men to the sheriff. When she finished, tears rolled down her face.

He sat there, silent and brooding for a very long time. She was fine with that. She didn’t want to talk anymore anyway.

“Connor.” Doc Whitman’s voice came softly from the doorway.

Abby looked up. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Connor rose to follow the doctor from the room, but Abby was up and through the doorway before they could stop her. She ran into the operating room.

“Wyatt,” she whispered frantically. She grabbed his hand. It was cold. Too cold. “Wyatt, wake up.” She shook his shoulder gently. His body jiggled with the movement and his arm flopped limply off the table. She longed to scream at him, to beg him to wake up, but she didn’t want to wake Hannah. She wasn’t ready to put her littlest sister through that kind of pain.

A pair of hands gripped her shoulders and pulled her away. She swung around and buried her face in the doctor’s chest. “I’m sorry, Abigail,” he said as he stroked her hair, but she couldn’t hear him over the sound of her own grief.

Chapter 16

Charity stared at the stars overhead. The men Little Bear tasked as scouts had been gone for three days. That meant that the farm they found was at least a day’s walk away. She pondered for a moment. Dixonville was in the other direction. She knew Lonesome Ridge was a few days’ ride that way.

David had taken her there once. There were lots of townsfolk there, more than double the number at Dixonville. The railroad ran right through it, making it the most important town in the area. And she couldn’t deny that the sheriff was pretty cute. It would make a good place for the start of her new empire.

Charity tapped her chin. “I like that idea,” she mused aloud.

She turned and looked at the men and women milling around outside in the dark. They weren’t a real army. Not yet. But they were a start.

“A start,” she muttered before walking back up the stairs.

Walton had consigned himself to his fate and sat with his legs draped over the edge of the far end of the porch. She pulled the door open as quietly as she could and locked it tight behind her. Then she went into the kitchen and found the big butcher’s knife sitting on the table where Isabelle had left it. She tested its weight in her hand and ran a finger across the blade. It cut a fine slit in her thumb, parting the gray skin like it was butter.

Charity’s lips pulled into a tight smile. “Perfect,” she whispered.

With the knife firmly in hand, she tiptoed across the hallway into the sitting room. The top of Little Bear’s head was visible above the chair in front of the fire. With Walton was outside with the other mindless drones, the young man was alone.

Indecision tore at her. She could take him now, slam the knife into his head and end it all. Or she could give him a chance to change, to bow to her rule. The small shred of loyalty she felt to him won out. She walked around the chair and stood in front of him with the knife dangling in her hand.

She waited for him to look up. He wouldn’t. He knew she was there, of that she had no doubt. His non-reaction made her second guess herself, but she was committed to her course of action.

“Things need to change around here,” she said. “We’re not scavengers. We shouldn’t have to hide anymore. It’s time we take control and make ourselves known.” She raised her voice as loud as it would go without yelling. She could already hear the shuffling noises outside the window before she finished speaking.

“No.” Little Bear shook his head. “No.” His voice was soft. It did not carry like hers, and his hands gripped the arms of the chair so hard the wood creaked.

“Your time is done,” she said. “You are ineffective.”

“No,” he said again. His tone was pleading, sad. He already sounded defeated. It threw her off, shook her nerves. It poked at her confidence and made her second guess herself even more.

They stared at each other for a full minute, her with her gray-blue eyes and him with his red pits. Then he was in the air, flying toward her with incredible speed. An animalistic snarl erupted in his throat as his hands reached for her.

Charity brought the knife up and slashed at his wrist as a scream burst forth from her lungs. He growled and yanked his injured arm away, spitting words she didn’t understand at her. As he bumped into the chair, she spun aside and put as much distance between them as she could. With a howl, he grabbed the chair and tossed it in her direction. It flew past her and smashed into the wall with such force that it shattered into pieces. A broken leg rolled to a stop by Little Bear’s feet and he snatched it up as he lunged toward her again. He swung the leg at her like a club and it shattered across her shoulder. She bit down on a cry and stumbled to the other side of the fireplace.

Little Bear smelled her pain and leapt across the space between them. As he did, she slashed upward and drew a long, bloodless gash across his neck and face. He crashed into her and they toppled to the ground. The butcher’s knife tumbled from her hands and spun away, out of reach. He tore at her with teeth and nails, aiming for her throat and face. She held him at bay with one hand as the other scrabbled for the knife. Her fingernails dug deep grooves in the ground even as they peeled away from her skin. She fought for every inch as Little Bear ripped chunks of skin from her neck and back.

Finally her fingers touched the wooden handle of the knife. She screamed as she threw herself forward with every bit of strength she had. Her hand slipped around the handle as her body twisted sideways. Pulling herself onto her back, she kicked out with both feet. They planted squarely into his stomach and he stumbled back, slamming into the fireplace with an audible crack.

Charity didn’t hesitate. She launched herself to her feet and threw herself at Little Bear. He brought his hands up to protect his head, but the blade, combined with the force of her attack, sliced through his arm, separating hand from wrist. The knife bounced off his skull, but dazed him just long enough. She pulled it back and smashed it back down. It buried deep into his skull.

He stumbled back a step. He held up his hands as she followed. “Charity,” he whispered. His voice held such deep betrayal and sadness, she almost stopped, but she pushed aside any feelings of fear and guilt.

She grabbed the knife’s handle again and yanked as hard as she could. The blade came free with a loud slurp. She raised it high and smashed into the wound that was already there. Little Bear’s head split wide open. Gray, squishy matter dripped from the hole. Her opponent grunted, but Charity didn’t stop. She let go of the knife, leaving it in his brain. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled until she heard the telltale pop and he sagged into her. Only then did she release him and step back.

He dropped to the ground like a sack of flour. His body twitched twice and then lay still. She stared at him for several moments before she leaned over and ripped the knife from his skull with a slurp.

“Gross,” she mumbled as she wiped it off on his shirt.

Charity walked to the window. Several of the others, including Walton, stood there staring through the glass with gaping mouths. She set the knife on the window sill and returned their stares. The moon was bright and it lit the area well. She smirked. They were hers, all hers. She left the knife where it was and went out onto the porch.

“Listen to me.” She yelled just loud enough for her voice to echo out across the area between the house and the barn. Those who were not at the window stopped milling about and turned toward her. Slowly, they gathered at the base of the stairs. David stood in front, staring up at her like a lost puppy. When they were all there, she raised her hands. “Listen. Little Bear is dead. He is no longer your leader. I am.”

She paused, giving them time to react. They didn’t even flinch.

Her smirk grew into a full fledged smile. “That’s right. You know who your true ruler is. And you know what we need to do. We are not meant to hide away in the darkness, afraid of mere humans. We are better than them, stronger. They are our cattle, we are the masters. It is time for us to go out and take what we deserve.” She paused again. And still she received no reaction. This time she was a little annoyed. “I am your queen. You will do whatever I say, do you understand?”

A few people nodded.

She growled. “Say ‘yes, my queen’.”

“Yes, my queen.”

“Louder!”

The roar echoed across the plains. “Yes, my queen!”

Charity grinned and pointed toward Dixonville. “Go that way. Tomorrow, we show the world who we are.”

The horde began walking down the road. She called Walton and David over to her. “You are now my lieutenants. I will tell you what to do and you tell the others, got it?”

The men nodded.

She was about to dismiss them when a thought occurred to her. “Walton, is it true that no one has ever escaped?”

The soldier hesitated, clearly still unsure about the sudden change in leadership. “Little Bear said we weren’t to talk about it.”

Charity snarled as her hand shot out and smacked him across the ear. “Little Bear is dead. I am in charge now. Tell me.”

The soldier cowered before her and cupped his ear, even though it didn’t hurt. “There was one,” Walton mumbled. “Her name was Summer Rain. She was with him when they turned me. She did not like the way he ran things. They fought. She left in the middle of the night one night. We were not allowed to stop her.”

“Who was she? Was she important to him?”

He hesitated again, until she raised her hand. “They were to be married,” he stammered quickly.

Charity’s eyebrow shot up. “Married? How interesting. So there’s another group of us out there.” Ignoring the others, she stood on the porch and watched as her new army filed out of ranch, heading toward the first town she intended to conquer.

Chapter 17

Abby’s shoulders shook as she sobbed into Doc Whitman’s chest. “Shh,” he whispered as he stroked her hair. He shot a look at Connor and shook his head.

Eva tapped him on the shoulder. “Let me help.”

The doctor stepped away from Abby and let his nurse take over. She cooed softly as she settled Abby into a chair beside her dead brother. Tears spilled down Eva’s cheeks as she watched her former future sister-in-law slip her fingers into Wyatt’s hand. The nurse placed her hand over Abby’s and squeezed them both tight.

Connor walked over to stand beside the doctor in the doorway. “It makes no sense,” Doc Whitman whispered to the sheriff. “That wound should not have been putrefied that fast. Not in the few hours since he was attacked. And he didn’t bleed out enough to kill him, either. It’s all very perplexing.” He stroked the stubble that was growing on his chin “It had to be that bite. It was poison of some sort. It had to be. What did she say? Was it really a human?”

The sheriff nodded. “If the story hadn’t come from Abigail Crawford, I never would have believed it. She swears they were dead, walking dead.”

The doctor laughed, a disbelieving snort. He stared at Connor with humor in his eyes. “Dead? Abigail said that?”

Connor didn’t share in his mirth. “Yep. She said their skin was gray. She and her pa went to the barn when they heard the animals screaming. They attacked Abraham, tore him apart. With their teeth. Same with her ma and Madeleine.”

Doc Whitman shook his head. His forehead was knit with refusal to believe an impossible story. He waved a hand at Wyatt. “And they bit the boy? Causing that? Not possible. Not just impossible. Completely ridiculous. I can’t believe a story like that would come from Abigail Crawford.”

Connor crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame as he stared at the pale figure on the table. “I want to agree with you, but I can’t. I’ve got a terrible feeling. Like I’ve never had. We’re in something here, doc. I don’t know what yet, but it ain’t good.”

The doctor pressed his lips together as he watched the trio at the table. He didn’t want to admit it to anyone, much less himself, but was afraid that Connor might be right.

Abby’s fingers gripped Wyatt’s tightly, clinging to what little hope she had left, praying to anyone who would listen that he would wake up. She squeezed his fingers so hard it made her hand hurt. “Please, Wyatt,” she begged as tears rolled down her face in heavy streams. “Please.”

His fingers moved and he squeezed back.

Abby jerked away and gasped. Her eyes were wide as she stared at her hand. The tears stopped as her brain tried to process the impossible. Wyatt’s fingers had moved. She was sure of it.

“What is it?” Eva arm was around Abby’s shoulders and she eyed her with concern.

“Wyatt?” Abigail stood up and leaned over her brother. His eyes were still closed and his skin had taken on a cold, gray pallor. “Wyatt?” she whispered as her hand hovered near his shoulder, but she couldn’t work up the courage to actually touch him.

His eyes popped open. Abby slapped her hand to her mouth as the sliver of hope in her chest flared to life. She reached for him, ready to grab her brother up in the biggest hug she could manage. Then she saw his eyes, those dull, dead eyes. Her heart lodged in her throat. She stumbled backward. Her foot caught on the chair right behind her and she fell head over heels. Her warning shout came out in an incomprehensible burst of air as she hit the ground hard.

“Wyatt!” Eva’s joyful shout echoed off the walls. She leaned over Wyatt as Connor pushed himself away from the wall. Abby’s reaction set his alarm bells blaring and his hand flew toward his gun. It was halfway from its holster when the young man on the table grabbed at the nurse.

“Wyatt,” she breathed with relief as she reached forward to touch his face. Her relief quickly turned into a blood curdling scream as he yanked her to him and sank his teeth into the soft flesh of her neck.

“Get him off her!” Doc Whitman screamed at no one in particular. He raced forward and grabbed a handful of the boy’s shirt. He jerked the smaller man backward away from the nurse. Wyatt snarled at the intruder. He spun around and shoved the doctor with all the strength he could muster. Doc Whitman flew backward and smashed into the wall with a crack.

Eva was scrambling away from the table, but Wyatt spun and launched himself at her again. His teeth sank into her shoulder as their bodies collided. They went down together in a screaming, snarling mass of limbs and blood. Eva’s head smashed against the corner of the table, sending a shower of blood across the floor. She was silenced mid-scream. Wyatt landed on top of her and tore a chunk of flesh from her shoulder. He looked up at Connor with blood dripping down his chin as he calmly munched on his meal.

The sheriff’s hand wobbled as he pointed the gun at the boy. His finger twitched on the trigger, but he couldn’t force himself to pull it back. It took him three tries to put enough pressure on it. The gun finally went off when Wyatt leaned down for another bite. It tore through his side.

A pained growl escaped around the lump of Eva’s neck he still had in his mouth. He turned his head slowly and stared at the gun, then he dropped the meat and leapt at Connor’s hand. The gun barked loudly. Wyatt tumbled from the air. He landed on the ground with a hole in the middle of his forehead.

Abby was curled up in the corner with her arms over her head and Doc Whitman lay groaning on the ground as Connor stepped over the boy’s body. His fiancée was sprawled on the floor beside him. Her head was turned at an impossible angle and her eyes were wide and lifeless. Blood pooled underneath her, pouring from the holes Wyatt had torn in her flesh.

“Oh God, Eva.” Doc Whitman’s breathless whisper came from behind Connor. The sheriff watched as the doctor crawled across the floor to kneel beside the young woman. He lifted her wrist and checked her pulse, but they both knew it was unnecessary.

“Connor!” Amos burst through the door to the house with his gun drawn. Several armed men flowed in behind him.

He ignored them all and raised his Peacemaker. He pointed it at the girl with a hand that had finally steadied. He fired once, twice. Both shots hit her right between the eyes.

Abigail screamed. A matching scream echoed down from upstairs. “Connor!” Amos shouted again, even as Doc Whitman yelled. “What the hell, Connor? She was dead!”

The doctor fell beside his nurse and stroked her face. Connor looked back at Wyatt’s still form. “So was he,” he said. It was an effort to talk. Every part of him felt like it was made of stone. Even breathing was a chore. When he moved, it was in slow motion. He wondered briefly if he was dreaming, or possibly drowning.

A flicker of movement caught his eye and he raised his pistol as he turned. Abby was standing in the corner. “Were you bit?”

She shook her head fiercely and stared at him with eyes as wide as wagon wheels. “No.” Her voice was a soft, strangled whisper.

Connor’s eyes narrowed at her. He let them stray up and down her body. “Turn around,” he demanded and gestured with his pistol.

She did as she was told. The only blood on her was the blood she had come in with. He nodded his head toward the stairs. “Go check on Hannah. Get her and come right back down.”

Abby pushed away from the wall and scampered out the door. She took the long way around the table to avoid both Connor and the fallen bodies. As she pounded up the stairs, Amos walked up beside him.

“Holy hell, Connor,” he said as he ran a hand through his tousled hair. He had forgotten his hat in his rush to take care of the horses. He still had his gun out and held it in a shaky hand. “What the hell happened?”

Connor blinked once, twice. Then he glanced at Doc Whitman. The man was leaning against the table with his head in his hands. There was no blood on him that Connor could see. The other men stood near the door, confused and afraid.

The sheriff holstered his gun and walked over to the chair Abby had tripped over. He set it upright and swung a leg over to settle in it backwards. He leaned an arm on the back and rested his head in his hand. His entire body shook. “I don’t know, Amos. I don’t fucking know.”

***

Abigail Crawford raced up the stairs, desperate to get away from the carnage in the room below. Her little brother, the boy she had always adored and cared for, had turned into one of the things that had killed her father, mother, and older sister. He had attacked Eva, his wife-to-be, just like those creatures had. Abby had looked in Wyatt’s eyes. They were dull, lifeless. They were not the vibrant eyes of her brother, always laughing, always looking for mischief and full of love for his family and Eva. They were the eyes of a mad beast, looking for only destruction and blood.

There were two rooms at the top of the stairs, one door on either side. The one on the right was wide open. Inside was a small bed, a dresser, and a night stand. Nothing more. The door on the left was closed. Soft whimpers escaped under the door. Abby went into the room on the right and sank onto the bed. She glanced behind her. On the night stand were two pictures. In the first one, a young Eva stood smiling with her mother. In the other, taken just a few months before at a social, Eva and Wyatt grinned like newlyweds, even though the wedding was still months off.

Abby’s heart wrenched in her chest. She had known Eva since the nurse was a little girl. She had been close friends with her older sister before Rachel married and moved back east. Abby had been overjoyed when Wyatt and Eva were finally engaged.

The young woman doubled over and covered her face with her hands. Her breath caught in her throat and she struggled to breathe. Her chest hurt. For a terrified moment, she feared she was turning into one of those vile creatures, but no, it was pain of a different kind. It was the pain of intense loss. Her heart was breaking over the deaths of so many people so close to her. She was wounded, even though her scars would be deep inside, invisible to everyone but her.

Tears welled up and poured down her face, bearing some of the pain away with them. She sat there on the bed of her dead friend for several minutes, taking deep breaths, trying to compose herself. It would do no good to let Hannah see her like that. Hannah needed her to be strong. Hannah needed her to be a rock.

***

Hannah Crawford cowered in the corner of the doctor’s bedroom, between the dresser and the wall, with a shaving razor clenched tightly in her hands. She’d heard the screams, she’d heard the gunshots. She had lost her mind for a moment and let her screams, her fear, mingle with the shouts downstairs. Then she snapped her lips shut. If those creatures found them, if they killed the sheriff and Abby and the doctor, they would come looking for her next. She would not go out like that. She refused. Her family thought her weak, she knew that. She was young and quiet and thoughtful, but she wasn’t stupid. Pa had taught her privately how to shoot. She was better than Abby, though neither of them would ever tell her older sister. She had also practiced with knives in the barn. She preferred them over the loud, ungainly guns. With a knife, she could hit a spot the size of a silver dollar from halfway across the barn nearly every time. She wasn’t weak. She was a survivor, and she wouldn’t go down without a fight.

When the door opened, she leapt to her feet and drew back the razor blade. She nearly threw it, until she saw Abby’s dark hair and tear-stained face standing in the doorway.

“Hannah?” Abby’s eyes were wide as she stared at her little sister.

Hannah took a step forward. “Wyatt?” she whispered. She already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it out loud.

Abby was silent for a moment as she looked from Hannah’s face to her hands and back again. Hannah glanced down. She still held the razor blade, open and pointed right at Abby. She snapped it shut and tucked it into her pocket. Abby ran the few steps to cross the room and bundled Hannah into her arms. She stroked her younger sister’s hair.

“I’m so sorry, Hannah. I’m so sorry.”

The two girls allowed the grief to wash over them and tears rolled down both of their faces.

“Wyatt,” Hannah whispered again, but this time it wasn’t a question.

Abby nodded. “And Eva.”

Hannah pulled back and stared at Abby. “Eva?”

Abby took her hand and led her to the bed. They sat down. “He turned into... one of those things. Those things that attacked Ma and Pa and Maddy. He...”

Hannah’s shoulders hitched as a sob broke from her chest. It was the pain of loss and anger and fear all bundled into one. She looked at her older sister with watery eyes. “Those things are still out there, Abby.”

“I know.” Abby’s shoulders slumped.

“They could follow our trail.”

Abby’s lips pressed together in a tight line and she nodded again.

“They could come here. They could come to town.” She reached her hand into her pocket and gripped the razor blade tightly.

Chapter 18

“Come on, you lazy dogs, we need to go. We’re burning daylight.” Jed’s voice echoed off the surrounding hills. The horses were tied up in front of the porch and he grabbed Saddle’s reins and swung himself up with practiced ease.

Jeremiah slammed the door open and clomped down the steps toward Nellie. Jasper followed more slowly, buckling his belt as he walked.

“Quit yer moanin’, Jas. It’s just a test run.” Jeremiah clapped him on the shoulder before he hopped up on his horse.

“Yeah...” Jasper wanted to protest Jed’s new plan, but his oldest brother was glaring at him with that look that would melt gold. He bit his tongue and climbed onto Dynamite.

The trio rode out of the little valley, heading in the direction of Lonesome Ridge. A stony silence settled over Jed and Jasper, but Jeremiah was heedless of their sour moods. He jabbered away as the horses plodded along, regaling them with stories of his latest adventures in the saloon.

“So, I says to Cora, I says—“

A figure stepped out from the woods on the side of the path they followed. Jeremiah stopped midsentence as Jed pulled up beside him. It was a woman with long, flowing black hair. She stood in the very middle of the thin dirt road, blocking their way around.

“Who is that?” Jed glanced sideways at Jeremiah. Jeremiah was leaning on the saddle horn as he eyed the woman.

“Dunno. Looks like some injun.” Jeremiah placed a hand on the pistol at his side as he glanced at the hills around them. “I don’t see no more, but they sneaky. Don’t trust her.”

She remained motionless in front of them with her hands clenched in fists at her sides. Her head was angled down, so that her long hair hid her face from view. Her hide dress was ragged and dirty, covered with unidentifiable brown stains, and her lower legs were crisscrossed with wounds.

Jed pushed his horse forward a few steps until he was several feet away from the woman. He yanked his gun from its holster and pointed it at her. “Hey, you. Yer in our way. You gonna move anytime soon?”

The woman didn’t flinch.

“You,” he said, waving his gun in Jeremiah’s direction. “Go see what she wants.”

Jeremiah looked at him and snorted. “Hell no. She’s crazy lookin’. You do it.”

Jed grunted. “Jasper, go,” he said as he waved his pistol toward the woman.

Jeremiah glanced at Jasper, then back to the woman. He gave an exaggerated sigh and swung his leg over his horse. “I’ll do it,” he said even as Jasper began to rise from his saddle.

Jed shot him a glare and his eyes darted suspiciously between the two men, but he kept his mouth shut.

Jeremiah jumped to the ground and readjusted his belt. “Hey, you all right?” he called across the open space between them.

No response.

Jed sighed. “Go up to her, ya idjit. Maybe she’s deaf.”

Jeremiah held up his hands. “Aright, aright. I’m goin’.” He hesitated next to his horse, messing with a strap on his pack until Jed cleared his throat. Jeremiah frowned and grunted, then he squared his shoulders and walked slowly toward the girl. She still wasn’t moving and an uneasiness settled in the pit of his stomach.

“Somethin’ ain’t right here,” he grumbled under his breath as his hand found his weapon. He rested his fingers on the grip and they itched to draw it. But he was afraid to spook her and kept his instincts in check.

He was just a couple feet away from her when the wind shifted and blew her hair away from her face.

“Holy shit!” He stepped back, appalled at the sight in front of him, but his boot caught on a rock and he landed hard on his behind. His heart pounded in his throat as he stared at the girl.

Her brown skin had an ashen tone to it. Her face was dull gray and splotchy. But what drew his attention, what set his heart racing and threw his stomach into fits, was the large chunk of flesh missing from her chest, just below her neck where her dress formed a vee. The muscles visible in the gap were gray and rotten. The stench of death wafted over him in the light breeze and sent his gag reflex into overdrive.

She raised her eyes to him. Her appearance activated his flight instinct, but what he saw behind those eyes made him freeze in his tracks. They were the eyes of the most dangerous predator, deep and hungry. She didn’t see him. She saw food, she saw fun. Her lips pulled back into a snarling grin as she looked him over. His body began to shake. He felt his joints grow weak. Somewhere in the back of his mind a little voice screamed at him to run, but he couldn’t force his limbs to work. He just stared at her, locked in her trance. Until she moved.

She darted toward him like a cat going after a mouse. He shouted and tried to scramble back, but she reached him before he could get to his feet. Jed and Jasper shouted behind him, but he couldn’t understand their words. She was on him, tearing at him, snarling and spitting like a rabid coyote. He threw up his arm to protect himself and her teeth sank into his wrist.

“Shoot her!” He screamed at his brothers even as he kicked at the woman on top of him. His foot connected with her knee. Her heard a crack and she screamed as she rolled off of him. Shots echoed out. He tumbled away from her, scrambling in the opposite direction she did.

He climbed to his feet and grabbed for his pistol. She was already up and spun to face him. She stared at him for the briefest second as he pointed the gun in her face. Then she screamed again, a loud, high animal cry. She ran. He fired. The woman jerked twice as his bullets hit their mark, but she did not fall. She disappeared into the woods.

“Should we follow her?” Jasper was standing up in his saddle, ready to jump to the ground. His horse danced beneath him.

“No, stay there!” Jeremiah held a hand up to stop his brother as they watched her go. He staggered to his horse and leaned against it. “Did you hit her?”

Jed grunted. “At least once. And Jasper hit her, too. She should have been a bloody mess.”

Jeremiah looked at his brothers. They were both pale and their gun hands were shaking. He tucked his pistol back into its holster and stuck his foot into the stirrup. It took him three tries to get into his saddle.

“You all right?” Jed was looking at his arm.

Jeremiah glanced down. Blood was dripping onto his horse. “Shit.” He ripped a piece from his shirt and wrapped it around the wound. “Dumb bitch.” He flexed his fingers. “I dunno. I think she broke somethin’.”

“Maybe we should head into town and see the doc.”

Jeremiah shook his head. “I’m fine. I just need a stiff drink.”

Jed kicked his horse. It huffed and moved forward slowly, still shaken from the encounter. “Let’s hit the saloon. We’ll have Cora look at it.”

Jeremiah glanced into the woods. He thought he glimpsed a flash of brown between two trees, but it disappeared the next moment and he didn’t see it again. A shiver ran up his spine. He shook his head to clear it and spurred his horse into gear, trying to put the crazy woman out of his mind.

Chapter 19

Half an hour after they left the ranch, Charity regretted letting them eat all the horses. She plodded along behind the group with David on one side and Walton on the other. It was the most she had walked in months and she had no interest in continuing. She narrowed her eyes at the men and women in front of her. They shuffled forward without much thought for what they were doing, just going in the direction she told them to.

With a huff, Charity stopped walking and crossed her arms. David kept moving forward, heedless of her predicament, but Walton turned around and joined her. She smiled inside. Little Bear had trained him well.

“My queen?” Walton held his hat in his hands and fretted in front of her.

Charity pressed her lips together in a tight line and thought for a moment. She looked at the trees around them. “Walton,” she said. “I’m tired of walking. Build me a throne and have the strongest carry me.”

A strange expression flickered across Walton’s face and he hesitated for a moment. But then he nodded and walked away. He stopped David and sent him back to sit by Charity. She plopped down on the ground and frowned at her husband.

“You’re very boring, you know. You’re not at all the man I married.”

David stared straight ahead. He didn’t react to her in any way.

She continued to study him. “No, that’s not right. Maybe you are exactly the man I married. I just didn’t know who I was marrying. I think your mother was right.” The words were bile in her mouth and she forced herself to stop talking.

They sat in silence until Walton returned a bit later with several of the other men and women in tow. They were all carrying armfuls of branches and twigs. They dumped them on the road in front of Charity and set to work.

She watched them with interest at first, but as the sky started to lighten from bluish black to cerulean, she began to fret. The sun was not kind to them and Dixonville was still several hours away. She stood and walked over to Walton.

“How much longer is this going to take? Is it really that difficult to build a chair?” She popped her hips to the side and slapped her hands onto them. The anger that had been building over the last six months found its way to the forefront and her annoyance showed on her face.

Walton bowed his head. “Soon, my queen. Soon. I’m doing my best, but the others...”

Charity made an irritated noise in the back of her throat. “Are they all really so stupid?” she snapped.

Walton bowed his head again. “No, my queen, not always. There were others, smarter. Little Bear killed them.”

She scoffed. “He told me. I don’t get it. Why would he do something so stupid?”

Walton just shrugged.

Charity rolled her eyes and walked away toward the east. She stared at the horizon where the dark blue was growing lighter. Why would Little Bear kill anyone who showed signs of intelligence? But more importantly, why would he let her live? Her lips puckered to the side in a grimace of confusion. And what else did he not tell her? She suddenly felt less than sure about her decision to remove him and take the world on by herself. She sank down beneath a tree to ponder.

The sky was turning pink by the time the men finished the chair. Charity climbed onto the contraption and sat down. It wobbled as they picked it up, but it held together. Walton had layered branches full of soft leaves onto the seat and it was more comfortable than she expected.

“Go,” she called to the men beneath her. Their shuffling gait caused the throne to tip and she almost fell off. “Watch it, you morons!”

It took another hour and a lot of instruction from Walton before they managed to carry her without dumping her onto the ground, but by then the sun was peeking above the horizon. It licked Charity’s skin like flames from a hot fire and small cracks began to form along her arms.

She growled and stomped her foot on the platform. “Put me down.” They started to lower her to the ground. “No, wait. Carry me to those trees.” She pointed to a thick copse of trees off the road. “We’ll stay there until sunset.”

As they carried her to shelter, she let her anger bubble over and berated them for being bumbling idiots who couldn’t accomplish a simple task. Not one of them spoke against her and in the end, she decided it only made her angrier. She settled into brooding silence and let them finish their task.

They found a cool spot under a tight cluster of trees that provided plenty of shade for the whole group. Very little sound found its way through and the ground was blanketed in thick ferns. Charity took off her boots and wiggled her toes in the soft foliage.

“Walton, line my throne with these. And the platform.”

He bowed in acknowledgment and began plucking the soft ferns from the ground.

“Also, make me a canopy. I want to be completely blocked from the sun and rain.”

He glanced up at her from his hands and knees, then he climbed to his feet. He bowed again and went to the group of men and women.

Charity watched them. It bothered her that they just stood there under the trees doing nothing until someone gave them clear instructions. She was quite sure that if she wasn’t around to command them, they would stand there until they died.

“Stupid people,” she muttered as she settled under a tree in a thick bed of ferns. She stretched out and watched the men work on her makeshift carriage.

She was staring into the space between sleep and wakefulness when a branch snapped off to the left. Her head jerked in that direction. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that all the others did, too. A large buck stepped out of the space between two trees. He had a clump of ferns hanging out of his mouth and he munched noisily until he caught sight of the intruders. His body froze, but his eyes darted around the small clearing.

Charity’s nostrils flared. She could smell the blood pounding through his veins, she could taste his fear on her tongue.

With a snort, the buck spun on his hooves and bolted back into the trees. The men took off after him, some snarling and spitting, some completely silent and intent on the prey in front of them. Charity sprang to her feet and took two steps before she forced herself to stop.

“What are you, an animal?” she asked herself. Contempt dripped from her tongue at her behavior.

She listened with both longing and disgust to the chase through the trees. It didn’t last long. The deer was large and fast, but there were a lot of hungry beasts after it. Its dying screams echoed through the woods. Charity rolled her eyes when David stumbled back into the clearing with blood on his face. He was still chewing what little meat he could grab before the deer was devoured. The others soon followed.

“Animals,” Charity spat at them, but the hunger inside her regretted not going with them.

Some of the men did not return. The first handful to reach the deer had been rewarded with broken necks and smashed skulls. Charity shrugged. It didn’t matter. There were still enough left to take over Dixonville, and once she had turned the town, she would head to Lonesome Ridge. Her army would grow and then she would set off to build her empire.

The sun was sinking toward the west when the canopy on her throne was finished. It was rough and ugly, but it kept out the sun. She sat back in the chair and made them take her out into the bright light to test it. It worked. None of the skin-scorching rays touched her. Charity smirked.

“Let’s go. No more dawdling about.”

The men and women who still huddled in the cover of the trees hesitated. Even Walton looked at her with trepidation instead of his usual benign obedience.

“The sun...” he mumbled as he waved his hand in the direction of the sky.

She pierced him with a glare. “What about it?”

He cowered and shook his head. “It’s still hot. The skin,” he whispered just loud enough for her to hear.

“My skin will be just fine.” She smiled at him. “And yours. You’ll be up here with me.” She scooted over and patted the seat beside her.

He hesitated, glancing at her and the men around her. Then he walked the short distance through the painful sun to climb aboard the contraption. From his safe seat, he ordered the group to move out. With a satisfied smirk on her face, Charity relaxed back onto her mobile throne.

The dark had settled in when they reached the outskirts of Dixonville. Charity called them to a halt and had them take shelter behind a ridge of boulders. She wanted to wait until the town was sleeping before she attacked. The men sagged down to the ground. Their energy was spent. Several of them had cracks along their arms and face, anywhere that wasn’t clothed. They were lethargic and their skin was brittle and dry.

Charity hopped down from her throne to give them a pep talk. “In just a couple hours time, you will forget all about this. Your stomachs will be full and your bodies rejuvenated. You have been starving for too long, subsisting on animal meat and only the occasional treat. But don’t worry. Now that Little Bear is gone, now that I am your queen, you will not want for anything. As long as you stay with me and do all I ask, I will see to it that you are fed the way you should be. You will not lower yourselves to chasing deer in the forest ever again. You will feast on flesh of the best kind. Tonight, you will feast with me.”

She beamed at the men and women with expectation. As usual, they just stared back at her.

“Useless,” she sighed and plopped herself down against a tree.

When the night was as black as it was going to get, Charity rose to her feet. “It’s time.”

The men rose and followed her down the road. She left her throne where it was. When they neared the first house, Charity stopped them.

“There is a woman, Stella. She is in the third house on the right. She is mine. No one else is to touch her, do you understand? No one. Now spread out. There is no need to stick to the edges of town. We are not hiding anymore. Attack everyone, but try not to kill them forever. Arms and legs, stomachs, shoulders. You can eat the children. We don’t need them. Any questions?”

More silence.

“Go.” Charity waited as they fanned out and headed toward the silent houses. Dixonville wasn’t huge, maybe a hundred people, but it would be enough.

Walton stayed back near her, uncomfortable with abandoning his post. “Get. I’ll be fine on my own. Enjoy yourself.” She gave him a genuine smile as she waved toward one of the closer houses.

He bowed as a predator’s sneer pulled at his lips, then he stalked toward the house.

Charity walked to the front porch of Stella’s house and waited until she heard the screams start around her, then she stomped up the stairs. A light flickered on in an upstairs window. Charity smiled and raised her foot. The wooden door shattered as her heel connected with it. She tore what was left of it off its hinges and tossed it to the side. Her boots echoed ominously on the floors inside.

Shuffling footsteps and frantic whispers came from upstairs. With a sneer on her face, she followed them. As she reached the top, a blast rang out and she jerked to the side. A sharp pain tore through her shoulder, but it faded quickly. She glanced down at the gaping hole, then up into the wide eyes of a man holding a shaking shotgun pointed straight at her.

“You ripped my dress. I liked this dress.” Her smile grew as confusion fluttered across his face. She didn’t bother walking up the last two steps. Instead, she placed her hands on the railing and used her arms to throw herself toward the man. He collapsed beneath her like a rag doll. She gripped his throat and clamped down on his windpipe. He struggled, but he was no match for her. She sank her teeth into his shoulder just below his neck.

Two bare feet came into view around a doorway just as the man stopped moving. Charity tried to snarl, but her mouth was full. A large chunk of flesh came off when she jerked back. She spat it out and raised her head. Stella’s eyes were wide and terrified. She clamped her hands to her mouth and took a step back. Charity rose and took a step toward her.

“Hello, Stella.” The name tasted like bile on Charity’s tongue. She hated the woman with a passion. Stella was the elected leader of the local woman’s club. She had tried to recruit Charity several times, but all the while she looked down on Charity as if she were a worthless transplant. Charity would not be treated that way, not by anyone. Not anymore.

Stella whimpered. Charity grinned. “A little louder, if you please.”

Stella’s jaw dropped. For a brief second, she hesitated in the doorway and then she ran. She tried to reach the door on the other side of the stairs, but Charity darted out in front of her. She clamped her hand around Stella’s throat and lifted her into the air. With a strength she didn’t realize she possessed, Charity tossed her through the door. It shattered amid a myriad of moans.

Stella landed on the floor with a huff as her breath was forced from her lungs. She tried to climb to her feet, but her legs were tangled in her nightgown and she struggled to breathe.

Charity enjoyed the resounding echo of her heels on the wood as she crossed the floor to the bed. Two little boys were huddled together against the headboard. Twins. They whimpered as she reached them.

“No, please.” Stella reached out toward her children.

Charity turned halfway and cocked her head. “Please? Please what?”

The woman coughed. “Please don’t hurt my children.”

Charity smirked. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt them nearly as much as I hurt you.”

Then she grabbed the little boys by their hair. Stella screamed behind her as she pulled their bodies apart and smashed their heads together. They died instantly. She tossed the bodies to the ground. Deep inside, she felt a twinge of hatred at herself, but she shoved it back into the darkness and focused on the woman.

Stella collapsed onto the floor, sobbing into the wood. Charity walked over and knelt beside her. “See? They didn’t feel a thing,” she said as she stroked the woman’s hair. Her fingers tangled into the messy bun and she slowly arched the woman’s head back. “Unlike you.”

Charity squeezed the hair until the woman yelped in pain. Then she took her sweet time stripping Stella’s body of the most delicate flesh. A pool of blood spread out from the body and dripped through the wood and stained the ceiling below. Stella’s screams started out strong, but they dwindled to whimpers and soon she no longer moved.

Satiated at last, Charity sat back on her heels. Then she reached out and snapped Stella’s neck with one swift motion. “You are not coming back,” she said to the body beside her.

After a few minutes of sitting peacefully in the dark, purposefully refusing to look at the cooling bodies on the bed, she forced herself to her feet. She left the room and shut the door behind her, mentally shutting out the carnage with it, then she headed into Stella’s bedroom. Using the wash basin, she cleaned herself up. In the closet, she found Stella’s nicest dress and stuffed herself into it. By the time she was presentable again, the screams and shouts in the rest of the village had stopped. She made her way downstairs and walked out into the quiet.

She strolled down the middle of the street. Her men and women stumbled from the houses, drunk on the best dinner they had ever had. They gathered around her and waited. When the recently deceased began to rise, they joined the group, lost and confused, but aware that they were now part of something bigger. None of those who turned displayed signs of Charity’s level of intelligence. She was both dismayed and grateful. She longed for someone to talk to, but she also feared the challenge to her rule.

When all the bodies that weren’t destroyed had risen again, Charity sent Walton to find a carriage. They rigged it to be pulled by several of her new soldiers, one of them being David, as none of the horses survived the slaughter. She grinned as she climbed inside. It was plush and comfortable. Her army was more than triple its previous size. She was fed and feeling good. She couldn’t be happier.

“On to Lonesome Ridge,” she told Walton as he climbed in to join her.

Walton relayed the message and Charity sank back into the overstuffed seat as they began to move.

Chapter 20

The Gaines brothers reached town early in the evening, just as the sun was sinking below the trees on the horizon. Jeremiah drooped against his saddle horn. His eyes were closed and he forced himself to take slow, steady breaths. His horse lagged behind Jed’s a bit, but Jasper stayed next to him. The young man kept throwing furtive glances at his injured brother and it was starting to get on Jeremiah’s nerves. He clenched his teeth and dreamed about taking a long swig of Neil Avery’s special whiskey.

The quickest path to the saloon from where they were was just a turn onto Main Street and then a straight ride to the middle of town. But Jed swung out and around the town, bringing them in near the train station. He slowed the horses to an almost painful crawl.

“Looks like Fitch is shipping some crates back east,” he said as he craned his neck to survey the loading platform attached to the back of the station. “Train should be in around noon tomorrow.”

He left the rest of his thoughts unsaid. The others didn’t need to hear it. It wasn’t the first time they’d hit the train before it came into Lonesome Ridge and Jed had already given them the rundown. They would rest up at the saloon for the night and then head out before dawn. If all went according to Jed’s master plan, they would waylay the train a couple miles outside of town and steal anything of value.

Jasper swallowed his sigh. The last time they tried to rob the train, Jed had made him jump from his horse onto the locomotive. He had missed the stairs and was rewarded with a broken leg and a cracked rib. Jeremiah had made the jump, but that particular train held few valuables and the risk wasn’t worth it.

This time, though, Jed wasn’t going to act on just a whim. He already had an area picked out. Jasper had helped him stuff a bunch of clothes with straw and the dummies were waiting out near the tracks. The plan was to prop the dummies up on the tracks before the train arrived. The conductor would be forced to bring the train to a stop. While he was dealing with the fake outlaws, the real outlaws would jump up from where they hid in some weeds and board the train. Rumor had it that a big shipment of money was coming from back east to bolster the bank in Lonesome Ridge and if the rumors were true, the Gaines boys would be quite comfortable for awhile. Jasper liked comfort, but he also liked his life. He was less optimistic than Jed about the whole operation and hoped against all hope that something happened to keep them from having to try the not-so-little heist.

“You awake, boy?” Jeremiah nudged Jasper in the foot as Nelly pulled to a stop beside Dynamite.

Jasper blinked and looked away from the crates. Jed was half a block ahead of them, having seen what he wanted to see, and Jeremiah was waiting. He was looking a little pale.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He kicked his horse into gear and it followed after Jed.

Jeremiah raised an eyebrow. He understood Jasper’s reservations. He had many of his own, but Jed was the boss and they didn’t have much say in the matter.

“What about you? How’s your arm?”

Jeremiah wiggled his fingers and winced. “It’s a bit stiff. Probably gonna have to waste some o’ that good whiskey on it. Maybe I’ll get Cora to fix me up right nice.” He grinned as Jasper laughed.

“She’d be quite happy to fix you, but not in the way you’d like.” Jasper returned his brother’s grin, but he was worried about Jeremiah. The wound was still bleeding through the cloth and every time he pictured that woman, a shiver worked its way up his spine. She wasn’t right.

“You ladies done gossipin’?” Jed asked when they finally caught up. He didn’t expect an answer and they didn’t give one. The three of them angled their horses toward the saloon.

Jeremiah sighed with relief when he saw the familiar faded sign hanging from the roof. His heart did a happy little dance, for more reasons than one. Whiskey and women were the two things he loved most in the world and the saloon had them both. It didn’t matter that his woman of choice, Cora, had no interest in him. He would settle for one of the others. They were cheaper anyway, and they were more willing to give him what he wanted. Cora was a fine looking woman and fun to be around, but she would never do more than dance, and he had needs.

His horse stepped on a rock and stumbled slightly. It jostled Jeremiah’s arm and he grunted in pain. At least he would get a little attention from Cora, he thought. She was the best of the girls at fixing the injuries that the men tended to come in with, those that refused to see Doc Whitman, anyway. He flexed his fingers again and gritted his teeth. He considered turning around and heading to see the doc instead, but they were nearing the saloon. Besides, Jed would never pay the bill, so he pushed the thought out of his mind.

A large crowd had gathered on the porch in front of the saloon. It was always fairly busy this time of night, but the regular patrons were accompanied by men and women who usually considered themselves too upstanding to be seen around the drunkards in the saloon. Those folks typically kept to the hotel restaurant on the other side of town.

Jed led his brothers up to the outside of the crowd. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the people. Most were chatting amongst themselves, but nervous energy rolled over them like a heat wave. Sheriff Connor McClane and his deputy stood on the porch talking to Neil Avery and Cora Monroe.

“What’s going on?” Jasper asked. He had a very bad feeling about the whole thing and wanted nothing more than to head inside and get a drink.

“Dunno anymore’n you, do I?” Jed fixed his stare on the sheriff for a long moment before turning to his brothers. He nodded his head back down the street. “Go see the doc, Jeremiah. Have him take a look at you, get that arm fixed. I’ll see what I can find out.”

Jeremiah grumbled. “It’s fine. Can’t I just go get a drink and have Cora look at it?”

“No.” Jed glared at him. “Get outta here, now.”

Jasper and Jeremiah exchanged a look. Jasper shrugged and spun his horse around. Jeremiah returned Jed’s glare for several seconds, but his head was starting to swim and he really wanted to get off his horse. A cough rose in his throat, but he forced it away. Jed didn’t need to know how sick he really felt.

He followed Jasper down the street and they found Doc Whitman’s house. Jasper hopped off his horse and tied him up at the post. Dynamite immediately dipped his head under the bar to drink. Jeremiah pulled his horse in next to Jasper’s, but he didn’t have the energy to get off. Instead, he sank further forward in the saddle and rested his head on his good arm. Jasper came over to him.

“You gonna make it?”

Jeremiah laughed. “Yeah, it’s just a bite. I guess fightin’ with that crazy bitch took a toll.” He gathered his strength and swung his leg over. Jasper caught his arm and gave him some support as he climbed down. The younger man tied up the horse as Jeremiah slowly made his way to the steps. Jasper gave him his shoulder as he climbed up to the walkway and he leaned heavily against a post when he reached the top.

Jasper left him where he was and knocked on the door. Inside, he could see three figures through the curtains. One of them turned to the door, then rose. The door opened.

“Jasper.” Doc Whitman’s surprise was evident in his voice and on his face. The Gaines boys only came to see him when something was really wrong.

“Hey, doc.” Jasper gave him a weak smile and waved a hand at Jeremiah. “Jer needs a bit of fixin’ up. We wouldn’t have bothered you, but there’s a big pow wow going on at the saloon and the girls look otherwise engaged.”

The doctor stiffened and cleared his throat. Jasper narrowed his eyes at him. He knew something about what was going on. “What’s up, Doc? Something bad happen?”

Doc Whitman bit his lip and glanced between the two men. Then he stepped aside. “Come in, please. We’ll discuss it inside.”

Jasper gave him one last look before walking over to Jeremiah to take his arm. “Let’s go.”

Jeremiah leaned against Jasper as they entered the doctor’s house. The men turned to the left to enter the doctor’s examination room. It was a mess. The table was askew, chairs were busted, blood was everywhere.

“What—“

“This way, please.” The doctor stood in the door to the kitchen. His eyes were hard as he stared at the men.

Jasper glanced back at the blood. There was a lot of it. He led Jeremiah out of the room and into the kitchen. The older Gaines man sank down into a chair. He was breathing heavily as he flopped his arm onto the table. The two girls on the other side of the table stood up so quickly, one of them knocked her chair over.

When Jasper finally pulled his attention from his brother to look at them, he had to bite back a gasp. The Crawford girls. He had known Abby and Hannah since they were kids. He was a year older than Hannah, Wyatt’s age. He and Wyatt used to play together on Sundays on the town square. One of his best memories was of going to the church social with his ma and pa, of a young Hannah Crawford playing with them and her sisters, her blond pigtails bouncing as they chased each other in circles.

“Come on, Hannah.” Abby gripped her younger sister’s hand and pulled her toward the door.

As they left, Jasper’s eyes met Hannah’s. He smiled at her. He couldn’t help himself. Her blue eyes glistened as she looked at him. She shook her head almost imperceptibly before she pushed past him and followed Abby up the stairs.

“What are they doing here?” Jasper asked as Doc Whitman set Jeremiah’s arm on a clean kitchen towel.

The doctor glanced at him briefly and began unwrapping the bloody bandage before answering. “Wyatt is dead.”

Jasper’s jaw dropped as his heart sank. “Wyatt? What happened?”

The doc cleared his throat and shook his head. “It’s not my story to tell.”

Jasper glanced up the stairs after the girls. He longed to go up and wrap his arms around Hannah, to comfort her. He took a step toward the stairs.

“Holy hell...” The doctor’s gasp drew Jasper back to his brother.

The wound was festering and smelled of rotten flesh. Jeremiah flinched and visibly gagged. “Dumb bitch,” he growled from between clenched teeth.

Doc Whitman narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. He stared at Jeremiah intently. “What exactly happened to you? I need to know everything.”

Jeremiah explained the story about the woman who attacked them. “She was crazy.”

The doctor pressed his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes for a second. Then he pushed himself back from the table and stood. He walked out into the hall and called up the stairs. “Abby? Abby, can you come out here, please?”

Abby appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Abby, I need you to go get Connor. Quick now. Don’t dawdle.”

The girl frowned as she stomped down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

He leaned close and whispered, “Just get him, please. And hurry.”

As Abby left, Jasper grabbed the doc’s arm. “What’s going on?”

“Your brother... He’s in big trouble.”

“Why? What did he do this time?”

“It’s not anything he did. Nothing he could have stopped. That woman, she... Wyatt... I can’t. I just can’t. Connor has to explain it to you. He has to make the decision. I’ll clean your brother’s wound, but there’s not much else I can do. It’s too late. I’m sorry.”

Jasper squeezed his arm tighter as a boiling mixture of anger, fear, and despair crept into his chest. “Too late? What does that mean? How is it too late? It’s just a bite. Fix him.”

“Jasper, you’re hurting me.” Doc Whitman’s voice was calm, but firm as he delivered the unspoken command.

The young man glared at the doctor a little longer before releasing him and giving him a little shove. The doctor shook his head and sighed, but said nothing. Instead, he walked over to the table and began to clean Jeremiah’s arm. He was very careful, both not to hurt Jeremiah and not to touch the actual wound. He was just finishing when Abby returned with the sheriff and Jed Gaines.

Connor looked from the doctor to Jeremiah to Jeremiah’s arm.

“He’s been bitten,” Doc Whitman said.

Connor blinked once and pulled his gun.

Chapter 21

Jed reacted on pure instinct. His own pistol was out in the blink of an eye and trained on the back of Connor’s head just as the deputy came in. Amos stared at the group for half a second before pulled his gun and pointed it at Jed. Jasper’s eyebrows rose up to his hairline as he pulled his gun and pointed it at Connor before switching it over to Amos. The whole scenario would have garnered many laughs had it been done by stage performers, but no one was laughing as they stood in the middle of a deadly showdown in the doctor’s kitchen.

Jeremiah sat at the table, tired and confused. His mouth gaped as he watched the display of machismo. Hannah clapped her hands over her mouth as she came down the stairs and witnessed the strange scene. Abby backed up into the hall and placed herself between the men and her youngest sister. She longed for her own gun and her mind raced to decide who she would aim it at. Jeremiah was her top pick.

Connor cocked the hammer back on his Peacemaker and took a step toward Jeremiah. Three more identical clicks echoed through the room. The men were locked and loaded. If any of them fired, it would be a bloodbath and no one would make it out of the house alive.

“Hang on, hang on. Put the guns down. Let’s talk about this.” Doc Whitman rose from his seat on the other side of Jeremiah and walked across the room. He placed himself between the injured man and the sheriff with his hands raised defensively. His eyes were locked on Connor’s.

“He’s a dead man, Jacob. You know it as well as I do. If we don’t kill him now...” Connor let the words hang in the air like a stick of dynamite waiting to go off.

“No one’ll be shootin’ my brother ‘cept me.” Jed stepped forward and pressed his gun against Connor’s head, knocking the sheriff’s hat onto the floor. Amos’s trigger finger twitched, but he restrained himself. The ball was still in the sheriff’s court and he didn’t want to be the cause of an all-out war.

“No one is going to be shooting anyone just yet. Let’s talk about this.” Doc Whitman reached his hand up slowly and wrapped his fingers around the barrel of McClane’s gun. He put gentle pressure on it. Connor glared at him, but he let the gun be lowered. He did not uncock it.

The doctor looked at Jed. “Now you.”

Jed pressed the gun harder into Connor’s head, making the sheriff growl, but he eventually pulled it away. He lowered it to waist height and left it there, still pointed at the sheriff’s back.

The other two men lowered their guns and reset the hammers. Both were relieved that it hadn’t come down to a shootout yet and they were more than willing to talk things through.

Jasper put his gun into his holster and entered the kitchen after tossing a glance back toward the stairs. Hannah sat halfway up, her face as white as a sheet. He pressed his lips into a tight line. She had seen him pull a gun on someone. Not just anyone, but the sheriff and his deputy. He mentally kicked himself and hoped to God she would forgive him.

He scooted around his older brothers and took the doctor’s vacated chair on the other side of Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s hands were shaking, so Jasper put his own hand on Jeremiah’s bare arm. It was cold and clammy, like his mother’s had been after she died. His heart sank into his stomach.

He looked up at the sheriff. Connor was watching him with a sadness in his eyes. “What’s going on?” Jasper asked. His voice hurt his throat as the question forced its way out. He didn’t want to know the answer, but he needed it.

Doc Whitman beckoned the Crawford girls in. Abby straightened her shoulders as she forced her way into the kitchen. She purposefully bumped into Jed with her shoulder, hard. He had no choice but to step aside as she and her sister walked into the room. Hannah brushed past Jasper and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze before taking the seat further away from him. Abby settled herself into the chair between them.

“Jed, put the gun away,” the doctor admonished the only outlaw that remained standing.

Jed shot a look of death at the doctor. “Hell no. Ain’t nobody threatens my brother.”

The doctor sighed and shook his head. “Fine. Just don’t shoot anyone until we finish talking, okay?” He walked over to the table and propped himself on the corner next to Jeremiah. He turned his attention to the man with a grave look on his face. “The woman who bit you, you said she was sick, right? Gray skin, dull gray eyes?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well...” Doc Whitman paused and glanced at the girls. “A few men with a similar description attacked the Crawford farm a couple days ago. They killed Abe and Phyllis, and Madeleine. They got to Wyatt, too. He was bitten.”

Jeremiah flexed his fingers and winced at the pain radiating up his arm, into his shoulder and neck. “Like me?”

“Yeah, like you. The wound festered and rotted in hours.” He paused. “It killed him, Jeremiah. He died on the table in there.” Doc Whitman glanced at Connor before continuing. The sheriff nodded. The doctor cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “Then he came back.”

Jed took a step forward, putting himself part way between the sheriff and his brother. His eyebrows knit as he eyed the doctor. “What’s that mean? How’d he come back?”

Doc Whitman shrugged. “He came back to life. Only, it wasn’t him. He was... different. His skin was gray, and his eyes were the eyes of the dead, dull, no light in them at all. He tried to bite Abby, but she got away from him.” Tears sprung to his eyes and he fought to keep them in check. “He got Eva, though. It was like he didn’t even recognize her, his own fiancée. Tore a chunk of flesh from her neck and began eating like it was Christmas dinner... He was a monster.” His voice faltered and he buried his face in his hands.

Jed raised his gun again, pointing it straight at the doctor’s face. “My brother ain’t no monster.”

“Jed, put the gun down.” Jeremiah’s voice was weak and strained. His breathing was labored and his skin was even paler than it had been when they arrived. “He ain’t lyin’. I can feel it comin’. I can feel it in me, eatin’ me alive.”

The oldest Gaines brother lowered his gun and stared at Jeremiah. “No. You ain’t a monster. No one’s killing you. Not ever.”

Jeremiah opened his mouth and closed it. He had no answer. He knew what needed to be done, but hell if he wanted to die.

“What if we promise to leave and not come back?” Jasper’s hand still gripped Jeremiah’s arm. He was sitting forward on his chair, pleading with the sheriff with puppydog eyes.

The sheriff shook his head. “Not good enough. You might come back anyway. After he’s turned.”

Jed latched onto Jasper’s idea. “Nah, no, that’s good. That’s a good idea. We’ll ride until we can’t go no further. We won’t ever come back here. Not to Lonesome Ridge. Not ever.”

Connor’s lip twitched. Jed was a liar and a cheat. He wouldn’t trust the man as far as he could throw him, but the sincerity in his voice was more than Connor had ever heard. Besides, the brothers were dead men if they stayed with Jeremiah.

“Do it, Connor. Please.” Doc Whitman pleaded with the sheriff. “Just let them go.” He stood up and walked over to whisper in Connor’s ear. “He won’t last much longer. I’d rather he not be here when he turns. We can send out a party in a little while to track them.”

Connor glanced at the doctor. The man had a good point. “Very well. Go, before I change my mind.”

Jasper rose and helped Jeremiah get to his feet. His brother leaned on him as they shuffled toward the door.

Connor watched the young man for a few seconds before he stepped up and gently gripped his arm. “You don’t have to go, Jasper. You’re welcome to stay here.”

Jasper’s eyes went wide with hope, but they fell when Jed glared at him. “I...”

“The Gaines brothers stay together, Jasper. Always. You’re coming with us.” Jed’s voice was hard and held an unspoken threat, but Jeremiah shook his head.

“No,” Jeremiah said. His thick accent disappeared as he spoke. “Let him stay. He belongs here. He deserves a chance at a life we could never have.”

Jed turned his baffled glare on Jeremiah. “No—“

“Shut up, Jed. For once in your life, just leave it alone. Let the kid be. Let’s go.” Jeremiah leaned over to give Jasper a weak hug. “Good luck, little brother. Make Ma proud.” Then he pulled away and hobbled out the door before anyone could stop him.

Jed stared after his brother for a moment before turning to Jasper. “Yer dead to me. If we ever meet again, I’ll kill ya.” He stomped out the door and slammed it shut behind him.

Chapter 22

Jasper walked to the window and leaned his head against the dusty glass. He watched with a heavy heart while Jed struggled to help Jeremiah mount his horse.

Off to his right, Connor called out the door to the pair. “Go around the back way. Don’t go by the saloon. There’s a crowd there and they know something ain’t right. You don’t want to be caught out there.” His voice didn’t carry a threat. He was warning the brothers, giving them a chance to get away before the inevitable happened.

Jed didn’t respond in any way, but he steered their horses toward the far end of town. As Jasper watched them leave, he felt someone come up beside him. Hannah placed her hands on the windowsill and gave him a small smile. He felt his lips twitch in return. It was the most he could muster.

“I know what it’s like,” she whispered. “To lose someone, I mean.”

Jasper’s eyes burned and he blinked rapidly. He forced a bigger smile and gripped her fingers gently. “Your pain is worse than mine. At least they’re still alive.”

Hannah turned back toward the window. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. The unspoken “not for long” hung in the air between them like a rain cloud.

As Jed and Jeremiah disappeared from sight, Connor looked at Amos. “Follow them.”

Amos nodded once and left. He would take a route through the town on foot to make sure the men really did leave. And if they didn’t... Jasper didn’t want to think that far ahead.

Connor placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You can stay with me at the jail. I have a spare room. You’re welcome to it.”

“Thanks.” Jasper chewed on his lip for a moment before bobbing his head toward the door. “Can I talk to you outside, sheriff?”

Connor glanced at Hannah briefly. “Sure thing.”

Jasper gave the girl another quick smile before leaving the kitchen.

The porches in the middle of town were all connected into a walkway, so Jasper followed it down a bit before leaning his elbows against the railing. The barber shop behind him was dark and quiet. Connor propped himself beside the young man and waited.

Jasper watched the lights in the torches flicker for a bit before he spoke. “This is all so surreal. I feel like I’m in a dream.”

The sheriff pursed his lips. “Yep. I’ve been pinching myself for a couple days now. I don’t seem to be waking up.”

“Ya know, I wouldn’t have believed you about Wyatt if I hadn’t seen the woman myself. We shot her half a dozen times between the three of us, and she was still on her feet. Hell, I shot her in the back. At least twice. She should have been crawling at the very least. I didn’t even see any blood.” Jasper barked a laugh that had not a trace of humor in it.

Connor pressed his lips together as the young man stared out into the dark. He wasn’t looking for a response, just a friendly ear. The sheriff waited for Jasper to continue, but he didn’t. Connor cleared is throat.

Finally Jasper spoke again. “What’s going to happen to Jeremiah? You said Wyatt died and woke up again, as... as something else. But what?”

“Well,” Connor said as he readjusted his posture so he mimicked Jasper’s. “Abby said Wyatt was bitten back at their ranch, around dinner. It took a few hours for them to get into town, so that timing would be about right. The bite was deep, a lot worse than Jeremiah’s. He was missing a chunk of his leg. By the time they got here, he was weak and feverish. He could barely stay on the horse. The wound was rotting, just like Jeremiah’s is. He died a short while after they arrived.”

“So he could be dead already. My brother could be one of those things.” Jasper coughed to cover a sob that tried to force its way out. He blinked fiercely to clear the tears that threatened to overwhelm him.

“Maybe. But you gotta remember that Jeremiah is a lot bigger than Wyatt was. If it’s poison, which is my guess, it could take longer. Your brother’s a big boy. He could last a day or two, maybe.” Connor bit his tongue. “Shit. Sorry Jasper. I know that’s not helping. I wish I could tell you that they’ll be fine, but I can’t. This thing... I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to stop it.”

The two men were quiet for awhile until Amos joined them. “They’re gone,” he said and propped his arms on the railing beside Connor.

Jasper draped his head over the railing between his arms and placed his hands on the back of his head. Amos walked to the other side of him, and the three of them stood in silence until Doc Whitman came out a little later. The night was deep around the town and all the respectable folks had retired to their homes. The only activity was visible farther down the street at the saloon.

“How much did you tell them?” The doctor broke the silence.

“The townsfolk? Not much. Just that there are some bandits out there who are infected with something and that they need to be wary of people they don’t know. That they need to remain in town until I give further word.”

“What did you tell them about Eva? About why you shot her?”

Connor shrugged. “I just said she was infected. Then Abby showed up. I offered to pay for everyone’s drinks for the night and left.” He gave the doc a halfhearted grin. “It’ll take me years to pay off that tab.”

Amos snorted a laugh. “Yeah, but it was a good distraction. The only one who noticed the Gaines boys was Cora.” He tilted his head down the street and they all looked that way.

Sashaying her way down the walk was the lovable Cora Monroe in a dark green bustle. She walked up to the men and propped one hip against a post as she crossed her arms. “You boys have had a mighty interesting couple of days. First the Crawfords, then the Gaines brothers come into town. Jeremiah and Jasper disappear with Jeremiah looking mighty ill, then Abby comes to get my darling brother and they take off, followed by a very angry looking Jed. And now I find you fellas out here, all chatty-like, with little Jasper himself, and no older brothers to be seen.”

She gave Connor a meaningful look, but he purposefully ignored her as he found the darkened house across the street to be infinitely more interesting. Amos shuffled his feet uncomfortably and coughed. Jasper and Doc Whitman darted glances between the three of them, unsure of what they should and shouldn’t share.

“You might as well spill, boys,” Cora said as her eyebrows crawled up her forehead and her lips puckered. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not some scared little girl you can pat on the head and shoo away.”

Doc Whitman was the first to crack. “We might as well tell her, Connor. Someone will figure something out sooner or later and it’s better that the real story be out there.”

Connor quirked an eyebrow at him. “Is it?”

The doctor shrugged. “If more of those things come, we need to be ready.”

Connor chewed his lip for several seconds. “I know. Son of a bitch.” He pounded a fist against the railing and straightened. “all right. Inside.”

The group followed him back into the doctor’s house. Abby and Hannah were in the kitchen. “Tea’s ready,” Hannah said as they walked in.

Connor gave her a smile. “Thanks, Hannah. We need another cup, please.”

“Oh my Lord!”

He turned in the doorway. Cora was standing in the examination room with her hands clasped to her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet. He walked over and slipped his hand into her elbow to lead her away from the mess that had yet to be cleaned. Amos came in just as they entered the hall and Connor tried to pass Cora off to him. Instead, she pulled her arm away from them both and cleared her throat. She swiped at the tears in her eyes and straightened her skirts.

“So it’s true then,” she said. Her shoulders were straight and her head was high, but her fear made her voice crack. “Wyatt really did attack Eva? And you killed them both?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You don’t think they believed that cockamamie story you gave them, do you? We have ears, Connor. And eyes.” She glanced back at the destroyed room.

“Fair enough. Yes, it’s all true. There’s something going around that causes...” He waved his hand toward the mess. “That. Dunno what it is, or what to do about it.”

“And there are others infected with whatever he was infected with roaming around?”

“We know there are at least four others. We’d be stupid to assume that was it.”

She pressed her lips together and thought for a minute. Then her shoulders straightened and she looked around the room, meeting everyone’s eyes straight on. “Then we had better come up with a plan. And it better be good.”

Chapter 23

Summer Rain knelt inside the barber shop in the dark, tucked into the corner underneath the window. The twitching body of the old barber lay beside her. Blood bubbled from his lips and the hole in his throat. His eyes were huge and they stared at her with wonder. She reached down and pushed them closed. He didn’t have the strength to open them again.

A snarl escaped her lips as she listened to the sound of retreating footsteps. Her English wasn’t the best, but she understood some of the conversation. They were aware of what she was. At least, they understood the idea. This was the end of it, the end of her little game. She would have to be more careful from now on. But what she was planning would have led to the same thing anyway.

She fought the urge to follow the group, to attack. There were too many of them, even for her. So instead she waited, huddled in the dark like a fugitive, until she heard a door close down the street. Then she stood up and looked out the window. The street was empty, but lights were on in several houses. She gave the barber a nudge. He wasn’t quite dead yet. Good, she thought. The longer it took for him to die, the longer it would take for him to turn. She wanted to be out of town before he caused too much of a stir.

Summer Rain caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the barber’s chair as she walked toward the door. She had avoided mirrors when she was with Little Bear. She did not want to see herself. She did not want to admit what she had become. It was easier to accept her awful deeds if she didn’t have to look herself in the face.

But now she stopped and stared. The face glaring back at her was almost unrecognizable. It was pale, no longer the honey brown color she so loved. Her hair hung loose and matted. It wasn’t sleek and soft the way it had been when she was alive. Her hide dress was stained and ripped, barely a rag drooping off her emaciated body.

She looked like death. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips when she realized that what she was seeing was what all her victims saw before she set upon them. A young woman who was once beautiful, who was once alive, now the very thing they feared. Sometimes, she let them scream. Their fear made her feel human once more.

Her eyes caught a glimpse of the hole in her shoulder where Little Bear had attacked her that fateful night so long ago. The smile turned into a bitter sneer. Little Bear, the man she trusted and loved, he had done this to her. He had turned her into this despised thing. He had stolen any chance she had in life and made her a harbinger of death and despair. When she left him, she had wanted to kill him. She still cursed herself for not taking the chance, but she was weak back then. Now, she was stronger, she was faster, she was a cold-blooded killer. If they ever met up again, she would tear him to shreds. She would make him pay for what he did to her.

She tore her gaze away from the mirror and stalked out into the street. Little Bear would get what he was owed, but in the meantime, she would find her fun elsewhere.

Keeping to the shadows, Summer Rain crept in the direction opposite the doctor’s house. She found a lighted window and looked in. A man sat in a chair near an empty fireplace with a book in his hands. His wife was on a stool opposite him with her sewing.

Summer Rain’s bare feet made no sound as she walked to the door. She tested it. It was unlocked. Pushing it open slowly and quietly, she eased herself inside. The door led to a small entryway. Stairs ran up and out of sight and two doors opened on the right side of the short hall. She crept forward and peered into the sitting room where she had seen the man and woman. They were still there, both absorbed by their distractions of choice.

The husband shifted in his chair and Summer Rain ducked back into the hall. She pressed herself flat against the wall and held perfectly still. She closed her eyes and let her hearing take over.

“Mama!” The call came from directly above her. Summer Rain fought back a growl. Children always complicated things.

“Mamaaaa!” The cry came again, more frantic this time with a high-pitched squeal at the end.

The woman in the sitting room sighed. “I’ll go see what she wants.”

Summer Rain crept further down the hall and tucked herself into the shadows underneath the stairs. She waited for the woman to come out of the room. Just as she reached the stairs, Summer Rain scratched the wall behind her very lightly. The woman paused and glanced around. Summer Rain was hidden well enough that she could not be seen. She stared into the dark for another moment before putting a foot on the bottom step. Summer Rain scratched again, louder this time. Uncertain fear played across the woman’s face, but she took a step in Summer Rain’s direction. The younger woman pressed her lips together to hide the predator’s grin that was trying to grow on her face.

The other woman kept walking toward her, slowly, examining the area around her, trying to see into the dark. Summer Rain waited until she was out of direct sight of the doorway, far enough that she wouldn’t be seen if she fell that way, before she pounced. She snapped the woman’s neck with a quick turn and lowered her slowly to the ground without a sound. The woman didn’t even know she was going to die. She never had time to even gasp. A pity, Summer Rain thought. A broken neck meant the woman wouldn’t turn, but there were at least two others in the house who could be used.

When the woman was down, she pulled the body back underneath the stairs. She folded it up so it couldn’t be spotted unless someone was directly beside it. Then she walked toward the door to the sitting room. She hesitated for a moment at the stairs, deciding between victims. She chose to take out the father first. He was the biggest threat.

She walked into the room without stealth. Men rarely screamed. They would fight to near death before they would scream. This man was no different. He rose from his chair spitting curses at her.

“Get out of my house.” He hissed at her instead of shouting and his eyes darted upward toward the toddler. He clearly still thought his wife was safe upstairs.

Summer Rain grinned as she advanced on him. When she was halfway across the room, she leapt. The distance between them evaporated and she clamped her left hand over his mouth as she shoved him to the ground with her right. Once she had him pinned down, she gripped his throat with her right hand. Her left hand remained on his mouth to keep him from crying out loud enough to alert the neighbors. Her lips twitched with anticipation as she leaned over and trailed her tongue in a long line up his neck. She savored the taste of his skin until his body went slack beneath her.

A pout puckered her lips as she sat back. The man’s breathing had stopped. She was a cat playing with its mouse, and the mouse had given up too quickly. She leaned over and ripped his shirt open. She had to act fast or he wouldn’t turn. She sank her teeth into his chest, just over his heart, and tore a chunk free. She didn’t need to, a simple bite would work, but why waste the opportunity for a snack? She savored the meat for a minute before pushing herself back to her feet.

Her mouth started watering in anticipation as she walked to the stairs. The flesh of a child was the sweetest of all those she had tried. It had been months since she had run across one so young, and she longed to taste it on her tongue. Summer Rain padded up the stairs slowly. Two doors greeted her at the top.

“Mama?”

It came from the second room, a small doddering thing with messy blond hair and a sleepy expression on her face. The girl rubbed at her eyes and squinted in Summer Rain’s direction.

“Ma...” Her voice trailed off when she really looked at the woman in front of her. Her little mouth curved into a wide O and her blue eyes grew huge on her tiny face. She stared at Summer Rain, but didn’t move.

Summer Rain smiled as she advanced on the child. She meant it to be a calming thing, but all the child saw was the snarling face of a beast. The little girl whimpered and cowered against the door frame, but she didn’t run. She had nowhere to go.

“Mama,” she whispered when Summer Rain reached her.

The dead woman just shook her head. She leaned down and picked the little girl up. The child shook in her arms as tears formed in her eyes. Summer Rain reached up with one hand and pushed up the sleeve on the nightshirt the little girl was wearing, exposing the tender flesh on the pudgy little arm. Then she moved that hand to the girl’s mouth, gripping it like she had her father’s. The muffled screams vibrated against her palm as she sank her teeth into the delicate meat. It was divine. She had not tasted such tender sweetness in a long time.

When the child sagged into her arms, she laid her on the floor. Her breathing was ragged, but she was alive, temporarily. Summer Rain allowed herself another taste, this time from the fatty muscle of the leg. She sat back on her heels and sighed as the blood dripped down her chin. When she swallowed her last bite, she licked her lips and stood.

Inside the room, she found a small bed and a crib. A baby lay sleeping inside the crib, a boy. She reached toward him, intending to simply snap his neck and end it, but as her fingers caressed his face, she changed her mind. She picked him up gently and wrapped him in a blanket.

Summer Rain walked back down the stairs and out of the house. Further down the street, she found another unlocked door. She laid the baby just inside and found all the inhabitants of the house asleep—a mother, a father, three teenage daughters, and one younger son. She dispatched them all quietly and carefully, making sure they would return.

Satisfied, she picked up the child and worked her way back up to the barber shop. She peeked in the window. The barber was not yet awake, but he would be soon. She smiled as she stroked the baby’s cheek. The sheriff would not be prepared for an attack from inside his precious town. Nine undead would walk the streets soon, with a terrible aching hunger in their bellies. They would attack anyone who came near them. She hoped they would be able to turn some others before they were taken down by the sheriff, if he could take them down at all. The chaos would be wonderful.

Summer Rain’s pout returned. She wished she could stay to watch, but instead she followed the shadows back out into the wild. Knowing the havoc her new minions were about to cause was enough. She found greater pleasure in the small acts of sabotage than actually destroying a whole town. Of the four she had attacked this way, two of them had been overrun, its inhabitants either turned or killed. Those were tiny settlements far removed from the rest of the world, much smaller than Lonesome Ridge, and Summer Rain had stayed around to witness the effect. A few of the inhabitants had tried to flee, but she caught them and turned them, leaving them to wander the woods alone. She wondered how long it would take until the creatures were discovered. So far, she had not encountered anyone that understood what she was. It made turning them easy. But now, she knew, that would no longer be the case.

Summer Rain walked through the woods until she found a small hill that rose into a clearing at the top. She settled down with the sleeping baby in her arms and looked up at the sky. For a very brief moment, she thought of her previous life, of the life she knew as a young maiden in a village by the river. Her finger trailed down the little boy’s cheek. She would have had children of her own someday and they would have been raised up to be shaman like their father. Instead, she was a monster, doomed for the rest of her days to walk the earth in search of living flesh, to turn others into vile creatures like herself. No, she thought, not like her. Most of them did not know the hell she lived in. They didn’t remember their past, what they were, the life they used to have. They were simply predators in a world of prey. She was cursed to always know what she was, what she could have been, what she lost.

Summer Rain growled into the night and shook the baby hard. He jolted awake and his startled cry echoed across the hill. She yanked away the blanket and clothing from the child and tossed the cloth to the ground. Silently cursing Little Bear, she sank her teeth into the soft flesh of the pudgy stomach. Flavor exploded across her tongue as tiny screams ripped through the night.

Chapter 24

As Hannah set cups and saucers on the table, Abby poured some cream from the ice box into a small pitcher and set the sugar bowl on the table. There were seven of them crowded around the little kitchen and it made for tight quarters.

“Here, take my seat.” Jasper stood up from the chair he occupied near the end and beckoned to Hannah. With a bashful grin, she returned the kettle to the cast iron stove and scooted around the other bodies. She slipped into the vacant chair. Jasper settled his hands on her shoulders.

Cora wrinkled her nose teasingly at him before she turned to Abby. The younger woman’s hands were on the table, cupping her tea, and Cora slipped her fingers into one of them. “Abby, Hannah, I know this is going to be difficult for you, but we need to know exactly what happened. Every detail. We need to know all you can remember so we can fight these things, so we can keep it from happening to anyone else. Can you do that for us?”

Abby took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She exhaled and looked straight at Cora. Her expression held none of the sadness and despair that had been etched into her features since that horrible night. Her jaw was set, her mouth was hard, and her eyes burned with determination. “Yes, we can do that. They need to be stopped, all of them. They need to be dead, permanently.”

Cora gave her a weak smile. “That’s the plan. With your help.”

Between the two of them, Abby and Hannah relayed everything they could remember. Shortly after they started speaking, Doc Whitman disappeared into the other room and returned with some paper and a pencil. Cora took note of anything she found useful. By the time they were finished, Hannah’s face was streaked with tears and Abby was shivering.

“Thank you, girls. I know that was hard, but this will help. I promise.” She patted the older sister on the hand and turned to her brother. “So what’s the plan, little brother?”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “I dunno, big sister. You’re always the one who comes up with the big plans. What do you suggest?”

The saloon girl rolled her eyes, but the little banter between them helped to lighten the mood. “Well,” she said. “I think someone needs to head out to the Crawford farm, check things out, see what’s going on there. If those things are there, they need to be destroyed.” She cut a glance between the sisters. “And we need to take care of the others. I hate to say it, but if they’re not one of those things, they should probably be burned, just in case. We don’t want it spreading.”

Amos cleared his throat and straightened in his chair. He had been quiet up to that point. “I think you’re right. I’ll go, if you don’t mind, sheriff. I’ll take some men with me and we’ll clear the place out.”

Connor chewed his lip as he looked at Amos. He was a good man, but he was young, about Abby’s age. He was also terrified of his own shadow and could get beat in a bar fight pretty easily. But he was still the deputy, and he had to take responsibility sometime if he was going to take Connor’s place as sheriff.

“Yeah,” McClane conceded. “All right. But you take some men with you. Abby, how many did you say you saw?”

“Three, I think.”

“Okay. Amos, I want you to take half a dozen men. Good men, who know their way around a pistol. Let’s see... Get Paul Finch, Norman Baker, the Anders brothers...”

“I’ll go.” Jasper’s hands were still on Hannah’s shoulders as he volunteered. Her head shot around and she stared at him with wide, glistening eyes.

“No.” Connor, Hannah, and Cora all spoke at the same time.

“Not happening,” Connor said.

“Please don’t,” whispered Hannah.

“We need you here, Jasper. Someone has to fill in for the deputy while he’s away. Connor needs someone by his side.” Cora’s voice was bright and reasonable. She spoke as if there was no other way to do things and that’s just how it had to be. Jasper pressed his lips together and lowered his head.

Connor glanced at him once more before turning back to the deputy. Get Billy Teagan and Longtooth McKee, too. They’ll go. Can’t trust ‘em for much, but they’re some of the best shots in the area. Cora, why don’t you go with him, help him explain the situation.”

Her eyes glittered as she winked at Amos. “I’d be happy to.”

The deputy flushed from his neck to the top of his head.

Connor rolled his eyes. “All right, so that’s settled. Now we need to talk about how we’re going to protect this town. We need patrols, day and night. Anyone who comes in or leaves gets checked for bites and whatnot. Doc is in charge of that. Anyone sick heads to the jail. We’ll keep them behind bars until he gives them the all clear.”

“That’s all good and great, but how are we going to get people to volunteer? You think anyone is going to believe this? I mean, it sounds like a load of bullcrap, if we’re completely honest.”

All eyes turned to Hannah. She was quiet and reserved, a little mouse who scurried around and never bothered anyone. And here she was, participating in a conversation that could literally be life or death.

“I’ll take care of that, too,” Cora said. “Tonight, I’ll help Amos and we’ll get him out of town at first light. Then tomorrow morning, we’ll gather everyone at the saloon and I’ll give them the lowdown. No offense, little brother, but I think they’ll be more willing to volunteer for a lovely lady like me than a drunk sheriff who can’t protect the town.” She returned his glare with a grin.

“Careful, Cora.” He pointed a finger at her and shook his head. “Anyway, that sounds like a good plan. Jasper and Jacob, why don’t you fellas join me at the jailhouse. We can go over the patrol routes, get it all worked out. Cora, you and Amos head out, round up the cavalry. Girls, you go on up to bed. Get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.”

As everyone disbanded, Jasper pulled Hannah aside. He slipped his hand into hers and his heart melted as she gazed up at him with her startlingly blue eyes. “Hannah, I—“

She reached up and pressed a finger to his lips. “No, Jasper. Not yet. Not until this is over.” She leaned up on her tiptoes and gave him a peck on the cheek, then scampered up the stairs without looking back.

Cora and Amos were able to convince all the men to join the deputy on his trek out to the Crawford farm. They tried to grab a few minutes of shut-eye, but none of them were able to sleep. Nearly a dozen people were gathered in the jailhouse. Instead of hemming and hawing until the light broke, they decided to start early, so they could be back before it grew dark again.

“Okay, boys,” Amos said as he glanced out the window. “Let’s head out.” He readjusted his belt and slapped his hat on his head. He looked more confident than he felt. Inside, his stomach was twirling like a twister and his heart was pounding so hard it hurt.

Connor walked over to him and slapped a hand on his shoulder. “All right. You boys listen to Deputy Barnett, now. You hear me? He has my full authority to make any calls he needs to make. Don’t question him. Just do what you’re told. And come back in one piece, got it?”

The men mumbled in ascent as they filed out the door. Only Amos remained. “It’ll be fine,” Connor told him. “They’re probably gone. And if they’re not, just be careful. There are three of them and seven of you. You have guns. Keep them loaded, keep them ready.”

Amos nodded and walked toward the door as Cora waltzed over to him. She grabbed his cheeks with her hands and pulled him to her. Her lips pressed against his and held him there for several seconds. Fire danced up and down his body and his mind ground to a halt. When she finally pulled away, his knees were shaking and he had trouble staying upright.

Cora laughed and patted him on the bottom. “You better come back to me, boy.” She gave him a wink and trotted upstairs and out of sight.

The sheriff sighed. “Be careful, Amos.”

The deputy regained his composure and cleared his throat. “Yes, sheriff. Will do.” Then he tipped his hat and disappeared out the door.

When the group had ridden out of sight, Connor followed his sister up the stairs. He found her in Amos’s bedroom, sitting on his bed with her head in her hands. Her shoulders shook and she sniffled loudly.

“Hey now, what’s the matter?” Connor strode across the room and gathered Cora into his arms. He stroked her hair and kissed her forehead. “What’s wrong?”

She cried into his shoulder for several minutes before she could articulate a sentence. “I have a bad feeling about all this, Connor. A very bad feeling.”

He pressed his lips to her hair, but said nothing. He had a bad feeling, too, and it just kept getting worse.

***

The sun was up in the sky when the Crawford farm came into view. Amos raised his hand and pulled the group to a stop. The men huddled in a quiet group around him as their horses snorted and danced.

“Finch, McKee, you boys head around to the left. Davey, Seb, go right. If anything seems off, you stay together and get the hell outta there. If things go bad, meet up at the bridge. Got it?”

“What’re we gonna do, boss?” Billy Teagan stared wide-eyed at the buildings in front of them. He had been joking about Amos, a boy half his age, being in charge the whole way there, but this time his voice held no trace of humor. He looked to the young man for real direction.

Amos swallowed and sat up higher in his saddle. “Let’s go. No point in dawdlin’ around here all day, is there? We have stuff to do back in town.” He kicked his horse into motion and clenched his teeth together as he rode straight toward the house.

The horses shivered as they got closer to the buildings, but none of them tried to bolt and nothing else moved. He could see Paul Finch and Longtooth McKee as they approached the barn. The Anders boys had swung around toward the fields. Amos dismounted in front of the house and tied his horse up to the hitching post. He narrowed his eyes at the front porch. A long rusty brown streak trailed across it from the door to the stairs. It disappeared in the dust at the bottom of the steps. His stomach lurched and he took several deep breaths to steady himself. When he turned, the two men were staring slack-jawed at the blood.

“Billy, you stay out here, keep an eye out. Give us a call if anything funny happens.”

“Aye, boss.” Billy pulled his pistol from his belt and double-checked it. Then he turned away from the mess and scanned the horizon.

Norman Baker was right on Amos’s heels as they walked into the small house. A small bed sat untouched in a corner and the cast iron stove was cold. The dining table was covered with the Crawford’s uneaten dinner. It had been knocked askew and several plates lay smashed to bits amid moldy food on the floor. The blood trail led from one of the bedrooms. “Stay here,” Amos commanded. “Watch my back.”

Norman’s gun was already out and Amos heard it click as he cocked it. The deputy sent up a tiny prayer that Baker wasn’t trigger-happy. He moved toward the open door and peered around the frame. It was trashed. The bed was flipped on its side and blood was everywhere. The curtain on the window flapped in a light breeze. Holding his gun up and ready, he edged toward the bed. He counted to three before stepping around it, ready to fire, but his shoulders relaxed when he found nothing. The room was empty.

He walked back out into the main room. Norman’s finger twitched on the hammer, but the man kept his cool enough to not shoot the deputy. “All clear in there. I’m gonna check this one.”

Norman nodded. He was wound as tight as a spring, but so far he was keeping his head. Amos laid his hand on the closed door and slowly turned the knob. When it clicked open, he listened carefully for any noises inside. It was silent, so he pushed the door open all the way. There was a big bed in the middle of the room and a dresser along one wall. He checked underneath the bed. It was clear aside from an empty leather sack. He grabbed the bag and turned to the dresser. He didn’t know which clothes belonged to who, so he just filled the sack with whatever he could find and pulled it closed. Then he swung the bag over his shoulder and walked out of the house.

“What do you see?” he asked Billy as Norman followed him out.

“S’all quiet right now, boss, but Finch and McKee disappeared into the barn and I ain’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em since.”

“Let’s check it out.” He tied the sack to the back of his saddle before heading toward the barn.

Near the doors, they found a big brown stain on the dirt. “This must be where Abraham died,” he murmured as he stared at it. Glancing around, he found pieces of clothing and a long bone, but nothing else of note. He pressed his lips together and turned away. He held his gun up as he pushed open the door. It creaked loudly and he cringed. After checking that Billy and Norman were right behind him, he inched inside.

The interior of the barn was dark. He found a lantern hanging on a hook and used Billy’s matches to light it. The lantern flared to life and cast an eerie glow on the area around then. Bones, dried blood, and rags littered the space. A boot lay next to one of the stalls. Abraham Crawford’s boot. The foot was still attached, but it was rotting quickly. A faint sound echoed from the other side of the stall wall. With careful, quiet steps, he walked toward the stall and peered over the short wall.

Phyllis Crawford, or what was left of her, lay on her back. Her lower half was missing completely, along with one arm and part of her chest. She flailed her remaining arm weakly, whether trying to turn over or reach for him, he did not know. The left side of her jaw was missing, along with her tongue. Her mouth worked, as if she was trying to speak, but all that came out were muted moans. Her mottled eyes stared at him with a hunger that set his adrenaline racing.

“Oh, Lord in heaven.” Billy Teagan was never a man of God, but when Amos turned around, he found the old troublemaker on his knees with his hands folded. Norman Baker ran to the door and wretched outside.

Amos backed away and shut the door. Phyllis wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to check the rest of the barn before he figured out what to do with her. A faint glow lit up the barn at the far end.

“Billy, come on.” Amos raised his weapon again and walked toward the light. “Paul, is that you?” he called as he neared the other side of the barn.

The only response he received was a low groan. He tried again. “McKee? You down there?”

The stalls ended near the door and made way for a small storage room. Amos crept to the side and peered around the last stall. The door to the room was half open, moving back and forth slightly. Small grunts came from inside. “Paul?”

He sidestepped toward the door. Booted feet were sticking out from behind it, jerking back and forth in random fashion. “Shit,” Billy whispered behind him. He echoed the sentiment. Amos nudged the door with his foot. It didn’t move, but the grunts stopped. He glanced back at Billy, who held his gun higher and nodded.

Amos stepped up to the door and placed his hand on it. He was about to shove it when a man, one he had never seen before, moved out from the shadows. The man snarled at him and lurched forward. Billy’s gun went off behind him and he felt a seering pain in his back. He jerked to the side, just out of the reach of the dead man. Billy fired again and hit the man in the chest.

“The head,” cried Amos. “Shoot him in the head!”

He leaned against the wall and pressed a hand to his stomach as he leveled his gun. He fired. A hole blossomed between the man’s eyes and he dropped like a rock. Screams tore through the barn from the other end.

“Oh, God. Norman!” Billy glanced at Amos with wide, fearful eyes.

“Go!” Amos waved his gun in the direction of the other door. “I got this.”

He wasn’t sure if he had it or not, but Billy had shot him, and didn’t even realize it. He didn’t want the man’s gun anywhere near him. He glanced up just in time to see another of the undead shambling around the door. It was a woman and her face was covered in blood. He leveled his gun at her and shot her through the left eye. She tumbled forward and landed in a heap on top of the man.

Blood coated his hand and his body felt like he was on fire, but he pushed himself away from the wall. Inside the small room, a lantern lay on its side, flickering in the dark. Two bodies were on the ground beside it. Paul Finch and Longtooth McKee.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He pressed his gun hand to his head and closed his eyes.

Billy’s gun barked outside. Once. Twice. Then it was replaced with some of the most awful screams Amos had ever heard. He stumbled out of the room and leaned against the wall as he made his way toward the closest door. Outside, the screams were louder, vibrating through the air like terrible church bells.

He walked toward the screams, using the outside of the barn to support himself. When he reached the corner, he peered around. Billy’s screams had stopped. His body lay on the ground next to Norman’s. Neither of them put up a fight as two men chewed on their flesh.

The undead had their backs to Amos so he stepped out from his hiding area to survey his options. A body lay on the other side of the corral, Davey Anders. His brother Sebastian was nowhere to be seen. His horse danced on the hitching post, trying to break free. The others had already ripped their reins and were racing off into the wild.

The deputy’s eyes darted from his horse to the men in front of him. He didn’t think he’d be able to make it, but he sure as hell was going to try. He pushed away from the wall and staggered forward. His stomach was pouring blood and he left a trail behind him. It drew him unwanted attention.

A snarl alerted him to the creature. He glanced back as it pulled away from Billy’s leg and started to rise. Amos threw his gun away and pressed both of his hands to his stomach. As he half shuffled, half ran, he whistled the special whistle he had always reserved for his beloved horse. She jerked her head toward him, and the motion unraveled the reins. She danced for a second, torn between running away or running toward the man she had devoted her life to.

Training won out over instinct and she sped toward him. He cried out as the pain in his abdomen multiplied as he moved toward her, but he didn’t stop. He gripped the saddle and pulled himself up just as the man came within reach. She didn’t need any prodding. Her hoof came out and connected with the creature as it lunged. It sailed through the air and crashed into the fence. Then the horse turned toward Lonesome Ridge and took off in an all-out gallop.

Amos pressed one arm to his stomach and the other clung to the horse’s mane. He prayed he would make it to town before it was too late.

Chapter 25

Summer Rain stared at the scrawny coyote who stood on the hill just below her. Its jaw was open and saliva dripped from its teeth as she tore another chunk of tender flesh from the still body in her hands. She chewed and he drooled, two beasts aware of their stations in life. She was the hunter, predator of the most dangerous prey. He was a scavenger, feeding on the weak and the dead. She had seen him before. He followed her trail and feasted on her leavings.

The young woman ran her tongue around the outside of her mouth to gather up the last drops of blood before she tossed the small carcass down the hill. The coyote snarled and jumped back. For the briefest of moments, he readied an attack, his back hunched and his fur bristled, his deadly gaze locked on Summer Rain. Then he turned his attention to the still warm flesh nearby. With a savagery Summer Rain could appreciate, he leapt at the body and sank his sharp teeth into it with fervor.

Summer Rain watched him for a few minutes before she looked up at the sky. The sun was coming over the horizon and it was already growing too warm for her tastes. She stood up and wandered away from the coyote toward a thick clump of bushes at the base of the hill. Dropping to her hands and knees, she pushed aside the biting branches and crawled into the dark interior.

This was a familiar routine to her. It had been a long time since she had taken shelter inside a building or tent. The wilderness was her home. It was where she belonged. She was a predator, a killer. Her sole goal in life was to wreak havoc on those around her. Especially the white men.

A snarl escaped her lips as she thought of the vile beasts who had destroyed her family. She wanted nothing more than to make them pay, all of them. Every last pale skinned monstrosity deserved to rot in the sun, or to suffer like she had.

Little Bear had wanted that at first, too. Together, they tracked down the soldiers who destroyed their village. They found them in a clearing not too far from another village. It was a band of some of the most ruthless white men the earth could create: former soldiers, outlaws, men of general ill repute. Summer Rain would have found the camp appalling if she had not been changed. Bodies of men hung from poles in the middle of the camp, guilty of some crime or another against the man who called himself the leader. The women in the camp were no better than the men. They were whores who threw themselves on the men at every opportunity, or worse, slaves who had no choice in the matter.

Summer Rain and Little Bear made the wicked men and women pay for their misdeeds. They sent them to their own hell as screams tore from their bloody lips. It was a glorious, joyful day when the parched earth drank up the blood of their victims. Summer Rain had never felt so alive, so completely and utterly at peace with herself and the way of the world. As she ripped through bodies and chased down anyone who tried to run, she knew she had found her place in the world. She was happy at last.

But once that was over, once the men who took her previous life from her were gone, it all changed. She shared her dream with Little Bear, a dream to take back their lands from the white man and create a new world. The look of pure horror on his face was forever etched in her withering heart. She was glad he did not have eyes. She could not bear to think what would have been in them.

She stayed with him for a long time after that, more out of habit and a strange sense of loyalty to the past than anything else. Her initial guilt at his reaction to her plan overshadowed the truth of what they were, she knew. She let it keep her pinned to him, to his unfathomable desire to hide from the world. As they wandered the lands, they turned others like them, but Little Bear’s fear kept him from seeing their true potential. Any who turned with more than a modicum of intelligence were immediately destroyed. Little Bear carried a strength greater than all of them and they were no match for him. He only kept those mindless creatures who had little or no memory of their past, who had little desire to achieve anything but their next meal.

He preferred those like Walton, a former soldier who had run away from his army out of fear. Summer Rain hated the man the moment she met him. He was weak, even before he was turned. He was sniveling and scared of everything. The only good thing about him was that he was an interpreter, able to speak their language. She hated the white man’s tongue and it hurt her throat to speak it.

“Weakling,” she muttered. She wasn’t sure if she was talking about Little Bear or Walton. Or herself, for allowing herself to be ruled by them for so long.

She slapped a branch and hissed when it moved aside to let the sun burn her eyes. She rolled over and lay her head on the soft grass.

She thought of the man she had encountered earlier in the day, the cowboy she bit. Jeremiah, they had called him. He was stupid, like the rest. All she ever had to do was stand in the middle of the road and wait for them to come to her. They always did. It was a game she played. The more men in the party, the more dangerous the game, and the more enjoyable. Usually she could take them all out fairly easily. They were fooled by her small stature, by the fact that she was a woman. They underestimated her and it often led to their violent, bloody end.

Occasionally they got away, but never unscathed. She would track them and take them down when she could, but if she was truly outmatched, she would follow until she could separate them, or leave to roam the wilds forever. She was sure there were more like her wandering the plains, searching for food. On occasion, she would be sure to bite them at the very least. Once in a great while she would encounter one of those she had turned. They were often wandering lost and alone, confused, driven only by their hunger. She would attack them with vigor. They were always more of a challenge than the mere men were and it was a much better fight. There were times she was sure she was going to lose, but she always got the upper hand and took them down in the end.

She contemplated not killing them, from time to time. She was lonely and longed for companionship. But in the end, her predatory nature took over. None of those she met was worthy of being her equal and she simply could not abide that. No, she would not allow herself to fall into that trap again.

Summer Rain sighed again and waited for the sun to go down. As soon as the painful rays dropped below the horizon, she crawled out from underneath the bushes and began walking in the direction opposite Lonesome Ridge. It was the same direction the two men had taken when they left town on their horses. She half hoped she could find them, if only to see the one turn on his brother.

She wandered along the hillside, keeping the road below in sight. She spotted the dust cloud long before the group that made it became visible. Crouching beside a large pine, she stared at the figures. They shuffled along at a slow, but steady pace. It didn’t take her long to realize they were all like her. All of them had been turned.

Several of the men were hooked up like horses and pulled a carriage along behind them. She gasped and her hand went to her mouth before she could stop it. A strange sensation floated in her belly. Hope.

“Little Bear?” she whispered, but even as she spoke, the feeling faded. It couldn’t be him, she knew. He would never travel along a main road. It was too risky and he was scared and weak. She berated herself for even thinking about him.

Her curiosity grew as she watched the band of creatures shamble by. The carriage was curtained and she could not see inside. Her interest was piqued and she followed the group for a long time. As they rounded a corner in the road, one of the carriage’s wheels lodged in a deep rut and someone inside called a halt. She watched as a man descended the steps, a man she could never mistake for anyone else. A man she hated. Summer Rain crept closer. She narrowed her eyes and peered down the hill. The hopeful little quiver returned.

“Walton.” If it was the soldier, Little Bear’s closest confidant, then Little Bear must be nearby. Walton would never leave his master’s side.

She used boulders and trees for cover as she darted down the side of the hill toward the caravan. Most of the men and women wandered off into the woods, likely looking for food. She crouched under a bush as several of them shambled by, completely unaware of her existence. She sneered at their stupidity. If she were in charge, those would have been the creatures to be put down, not the intelligent ones.

She waited in the bush until the only sounds she could hear were the grunting and groaning of those trying to free the wheel, then she left her hiding spot and crept up to the carriage. Walton was on the other side giving direction to the others in his monotonous, dull tone. She always hated that voice. It grated on her nerves and she resisted the urge to attack him. As she rounded one wheel, one of the men trying to free the carriage caught her eye. She tensed and waited for him to call her out, but he just turned away as if she didn’t exist and went back to trying to lift the carriage.

She padded up to the other door and pulled it open a crack. A blond woman sat inside, peering out the opposite window at the men working. Every now and then, she called out alternating threats and encouragement, but she refused to get out of the carriage to lighten the load or help.

Summer Rain’s nose curled. What was a white woman doing with Walton? And where was Little Bear? Perplexed, she sneaked back to the hill and hunkered down to wait and watch.

The others returned and still more fussed with the wagon. They finally jerked the wheel free, but in the process, a piece of it broke, rendering it useless. The harsh shouts of the angry woman echoed off the hills and rolled over the men and women. And then the woman exited the carriage. She stormed away from the scene and left Walton and the others to fix it.

Summer Rain hesitated only a moment before following the woman into the woods. It was a stroke of luck she had not expected and she acted solely on instinct. She waited until they were truly alone before she stepped out from behind a tree.

The woman jumped back a step when she saw Summer Rain standing before her, but she recovered quickly and straightened her shoulders. When she spoke, her voice was hard and accusatory. She spoke quickly and it took Summer Rain several seconds to translate the words into her own language.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Summer Rain took a step forward. The woman stood her ground. “Little Bear?” Summer Rain’s voice was rough and gravelly. She was unused to speaking and it was uncomfortable to make her mouth form the white man’s words.

The other woman laughed. “Little Bear?” She said a lot that Summer Rain could not understand, but there was one word she caught. Dead. The look of triumph on the other woman’s face confirmed it.

A sudden and unexpected fury boiled up in Summer Rain’s chest. It overwhelmed the sadness that tried to grow and blocked out any other thoughts. With a blood-curdling howl, Summer Rain threw herself at the woman. Her hands were out and her fingers were curved like talons. She tackled the woman to the ground, hissing and spitting like a cat in pain.

For a stunned moment, the other woman lay there taking the brunt of Summer Rain’s attack, then she lifted a foot and kicked the dark-haired woman in the gut. The kick was powerful and sent Summer Rain flying into a tree. Her back cracked against the trunk and she grunted as she sank to her knees.

But she refused to stay down long and pushed herself back to her feet. The woman was coming at her and she barely had time to get her hands up. They ripped at each other with hands and teeth, snarling and growling. It was an evenly matched battle and while they both took a lot of damage, they gave as good as they got.

“Stop! Summer Rain, stop!” Walton broke through the trees, shouting at them both. It was the most passionate Summer Rain had ever heard him be. She shoved the woman back away from her and stood panting, but ready to go again if the woman tried to attack her.

She watched as Walton talked to the other woman. Then he approached her.

“Summer Rain,” he said. “This is Charity. Little Bear turned her after you left. She is our new queen.”

Summer Rain bristled again at the thought of Little Bear having a queen besides her. She hissed at the woman, but Walton continued. “She is like you. She is smart and strong. She wants to build a... What is it called?”

“An empire.” The other woman took a step toward them as she eyed Summer Rain.

“An empire?” Summer Rain tested the odd word and then repeated it again in her own language when Walton explained.

“She no longer wants to hide?” Summer Rain asked Walton.

He shook his head. “She wants to build an army, to take over the West. She wants to be feared, to make men cower before her.”

Summer Rain pressed her lips together. “Little Bear?”

Walton hesitated. “He is dead. He did not want it.”

The anger threatened again, but Summer Rain forced it down. She had wanted him dead, after all. She had wanted to do it herself, but it was too late to change that.

“Where are you going?”

“Lonesome Ridge,” he said as he waved a hand in the direction of the town she had just come from.

Summer Rain bit back a smile. What would they find there, she wondered. A town full of the dead? Or the undead?

Charity took another step, bringing her within arms’ reach of Summer Rain. “Come with us,” she said. “Join us.”

Summer Rain glared at her, but her mind was made up. She nodded once and walked to the carriage.

Chapter 26

Jeremiah sagged in his saddle as the horses plodded along in the dark. His entire body ached and all he wanted to do was sleep, but every time he asked to stop, Jed went into a rant.

“Hell no. You told that damn sheriff we’d be far outta town and never come back, so we’re gonna keep ridin’ til the horses drop.”

Jeremiah leaned against the saddle horn and groaned. “What good’ll it do us if the horses die? Com’on, Jed. Just a few minutes. There’s a stream right over there.” He flopped his hand in the direction of a bubbling brook just off the road.

“That damn Jasper. Ungrateful little shit. After all I did for him...” Jed continued to grumble under his breath, but he yanked on the reins and pulled the horse off the dirt path. He stopped Saddle next to the stream and jumped off. The exhausted creature immediately sank his head into the water up to his eyeballs and took a long, loud drink.

Jeremiah steered his own horse over to the stream and dropped the reins. It dipped its nose into the cold water and slurped. Jeremiah took a deep breath and focused on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. His stomach roiled and screamed, threatening to spill its contents onto the horse. With clenched teeth, he leaned heavily on the saddle horn and dragged his left leg over the back of the beast until it flopped off. He dangled there for a moment before he let go. His knees gave out as he hit the ground and he collapsed into a heap.

Jed spared him a glance. His lips were pressed tight and his eyes were narrowed. “Maybe I shoulda left you behind, too.”

Jeremiah didn’t bother to remind him that Jed had only left because of him. Instead, he used what little energy that remained to drag himself over to a tree. He propped his back up against it and slouched down. His body still screamed at him, but at least he no longer had to make himself to stay upright.

“I’m just gonna rest for a bit,” he mumbled just loud enough for Jed to hear. “I just need to rest. Then I’ll be all right.” He almost believed the lie. Almost.

“Yeah, yeah, all right. Fine.” Jed dug through his pack and found some dried deer jerky wrapped in brown paper. Jeremiah watched him through half-closed eyes as he walked up the stream. Jed kept tossing furtive glances at him. Despite his insistence that he didn’t believe a word of what the sheriff said, Jed was suspicious and concerned. He didn’t trust Jeremiah anymore. There was no doubt about it. The entire ride he had kept several paces in front of his younger brother. He would barely look at him.

Jeremiah decided he didn’t care anymore and leaned his head back against the tree. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and let them fall all the way shut. He listened to his own breathing as it grew soft and slow, and slower. And slower.

***

Jed wandered up the stream away from Jeremiah. He purposefully kept the younger man at his back and did his best to not keep looking around at him. The woman on the road was crazy, sure, but the sheriff’s story was even crazier. The dead rising to attack the living? Hogwash. Jed stuffed another piece of jerky in his mouth and chewed it loudly.

“Freakin’ Jasper,” he mumbled. The distraction worked. The fear that was growing in his gut was beaten back by the anger that flooded through his veins. He’d done everything for that damn boy. Everything. Ever since Ma and Pa Gaines got sick, Jed had been the one to keep the family going. He was the one who had to bury Ma. He was the one who had to put Pa out of his misery when he was left alone without the woman he loved. He was the one who fed and clothed the other two. He was the one who risked his life going after stage coaches and trains when they were boys so that they didn’t starve to death. And how did Jasper repay him?

“Damn kid,” he grumbled again and kicked a stone into the water. It plunked loudly and the horses snorted behind him. He stopped walking and sat on the edge of the stream. He cupped his hand and dipped it into the water. It was cool on such a warm evening. He pulled his hand out and slurped at the refreshing liquid. Some dribbled down his chin and neck, leaving tracks in the dust on his face.

He glanced back at his brother. Jeremiah was sleeping beneath the tree. Or so he hoped. There was no movement that Jed could see, not from that distance. The oldest Gaines brother bit his lip. He was half-tempted to go wake his brother up, just to make sure he wasn’t dead, but instead he pulled his boots off. He tossed them to the bank and stripped off the rest of his dirty clothes before submerging himself into the fast moving water. The horses raised their heads and glared at him for polluting their drink, but he didn’t care. He squatted so that the water came up to his shoulders and let it wash the grime and irritation away.

He glanced at Jeremiah again. Still no movement. Jed dipped his head into the water and scrubbed it hard with his fingers. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d given himself a real good cleaning.

“Yeah, I do remember,” he muttered to himself with half a smile. “That whore house in Abilene six years ago with Bobby Blake and Jimmy Two Fingers.” Jed snorted a laugh. The smile faded from his lips. Jeremiah had never been to Abilene. Jed decided that’s where they would go. There were good doctors in that town, more than one. They’d sort him out and fix him up right, better than that quack Whitman ever could.

Jed pulled himself out of the water and back onto the bank. He shook like a dog before pulling his clothes back on. Then he ran his fingers through his hair to try to rid it of some of the knots that had accumulated there.

“A good barber, too,” he muttered. Jed’s face wrinkled. He’d been talking to himself a lot since they left Lonesome Ridge. It wasn’t natural and he didn’t like it. It made him feel crazy. There was enough crazy to go around without him adding to it.

He pulled his boots on and stood up. Jeremiah still hadn’t moved. “Well, shit,” he said as he slapped his hat against his leg. With a resigned sigh, he walked slowly over to where his brother lay.

Jed nudged Jeremiah’s toe with his own. No response. He nudged a little harder. Still nothing. He hauled his foot back and kicked Jeremiah’s foot so hard it made his own toe hurt.

Jeremiah grunted. The horses snorted softly as their ears perked back.

Jed kicked him again, gentler this time. “Get yer lazy ass up. We gotta get movin’.”

Jeremiah groaned, but didn’t move to stand. Saddle and Nelly danced, only their years of training keeping them in place.

Jed leaned over and tipped Jeremiah’s hat back. The moonlight made his brother’s skin look gray and his eyes look dull and mottled. He gasped and stepped back.

“Jer?” His hand found his gun belt and rested on the handle of his pistol.

Jeremiah tilted his head up so he could see Jed. The hat fell off to reveal a hungry stare.

Jed stumbled back a step. His free hand shot up in front of him, palm out. “Now, Jer, don’t go doin’ nothin’ crazy-like. Yer not one of them things. Yer fine. Yer just sick s’all.”

His brother groaned and struggled clumsily to his feet. The horses bolted, leaving their owners far behind as their terrified whinnies echoed through the still air.

Jed took another step back. “Jeremiah, now you stop this bullshit. I already lost that rat bastard Jasper. I ain’t losin’ you, too, ya hear? There ain’t nothin’ wrong with ya. Nothin’.”

Even as he spoke, he pulled his gun from its holster and cocked the hammer back. He could hear the horses crashing through the trees. They were long gone and he had no other means of escape.

Jeremiah took a step toward his brother and snarled. Jed tried to backpedal again, but his heel caught on a rock and he fell over. He landed hard on his backside with a loud whoof as the air left his chest. As he went down, Jeremiah continued to move forward.

“Don’t come any closer,” Jed shouted as loud as he could. Jeremiah kept advancing, slow and steady, one laborious step at a time. “You filthy bastard,” Jed shouted as he leveled his gun.

The bullet ripped through the air. It slammed into Jeremiah’s pelvis and forced him back a couple steps. But it didn’t bring him down as it should have. He righted himself and continued walking toward Jed.

Jed fired again, this time aiming for his brother’s shoulder. The shot hit and Jeremiah jerked hard, but it didn’t stop his forward progress. The gun barked again and again, hitting Jeremiah in the stomach, the thigh, the chest. Each bullet had less of an impact and the weapon clicked with a dreadful sense of finality just as Jeremiah reached him.

Jed threw the gun, trying to hit Jeremiah in the face, but it missed and tumbled harmlessly into the water.

Jed scrambled backward as he pleaded with his attacker. “Jeremiah, I’m your brother. You can’t do this to me. I took care of you.”

Jeremiah stopped in front of him. The dull, slack face lit up into a smile. “No, you didn’t.” Then he lunged. He grabbed Jed by the neck and smashed his head into a big rock. Blood sprayed out across the ground as his older brother collapsed beneath him. Jeremiah fell to his knees and sank his teeth into Jedidiah’s throat.

He ate until he could eat no more, then he sank back onto the ground. The small battle had worn him out. His body ached, he could feel it still changing, but the food had helped. He felt renewed, more alive than he had ever felt before. He lay there for awhile next to the cooling body of his oldest brother, his biggest enemy. He rolled his head to the side to look at Jed’s frozen, startled face.

“That was for Jasper,” he said. “And Ma and Pa.”

Then he pushed himself to his feet and walked into the stream to wash the blood off. When he decided he was clean enough, he tried to follow the horses, but every time he got anywhere near them, they would spook and run.

Resigning himself to his fate, he walked back out to the road. He didn’t know where to go. He was a monster, he knew that. He couldn’t go back to town, he couldn’t go to any town. He would be killed on sight. He decided to head back to the home he grew up in until he could figure out what to do. He kept to the trees, just in case he ran upon any travelers.

The path he was on met the road to Lonesome Ridge further down. As he neared the fork in the road, he heard the muffled sound of numerous footsteps. He ducked down behind a big rock and watched the large group as it shambled along. It didn’t take long for him to realize what he was seeing. There were so many of them, all people like him. The undead. If he had any blood left in his veins, it would have frozen. They were shuffling along in the dark, over a hundred of them. All heading for Lonesome Ridge. For Jasper.

Jeremiah clenched his teeth. He had to do something. He couldn’t let them hurt his little brother. He stayed where he was and watched them pass. A carriage rolled by, pulled by a dozen men. He could see a women and a man through the window. A plan formed in his mind. Their leader had to be in there. He would talk to them, try to steer them away. There were other towns they could hit, other places they could find food. He rose from his hiding spot and strode down the hill.

Chapter 27

“Okay, boys, listen up!” Cora Monroe stood on the porch of the saloon with the most popular whores assembled in a semicircle behind her. They were all dressed in their finest, most revealing outfits and had their hair and makeup done up. The large crowd that had gathered to hear her speak was made up of mostly men and they shushed each other into silence. The sun was rising up over the saloon, turning the sky behind her a bright, bloody pink.

Jasper stood next to Connor near the back of the group. “You think the warning about red skies in the morning apply to dead folk rising up, too?”

The sheriff gave the young man a sideways glance. “I sure hope not.”

Cora rested a hand on a cocked hip as she beamed at the crowd. “Now,” she said in her most sultry voice. “Some of you fellas may have heard some rumors circlin’ about, claimin’ that the dead coming back to life and all that.” She paused for effect and Connor smirked as the whole crowd leaned forward in anticipation. She took a big breath and placed a hand on her chest as if to steady herself. “I hate to tell you lovely folks this, but all the rumors are true.”

Murmurs rumbled through the crowd. Cora gave them a moment to rise to a swell, then she held up both hands to quiet them. “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. I’m sure some of you think I’m a total loon, but when have you ever known Sheriff McClane or Doc Whitman to lie? They are the most honest and upstanding men this town has ever seen, and I for one trust them with my life.” She clapped her hands over her heart and gave them all a doe-eyed you-can-trust-me look.

She caught Connor’s eye over their heads and tossed him a wink. The sheriff shook his head as he laughed at how the men responded to her.

“It’s scary, I know,” she continued. “I’m all a-shiver just thinking about it.” Her forehead puckered in worry and she waved a hand in front of her face to fight back fake tears. Then she reached both hands back and clasped the hands of the women behind her. They all took her cue and began swooning and fretting. Cora turned her attention back to the crowd. “But with all you strong, able men out here, I just know you’ll help protect this town from all the bad guys and keep us lovely ladies safe. Right?”

Connor laughed and nudged Doc Whitman with his elbow. “She’s good, that one.”

The doctor was grinning, too. “She is. She has them wrapped around her little finger. They’ll be scrambling to volunteer.”

Cora was still addressing the men. “We need a few strong, able-bodied men who are handy with a rifle or pistol to run patrols around the perimeter of town and check out the outlying farms. We know there’s at least one of these things out there preying on the fine folk of this town. We can’t let that happen, can we? You fellas won’t let anything hurt us, would you?”

No’s echoed out firmly from the group. Cora beamed at them and clasped her hands over her heart again. “I just knew we could count on you lovely gentlemen to protect us. Sheriff McClane has a sign-up sheet posted outside the jail. Head on over and scribble your name down. The more volunteers we have, the fewer patrols everyone will have to run.”

The crowd wavered, torn between staying with the saloon girls and running right to the jail to sign up. Cora waved her hands at them. “Go on, now, scoot. We have a town to protect.”

Connor, Jasper, and Doc Whitman had to press themselves against the hitching posts to keep from being crushed in the stampede. The line in front of the jail was so long, it went past the saloon. Cora and the other girls brought out trays full of whiskey shots and handed them out to the men standing in line to show their gratitude.

The paper was full of names by the time the last person in line signed up. It was Robert Zane, the butcher. He scrawled his name in a corner and dropped the pencil so it dangled from the string, then he leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms.

“You ain’t lyin’?” he asked as Connor strode up onto the porch with Cora on one side and Jasper on the other.

Connor shook his head. “No, Robert. It’s no lie. The Crawford boy was the first. He died on Doc’s table from a bite on the leg. Then he came back and killed Eva.”

Robert chewed on a stick. “Aye, I heard ya shot her in the head.”

“She was already dead. I was just making sure she wasn’t coming back.”

“And the Gaines boys?”

The sheriff exchanged a look with Jasper. “That’s Jasper’s story to tell, not mine.”

Jasper lowered his eyes. He didn’t want to discuss what had happened with his brothers. He didn’t even want to think about it.

Robert chewed on a toothpick as he appraised the young man. “A’right. I understand. See you fellas around.” He nodded and sauntered off.

Cora snorted. “Gotta love that man.” She grabbed the piece of paper and pulled it off the nail. “It’s so full, people were writing on the back.”

“Good. We’ll have to set up a schedule, make sure everyone understands what’s going on. We don’t want anyone else to get bit because of this.”

“all right, I’ll—“

A scream echoed down the street. As they turned in the direction of the sound, a horse came barreling toward them.

“That’s Amos’s horse!” Connor jumped off the walkway and ran to the horse. It skidded to a halt in front of him. Sweat poured off its hide and its tongue lolled out of its mouth.

Amos was draped over the horse’s neck, barely managing to stay on. Connor grabbed him and pulled him off. Jasper came over and together they carried him into the jail. Cora was right behind them. She scooted around and cleared everything off the desk as the doctor rushed in.

“Amos? Amos, can you hear me?” Doc Whitman pressed his hand to the deputy’s forehead as they laid him on the desk.

Amos moaned and his eyes fluttered open. “Shot,” he whispered.

“Shot?” Connor’s forehead puckered as his eyes narrowed. “Who shot you?”

“Oh, no.” Doc Whitman didn’t need to examine the young man to know where he’d been shot. His lower clothing was soaked with blood. The doctor lifted up the deputy’s shirt and used a cloth to clear away some of the blood. “Connor...”

Connor’s jaw clenched when he saw the wound. His eyes burned and he wanted to scream.

“Oh, God.” Cora clamped a hand over her mouth as tears poured down her face. “Oh, Amos,” she whispered. Doc Whitman stepped aside as she slipped her fingers into the deputy’s.

He gave her a faint smile. “S’all right, Ms Cora.” His voice was weak and she had to strain to hear him. She kissed his bloody fingers as he turned his head to Connor. “It was Billy,” he said. “We were attacked. He didn’t mean to.”

Connor gripped the edge of the desk to keep his hands from shaking. “Where is Billy now?” He was afraid to ask. He didn’t really want the answer.

“Dead. They all are.”

“Did they turn?”

He tried to shake his head, but it required too much effort. “No. Not yet. But they might.”

“Were you bitten?”

“No, sheriff. Just shot.”

“Amos...” Doc Whitman stood beside Cora with his hand on her shoulder.

Amos smiled at him. “I know, Doc. It’s all right. I’m all right.” He took a deep breath and his fingers slipped from Cora’s. The smile remained plastered on his face as he stared at the Doc, but no longer saw him.

“No. God, no. Amos?” Cora picked his hand back up and cupped his cheek. His head rolled so he was facing her. “Amos?” she cried as she shook him.

The doctor gripped her shoulders and tried to pull her back gently. “He’s gone, Cora.”

“No, he can’t be. I never... He...” Her whole body shook as she drooped against the desk to stay upright. “Oh, Amos.” She cupped his cheeks in her hands and leaned over him. “I’m so sorry, Amos.” She pressed her lips to his and let her tears stream onto his face.

Their grieving was broken by several shouts outside. “Now what?” Connor funneled his pain into anger and stormed outside. Jasper was right behind him.

More noise echoed down the street as Cora joined them. They all spun in the direction of the anguished screams at the far end of town.

Connor grabbed Cora by the arm and shoved her toward the jail. “Get inside, lock the door. Don’t let anyone in unless you know they haven’t been bitten.”

“But—“

“Just go! Come on, Jasper” They took off at a run.

Doc Whitman came up beside Cora. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It can’t be good.”

“It never is.” The doctor pressed his lips together and trotted toward his office. Cora followed close behind.

***

Down the street, Connor and Jasper came upon a gruesome scene. Little Danielle Dinfield crouched on the walkway over Emma Jones. Tendrils of veins were dangling out of her mouth. Emma moaned as blood pooled on the wood around her head. A crowd gathered quickly, forming a semicircle around the pair.

Connor snapped at the morbid spectators. “Get back to your homes. Lock your doors.” No one moved. “Get these stupid people out of here, Jasper.”

He pulled his gun from his holster as his deputy tried to manage the crowd. He held a hand out to the girl as he walked up the steps. “Dani...”

The young child raised her head, but kept chewing. Emma had stopped moaning. Bile rose in Connor’s throat. He would have to shoot the little girl. There was no way around it. He glanced back at the crowd. Some had heeded Jasper’s warnings, but most remained where they were.

A big bellow parted the crowd. Robert Zane stomped through with two large butcher’s knives in hand. “Din’t ya hear him? Get back to yer homes, ya idjits, afore ya get yerselves all killed.”

The people grumbled and moaned, but they scattered. Connor gave Robert a nod of thanks.

“Whoa, that’s not right. Is that baby Dani?” Robert peered at the little girl who couldn’t have been more than three.

“Yup.” Connor cocked his gun.

“Where’re ‘er folks?” Robert stepped up to the open door, but he gave the little girl a wide berth.

“Dunno.” Connor held the pistol out and pointed it carefully at Dani’s head.

As Robert stepped inside, he fired. Startled screams echoed from down the street. The little girl flopped on top of Emma Jones’s body and didn’t move. Connor cocked his gun and fired again to silence Emma permanently.

“Her ma’s in here. Don’t think she’s comin’ back. No sign of her pa, though.”

The big butcher was halfway out the door when Dani’s father threw himself down the stairs. Robert heard the man grunt and spun out of the way enough to avoid his teeth, but they went down in a heap on the walkway. The undead man snarled and snapped, trying to latch his teeth onto any part of the butcher he could. Robert was having none of it. He sliced and diced with the proficiency only a seasoned butcher could have. Chunks of the other man’s face fell away, then an arm, then his entire jaw, and soon he was just a pile of parts on the ground. Robert brought his biggest knife down heavily on the man’s head and split his skull clean open. The man finally gave up and joined his daughter in true death.

As Robert wiped his knives off, shots rang out further down the street. Jasper took off at a run, followed quickly by Robert. Connor checked the rest of the house before heading after them.

***

Doc Whitman grabbed his medical bag and hurried up the street toward the sounds of the gunshots. Cora was right on his heels. He gave her a quick glance, but didn’t bother telling her to go back to the jailhouse. They ran down the walkway, right toward the barber’s shop.

***

The end of town was a mess of bodies and blood by the time Connor, Jasper, and Robert arrived. People were screaming and fleeing in all directions in a panic. Hannah and Abby were in the middle of the street, surrounded by the entire Smith family. Abby had a rifle, but Hannah held a knife in each hand. The mother and two of the Smith daughters were already dead, two from gunshot wounds and the other from a hole in her head. The father, other daughter, and son still crept up on them.

Jasper raised his gun, but Connor grabbed his arm. “No, you might hit one of the girls.”

Robert roared and charged with his knives up. The father turned and tried to tackle him, but he took the man down as easily as he had Mr. Dinfield. With the creatures distracted, Abby took the chance to shoot the son in the head. The boy toppled to the ground in a heap. The daughter screamed and threw herself at Hannah, who was closest to her, but Hannah raised a knife, aimed, and let it fly. It sank deep into the girl’s eye socket. She tripped over her own feet and slid to a stop mere inches from Hannah’s boots.

“Everyone with a weapon, get in groups of three,” Connor shouted. “Search the town. Kill any of those creatures. Anyone who’s bit, come to the jail.”

***

Doc Whitman was running full speed past the barber shop when the window shattered beside him. It startled him so much, he tripped and stumbled sideways. The barber threw himself out of the window at the doctor and latched onto the man’s shoulder with his teeth. Cora screamed as the pair went down in a heap. The doctor tried to roll away, but the barber grabbed him and snapped down on the man’s throat.

Cora pulled up her skirts and yanked the small pepperbox from its hiding place on her upper thigh. She cocked the hammer and fired. It missed the barber and hit the doctor in the cheek. He slumped underneath the barber. Screams tore at Cora’s throat even as she cocked the gun again. The barber, realizing his prey was dead, turned toward the living flesh behind him. He hit her legs as her gun went off and she toppled to the ground. But she was a better shot than her brother and she fired, again and again, until the gun was empty and the barber stopped moving.

***

When all was said and done, seventeen people were dead, including those who had been turned the night before.

“You all right?” Connor asked as Cora helped him load the body of Doc Whitman into the wagon to be taken out of town. They were going to burn the bodies and leave symbolic grave sites. No one wanted to leave one of those things around where it could return.

“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Connor, my darling, I am perfectly all right. I’m just a bit shaken is all.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, but didn’t push the issue. When he had returned from the edge of town, he had found her curled up against the wall, shaking, with her arms around her knees. The empty gun lay between the two dead bodies. He had wanted to check her for bites, but she was insistent that none of it was her blood.

At Connor’s command, the remaining residents were all moved closer to the center of town and heavy patrols were set up. Those who refused to move were given strict rules about how and when they could come into town. They had to be carrying a white flag, and no one was allowed to enter after the sun set. Everyone also had to be thoroughly checked for bites and meet the approval of the guards who were handpicked by Connor. All the undead had been mindless eating machines, as far as Connor could tell, so he figured anyone who was capable of creating and carrying a white flag would at least be still alive.

He left Jasper in charge of the patrols as he headed out of town with the wagon. Cora waved them off before she turned toward the doctor’s office. She gritted her teeth tightly as she walked across the street. Once she was inside, she shut and locked the door. She started a fire in the fireplace and put the kettle on to boil, then she grabbed a bunch of bandages and antiseptic. When the water was hot, she took the antiseptic, bandages and hot water upstairs to Eva’s old room.

She set the supplies on the dresser and pulled up her skirts. The bite looked almost as bad as it felt. With nerves of steel, Cora set to work cleaning out the wound.

Chapter 28

Jeremiah approached the caravan of undead from the back. He walked up to a woman shuffling along and fell into step beside her. “Howdy,” he said with a grin as he tipped his hat in her direction.

Her head cranked around slowly. She stared at him with dull, dead eyes for three full seconds before facing forward again and promptly ignoring him.

He scratched his head and shrugged. “A’right then.” He moved up next to the man in front of her. “Howdy,” he tried again. The man blinked at him twice, but continued shuffling forward without a word.

Jeremiah received the same response from everyone he tried talking to as he worked his way forward through the group. Finally, when he was almost up to the carriage, a young woman who was missing an arm responded in the form of a finger pointed at the carriage.

“Queen,” she hissed as she dropped her hand and continued walking.

Jeremiah tipped his hat to her. “Thank ya. Mighty kind o’ ya, miss.”

The woman went back to ignoring him altogether.

“A’righty then,” he grumbled. “Lovely group o’ folks here. So nice to meet y’all.” Jeremiah gave up trying to elicit conversation from those around him and trotted up to the carriage. He grabbed hold of the bar beside the door and swung himself up onto the step as it rolled along.

“Anyone in there?” he called as he knocked on the window.

The curtain pulled aside to reveal a face that took his breath away. Even though her eyes were that same dull gray of all the others and were narrowed suspiciously at him, her beauty could not be masked. Her blond hair was pulled back to reveal her long slim neck, her lips were shaped perfectly, and he wondered briefly is she had ever considered a career as a saloon girl.

“Who are you?” Her voice was hard, not at all as soft as her features. “What do you want?”

The carriage hit a bump and jostled him on his precarious perch. His foot slipped and he swung halfway off the step. “Uh, do you mind if I come in there, miss? It’ll be a might bit better’n hanging around out here all day.” He grinned at her, hoping he looked charming and irresistible.

The woman’s eyes searched his face. For a tense moment, he feared she would turn him away, but then she said, “Very well. Come in.” She leaned forward and popped the latch on the door.

Jeremiah took the handle and yanked it open. He had to dangle further off the step to allow it to swing out all the way, but he managed to pull himself inside and jerk the door shut behind him. He plopped down on the seat opposite the woman and sighed.

He took his hat off and held it across his heart. “Nice to make your acquaintance, miss. My name’s Jeremiah. What might yours be?”

Her nostrils flared as she decided whether she really wanted to talk to him or not. “Charity,” she finally said. “Charity Banks... No, Thomas. Charity Thomas.”

He held out his hand and she took it. Her fingers felt nice cupped in his. “Pleasure to meet ya, Miss Thomas. It is miss, right?”

The corner of Charity’s lip twitched. “Yes,” she said. “It’s miss.”

They were both quiet for a moment as the carriage rolled along. “So where’re ya headed, miss?”

Charity leaned back in the seat with her hands clasped in front of her and stared at him. “Who turned you?”

Jeremiah debated whether to mention the fact that she avoided his question, but decided to let her have the upper hand for the time being. “Dunno.” He shrugged a shoulder and leaned back. As he set his hat on the seat beside him, he elaborated. “Some crazy Injun woman attacked me on the road the other day as I was headed to town. I shot her a couple times, but she didn’t die. Then I started to feel all sick and stuff, and now I’m like this. Like you. I sees all you people comin’ and decided I’d introduce myself and figure out what’s goin’ on, ‘cause it don’t make no sense to me.”

“Interesting. An Indian woman, you say?”

“Yup. Though I don’t see no Injuns in your group here.”

Charity smiled and crossed her hands in her lap. “So Jeremiah, where are you from?”

His eyes darted in the direction they were heading, but he nodded off to the left. “Out that’a way, miss. On a small ranch in the hills. Grew up there with my Ma and Pa and two brothers.”

Charity arched an eyebrow. “Oh? Two brothers? Are they still alive?”

Jeremiah hesitated. “One is,” he finally answered. “The other met an awful end at the hands of a pretty bad man.”

Charity’s eyes trailed down his face to his shirt. It was still stained despite his attempts to wash off the blood. “And did this happen fairly recently? When this ‘bad man’ attacked your brother?”

“Yes’m.” Jeremiah couldn’t meet her eyes. He was afraid of what he might see.

Charity leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. She clasped her hands and placed her chin on top of her knuckles. “And how did he taste?”

Jeremiah’s head jerked up. Her lips held a friendly smile. It was also a creepy smile that gave him the shivers. For the first time, he considered that joining up with this group might have not been the best idea. “Well, miss, to be honest, bits of him were delicious, but most of him was tough and, well, off. He wasn’t a nice man, neither, so I guess the end was fitting.”

Charity closed her eyes and she licked her lips. “I bet he tasted lovely.” Her voice had a dreamy quality and Jeremiah was sure she didn’t hear a word he said.

The carriage pulled to a stop as he was about to ask her about it. She sat up and looked at the door just as it opened. A man in a tattered Confederate uniform climbed in, followed by a young woman with long, matted black hair.

“You!” Jeremiah pointed at the woman even as he scooted across the bench to other side. He jerked his feet up and pressed himself into the corner of the carriage.

The man sank onto the seat next to Charity, leaving the only open place on Jeremiah’s bench. The Indian woman sat down and grinned at him like a crazy person who belonged in an institution.

“Jeremiah,” Charity said. “I’d like you to meet Walton and Summer Rain. You see, we do have an ‘Injun’ in our group. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that she was the one who attacked you.”

Jeremiah’s eyes darted between Summer Rain and Charity. Charity clearly found his reaction to the woman amusing and Summer Rain made no attempt to attack him again. He began to feel absolutely ridiculous cowering like a scared child. With a growl, Jeremiah shoved his feet off the bench and back to the floor. He sat up straight and clutched his hat in his hands. Then slowly, with a scowl plastered on his face, he forced his hand out and offered it to the black-haired girl.

Summer Rain took it and shook. The animal grin never left her face.

When their hands released, Jeremiah scooted a bit closer to the wall and leaned against it. “Someone wanna tell me what’s goin’ on here, maybe? I’m feelin’ a bit lost in the dark.”

Walton was the one who spoke. “My queen, we still have too far to go. We will not make it before the sun comes up and we cannot attack in the daylight.”

Jeremiah’s jaw twitched at the word ‘attack’, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Very well,” Charity responded. “Find us some shelter. We will wait until the night falls. “

Walton nodded and climbed from the carriage. Summer Rain hovered on the edge of her seat for a moment and looked as if she wanted to say something to Jeremiah, but then she followed Walton out into the morning light.

Charity waited until they were gone before she spoke again. “Walton is my...” She waved a hand around in the air while she searched for the right word. “Assistant, I guess you could say. He is the least stupid of the bunch and follows my commands well. He also speaks Summer Rain’s language. That’s very useful, since she speaks very little English.”

Jeremiah scooted himself back to the middle of the seat. “So where we headed? I’m gatherin’ that it’s probably Lonesome Ridge, since that’s the closest town an’ all.”

Charity allowed herself a small smile. “Yes, we are heading to Lonesome Ridge. You see, I’m building myself an army.”

“Is that why he called you a queen? You gonna make yourself a little country of your very own?”

“That’s the plan.” She tilted her head to the side. “You must call Lonesome Ridge your home if you live right around here.”

He bobbed his head slightly. “Yes’m. My Pa built a homestead out here when the town was just small. Grew up here.”

“So you know everyone in town, then.”

“Yes’m.”

“Is that going to be a problem for us?”

Jeremiah hesitated a moment. Jasper was there, and if he ran across his little brother, it was going to be a big problem. But then again, if Jeremiah wasn’t there, someone was going to go after Jasper anyway. “Not at all, miss.” He smiled a big brown smile.

Charity’s upper lip curled slightly at the smile. “Very well. You may be of some use, then. It would seem that you’re smarter than you look, so you might be able to help us find the town’s weak points.” The curled lip grew into a lovely white grin. “And if all goes to plan, who knows. A queen needs a king, doesn’t she?”

It took Jeremiah a few seconds to figure out her meaning. He slapped his thigh when he finally got it. “Hell, yeah, she does.” He leaned back on the seat and thought about how great it would to be king.

Chapter 29

Becky Xavier was an eleven-year-old orphan who lived with her grandmother and grandfather in a small cluster of houses just outside of Lonesome Ridge. The little makeshift village was less than an hour’s walk to get into the bigger town, but it was far enough away from the bustle and the train tracks that they had peace and privacy in their own little world. Her house was the last on the little road, closest to town.

She was sitting on the porch in the fading light, rocking in her grandfather’s favorite chair, watching a hawk dance on the wind, when a cloud of dust billowed up further down the road. She stood up and leaned over the rail and stared at the dust cloud. A man stepped from the cloud near the edge of the village.

“Grandpa,” she called into the house. “You may want to come out here.”

She stood on the steps as more people materialized in the waning light. They moved along like a herd of cattle, slow but steady. When they reached the first of the houses, several of them broke away from the rest of the group and jumped onto the porch.

“Clear them out.” A woman’s harsh shout echoed off the buildings.

Screams exploded out from the house, followed by a single gunshot. The rest of the group kept moving and when they reached the next houses, the screams were louder and more frequent. Gunshots peppered the air, but they were few and far between. The inhabitants were being taken by surprise, unaware of the danger and unready to defend themselves.

Becky jumped and squealed as her grandfather grabbed her arm. “Go get Lightning,” he whispered. “Quickly now. Get to town and tell the sheriff.” He grabbed his rifle from its spot just inside the door and went out to meet a pale Indian woman who was walking up to their porch.

Becky hesitated, unwilling to leave her grandfather. She watched him approach the stranger, until the woman looked at her. The pure hunger in the woman’s eyes sent her blood pumping and she tripped over her own feet as she scrambled into the house and out through the back door. Her grandfather shouted at the woman and fired his gun until he ran out of shells.

The young girl reached the small shed that served as a barn just as a man rounded the corner of one of the houses further down. Several fences separated them and she tried to hide behind them, but he spotted her anyway. Her horse was dancing and snorting in the pen, but he came over to her as she opened the gate. She grabbed a handful of mane and swung herself up onto Lightning’s back.

The man was still climbing over the fences as she raced off toward town. The last things she saw were his pale gray skin and hungry eyes.

***

Connor stood on the walkway in front of the jailhouse. He was exhausted from little sleep and a lot of work, not to mention the death of his best friend, but he had to get the patrols set before the light disappeared completely. He would not leave his town unprotected from the new danger that lurked in the shadows. He would not let Doc Whitman’s death be in vain.

“Robert, you and Neil will take first watch on the east. Jasper, Abby, you got the west. The train station will mark the end of each of your patrols. Cora and I will take over for Jasper and Abby around midnight. Wicks and Jones for Robert and Neil. I want all lanterns lit and blazing. Make it look like daylight.” He laid out the patrol schedule for the next day and sent the volunteers on their way.

The butcher and the saloon owner climbed onto their horses and trotted off.

Jasper made to get on his horse, but Connor stopped him. “Jasper, hold up a second. I need to talk to you.”

The young man turned around to face the sheriff. “Something wrong, Connor?”

Connor pulled a dented piece of metal from his pocket. He ran his thumb over the engraving on the front. He had already cleaned off the blood and it shone as brightly as it could. “Yeah. It seems I’m in need of a new deputy.” He raised his eyes to Jasper. “Care to take on the job?”

Jasper’s jaw worked as he stared at the man. “Really? You want me to take over for Amos?”

“Absolutely. You can handle it. You’re a good man, and you deserve it.”

Abby patted Jasper on the shoulder as she grinned beside him. “Do it. For Hannah.”

His hand shook as he reached out and took the badge from Connor. “Okay. Thanks, sheriff.” He pinned the badge to his jacket and tipped his hat to Connor.

The young man sat straight and tall as he and Abby trotted their horses out to start their patrols. Connor watched them go, then slumped down onto a bench in front of the jail and rested his head in his hands.

“You need sleep.” Cora sat down beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. He leaned against her and sighed.

“I need to end this is what I need.” He took a deep breath and shoved himself to his feet. He was just walking into the jail when he heard someone call to him from down the road.

“Sheriff!” A horse came racing down the middle of town at full speed and slid to a halt in front of him. “Sheriff, Robert Zane said I could find you here. My house. My grandpa. Please, you have to help.” Becky Xavier panted hard and tears streamed down her cheeks.

Connor pulled his gun. “What’s wrong, Becky? You been attacked?”

Her pigtails bobbed as she nodded frantically.

“People?” His stomach plummeted into his feet.

“Yes. They were... gray.”

The sheriff’s lips pressed tightly together and his heart hammered in his chest. He removed his hat and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “Well, shit. How many?”

“Dozens. Hundreds!” She was shaking so hard, she could no longer hang onto the horse.

Cora helped her down. “I’m going to take her to the hotel, Connor. She’ll be safe there.” The sheriff nodded and Cora led the sobbing girl away.

Connor gritted his teeth and stared down the street, searching for some sign, thinking about a plan of action. Then he squared his shoulders and stomped up to the saloon. A large bell hung on the porch near the door. It had never been rung before for any reason, but it was loud and could be heard across the entire town. Connor reached up and wrapped his hand around the heavy string. He put all his strength into it and beat the clapper firmly against the bell. Its peal vibrated in his skull and he tucked one ear against his shoulder, but he kept on ringing.

People poured out of their houses in droves. Men and women alike carried weapons of all sorts, ranging from shotguns and pistols to kitchen knives and brooms. The bell meant trouble of the worst sort and they were ready to take on whatever would come. The crowd gathered up in front of the saloon and hushed each other so the sheriff could speak.

“There’s an army coming,” Connor said as soon as they were quiet. “An army of the dead. I want a perimeter all around this town. Make it heavy to the east. That’s where they’re coming from. But don’t leave any area unguarded. None of those things gets through, you hear me? None of them. And no one gets bitten. Do whatever you have to to take them down, but do not get bit. Aim for the head. Body shots don’t work.” He paused and scanned the crowd. Men, women, and children, not fighters. “Don’t get bit,” he repeated before he dismissed them.

He was never one for speeches and he knew the townsfolk would do everything in their power to protect Lonesome Ridge, their home. They would protect it to the death. Cora joined him on the porch as he sent the crowd off. She had a rifle in her hands and a hard look on her face.

“We’ll go out to the edge of town and set up on a roof,” he told her. He would have preferred she cower in the hotel with the other non-combatants, but he knew Cora. She would never hide from a threat such as this. She would be on the front lines, and he wanted her beside him

“Where do you want us?” Jasper and Hannah walked up to Connor, hand in hand. Jasper had a pistol on each hip and Hannah carried a slew of knives she had scavenged from the doctor’s kitchen, tucked into her belt.

The sheriff examined them for a moment before he said, “Protect the hotel.”

Jasper gave him a small smile and a nod before leading Hannah away.

Cora and Connor grabbed extra ammunition from the jailhouse, then climbed a ladder in the back of the saloon. They walked along the connected roofs to the east end of the center of town where the main force of defenders set up. Together, they knelt down, rested their barrels on the edge, and waited in silence.

***

Charity called the group together once the houses were cleared out. “Summer, Walton, and David will lead you in. This town will be ours before the sun is up. Everyone must be killed or turned, understand? No one gets away, no one stays human.”

She didn’t know that someone had already ruined her plan. The man who had spotted the girl never mentioned her. He was turned under Little Bear’s rules and he knew the consequence of letting someone get away was death.

Jeremiah walked up to Charity as the group began shuffling toward Lonesome Ridge. “Are we just gonna hang back? Let the grunts do all the work?”

She smiled at him. “Of course. Queens and kings do not do battle. They send their minions to do it for them. Let them weaken the townspeople, then we will head in and clean them out.”

He returned her smile, but deep inside, his fear for Jasper was growing.

***

The sun was gone by the time the horde reached the edge of town. Torches had been lit, but Connor feared it wouldn’t be enough. He pulled everyone back so that the outer houses were left empty. Anyone who couldn’t fight was clustered into a few buildings in the middle of town that were heavily guarded. The best shooters were located on rooftops and in second story windows to give them the best vantage points possible.

Connor glanced at Cora. In the moonlight, her skin looked paler than usual and she had a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “You all right?” A nagging feeling began to develop in the pit of his stomach.

She gave him her most winning smile. “Of course, little brother. Why wouldn’t I be? We’re about to face people who were raised from the dead and want to eat our faces off. I’m doing just swell.” She stuck out her tongue at him before she let a laugh tinkle out over the rooftops.

“All right, all right,” he said as he held up his hands. “Point taken.” He grinned back at her, but the nagging feeling continued to grow.

***

Before they reached the edge of town, Summer gathered a smaller group of the undead and led them through the dark around the perimeter. Walton and David kept shuffling right down the middle of the road, thinking only of the feast that lay before them, unaware of the trap the townsfolk had laid.

***

“Here they come,” Connor shouted to those down below as the first wave of undead came into view.

He aimed his rifle at a blond haired man and waited for them to come into range. Cora did the same, picking a Confederate soldier that reminded her too much of her dead husband.

A shot fired, but none of the creatures fell.

“Wait until they’re closer,” Connor shouted as the undead started to run at the townsfolk. “Hold... Now!”

Shots rang out across the quiet town. The majority of the first line of undead staggered and collapsed on the ground. Those behind them stumbled over the fallen corpses of their comrades and hesitated in the middle of the street. They weren’t used to such an onslaught. They weren’t used to real battle.

Their confusion gave the townsfolk time to reload and they were firing again as the column began to advance. Several of the creatures were smart enough to break away from the group and head for the safety of the houses, but a large number of them just kept moving up the middle of the street like beasts going to the slaughter. All but a few of them were dispatched before they were anywhere near the center of town.

***

Hannah jogged down the street to the hotel, but she didn’t stop there. A small guard line had been set up further down the street, led by the newly deputized Jasper and Abigail. Hannah slipped in beside him.

“What are you doing here?” Jasper asked as he grabbed her hand. “Get back to the jailhouse. You’ll be safe there.”

Hannah clenched her jaw and turned to face him. “No, Jasper. This is my home, too. I’m going to protect it.”

Abby ran over and grabbed Hannah’s arm. “I’m not losing you, too,” she spat. She gave her sister a little shove in the direction of the hotel. “Go back. Now.”

“No.” Hannah’s voice was quiet, but firm as she jerked away from her sister. She pulled her knives from her belt and held them at the ready. “I’m not going to hide like a scared little child.”

Abby’s face was red with anger as she spun on Jasper. “This is your fault. She’s only here because of you. You protect her.” She poked him in the chest with a finger.

He set his shoulders and looked down at his accuser. “Hannah’s not a baby anymore, Abby. I’m pretty sure she can defend herself.”

Abby poked him again. “If she dies, I’m coming after you. I don’t care if you are the new deputy. She’s everything to me and I lose her, it’s your fault.”

Jasper opened his mouth to respond, but his was cut off as a group of undead came swarming out from in between the buildings toward the crowd of people.

“Shoot them,” Jasper yelled. “Aim for the heads. Don’t let them bite you.”

Abby raised her gun and aimed at the center of the swarm. She took down a man in the front of the group and was looking for a new target when a black haired Indian woman broke away and leapt at her. The shotgun barked once, but the woman didn’t even slow. She threw herself at Abby with teeth and claws bared. Hannah screamed behind Jasper and he pulled his gun, but he couldn’t get a clear shot without hitting Abby. Abby managed to roll over so she was on top and she wrapped her hands around the woman’s neck. The Indian woman tore at her with her nails and tried to bite her, but Abby held tight.

***

Charity and Jeremiah climbed down from the carriage outside of town. They heard the repeated barks of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Charity glared down the street and propped her hands on her hips.

“Don’t sound good,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t. That’s what I get for trusting others to do the job I should have done.” She pressed her lips together. “Let’s head around, attack them from behind.”

“’Kay.” He fidgeted with his hat as he followed her out and around the houses.

They walked along in the darkness of the shadows behind the train station. The train Jeremiah was going to rob sat on the tracks. People were sitting in the passenger cars, silent and still, but with their face pressed to the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the carnage in the streets. The engineer was in the locomotive, working frantically to get the fire going.

More shots rang out from the far end of town, but the noise was dwindling. Jeremiah and Charity broke into a trot, expecting to see the humans overrun. They came upon a fierce battle between the undead and the townsfolk.

***

Abby gripped the woman’s neck tightly, but not tight enough. She had never killed anyone and her will to survive was less fierce than the woman’s will to eat. With a warrior cry, the other woman kicked and threw Abby off balance. Abby flew over her and smashed into a set of steps. The Indian leapt on top of her just as Abby threw her arm up to protect herself. The woman’s teeth sank into the bare skin of her forearm and tore a chunk free.

Hannah’s scream mingled with Abby’s. The younger woman pulled a knife from her belt and tossed it with deadly accuracy. It stuck between the Indian woman’s shoulder blades. The attacker spun from her prey, spraying droplets of blood everywhere as she turned to meet the new threat.

“Hannah, no!” Jasper made a grab for Hannah, but she gripped her knives firmly in her hands and stomped toward her sister’s attacker.

The woman smiled at her. Jasper froze. He knew that smile, that face. She was the one who attacked Jeremiah. He raised his pistol and fired.

At the same time, Hannah swung her arm forward.

The undead woman stumbled to the side as a bullet tore through her cheek and a knife sank into her shoulder. She blinked rapidly and tripped over bodies as she made for a gap between two houses. Jasper fired again, putting a bullet in the woman’s upper back, but she made the safety of the shadows and disappeared.

Hannah ran to Abby. She pulled her older sister off the steps and cradled her in her arms. Abby stared at her with glassy eyes as tears poured down her cheeks. “It hurts,” she whispered. “Oh God, Hannah, it hurts so bad. I don’t want to die. Please, not like Wyatt. Please.”

Hannah gripped Abby’s arm and looked at the wound. It was an inch above Abby’s wrist. “You won’t,” she promised as she pulled another knife from her belt. It was big, like one of those Robert Zane used in his shop. “But it’s going to hurt. Bite down on this.”

Hannah stuck the handle of a smaller knife between Abby’s teeth and laid Abby’s arm out on the steps. Then she placed her knee on the inside of Abby’s elbow to steady her. “Ready?”

Abby nodded. Hannah pulled her own arm back and brought the knife down hard.

Chapter 30

Charity and Jeremiah crept quietly into the small gap between two houses. The battle was raging on the other side of the buildings and they wanted to get a closer look before they jumped in. Jeremiah paused at the corner and peeked around as Charity came up beside him.

A young blond haired woman kneeled on the ground very near to them. Another woman lay on the ground in front of her, unconscious. The blond girl worked furiously as she bound a belt around the other girl’s stump of an arm. The rest of it lay several feet away, with a clear bite near the wrist.

“Oh, no. Poor Abby,” Jeremiah whispered. He hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to see people who he knew all his life suffering at the hands of these creatures he now called family.

Jasper knelt beside Abby, holding her free hand as he kept his pistol trained on the area around them.

Charity gripped Jeremiah’s arm. “Do you know them?” she whispered as she slipped her arm into his.

He leaned further out from cover. Their army was falling quickly to the townsfolk. While many of the living had been killed, nearly all of the undead were laying motionless on the ground. They were losing, badly. Jeremiah’s eyes locked on Jasper just as the young man looked up. Jasper’s eyes went wide and his pistol wavered as it pointed at his older brother. The younger Gaines boy reached over and pulled Hannah tightly to him.

“Yes,” Jeremiah murmured. “That’s my little brother.”

The train rumbled behind them as it began to pull out of the station at a slow crawl.

“Your little brother?” She stared at the young man as him and the girl next to him stared back at them in abject horror.

“Yeah,” he said. “Jasper. That’s Hannah, and her sister Abby. Your men killed the rest of their family. They’re all alone now. All they have is my brother.”

Charity glanced up at Jeremiah and then at the train tracks behind them. She tugged at his arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”

He jerked beside her as if he had been shot. “Yeah? You wanna just leave?”

She looked back at Jeremiah’s brother, then at all the dead lying in the street. She had known the whole thing was lost as soon as those first shots rang out on the other side of town. “Yes. We’ve lost. It’s time to go.”

He shrugged as he turned away from his brother’s accusing stare. “Okay. Where we gonna go?”

She nodded to the train behind them. “Away. Someplace else. We’ll start over. Somewhere where we don’t know anyone.”

He gave her a small smile and pulled her in for a half hug. She wrinkled her nose and pushed him away. As she walked toward the train, he leaned around the wall once more. Jasper’s eyes kept darting back in his direction. Jeremiah waved to catch his attention. Jasper stared at him as he held up his hand, then placed it across his chest. Tears sprang to the boy’s eyes and he nodded.

Jeremiah melted back into the alley and followed Charity to the tracks. The train was picking up speed as it went by. The passenger cars were rolling past them. He could see the passengers in the windows. Some of them were townsfolk trying to escape the bloodshed, but most of them were simply people who were heading further out west and had been caught on the wrong train at the wrong time. They pressed their faces against the glass with their eyes wide as they caught glimpses of the butchery beyond the houses. Jeremiah doubted that they knew the truth about what was happening.

“Let’s go.” He grabbed Charity’s hand and began to run. They made it to the tracks just as the last of the passenger cars flew by. He reached out a hand and gripped the railing by the stairs. Using all his strength, he swung himself and Charity up on to the small platform at the back.

Charity grinned at him as they righted themselves. “Shall we have a little fun?”

He glanced at the door. A woman was peering out the window at them. He returned Charity’s grin. “I always love a little fun.”

The screams of the passengers echoed out across the empty prairie as the train barreled west.

***

Connor reloaded his rifle once more and picked off the last of the undead that were moving around on the street below. Robert Zane and Neil Avery had formed a group to go from house to house to search for any that had been missed.

“Nice shooting,” he said as he fired one last round into a man who was flopping on the ground with a missing leg.

His sister leaned against the wall and grunted beside him. His stomach churned at the sound.

He pulled back and set his rifle down on the roof. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before looking at her. She was pale and feverish and her hands were shaking so bad she could no longer hold the rifle. She drooped against the wall, taking deep, laborious breaths.

“Shit.” Connor removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “I knew it.”

She offered him a weak smile, a pale imitation of her normally endearing grin. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Cora...” he began, but he couldn’t finish. He placed his hand on her cheek and brushed it with his thumb. “Cora,” he said again.

She patted his hand gently. “I know, little brother. I know. I never told you thank you, by the way. For the thing with Michael.”

He gave her a small smile and patted her hand. “I would do anything for you. You know that.”

She gave him a tiny laugh. “As long as I didn’t drive you too crazy.”

He smiled at her. “You always drive me crazy. That’s what sisters do.”

Her eyes shone brightly in the moonlight. “I hope I did a good job, then.”

They sat there for a few minutes before she cleared her throat. With weak fingers, she tugged her skirts up to reveal her legs. Just above the holster for her little pistol was the wound Connor had desperately feared. It was black and festering, and it smelled like days-old beef.

“Can you give me a moment please, Connor? Just a moment.”

He met Cora’s eyes again and held them as he tried to convey all the things he had never spoken aloud. Then he leaned over and kissed her forehead before standing up. As he walked to the opposite edge of the roof, he heard the gun leave its holster. The bullet that pierced her brain ripped through his heart as well.

***

Connor laid Cora’s body down on the road in front of the saloon with all the other bodies that had been gathered there. He stood and met Jasper as he was walking down the road. The young deputy carried a body in his arms. Abby Crawford. Connor was numb to all feeling by that point, so he just stroked the girl’s hair once and pointed to Cora.

“No, oh no. I’m so sorry, Connor.” Jasper’s face pinched with grief for the sheriff. Hannah wrapped her arms around Connor’s waist and gave him a big hug. He returned it, and didn’t want to let go.

“Abby?” Connor pointed his chin at the girl in Jasper’s arms. Her chest was rising and falling, albeit slowly, but it was an important detail he had missed before. “She’s not dead?”

Hannah pulled away from him and lifted up her sister’s mutilated arm. “No, but...” She paused and looked at the sheriff with tear-filled eyes. “Please don’t kill her. Please. She’s all I have left.”

Connor took the arm from Hannah and examined it. It was a rough amputation job, but he could find no bites anywhere on her body. “Take her to the saloon. Have Avery fix it up, get it sterilized and wrapped. Once that’s done, take her to the jail and lock her in a cell. She stays there for a week, until we’re sure she hasn’t become one of those things. Got it?”

Hannah threw her arms around him again. “Oh, thank you, Connor! Thank you!”

She started walking up the saloon steps. Jasper turned to follow.

“Jasper,” Connor called before they went inside. The young man turned around. “If she dies...”

Jasper pressed his lips into a tight line and nodded. Then he followed Hannah inside.

Connor turned toward the jail, but he came upon Robert Zane as he was leaving a house with a small body in his arms. “What’s the damage?” Connor asked.

“Coulda been worse,” Robert responded as he laid the boy on the ground. “I’d say we lost about a third of the town, maybe a bit more, plus all those outside town. But we got all them, so far’s we can tell. That’s a win, I guess.”

Connor frowned. “I guess. Are we sure we got them all?”

Robert shrugged. “No, but there aren’t anymore in town that we can see. Come mornin’, we’ll set up a search party and follow any tracks we find, see if there were any stragglers we missed. Til then, not much we can do but hunker down.”

The sheriff chewed his lip for a minute. “All right. Good work, Robert. Good work.”

He patted Robert on the shoulder and walked to the jailhouse. He glanced around to make sure no one needed him before he went inside and up the stairs without removing his boots, hat, or jacket. He walked into his bedroom and locked the door behind him.

Connor pressed his hands against the wood and closed his eyes as he took several deep breaths. His chest hurt. The air burned as it entered his lungs. He captured his lip in his teeth and staggered to the dresser. With shaking hands, he jerked the bottom drawer open. He searched blindly, tossing clothing to the floor, until his fingertips brushed against the cool glass. He yanked the cork out of the bottle of whiskey before it had cleared the drawer and it was at his lips a moment later. His eyes settled on the picture of his sister tucked into his mirror. The amber liquid hovered at the edge of the bottle, teasing him, begging him to drink.

As the first drop hit his tongue, Cora’s voice echoed in his head. “Drinking again, are we, little brother?”

With a shout, Connor spun and slammed the bottle against the wall. It shattered into a million pieces and showered him with glass and ruined whiskey.

“No more,” he growled as he pounded his fist against the dresser. “I swear, no more drinking. Not until those things are wiped from the face of this earth. Not until I make them pay for what they did to you.”

Connor swore his promise to Cora’s image. Then he sank to the floor and let the tears flow.

***

“How are you feeling?” A week after the massacre at Lonesome Ridge, Connor McClane leaned against the bars to the only locked cell in the jail. His knuckles were white as he clenched his hands into fists to fight off the jitters that had taken hold.

“Tired.” Abby Crawford lay on the cot inside and gave the sheriff a weak smile. “And sore.”

The sheriff nodded as he looked the girl up and down. She was still pale, but her color was starting to return. For the first three days, he walked into the jailhouse every morning expecting the worst, but each day she proved his fears invalid. “How’s your arm?”

She gave a small shrug and raised her left arm. It disappeared three inches below the elbow. The stump was wrapped heavily in bandages. The bleeding had only just stopped the day before and now the wound oozed, but Sylvia, the whore-turned-nurse, had kept it clean and it was starting to heal.

“Connor?”

He pulled his eyes away from the shortened limb and looked into Abby’s eyes. “Mmm?”

“When are you going to let me out?” She waved the white lump in the air. “It’s been a week. I haven’t turned. I feel fine.” She sat up and winced. “Well, as fine as can be expected. How long are you going to make me stay in here?”

He stared at her for a minute with a pinched face before he nodded. “Yeah, all right.” He took the keys off his belt and unlocked the door. “Come on.”

The young woman grunted as she raised herself into a seated position and swung her legs over the edge. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Connor walked into the cell and tucked his hand under her good arm. Her lips twitched gratefully and she leaned her weight on him as he hoisted her into a standing position. The going was slow, but they made it out onto the boardwalk.

“It doesn’t even look like anything happened,” Abby mused as she got her first glimpse of the town after the battle.

Connor shrugged. “We’ve done a lot of clean-up. We have to move on. Life doesn’t stop for us, no matter how much we want it to.”

Abby glanced up at him and he gave her a sad smile.

“What happened to...” She paused, looking for the right words. “What about all those who were bitten?”

“We had a ceremony.” His voice quivered and he pressed his lips together as he blinked rapidly before he continued. “We gave them the best death we could. Then we burned the bodies outside town. The cemetery is littered with crosses now, but no new graves.”

They watched as a three-man patrol passed in front of them. The men were bristling with weapons and moved with purpose. They all tipped their hats to Connor as they walked by. Connor steered Abby in the direction of the doctor’s old house.

“We have patrols set up all around town. And we’re building a wall. No one comes in or out without being checked for bites first.”

“This is a strong town,” Abby said as she shuffled along. “We’ll be okay. We’ll survive.”

They had reached the doctor’s home and Connor paused. “Yeah, we will.” He smiled at her as he knocked on the door. “And so will you.”

A moment later, the door flew open. “Abby!” Hannah wrapped her arms around her older sister and hugged her tight.

Abby grunted as she placed her right hand on Hannah’s back.

“Careful, Hannah,” Connor admonished. “She’s still weak. Let’s get her inside.”

Doc Whitman’s house had been cleaned up, but the door to his office remained shut.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Hannah said as she settled Abby into a chair.

“What are we doing here?” Abby glanced around. On the wall between the windows, she noticed a photograph of her family, the one that had been hanging in their main living area. She remembered the day it was taken. Her father had saved for a long time to afford it and her mother had been in such a tizzy about Wyatt’s dirty face.

Hannah grinned as she set a cup in front of Abby. “This is our home, now. Becky is going to live with us, too.”

“I hope you don’t mind.” Connor raised an eyebrow at her, asking for her opinion.

Abby stared at the photograph, then her sister, before looking back at the sheriff. “It’s great. A new start, a new life.”

***

Eddie Clark sat on a hillside overlooking the prairie below. It had been his favorite place ever since he was a little boy, even though the tracks the railroad had put in a few years ago marred the beautiful landscape. His nose curled as he saw one of the offensive locomotives come into view out of the corner of his eye.

“Stupid trains,” he mumbled. “I wish they would all just blow up.”

He had barely voiced the thought when fire erupted from the smoke stack. He saw the explosion before he heard it. The locomotive at the front blew apart. Metal pieces flew out in every direction. The cars behind it screeched as they suddenly lost speed. The first one smashed into what was left of the locomotive and flipped over. It pulled the cars behind it off the tracks. The effect was spectacular.

THE END

Get Lonesome Ridge Book 2, Blood and Dust, here: http://amzn.com/B00MTW6PG0

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samantha Warren is a speculative fiction author who spends her days immersed in dragons, spaceships, and vampires. She milks cows for fun, collects zombie gnomes, and dreams about the day she’ll meet Boba Fett. Her love is easily purchased with socks and her goal in life is to eat a Beef Wellington cooked by Gordon Ramsay.

Send her a message!

Email: samantha@samantha-warren.com

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You Will Be Like God

Steve Stroble

1

Maybe these can be the children I never had.

Elani Graves admired the six seated in her den, all in their twenties, all wonderful, gleaned from her husband’s two decades of research and search for them. The largest, a huge Pacific Islander with a torso so massive Elani wondered how his skinny legs could support it, ended his introduction.

“Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and smaller island groups, like my homeland, have joined the Island Nation Federation, but Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia are still unwilling.”

Elani twisted a strand of her shoulder length light brown hair, a habit displayed when she was happy. “It’s time for the implants that will allow us to safely communicate. Who will be first?”

Only one of the six raised a hand.

“Patrice? Follow the robot to the basement. The rest of you follow me to the kitchen for lunch.”

* * *

Dr. Graves examined the scar on Patrice Oldefarmer’s scalp, so tiny that no one would notice it. Performing surgery satisfied him, especially the delicate variety perfected over a thirty-nine year career of pioneering laser surgery to correct memories. Emerging from his boring retirement was proving better than expected.

“Computer, is the implant on schedule to become fully functional before she awakens?” Dr. Graves asked the one he trusted more than any human.

“Yes,” the computer said. “However, I detected a large exchange of pheromones between her and Ramon Zappista during the meeting upstairs with your wife.”

The doctor’s frown produced wrinkles stretching from bushy gray eyebrows to his balding head. “Double the memory suppression rates to their implants.”

“Yes, sir.”

Graves turned to his second most used machine, a robot he called the hoverbot. “Deliver her to the garage.”

The hoverbot’s plastic arms lifted the unconscious female. It began climbing the stairs by using a cushion of air blown from the metal plate on its bottom.

“Stay upstairs after you deliver her.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dr. Graves turned to the monitor displaying those who were drifting into sleep in the kitchen. “So much easier to have cooperative subjects.”

“Yes,” his computer said. “The sedative you added to their food is adequate. My sensors showed none of the other five was willing to have the implant procedure performed. You had no choice.”

* * *

Upstairs in the garage, Bud Lee combed his wavy hair and wondered if his dying of it had improved his image. He smiled when the hoverbot arrived.

“Where do you want me to deposit her?” the robot asked.

“In the sidecar.”

Bud hopped onto the hovercycle’s seat and punched a button to release its kickstand and start the jets, propelling enough air to levitate it a foot off the ground. His cargo safely resting in the sidecar, Bud gunned the throttle. The cycle lurched away from what Bud called “Dr. Graves’ Nut House of Horrors.”

Bud did not consider Dr. and Elani Graves insane. Instead, it was their nonstop demands that drove him crazy.

Manservant? Slave is more like it. I’m the butler, valet, cook, chauffeur, janitor, handyman, gardener, and gofer all rolled into one. At least I’ve gotten into shape.

He flexed his biceps, two inches larger since he had taken this job. Other increased muscles on his legs, chest, and back gave him the appearance of his martial arts heroes.

Bud wondered why one as pretty and intelligent as his passenger would visit the Nut House of Horrors. Dr. Graves’ orders to deliver Patrice had included, “She must not awaken until after you have dropped her off. She cannot see you,” so the green rolling grasslands became a blur after Bud pushed the hovercycle to its maximum speed of 120 miles per hour. But the machine’s rain sensors cut that speed in half.

“Ah, man…” Bud tapped the button on the handle bar labeled Shield. A second later, driver and passenger rode encased under a thin plastic cover protecting them from the bullet-sized raindrops.

Bud admired the herd of buffalo grazing to his left. They don’t need any protection, he thought.

They arrived at the casino ten minutes later. The shuttle driver clucked as he helped Bud load the sleeping Patrice onto the bus bound for the Bismarck Airport.

“Too much party time?”

“Yeah.” Bud handed the driver her carryon bag. Now I even have to lie for the Graves. They don’t pay me enough.

* * *

Dr. Graves surveyed his sleeping wife and guests. “Let’s start off with Porky.” He pointed and the hoverbot moved to the largest of the group and lifted him. “How much does he weigh?”

“Including his clothing and sandals, 346 pounds, well under my 500-pound carrying capacity.”

“Bring him down to the lab for his implant.”

* * *

Bud took off his shirt and kept the shield down while he rode back to the Graves’ ranch. Somehow the rain pelting him seemed to be a cleansing agent.

Who am I? Employee following orders or accomplice? Such reflections brought turmoil because they reminded him of why he had taken this job.

As the thunderheads rolled off to the southeast, the rain stopped drenching him. No longer bound by his vehicle’s Foul Weather Speed Regulator, Bud cranked up the engine to his favorite speed of 120 mph.

The hoverbot met him at the garage. “I’ll recharge the hovercycle while you deliver Porky. Your excessive speeds rapidly drain its batteries. Dr. Graves will not be pleased.”

“Porky?”

“Porky is what Dr. Graves has renamed him. I agree. He is the heaviest object I have ever carried in my existence.”

Bud climbed into the jeep. “Be right back.”

“I’ll be waiting with the next one for you to deliver. Dr. Graves said to stay on schedule.”

“I know.” Bud waved goodbye and enjoyed his freedom from the crowded house, the dirty kitchen, and the foul smelling bathrooms, all because of The Club’s inaugural meeting.

Over the next two and a half hours, Bud transported The Club’s other five members to shuttles bound for airports in Pierre, Aberdeen, and Rapid City. With precision, Dr. Graves had scheduled the meeting, surgeries, and six deliveries of his wife’s sleeping “children.”

Only Patrice Oldefarmer missed her connecting flight.

Her jet from Bismarck, North Dakota to Minneapolis/St. Paul became delayed because of mechanical problems. She remembered her vacation to America’s high prairies to see the wonders of Yellowstone, the Black Hills, and the Badlands. But for some reason, the last eight hours seemed to be missing. She decided to nap while she waited for her plane to be repaired, thinking rest might restore her memory.

As she dozed off, the nightmares that had begun on the shuttle bus returned, scenes of something metallic probing her, violating her, stealing her God-given destiny.

2

“Someone named Bud Lee called.”

Tim Beheard rolled over, away from the voice. “Who?”

“A potential customer for you.”

No such call had come his way in weeks. “Tell him to meet me at Barney’s at eight.”

Tim swung his six-foot frame from the bed and stepped into his slippers. Groggy, he stumbled through the darkness to the soft glow of the night light in the bathroom. The voice from the other room invaded his privacy as he urinated.

“Your credits are at a dangerously low level again. You have two energy credits, five water credits, and no remaining food credits for the month.”

Tim groaned. “Is there enough to still take a shower?” He lifted his right arm and sniffed its pit. “I have to smell nice for Bud whatever his name is, you know.”

“Bud Lee. I contacted his computer to relay your appointment with him. A shower of two minutes will completely deplete your remaining water credits. Because it is five days until the replenishment of all of your credits, you or Moose or both of you may perish without water to consume. The latest reports show water on the black market is selling for two credits per liter. But if you barter your remaining two energy credits for water, we will have no electricity for our apartment and I will be unable to take care of you.”

Tim sighed. “Okay.”

To save water by not having to wash his hands, Tim lifted his foot to hit the button to flush the toilet. As his slipper tapped the button it jiggled loose from his foot and plopped into the toilet’s metal bowl. The toilet’s sensors detected what it identified as a large chunk of very dry feces. A laser embedded in the bowl attacked the object, which triggered another warning.

“The contents of your bowel movement indicate you are not consuming enough roughage.”

The rubber slipper’s toe melted as the low intensity laser beam consumed the part submerged in urine. When Tim grabbed the heel of the slipper, several globules of molten rubber burned his hand, causing him to toss it upward. Its gooey end stuck to the ceiling, which left the slipper dangling above his head.

“Extracting waste material from toilets, sinks, or pipes is forbidden by Health Code 93886; unless you are a licensed plumber wearing the code’s required protective gear.”

Tim cursed. Little respite came from the computer that had awakened him and ruled his 225-square foot apartment.

“Please hold still while I take your morning readings. Your doctor’s computer has already requested them twice.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He sat on the bed.

“My readings indicate higher than normal blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiration rate. But all internal systems appear to be functioning within acceptable limits. However, your weight is 197 pounds; lifestyle and occupation are both extremely sedentary. Thus, you will require 1,936 calories today to maintain current weight. To reduce to your optimum body mass, cut your calorie intake by 297 calories for 124 days and increase physical activity by 104 minutes daily.”

“Place everything into power-saving mode.”

“Now 1.82346 energy credits remain. According to my scan of your brain activity, your serotonin and dopamine levels are out of balance. Shall I order a prescription for you?”

“Let me rest a minute instead.”

His head plopped back onto his pillow as the hum of the refrigerator and overhead light faded until he could only see outlines of his apartment’s few objects: a dresser, small table and single chair where he ate and worked, and unwashed plates, glasses, and silverware.

He returned to the bathroom, dampened a wash cloth and worked the slivers of remaining soap into suds to remove the odor from his armpits and crotch. Returning to the kitchen, he found Moose on its counter, ready for breakfast. The five kernels of dry cat food that fell from the bag into her dish turned her expression from expectation to pleading.

Tim sighed as he opened his two-cubic foot refrigerator and pulled out remnants of last night’s late supper, a breast piece of chicken he had saved for breakfast. While he tore it into shreds and dropped them into his pet’s dish, he talked to the only one he believed understood him.

“Moose, you can have it.” He licked the chicken flavor from his fingers and bit down on the bones. They required six minutes of grinding before he could swallow them by using his saliva.

“Wonder how many calories that was?” He scratched the purring cat’s head, which bobbed above her bowl of chicken.

After dressing in the pants and shirt needing the fewest repairs, Tim grabbed a large plastic bag of recycles and stepped into the hallway. Every twenty feet a sign posted on the walls read 15-U.

He picked up his pace.

Fifteen Underground, fifteenth floor buried in the earth, serving as part of the foundation for a total of twenty-nine floors above it.

Who put the requirement into the building code that for every floor above ground, each structure had to have at least as many floors below ground? The earthquake back in 2035 that levelled most of Los Angeles and the resulting tsunami that sent part of the Pacific Ocean inland as far as Riverside was to blame; at least according to the old timers.

The most dependent became the Mole People, living and working underground. Those who maintained their independence by exempting themselves from the laws they imposed on the Mole People lived aboveground, rulers of a society defined not by race, class, or religion, but by where one lived. Tim wondered how he had slipped from “the thirty percent” of elites into the underground status of “the seventy percent.”

He stopped at a neighbor’s and left carrying her bag of recycles. Those waiting at the elevator groaned when he joined the line.

“Do you have to haul those recycles in the ‘vator? They stink,” said the youngest one, a girl.

Because the elevator car’s computer sensors detected a load thirty-seven pounds under maximum allowable weight, it shot to the First Floor Above Ground nonstop in 3.8 seconds.

Tim merged into the groups exiting the forty-two elevator cars in the lobby. Those who had come down on an elevator turned toward a parking garage or the escalator to carry them to the subway. The Mole People shuffled outside onto the dirty, narrow sidewalks.

Most of them squinted or shielded their eyes from the bright sunlight after spending eight or more hours in dwellings lit by 30-watt light bulbs, the maximum allowed by law. Whenever the curfew was in effect, they either hid at home from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. or wound up jailed.

At the first park Tim passed, scroungers loitered surrounded by their bags, boxes, and carts of recycles, anxious for the downtown reclamation factory to open. One of them bartered for Tim’s two bags by lifting her skirt above her thighs. She was the kind of California girl made famous by the Beach Boys 129 years earlier: blond, tanned, and with curves that promised pleasure. Estranged from his wife to the point of making love to her at most twice a year, Tim paused.

Then he slapped his cheek with his free hand. Better use the head on my shoulders instead of the one in my pants, he thought.

Tim hurried to a second park where a twelve-year-old girl waited for the treasure he carried because it could be converted to credits to feed her family. Only the artificial turf remained in the park. Scroungers had once again dismantled the playground equipment and hauled it off to the reclamation factory. Trees and shrubs held little color, their leaves stripped by those whose food credits had expired.

“Hello, June Bug,” Tim said.

June pouted as she pulled her dirty brown hair away from her green eyes and tried to smooth some of the wrinkles from her tattered blue dress, a hand-me-down two sizes too large for her. “I am not a bug. You are.”

He grinned as he handed the bags to her. “Just teasing.”

“Anything I can get for you?”

“Yeah. Moose needs some food.”

She dropped the bags and clutched her hips. “Are you out of food credits again?”

Tim shrugged. “Yeah, afraid so.”

“Okay, I’ll find her something. At least you still look healthy enough.” She pinched his belly, grabbed the bags, and ran. “I was checking if you need some food, too. But it looks like there’s enough fat left in your tummy to get you by.”

“Fat?” He remembered the computer’s advice on losing weight as he stared down at the belly hiding his shoes.

“Just teasing.”

“Thanks.” He tapped a code into his smart watch as he continued his nineteen-block stroll to Barney’s. It updated him.

“Current temperature in the greater San Los Diego area is 79 degrees. You should slow your pace so as not to strain your hamstring again.”

San Los Diego, SLD, short for San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and San Diego counties, the three most populated of the basin consisting of thousands of square miles.

When survivors had rebuilt after the Mother of All Earthquakes, the designations L.A. and Southern California faded, replaced by SLD. Some said it should be LSD, to place Los Angeles first. But after migrating Angelinos fled to the perceived safety of higher ground and the fewer fault lines in San Bernardino County, it overtook the surrounding counties in population. Reclaiming the deserts to the east had doubled the region’s inhabitants to almost forty-one million.

The population would be even greater if not for the earthquake and tsunami and resulting plague.

Some said the government released microorganisms to reduce the population; others pointed at terrorists. Those in the health industry talked among themselves about the isolation wards with patients infected by strains of super viruses and bacteria being breached by the damage from the 8.3 quake and floodwaters. As the patients died, some of their pathogens survived by finding new hosts to destroy. The quake and tsunami killed 72,005; the plague about a million.

Born two years after those events, Tim thought all of it to be ancient history. Only the cars from that era appealed to him, few of which remained because buying, insuring, maintaining, and registering the gas burners cost twice what the government subsidized electric cars did. He paused to admire a 2039 Ford Model Z rolling by him. He did not see any more fossil fuel or ethanol burners for another three blocks.

Tim was a footer, one of those who walked to most destinations, who ignored the stairways every block leading to the tube trains running for hundreds of miles in every direction under SLD. Intent on landing his first job in a month, Tim focused on his smart watch.

“Give me data on Bud Lee. I have to know how much he can afford to pay me.”

“Mr. Lee is a California native; last employed at a private residence in South Dakota, and now resides at his parents’ home in Pasadena. For more detailed information, you require either a security authorization clearance or payment of 52 credits. My records indicate you have neither of those.”

“Pasadena? What’s the household income up there these days?”

“On average, 384,091 credits per year.”

“All right. That means Bud can pay well. Can you show me his picture?”

“Searching for any image of him recorded in the public domain files. One moment, please.”

Tim focused on the 1 and 1/2-inch screen and read the day’s headlines as he walked on. Another pedestrian bumped into him, but Tim did not notice how the encounter turned him onto a side street until a faint rumble raised his stare from a story about food riots in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Denver, and Chicago. A half block ahead, a robot sweeper lumbered toward him. Turning around, Tim saw a robot depositor blocked any retreat.

Each machine’s width spanned the edge of the buildings’ fronts to twelve feet past the curb. The robot sweeper’s powerful vacuum pulled objects into its many chambered belly. Sensors sent recyclable material into one chamber. Dead organisms, whether plant, human, or animal, landed in a second chamber, and living organisms in a third.

The dead matter would be transferred to the waiting robot depositor for transport to be either recycled, burned to generate steam to make electricity, or turn into mulch, depending on each day’s demands. City dwellers complained of not having adequate electricity and water, while farmers pointed out their need for fertilizer and water to grow the food the urban ingrates needed to survive.

Tim might survive being sucked into the robot sweeper with only bruises. But sometimes a live rat, dog, cat, reptile, insect, or human ended up in the chamber for the deceased. Because the contents of that chamber were rendered into pet food, allowing oneself to be vacuumed into a sweeper was a game of Russian roulette.

Even if he did get deposited into the chamber reserved for the living, Tim would miss his appointment by the time he was released from the detainment center, the destination for vacuumed up people.

For the first time in thirty-seven years, Tim jaywalked.

He dodged the vehicles in the first two lanes of traffic, suffering drivers’ glares. But the last two lanes were jammed with cars headed to San Bernardino County, home of most of SLD’s factories, schools, and office buildings. Five times as many vehicles traveled that direction in the morning than any other. The two electric cars bearing down on Tim both skidded to a stop after their radar sent his presence back to the cars’ navigation systems.

When Tim mouthed his apologies after his feet landed on the sidewalk, the first passing driver shrugged. Most of the rest greeted him by extending their middle fingers, shaking fists, or yelling obscenities.

A drone the size of a hummingbird dropped in front of him.

“Halt.” The machine hovered six inches from his sweating face. Tim wondered what the human attached to the voice looked like.

“Me?” Tim conjured up his most innocent expression, learned long ago to deflect his parents’ and teachers’ expectations of him.

“Yeah, you. What’s the big idea of jaywalking?”

“I got in between the robot sweeper and robot depositor across the street.”

The drone turned the direction Tim pointed, where the former was dumping its cargo into the latter. Two rats’ legs clawed the air as they tried to swim to safety. A cat’s puffed out fur and screech did not free it. A drunk’s limbs flopped about as her sleeping body somersaulted into the trio’s metal prison.

The drone turned toward its detainee. “You get stoned last night or this morning? How else could you end up in between a sweeper and a depositor like you claim? You’re a footer, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Footers comprise ninety-two percent of all living humans who get themselves sucked into robot sweepers. Drunks, the homeless, and other bums account for seven percent. Smart citizens who use the tube trains only account for less than one percent. Why weren’t you riding the tube trains?”

If Tim admitted he had traded his transportation credits for rent credits on the black market, what began as a minor pedestrian violation might escalate into a misdemeanor or felony. He hoped a half-truth would slip by the drone’s truth sensor. “I needed the exercise. My control computer told me I’m overweight.” He grabbed his midsection and wiggled it.

“Okay. Give me your Federal Social Identification Number.”

“B4T-02-X3L9.”

“It says here your name is Tim Douglas Beheard. Confirm that name with your birth date.”

“It’s March 10th, 2037.”

The police officer commanding the drone from his office fifty miles to the east groaned. “You’re not that same dumb reporter who used to bug me to death for stories when I worked out of the Western Precinct are you?”

Tim stopped fidgeting and smiled. “Is that you, Hal? Long time no see.”

“Why can’t you crazy footers remember the drill? Robot sweepers clean the even numbered address sides of the streets on odd numbered days of the month and odd numbered address sides of the street on even numbered days of the month.”

“Uh…”

“Your smart watch’s records show you were reading it while walking. You can lose your walker license for the next offence like that. I’m shutting your smart watch off until you enter a building. Look where you’re going from now on.”

Tim wondered if the delay had cost him a job because he was now late for his appointment. “You got any hot tips for a story I can sell, Hal?”

“Go on. Get out of here before I bust you for loitering.” Tim’s sheepish grin changed the cop’s mind. “Oh, all right. If your meeting with Bud Lee doesn’t get you a job, get back to me. Maybe I can point you in the right direction for a story.”

“But how did you know about Bud Lee?”

“You know the drill. Your violation of Pedestrian Code 681 triggered an automatic search warrant of your smart watch and computer at your apartment.”

3

Bud Lee glanced through the tinted glass window for the eighth time in three minutes. A sign distracted him:

SMOKING ROOM. AGE 14 & OLDER ONLY ALLOWED. STATE LAW REQUIRES PARENTAL OR ADULT SUPERVISION FOR THOSE UNDER AGE 16.

BUSINESS AND HEALTH CODES FORBID CONSUMPTION HEREIN OF ANY SUBSTANCE NOT SOLD BY BARNEY’S REFUELING CENTER. ROLLING PAPERS, HOOKAHS, AND PIPES AVAILABLE FOR A NOMINAL FEE.

A digital screen updated the latest prices per gram of the marijuana available inside the room:

Synthetic cannabis available with 24-hr. advance order. Warning: the Surgeon General has determined that smoking marijuana…

Bud stopped reading when the smoking room’s double doors swung open, grazing Bud’s arm. One bloodshot-eyed patron stepped on Bud’s foot and another sneezed onto his face. A tuxedo clad robot blocked their exit.

“City, County, State, and Federal laws require that I test the levels of THC in your systems. Please exhale into these tubes.”

Two rigid blue tubes projected from either side of the robot’s bow tie. The patrons exhaled, coughed, inhaled, and exhaled five times before producing a valid sample.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but my sensors indicate you both have unacceptable levels of THC in your circulatory systems. By law, you must wait in our detox room to your left until your levels are under legal limits. Please follow me.” The robot led the way, but one customer walked out the front door.

“Sorry, waiter, but I’m gonna be late for work if I don’t leave right now.”

The robot’s metallic neck spun its plastic head 180 degrees. “Attention, control computer. We have a runner. Dispatch bouncer robot.”

Four seconds later a two-foot tall bouncer robot flew into the lobby and out of the open front door. Bud and the obedient stoned patron moved to the window to watch.

The runner turned toward the familiar whirring sound unique to bouncer robots, akin to the sirens police vehicles used. It gave him one warning. “Return to our establishment and you will not be reported to the authorities. If reported, you can lose your marijuana user license.”

Before his next step hit pavement, the net propelled from the bouncer robot’s chest engulfed him. Summoned by the café’s control computer, a drone dropped from its normal quarter mile high patrol level. Its prey struggled to get free from the net entangling his thrashing arms and legs. The drone read him his rights.

“You are under arrest for public intoxication. A vehicle will transport you to the detention center. Anything you say can be used against—”

Bud shook his head and sat in one of the foyer’s overstuffed chairs. Another five minutes of clock watching passed before Tim introduced himself.

“Mr. Lee?” Tim spoke before the front door closed behind him.

Bud stood and shook the sweaty hand. “Mr. Beheard?”

A waiter led them to the deserted dining area. “You may pick any table. May I get you something to drink before you order?”

Tim blushed as he wondered if his inability to buy anything would squelch this deal. “Some water for me, please.”

“I’ll have your Morning Blaster, five fruits, no vegetables, with yogurt and protein powder,” Bud said.

“Genetically or non-genetically modified?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Tim relaxed as he sat. At least he’s not picky. He stared at his potential client.

“Does my ethnicity surprise you, Mr. Beheard?”

“Not as much as how young you look.”

“I’m twenty. Do you mind taking on an Asian such as me? That’s the trouble with the name Lee. It can belong to an Englishman, cowboy from Texas, or even a third generation Chinese immigrant like me.”

“No, no problem.”

“A literary agent recommended you to me. Ann Underwood.”

Tim tapped his smart watch and repeated the agent’s name. He blinked when her image and then a description of his work for her flashed on the screen. “Wow. Forgive me for not remembering her, but it says here that the last job I did for her was back in 2075, twenty years ago.”

“She said you were reasonable. You see, my funds are limited.”

“What do you need?”

“A ghostwriter. At least she thinks so.” Bud frowned.

“Ghostwriter?” Tim savored the words and calculated the large payday such assignments could generate. “For what? An article?”

“A book.”

“Oh…” His estimate skyrocketed and smile broadened.

“So how much to help me write it?”

“Depends. Is it fiction or nonfiction?”

Bud pulled an object from his pants pocket and set it midway between them on the hemp tablecloth.

“What’s that for?”

Bud winked. “This is just in case the robot waiters eavesdrop on us. They do that to tailor their conversations with customers to get them to order more expensive items.”

“Oh, it’s a conversation cloaker. Those are illegal here in California, you know.”

“Wait a minute and you’ll understand why I have to be so careful. A little over a year ago a couple named Dr. and Elani Graves hired me as a manservant. For all I know, he could have hacked into the computer that controls our waiter. There’s nothing he can’t find out. It’s scary. I don’t trust him because he fired me.”

“In South Dakota, right?”

Bud sat back in his chair until its brass legs began to bend. “How did you know that? Has he already gotten to you, too? I know he fed lies to all those literary agents I contacted, all eighty-two of them.”

“I just researched a little about you. That’s standard in my line of work.”

A wry smile replaced Bud’s glare. “Guess I can’t blame you for being careful. Anyway, at first I just cleaned, cooked, did laundry and yard work, and drove them around.” He paused as his drink arrived. “Thank you.” He sipped the orange, lime, papaya, mango, and banana-based concoction. “Then Dr. Graves sent me all around the world to get DNA samples from eighteen applicants for The Club.”

“The what?”

“The Club. He advertised for this.” Bud handed him a copy of an ad.

Tim read it aloud, “Bright minds needed. Qualifications include the following: age 20 to 30, IQ of at least 130, proficient in speaking English, interested in global unity. Apply…”

He stopped reading.

Other jobs had turned into quagmires, ending when neither he nor the client was satisfied by partial payment and nonfulfillment of unrealistic expectations. He shoved the ad back at Bud and tried to force himself away from this client.

But visions of impending days of no showers, electricity, and maybe enough water to stave off dehydration and death kept him seated. At every end of the month at least one resident from his living complex exited on a gurney for the crematorium or a trip to the healing center. Few older patients returned from there. Almost sixty, he feared the healing centers more than those used for detention.

“Why did he need DNA samples?”

“To pick the final six from the candidates. Dr. Graves got thousands of applicants. He and Elani narrowed it down to 100 finalists. Then they let the computer pick the top eighteen out of those. So I traveled all over the world to get their DNA.”

“But that would cost a fortune. Why didn’t he have them use a local company to get the samples and then send them to him instead?”

“Dr. Graves said it was too risky, because applicants could bribe the company to send in a better specimen’s DNA.”

“Specimen? He makes those who applied sound like lab rats.”

“I know. But Elani called the final six, ‘her children.’”

“So you want to do a book on how this club is going to save the world? I think it might have possibilities. That theme is doing really well as we get closer to the year 2200.”

Bud slammed his palm on the table. “The Club is Dr. Graves’ plot to take control of the world, not save it. His final six are on track for positions of power.”

“You think we should contact law enforcement about this guy? I’ve heard of mad scientists before, but…”

“You’ve got your head in the sand worse than all those agents put together who turned me down.”

Tim stood. “Finish your meal. I’ll be right back.” He walked into the restroom and spoke to his smart watch. “Help me out here. Any chance what Bud Lee is saying is for real? Is he psycho or what?”

“Even if his story is not factual, you can always steer him to have you write a science fiction novel for him instead.”

“I hate writing fiction.”

“Then stay with this client as long as his story remains feasible. Partial payment is better than none.”

Tim returned to the dining room five minutes later carrying a bag.

“What’s that?” Bud asked while he swiped his Federal Social Identification Card through the robot waiter’s built-in scanner.

“Part of the leftovers from the kitchen,” Tim said.

“Health codes require that we dispose of all opened or exposed food and sanitize the entire facility daily to ensure that any pathogens deposited by our clientele are eradicated before we reopen at 11 a.m.,” the waiter said. “Would you like a reservation for lunch? My sensors indicate your metabolisms are low, especially Mr. Beheard’s.”

“No,” Bud said. He waited until he and Tim walked outside to offer his last bait. “It will be a best seller.”

That’s why almost a hundred agents turned you down and Ann sent you to me, Tim thought. I don’t care if it sells. I get my money up front.

“What do you think?” Bud nudged Tim’s arm as they descended a stairway to the tube trains.

“Look. Put yourself in my place. You are either a), crazy, b), your story is a figment of your over ripe imagination, c), you are mad at your former employers and want to get even in a book, or d), you have a story which might make you rich and famous and give me some work.”

“So you’ll help me?”

That depends, Tim thought. How much are you willing to pay me to write this book? “I don’t know. If this Dr. Graves character of yours is as evil as you claim he is…”

Tim ran his forefinger across his throat.

4

“You did what?” Elani Graves snatched a nearby vase and hurled it at her husband.

Dr. Graves ducked as the vase shattered against a wall. “I did it for you. You have been so depressed by our being childless. It was the only way. We can even have one of the children come live with us.”

“Live here? In Dr. Graves’ Mad House of Horrors? That’s what Bud Lee called it whenever he thought no one was listening. Why did you fire him? At least with him here I had someone to talk to.”

“His usefulness to us was over once The Club members gathered here.”

Elani grabbed her purse and stomped to the garage. “Well, perhaps my usefulness is over as well. I need some time alone.”

As Dr. Graves listened to the jeep speed off, he concluded Elani was bound for the casino where she would again gamble and drink away all her credits. He turned to the one he always considered more rational. “Computer, put a thousand credit limit on her card. What are the chances Elani will tell someone else about The Club?”

“If she drinks enough alcohol at the casino, there is a ninety-seven percent risk she will tell someone, perhaps even a stranger. If she remains sober, but finds a friend to tell her troubles to, there is a sixty-one percent risk that she will mention The Club. Is it time to implement Plan A?”

Dr. Graves looked at the door leading to the lab where he spent days and nights consumed by his vision. “First update me on The Club’s members.”

“Mr. Africa, Ms. Asia, Ms. India, and Mr. Island Nations are acting normally. However, Mr. Americas and Ms. Europe are not. There is a high probability that they will either remember what happened here or go insane while trying to remember what you did to them.”

“I thought you doubled the memory suppression impulses for them.”

“I did, but it’s not working.”

“Begin Plan A.”

The computer contacted the largest moving company in Rapid City. An hour later, a hovercopter lowered an empty steel pod onto the Graves’ driveway. The human pilot supervised two mover robots while they tagged every object pointed at by Graves in his laboratory. Within a half hour, they had the equipment packed and locked inside the pod.

“Where’s it going?” The supervisor tilted the clear visor downward in front of his face.

“Take it to St. Philomene’s Orphanage in Laredo, Texas. They can use the equipment in their school.”

The supervisor spoke to his visor. “Gross weight 2,974 pounds to Laredo, Texas.” Options flashed onto his visor and he read them to Dr. Graves. “It’s 12,239 credits by air, 10,846 credits by truck, or 9,260 credits by rail.”

“Rail is fine.” Dr. Graves ran his hand over the pod’s door. “Take good care of it.”

“Will do.” The supervisor ordered his helpers onto the hovercopter.

Dr. Graves waited until the cargo appeared to be a fly on the horizon before he stopped focusing on the pod dangling below the hovercopter. Back inside the house, he searched for items he feared might reveal his link to The Club and put them into the hoverbot’s basket. After inspecting every drawer and shelf twice, he ordered the robot outside.

“Take the items out and destroy them.”

The robot exited into the garden and dumped Dr. Graves’ notebooks, discs, and books, and the gifts the six members of The Club had given to Elani. It then aimed its built-in laser at the pile until ashes remained. Returning to his master’s side, it listened to Dr. Graves’ conversation on the vision phone. Chief Red Bear’s face filled the screen filling most of the den’s north wall.

“No, I haven’t seen her,” the Chief said. “You have another fight?”

Dr. Graves sighed. “Just a misunderstanding as usual. You ever go the extra mile for your wife and instead of her thanking you as she ought to, she gets angry?”

The Chief nodded. His wife did not suffer fools either. He ordered the casino’s 179 cameras to search for Elani, but each reported no sighting of her. “How did she get here?”

“The jeep.”

The Chief ordered the drone patrolling the 300-acre parking lot to search for “a 2093 black jeep registered to Dr. Graves.” A minute later the drone relayed an image of the vehicle.

“That’s it,” Dr. Graves said. “Perhaps she’s in the bathroom. Do you have cameras in there?”

“No. But cameras outside of them would have picked her up. Let me check the shuttle and taxi logs.”

He tapped a key on the four-foot wide keyboard that ran his casino of 45,000 electronic games, 200 blackjack tables, 120 poker tables, and other games of chance and forms of entertainment designed “to eventually scalp any customer foolish enough to keep playing.” Chief Red Bear surveyed the 109 wigs and toupees splattered with buffalo blood he had mounted as trophies on his office wall. Underneath them were names of the biggest losers at his casino: bureaucrats, executives, politicians, and film and music idols, who continued to arrive in personal jets no matter how many times they lost.

He smiled when Elani’s name flashed on the screen.

“Here she is. She boarded a taxi at 2:19 for Rapid City International. Boy, you must have had some fight.”

Dr. Graves sighed. “Thank you, Chief.”

The hover robot sensed the shift in its master’s brain waves. “May I fix you a tonic, sir?” His growing dark mood foreshadowed a storm of hurricane force if temper replaced depression. The robot’s rudimentary artificial emotions dreaded such storms, which would be directed at him because of Elani’s absence.

“Yes, I think I need one.”

The robot glided to the kitchen and activated the Happy Box, one of Dr. Graves’ many inventions. Its screen displayed various moods and scales of 1 to 10 next to each one. Because the robot selected 10 for anxiety, depression, funk, hubris, malaise, melancholy, and sadness, the mechanism prepared a mix of endorphins, beta blockers, kappa enhancers, and theta stimulators. The powders ran from the box’s many bins, down tubes and into the glass the robot held under the dispenser.

“Would you like it flavored with kefir or root beer or unflavored?”

“Kefir water. My digestive system is starting to act up again.”

The robot placed the glass under the tube that projected from the refrigerator. “Kefir water, triple strength with extra bacteria to calm the doctor’s upset digestive tract.” The command released enough liquid to cover the powders. Then the robot shook the concoction to dissolve them.

Dr. Graves swallowed the self-prescribed remedy in a single gulp. A minute later, his brain seemed to emerge from a dark fog. “Ah, much better. Computer, see if Elani bought a fare at Rapid City International.”

“Yes sir. A one-way seat to Atlanta, Georgia.”

“One-way? Whom does she know in Atlanta?”

“There are 129 contacts from her high school graduating class, fourteen from her college, and one sister who recently moved there.”

“Sister? Dial her for me.”

One thousand five hundred and two miles by car to the southeast, Elani’s sister answered her dashboard phone as she drove home from Atlanta International Airport.

“This is Tabitha.”

“I’m Dr. Graves, your sister’s husband. Is she there?”

Tabitha turned to her sister, who shook her head and pressed a forefinger against her lips.

“Uh, I haven’t really been in much contact with her. Anything you want me to tell her if she shows up here?”

“I finally came up with an even better plan for us to have children. It took a tonic to get my brain working properly.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me any of your personal business.”

“Elani has refused for years to have incubator children. All she had to do was donate an egg. Every female comes equipped with 70,000 or so of them.”

Tears fell onto Elani’s lap.

“Okay. If Elani does happen to show up, I’ll tell her to call you.”

“Tell her I love her. Please.”

Dr. Graves shut off the phone. “Another tonic, hoverbot. Or else I won’t get any sleep. Why did she leave me? Why is she so mean to me all of the time?”

Remembering the doctor’s last bout of sleeplessness, the hoverbot glided to the Happy Box to mix a triple strength sleeping tonic. He wondered if his master needed a terminal tonic instead, one to give him a permanent solution.

5

After much discussion, Bud convinced Tim to visit someone who could vouch for him. The first glimpse of their destination, a decaying building in Venice Beach’s poorest neighborhood, fed Tim’s doubts. It needed paint and a new roof.

They arrived at Bud’s church as his pastor wheeled his bicycle out of his office. His secretary robot stopped him.

“Two visitors are entering the narthex, Rev. Tully.”

He retreated to his office. “Tell them I can’t meet with them now and to make an appointment.”

Bud poked his head through the doorway. “Hey, Pastor Tully. This is the day that…”

“The Lord has made.” Rev. Tully gulped. Not only did he have to contend with his most irritating church member, but also a down and outer. The stranger’s worn clothing and disheveled hair signaled someone in need. “Hi, Bud.”

“Remember how I asked you to pray about my book? Here’s the answer to our prayers.” Bud introduced Tim.

Rev. Tully sighed. He parked his bike against a wall of his 50-square-foot office and listened to Bud describe Tim’s qualifications. “I see. Bud, I just have a few minutes. Why don’t you wait in the outer office and I’ll talk with Tim? Then I have to leave.”

Bud left and sat next to the secretary robot equipped with artificial empathy. His tone of voice and mannerisms betrayed a human in distress, most likely by the conversation about him in the next room. “Is there anything I can get you, Bud? A tranquility soda, perhaps. It contains non-GMO ingredients to calm one’s nerves.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

The robot’s right arm extended to its maximum length of nineteen feet and opened the small cooler’s lid. Its arm slid back into its plastic socket. “Help yourself.”

Bud chose the largest sized container. Half of its sweet liquid went down his throat before he sat down. “Can you search Pastor Tully’s sermons for any on conspiracies and make me a copy of them?”

“Certainly. Please give me your computer.”

Bud slid a silver plated ring from his finger and handed it to her.

Fifteen feet away, Bud’s destiny came to light for his pastor. “So he wants you to ghostwrite it? Interesting. If it sells well, I might have some work for you to do for me also.”

Tim relaxed for the first time since Bud had mentioned his pastor. All right. Maybe I’ve hit a string of paydays. Thank you, Jesus, thank you, thank you, Jesus. “That sounds great. Like you and Bud said, ‘this is the day that the Lord has made.’ God must have ordained our meeting today.”

Rev. Tully’s religious garbage meter, fine-tuned after thousands of encounters with pious people, alerted him. It amazed him how people could verbalize religious words without a life to back it up. “Please cut to the point.”

“Does Bud have a license to drink or use any drugs? Because of client confidentiality laws, it’s illegal for me to ask him.”

“Not that I know of. I can’t ask him that sort of thing either because of those laws.”

“Is he all there, up here?” Tim pointed at his head.

“Yes. At least I think so.”

“Does he have a vivid imagination?”

He nodded. “Sometimes. Why?”

Tim detailed how Bud said Dr. Graves planned to rule the world.

Rev. Tully cocked his head. “Maybe much of what Bud told you is true, but he drew the wrong conclusions.”

“What do you preach here?” Tim scanned the walls for a license from the Bureau of Churches.

“If you’re wondering if we are state approved, the answer is no.”

“But that means you have to pay corporate taxes. Do you at least still get income tax exemptions for your givers?”

“We lost the tax exemption for givers because a BOC undercover agent secretly taped one of my sermons on 1 Corinthians 6. The bureau accused me of being intolerant against fornicators, idol worshippers, adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, drunks, slanderers, and others who I said needed to repent based on Scripture. Over half of my flock left when their tithes and offerings were no longer tax deductible. I lost some others when we could no longer afford to heat the church during the winter.”

“But how do you survive?”

“We rent and our landlord is gracious. She sometimes trades our rent payments for repairs we make. You probably noticed how this place needs lots of them.” He stood and guided his bike into the outer office. “I have to work another job, too. In fact, I was headed to my other job when you two showed up. Sorry, but I have to be going.” He donned the mandated protective gear and walked his visitors to the nearest stairway descending to the subway.

“Your pastor is amazing,” Tim said as he and Bud boarded the train bound for San Bernardino. “Not many like him around any longer.”

“I knew he would convince you.” Bud ordered the computer embedded in his ring to on mode. “Play pastor’s sermon on conspiracies for Tim. Transmit it to his smart watch.”

Tim held his watch next to his ear and Bud his ring to his ear as the sermon began. Unauthorized noise would get them ejected at the next stop, so they set the volume to minimum. Tim enjoyed the pastor’s baritone voice:

“Many over the millenniums have lived in fear of conspiracies, especially during the last 200 years. You name it, there were freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, the top one percent of the wealthy, the Council of Fifty, the International Council of Churches, The Vatican, and on and on ad infinitum, all of them plotting to take over the world. But what does Scripture say about conspiracies?”

Bud elbowed Tim to get ready for what he believed would be the coup de grace, the grand slam walk off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Biblical passage to convince doubting Tim of Bud’s story:

“Look at Psalm 31:19 and 20: How great is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you, which you bestow in the sight of men on those who take refuge in you. In the shelter of your presence you hide them from the intrigues of men, in your dwelling you keep them safe from accusing tongues.”

Bud’s grin shrunk and pursed lips hid his teeth as the sermon continued:

“Now the word intrigues is also translated as conspiracies. So God’s goodness is great for those who fear Him instead of men. As a result, He even hides them in His presence, safe from any and every conspiracy; whether it’s some elite powerful group or some back biters at work or school who gossip about you.”

A pout replaced Bud’s upbeat mood by the time the train lurched to a stop at the first San Bernardino station. He stared at his feet as they exited it.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Tim said after the sermon ended. “My source believes more like you do than what your pastor said, so you haven’t struck out yet. In fact, some of his stories are even wilder than yours is.”

6

San Bernardino’s buildings extended deeper into the earth than those straddling earthquake fault lines to the west. Bud had never travelled so far underground.

“What level does your source live on?” The free fall sensation produced by the express elevator reminded Bud of the amusement parks of his youth.

“On 35-U.”

“Wow. That’s really deep. I’ve only been as far down as a 2-U level before.”

“That’s nothing. There’s another thirty levels below where my source lives.”

They exited the elevator and wound through corridors so narrow they seemed more of a maze than hallways to Bud. The 30-watt light sources embedded in the walls cast little light on the subterranean shadow lands. After they reached the source’s doorway, Bud felt more disoriented than when he had ridden The Adventure to Infinity and Beyond ride at Disney Universe at age six.

“Brent, open the door.” A series of five knocks relayed the long ago agreed on code.

On the other side of the door, Brent Fulsome tensed. He fingered one of the door’s five deadbolts and clutched the chair propped against the handle with his other hand. “Computer, scan hallway and identify who’s out there.” He turned to the one he interacted with more than humans.

“Two males are at the door. One resident is leaving her apartment. No others sighted. Shall I unlock the door for you?”

“Not yet. Is one of them really Tim Beheard?”

“Yes. The one who knocked matches facial features of human with that name who has visited here.”

“What do you want, Tim?”

“I need you to check out my client’s story. You’re going to love it.”

“No way. I told you to never bring anyone else here.”

“I have a bag of food.”

Brent’s mouth watered; his stomach growled because his food credits had run out two days earlier. “Computer, what’s in the bag?”

“Various food items. They appear to be from an eating establishment.”

“What’s your friend’s name, date of birth, and federal number?” Brent asked.

“My name’s Bud Lee. Born January 12, 2075. Federal Social Identification Number is 5A7-Q1-8N5T. Can we come in now?”

“Hold your pants on. Computer, run background check on him.”

“He appears to be clean. He has no employment or contract work with any government agency that I found.”

Hunger trumped paranoia.

Brent ordered his computer to open the door. Instead of shaking Bud’s outstretched hand, Brent yanked the bag away from Tim and dumped its contents on the small kitchen counter. He sorted the ready-to-eat items into a foot-high pile of popcorn, peanuts, pretzels, and candy, leftover munchies for the pot smokers at Barneys, while Tim rebagged the rest of the items. Some of the first handful shoved into Brent’s mouth was swallowed without chewing.

His frayed short pants and torn white T-shirt made Brent appear to be more of a scrounger than one who could help him, Bud thought. Brent’s five foot, eight inch, wiry body that appeared to contain no fat reminded Bud of his grandfather’s physique. “I don’t mean to interrupt your meal but Tim and I are on a tight deadline.” Bud leaned toward the door.

“Computer? Give further information on Bud Lee.”

“Data given by strange human matches a Bud Lee from Pasadena.”

Land of the rich and famous, Brent thought. Wonder if he’s part of the one percent? “Okay, what are today’s date and your favorite food, Bud?”

“6/3/2095. Buffalo.”

“Buffalo?” Brent gagged on bits of peanuts and pretzels. The gooey mess dislodged after Tim pounded on his back. It landed on Bud’s shirt. “Sorry. I haven’t been this hungry since the famine back in the 2050s. “

“You went through that?” Bud tried to wipe off the bits of saliva and food clinging to his shirt.

“Not voluntarily, Einstein. I was one of the last world population peak generation babies when it peaked at ten billion in 2049. Then the Great Famine hit because thirty percent of all crops were being used to produce biofuels. Because of that, the earth was back down to 8.2 billion people by 2069. Now we’re down to 7 billion thanks to the U.N.’s two-child rule.” Condensing factoids into short diatribes was Brent’s favorite passion, especially for someone who appeared to be even more naïve than Tim.

“But that famine was caused by global warming. The biofuels were helping fight global warming, right?”

Brent groaned. “Where did you find this one, Tim? He sounds so environmentally correct he probably even drinks biofuel.”

“Uh, is that why you wanted to know my favorite food?” Bud asked.

Brent pinched Bud’s cheek. “No. I was trying to check to be sure if you’re human. They have androids now with real human skin so I can’t tell for sure by touching you. Sure, your skin feels real. But if you ask a droid what their favorite food is, sometimes they hesitate just long enough to give themselves away. You didn’t hesitate. Besides, I doubt if any of the National Security Agency’s android programmers would program their spy androids to say they liked buffalo. That’s way too weird.”

Brent’s computer interrupted. “Background checks complete. Shall I continue with description?”

“No. Bring it up so only I can look at it.” Brent tapped his glasses to set their embedded screen on private mode. “Wow. You have quite a lineage. It says there are Knights Templar, Illuminati, and Triad connections to your ancestors. What’s your dad do?”

“He runs an import export business, mostly between here and China.”

“No lie? His ancestors probably traded with the first Knights Templar. Your dad imports illegal aliens, huh?”

Bud’s hands became fists. “No. He’s legit.”

“Okay, okay, partner. No offense intended. I’d offer you a Chill Out chocolate bar but I’m all out of them.”

“Well, that’s not funny.”

After searching for any missed ready-to-eat items in the bag, Brent handed it back to Tim. “Put away the rest.”

“Okay, boss.” Tim grumbled when he found the refrigerator and shelves empty and decided not to stock them. He calculated that the pile of goodies on Brent’s counter would keep him from starving until the first of the month.

“So what do you need to know, Tim?”

“Ask Bud. I’m starving because I didn’t get to eat any breakfast at Barney’s.” Tim took the texturized vegetable protein from the bag, placed most of it in the microwave and turned its dial to Well Done. Four seconds later the escaping aroma as the door popped open made him smack his lips. He dumped the smoking TVP onto a slice of stale rye bread, drenched it with all eight ketchup packets, and bit into his sandwich. A piece fell onto the floor.

Brent laughed as Tim devoured the dropped morsel. “So what’s the connection between you and Tim? When I did his background check, I never found any links of his ancestors to the kind of conspiracies yours were in.”

“I need to convince him about someone I worked for.”

“Good luck with that. Tim is Mr. Skeptic. What’s the name of your employer?”

“A couple named Dr. Graves and his wife Elani.”

“What’s his first name?”

“They never told me.”

“Where do they live?”

“Next to Cheyenne River Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota.”

“Computer, run background check on his employer.” Brent gestured for Bud to continue. “What did you do for them?”

“A little bit of everything. The important thing is that he had me do the legwork to set up a group he called The Club.”

“Is that that think tank kind of thing? I know someone who applied for it. I’ve been wondering why she didn’t get accepted. I helped her do her resume.”

Bud smirked at Tim. “Who knows? There were thousands of applicants. Maybe the computer who reviewed them didn’t like your friend’s background or your background. It checked into any associates of the applicants.”

“Wow. Your Dr. Graves is a man after my own heart. Can’t be too careful these days.” Brent glanced sideways at Bud. “Is some of what you’re cooking for me, Tim? What I ate was appetizers. I’m still hungry.”

Tim put the small uncooked portion of TVP into the microwave. “Sure. Okay if I take a shower before I cook it up for you?”

“Just keep it down to thirty seconds. My water credits are getting real low again.”

“Right.” Tim stepped into the bathroom. After undressing, he wet the small bar of soap and covered himself with suds until the bar dissolved. Then he hopped into the two-foot-wide shower and ordered thirty seconds of water, which left soap residue in his hair.

The last swallow of Carbo Fizz exploded in Brent’s stomach as it reacted with the salty food, and its gas exited his mouth as a belch. “Excuse my manners or lack of them, Mr. Lee. It’s pretty obvious you don’t normally hang around Mole People like Tim and me.” He wondered how many credits Bud’s tailored pants and shirt had cost. And his shoes, top of the line leather, probably came all the way from China on one of his dad’s boats. Brent’s smelly bare feet made him self-conscious. “Computer, you have any data yet?”

“Elani Graves. Born 2055. BS in nanotechnology. MS in hydroponics. She quit doctoral program in genetic engineering before its completion. Married in January 2078.”

“What about her husband?”

“No data found for Dr. Graves.”

Brent stopped trying to hide his bare feet. He sprang to the computer station that overshadowed everything else in his apartment. “You sure? You’ve always been able to find out something on everyone I’ve ever asked you about before.”

“I ran his name twice and even matching it to Elani Graves’ name produced nothing except their marriage date.”

Brent pumped his fist above his head. “A creeper.” He raised his hands and danced.

“Creeper? What’s that?” Bud asked.

Tim stepped from the bathroom. “Someone totally off the internet. At least the part of the net that Brent can hack into.”

“Anyone who’s a creeper has something to hide. I guarantee it.” Brent rubbed his hands together as he became the hunter.

“Excuse me,” the computer said. “There is data on his father, Dr. Sidney Graves, but it seems to be conflicting because the articles about him are not uniform.”

“Summarize any salient data,” Tim said.

“I am not programmed to obey your voice.”

“Go ahead and summarize.” Brent lowered his voice as if he were a spy.

The computer detailed Dr. Sid Graves’ work at NASA, and on ME-1 and ME-2, the first two missions to Mars with astronauts. After that, he had worked in organizations to reduce Earth’s population. The computer ended with an epitaph: “He committed suicide in 2049. For one so successful, such a death is illogical. Do you want me to try and access the Latter Day Saints’ genealogy computer in Utah for more data? That will require your special password.”

“No. That’s enough. I’m convinced that some kind of hanky-panky is going on with Dr. Graves and The Club.” Brent saw Tim rummaging through the bag in search of ready-to-eat items he might have missed earlier. “Ah, ah. The rest is mine for vetting Bud for you.”

“All I know for sure is that the good doctor and his wife exist. I should get some of this food besides that stinky vegetable protein I ate. It’s already giving me gas. You didn’t give us any good info on The Club.”

“When my friend applied for it, I ran the specs in the ad through my Conspiracy Buster Logarithm Program,” Brent said.

“And?” Bud leaned forward.

“It will cost you the rest of the food.”

Bud stepped into the kitchen, snatched the bag away from Tim and tossed it to Brent. “Okay, what did your conspiracy buster thing tell you about The Club?”

Brent frowned after examining the remnants in the bag. “Hey, there’s only some half empty jars of olives left. I hate olives.”

Bud stomped to the computer. “Download ten food credits from my card to your master’s card.” He waved his FSIN card at the monitor.

“I am not programmed to respond to your voice.”

“Do it.” Brent smiled. “Computer, also tell Bud what your Conspiracy Buster Logarithm Program came up with on The Club. He seems kind of anxious to find out.”

“Based on the expense and effort Dr. Graves went to, his selection of its members appears to have been his first priority. He advertised for members in 147 countries.”

“Bottom line, computer. Time is money.” Tim pointed at his watch.

“There is an eighty-three percent probability that Dr. Graves’ formulation of The Club is a part of a broader conspiracy.”

“What kind of conspiracy?” Tim asked.

“Based on the logarithms programmed into me, it appears to be a conspiracy to gain control.”

“Control of the world, right?” Bud asked.

“Possibly. I advise you to conduct further research.”

7

On the subterranean train ride back to Los Angeles, Bud pondered how to frame his request. He inspected the stain on his shirt, a reminder of where saliva and bits of food from Brent Fulsome the troglodyte had landed. His gaze moved to his right hand and he wondered what sorts of bacteria and viruses had transferred to it by wiping the mess off a half hour ago. The green scum on Brent Fulsome’s kitchen and bathroom sinks had kept Bud from using them.

Deadly organisms could still be alive, seeking entrance to his body. But what if he already had touched his mouth, eyes, ears, or nose since the tiny invaders landed on his shirt? Then they already were multiplying inside him by the second.

“Entering L.A. West Station. Next stop after L.A. West will be L.A. North Station.” The automated announcement snapped Bud back to other concerns.

“Well, this is my stop. I’ll get back to you with my estimate,” Tim said as he stood. “If you stay on this train, it will take you straight home to Pasadena.”

“We have one more preliminary step before I can sign the contract,” Bud said. They exited the train and walked to the nearest stairway. “You have to meet my father.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before we got off?” Tim did an about-face to return to the tracks. “Now we have to wait for the next train. You need to learn to speak up more.”

“Uh, my father is very formal and you are dressed very casually.”

Tim examined his pants and shirt. “Hope you aren’t expecting me to show up in a tux. In fact, I don’t even have a suit at my apartment. But there might still be one at my wife’s house if she didn’t throw my clothes away.”

“You’re married?”

“We’re separated. Wait. I can borrow a suit from my neighbor instead.”

When they reached Tim’s living complex, a miffed little girl met them in the lobby.

“Where have you been?” June thrust her face at Tim. “The clerk said you weren’t home.” She pointed at the robot who monitored all visitors and allowed them access to the elevators if the asked for resident answered his phone call. “He wouldn’t let me in even when I said I had to give something to Moose.”

“Sorry, I’ve been sort of busy,” Tim said.

“I found Moose some fish.” June pulled a can of tuna from her pack.

Scenes of eating the chunks of fish and letting his cat have the smallest pieces and liquid made Tim grab for it.

June dropped the can back into her pack. “No way. I get to visit Moose because I had to wait so long.”

* * *

Moose hid under Tim’s bed when she heard more than one person entering the apartment. But June’s, “Here kitty, kitty,” brought her out of hiding.

“I’ll check on borrowing that suit while you two get acquainted.” Tim backed out through the still open door.

Bud emerged from the bathroom, relieved to have at last washed the residue of his visit to Brent Fulsome from his hands. He dried them on his pants because the sole towel in the bathroom smelled of mold and mildew.

“Isn’t this place nice?” June asked.

“Sort of small.” He wondered how Mole People such as Tim maintained their sanity living in a space smaller than Bud’s bedroom.

“But at least it’s warm and safe in here. And he can even have a pet like Moose.” She continued to stroke the cat, which purred and massaged June’s legs. “Where do you live?”

“In Pasadena.”

“Oh, that’s a wonderful place. You’re really lucky.”

“How about you? Where do you live?”

Her head sagged. “Outside, sometimes. We got kicked out of our apartment because they said my dad is a sub…subver…”

“Subversive?” Bud took a step back. He wondered if the lobby’s cameras had recorded him standing near June. “Was your father ever sent to the L.A. Detention Center?”

“Just for a little while. He said they didn’t have any evidence so they let him go. But our landlord was mean and he kicked us out after that.”

Bud studied the youngster. One word seemed adequate to describe her: innocent. But also wise beyond her years because of too much life too soon.

He remembered a recent sermon of Pastor Tully about how, “God expects us to care for widows and orphans.” The rational part of Bud’s soul tried to analyze June’s sad tale so he could put it out of his mind and focus on his book. She’s not an orphan. Besides, there must be tens of thousands just like her. Maybe even hundreds of thousands in SLD.

But placing her into his often used, “sure, this person is needy but not as bad off as…” category did not ease his conscience. After a minute of turmoil, he called his church. The secretary robot answered and placed June’s family’s name on the list for shelter. When the call ended, tears were dampening Moose’s fur. The cat responded by licking June’s damp, salty cheeks.

“Why do you want to help us out? I just met you. The only other person who cares about us is Tim.” She wiped her tears with the sleeve of her torn windbreaker.

“Because…because…”

Part of Bud wanted to say, ‘I love you,’ but expressing emotion had never been easy for him. His throat tightened, making his words raspy. “Because it’s the right thing to do, I guess.” He turned when his eyes began to glisten.

Tim returned as Bud pretended to sneeze and blow his nose. “No luck. My neighbor’s suit didn’t fit me. I called my wife and she said she still hasn’t given away my clothes.”

* * *

Bethany Beheard rummaged through the closet containing her husband’s finest clothes, remnants of his better days, “before he went off the deep end,” her usual explanation about their separation.

This was her least favorite room of the modest 1,173 square-foot house. She never bothered to clean or organize it as she did weekly for the rest of her home. Over time, it took on the smell and appearance of a tomb. Into it she had crammed every reminder of Tim and their marriage.

She stared at the “Most Likely to Succeed” plaque, awarded by Tim’s journalism club during college. Its words cut her soul.

“Most likely to fail is more like it.” She shook her head while she pulled the one suit without holes from the hiding place of the moths she hoped would consume all of his clothes. Maybe she could even convince them to eat the other items – photos, gifts…Not only was he most likely to succeed, but so was their marriage, according to family and friends.

A year younger than Tim, she had abandoned her dream to be a doctor to marry him during his senior year of college. So she got her PHT, Put Husband Through, instead of the M.D. she wanted. Bethany had worked at one of the many agri-plants in San Bernardino, which converted produce into vegetable, carb, and protein products. America’s growing population demanded the compact, high density food.

At first, Tim did succeed; quickly moving up from a small daily paper to a medium sized one to the largest in the western United States, the SLD Times. Always restless, Tim also moonlighted, writing articles for other publications by using pen names to deceive his editors at the Times. Back then, they even made time for church, she in the choir and he at most worship services.

But both soon became so exhausted by work schedules that they spent little time discussing what she deemed important. How else could they afford the house she still lived in? It needed major repairs after the 2035 quake and tsunami, but by the time they bought it in 2062, it had upgrades, all the current appliances and comforts, all computer controlled.

Their first child, a daughter, arrived three years later. A son came twelve years after her.

Regrets always nagged Bethany if she entered the room. After much reflection, Bethany concluded their marriage, their family, everything, began to unravel when a literary agent who she freelanced for had contacted them with a need.

“My client has a solid plot and decent enough characters but she can’t connect the dots into a believable and enjoyable story,” the agent had said. “Tim, you could ghostwrite it and Bethany could edit it. You’ve done great work on those other books you edited for me, Bethany. Besides, it will need a woman’s touch to put back in all of what Tim leaves out.”

“You mean the mush, the kissy poo, the romance?” Tim had held his nose.

Bethany shut the door to reminders of what seemed a lifetime ago. Why did I ever agree to let Ann talk to Tim about that book?

* * *

Bud daydreamed about his book while they walked the four blocks from the train station to Tim’s former home in the north central part of Los Angeles. Almost one of every two houses they passed also had an underground dwelling, which meant two homeowners each for those lots.

The neighborhood’s residents included bureaucrats who worked at the city, county, state, federal, and international government buildings in downtown Los Angeles; lower tier actors who commuted to the studios; and the carpenters, electricians, and robot wranglers who built and maintained the sets at the studios. There were younger couples starting their life together, and older folks, some divorced or widowed, lonely and wondering why life had dealt them such a bad hand of cards.

Tim hesitated at the front door. “Let me do the talking so we can get in and out of there without a fight.”

Bud nodded.

Bethany’s smile after she opened the door soothed their fears. “So you’re Tim’s client?” Bethany coughed. “Been a while since you had one, huh, dear? You two please sit down while I get you something to drink. You want anything, dear?”

“No thank you.” Tim sat back and planted his feet on the mahogany coffee table to try and reclaim ownership of the house. Why did he feel like a guest in the house he had worked for decades to pay off? Maybe because she called him, dear. That’s it. What kind of game is she playing this time, he wondered.

“Sort of ironic, isn’t it?” Bethany handed a glass of vegetable juice to Bud and the blue suit to her estranged husband.

“My blue suit is ironic?”

“No, silly. Ann got you that job that convinced you to become a freelance writer full time and now all these years later she sends Bud your way. Maybe this time around you can finally come to your senses and get a real job like the one you quit because you became a freelancer.”

“Don’t start in on me!” Tim stood and threw the freshly pressed suit onto the many shades of the Saltillo tiles. “I always worked my butt off to take care of you and the kids. Sure, I didn’t make as much by freelancing. But if you would have gone back to work, it would have worked out okay.”

“What about your children? The least you could have done is send us more money after you moved out.”

“Nah, nah, nah. Still the same old nagger. You’re just a gold digger. Go ahead and get a divorce. Only now, I won’t have to pay child support, just alimony to support your worthless butt.”

Bethany stepped away from the source of her pain, too much hurt bottled up inside her soul for too many years. The argument went back and forth until Bud placed his half-finished drink on the table and stood. Part of him wanted to continue to watch the fight. He was mystified by Bethany’s beauty, her long brunette hair and brown eyes, their radiance intensifying as her anger had risen.

“Excuse me. Forgive me, Mrs. Beheard, but we have to be getting to my home for dinner. It’s getting late.”

The crimson-faced, spittle launching couple turned and stared at him. In their rage, they had forgotten the witness to their ten rounds, winner-take-all, verbal slugfest.

Tim collapsed onto the couch as Bethany went from shaking her finger at him to sobbing. “Go ahead and be bull-headed, Tim. You always were and always will be. I give up.”

Bud handed Tim the crumpled suit. He took it to the room he called Forget Me Not Land and changed into it. When he returned to the living room, he handed Bud a book titled, Writing the Next Best Seller and said, “So we can impress your old man.”

Tim waited until they stood at the front door to say good bye. He cupped his hands and yelled at the closed door of the room where his two children had been conceived.

“Dear, thank you for the suit, dear. And thanks for all the drama, dear. Bud enjoyed your performance, dear. Dear, you should win an Oscar…”

He jumped through the front door and ran down the brick walkway after Bethany emerged from the bedroom armed with a fist.

She shook it while launching her final salvos at him from the front porch.

“There he goes again, the poor tortured writer that nobody understands. If you had any sense, Mr. Lee, you’d dump that loser like I did.”

8

“Anything I should or shouldn’t say?” Tim asked.

Bud frowned. “Just don’t kowtow or try to impress my father. He will see right through you, like your wife does.”

Bud’s mother Nora met them at the Pasadena North train station in her biofuel Toyota. Her skin glowed and short black hair had the silky quality of her long, traditional gown, one embroidered with red, blue, and yellow designs, an heirloom she reserved for guests to her home.

“You didn’t have to pick us up, Mom.”

“Your father sent me because you are already twenty minutes late.” She let the computer drive the car while she monitored the dinner preparations at her home. “Place the soup on the table and check the oven for the prawns and dim sum,” she ordered while she watched her robot maid from the dashboard screen.

Judging by the few vehicles parked in front of the homes on the Lees’ block, Tim knew that few, if any of them, had a second home buried underneath the ones he could see. Tranquility, a laid back feeling of relaxation permeated the neighborhood. Tim remembered that his had been like this one when he and Bethany had moved into their house. But now it required constant security against burglars.

Bud’s father Chan shepherded them to the table after a brief introduction. His large smile seemed disproportionate to the rest of his 145-pound body. He let the other three make small talk during soup and dim sum courses and sampled a morsel of the fried prawns, beef chow mien, and fried rice dishes before passing them to Tim.

“Delicious as usual, Nora, even though you had to leave the kitchen to fetch them from the station,” Chan said.

Tim blinked as he saw the similarities of father and son. Both possessed a similar intensity, as if consumed by the same mission. “A true feast, Mr. Lee.”

“You may call me Chan. So what do you truly think of my son’s plan of writing a book about this mysterious group he calls The Club?”

“I think it has definite possibilities.” Like father, like son, Tim thought. Both of them like to get down to business.

“Yes, I guess anything is possible. But since he told me of his latest desire to get rich quickly so he can at last be free of his mother and me, I have done a little research. About 120,000 new books a day are published worldwide. Only a tiny fraction of them involve the use of a traditional publisher. The rest are published by the author.”

“Yeah. Once they let the genie of self-publishing out of the bottle back at the turn of the century, there was no going back to writers having to get an agent, who got them a publisher.”

“But much less than one percent of self-published books sell over fifty copies. Can your ghost writing skills improve my son’s chances?”

Tim choked on a piece of prawn. Bud relaxed when the morsel ended up in his guest’s napkin and not on his mother’s silk embroidered heirloom tablecloth from the eighteenth century. “Excuse me. I promise to do my best work.”

“Like you did on this book?” Chan pulled a paperback from its hiding place under the table.

Tim gulped. “Showdown in Hong Kong? I thought it was only available from computer subscription services that include old books.”

“My friend at the bookstore found me this copy. It took him a while to track down something you had ghostwritten. Luckily, the alleged author of Showdown in Hong Kong thanked you as an advisor in her acknowledgements.”

“Dad only reads hardbacks and paperbacks.” Bud cringed as his father opened the book.

“Here is a passage I marked: ‘Tired from his blood lust frenzy of killing half of the Dragon Master’s gang, Reg settled onto his bed and wondered if any of Hong Kong’s whores could be trusted any longer. Mai-Ling had betrayed him.’”

Tim blushed. “I’m afraid the author rewrote much of what I wrote for her original manuscript. She said it needed more violence and sex. I couldn’t afford to play the starving writer with a wife and kid and another kid on the way so I took the job.”

“Because ghost writing pays extremely well?”

“Sometimes.”

“You see, I have agreed to underwrite my son’s adventures one last time. So I will be the one paying you.”

Tim turned to Bud, who pretended to study his food.

“And what about libel if Bud’s subjects object to what he and you write about them? Are you sued as well?”

“I’m afraid so,” Tim said. “Most of the recent court cases have left everyone on the hook. You name it, the author, editor, publisher. Sometimes they even try to go after the proofreader.”

“So what is your strategy for avoiding libel?”

“Well, my Libel and the Law prof in college taught us the DIPPER Rule: defamation, identification, and publication equal libel. To guard against it, use a publisher, editor, and redaction to eliminate any libel from the manuscript before it gets published.”

“Redaction?”

“In questionable cases, it’s smart to run the manuscript by the people being written about and give them a chance to clarify or rebut what is being published.”

“I see. But libel remains my greatest concern.”

My bill to you would be my greatest concern if I were in your shoes, Tim thought.

After the meal ended, Chan led Tim outside for the final test of his guest. Half his backyard contained dwarf fruit trees, apple, orange, lemon, fig, cherry, walnut, avocado, and pistachio. Their size came from Chan’s grandfather growing the trees’ forebears in containers and teaching his grandson how to one day plant the smallest specimens in the ground. A pond’s koi, perch, and goldfish swam to their master.

Chan pulled two containers from the beam of an overhead trellis and handed one to Tim.

“I hope you don’t mind my many questions.”

“No.” Tim stared at the box of dried worms, ants, crickets, grasshoppers, flies, and moths. “I’d probably do the same if I were in your position.”

The largest fish crowded closest to Chan and devoured every dried insect tossed onto the water while the smaller fish darted around the edges of the feeding frenzy, fearful of offending the larger ones enough to be eaten alive. After a few minutes, Tim walked onto the ornate hand carved bridge over the pond’s middle and called out to the hungriest fish.

“Hey, small fry. Come over here.” When Tim dumped half of his container into the water, a school of the smallest fish swam to the floating meal.

Bud excused himself. “I need to check on Mrs. Kleindiest next door.” He exited through a side gate.

“I hope you can help tutor my son,” Chan shook his head.

“I’ll teach him all I know about writing, sir.”

“You and I both know there is very little, if any, chance that a traditional publisher will publish such a book. I even checked with a friend of mine in the business. She said there is a huge market for predictions for the year 2200. There’s a lot of doom and gloom being forecast.”

“I know. Listen, if you think this is wrong for him, I’ll tell Bud I can’t do it.” Tim thought of his own children’s idealism while he calculated whether someone who could afford top of the line food for his fish would also be willing to write a check for his time and services rendered so far.

“No. Bud needs to get this out of his system for good. Then he can settle down in the life I have prepared for him.” He shook Tim’s hand. “Besides, I know now I can trust you.”

Tim cocked his head. “Oh?”

“Yes. When you fed the smaller fish I knew you have a heart for people like my son. He’s a small fish trying to become a big one in a larger pond than I can offer.”

“There’s some of that in all of us.”

“Just be careful. There is an old saying: ‘To be like the gardener’s dog, who neither eats vegetables or lets anyone else eat them.’ I fear that Dr. Graves is such a dog.”

* * *

Next door, Bud found his friend looking wasted and trying to rest on a couch. Mrs. Kleindiest’s skin was pale and felt hot to his touch, her breaths sounded shallow, whiny rasps rattling out of her quivering throat. A widow, she depended on neighbors to survive. Her favorite and most loyal of all was Bud.

“Why didn’t you call and tell me how sick you were?” Bud asked.

“I did not want to disturb your dinner party. Your mother invited me. She is so kind.”

Bud turned to ask a computer to take her vital signs and then relay them to her doctor before remembering she did not own one, not even a Life Alert Band he had offered to buy for her last birthday. Instead, he dialed her ancient phone, a relic from the previous century, and summoned an ambulance. Then he spent an hour of trying to comfort her through alternating fever and chills.

By the time the ambulance driver knocked on the front door, Mrs. Kleindiest slipped in and out of consciousness. Her fate had been decided thousands of miles away a week earlier during a meeting of the National Health Directorate’s czar and her top lieutenants.

The federal agency that controlled allocation of health resources nationwide, the directorate’s decisions originated in computer models and algorithms. Such data for San Los Diego had turned grim.

“Current care resources are overwhelmed for SLD,” the computer had said. “Recommend immediate rationing of services.”

“What if we bump some of the patients from Level 4 Care into Level 5 Care?” The fattest and most pragmatic of the eleven seated at the table said. A quick and unanimous vote had passed the recommendation.

“Computer, how many patients need to be moved from Level 4 to Level 5 Care to alleviate the current crisis in SLD?”

“At least 217,914 must be re-categorized into Level 5.”

Another vote was taken and unbeknownst to her, Mrs. Kleindiest became one of those 217,914 Level 4 Care patients randomly chosen to enter Level 5 Care the next time they sought medical treatment or tried to fill a prescription.

“Is she your mom?” The ambulance driver studied the two strangers’ faces, searching for a resemblance between what appeared to be a German and a Chinese.

“No. I live next door.”

“Any nearby next of kin?”

“Her son lives out of state.”

The driver assumed his other duties as a paramedic and placed a hand held unit on the table next to his patient’s bed. He pulled Bud into the hallway and shut the bedroom door.

“Look, man. Even in a deep coma, they can still hear sometimes.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I have to see the readings first, okay? Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to hear if you were in her condition.”

They reentered the room and the paramedic read the device’s data. “I have to take her in.”

“Can I ride along?”

“Sorry. That’s prohibited by law.”

“Which healing center is she going to?”

“Altadena H C. Help me get her onto the gurney.”

Mrs. Kleindiest squeezed Bud’s hand before the ambulance’s doors shut, sealing her in what she feared was a coffin. Her driver steered the ambulance toward the healing center, hoping that by the time he arrived, the current rationing had been lifted. He did not know of the vote taken by the National Health Directorate a week ago. No human outside the room where the vote was cast knew either.

Its ramifications were fed into a computer that transmitted them to the computer that controlled health allocations for SLD, which in turn passed them along to those who oversaw Level 5 Care. But the ambulance driver always knew when rationing was in effect based on the actions of those he delivered his patients to. He slowed the ambulance’s electric motor, hoping to buy Mrs. Kleindiest enough time in case the current rationing might end.

“Increase speed by twelve miles an hour,” a metallic voice ordered him. He obeyed. If not, he would be fired.

A nurse android met him at the healing center’s loading dock for emergency vehicles. After reciting the patient’s name, the driver plugged his hand held unit into the android’s bosom. A second later, the mechanical nurse pulled out the device and handed it back.

“You do not need to accompany me.” She smiled at him before speaking into her built-in microphone connecting her to the healing center’s communications network. “Level 5 Care Ward, prepare for new patient.” She pushed the gurney onto the ramp leading to the underground floors of the hospital.

The driver cursed and slammed the door and hopped back into his vehicle. Details of five more calls were flashing on the windshield. He touched the address of the first one and his electric vehicle rolled out of the parking lot as he reached for a Honey Calmer Bar to steel himself for what he hoped would not be a repeat of his last call.

Inside the subterranean ward, a robot orderly wheeled the patient closest to death from his room to make space for Mrs. Kleindiest. Her nurse android ordered the orderly to her bedside.

“Start the end-of-life pain medication to keep her sedated. If her pain level reaches five or higher, increase the dose to termination level. Once the IV is started, take the patient in the hallway that leads to the crematorium. These humans can’t accept that their usefulness is over.”

Those whose vote placed Mrs. Kleindiest here to die all alone had also mandated Level 5 Care would no longer include food and water, even if a patient regained consciousness.

The bureaucrats making such regulations had exempted themselves, their families, and cronies by law from ever being placed into Level 5 Care.

Someone had to live long, ripe lives of ensuring the fates of hundreds of millions.

9

Brent Fulsome’s earliest years were filled with hunger.

The Great Famine began the year he was born, 2052. Most of those who starved to death lived in Asia, Africa, and Europe. But several million also perished in America, including Brent’s brother and sister and two cousins. His mother’s breast milk had saved him. To survive, Brent’s parents became sharecroppers until the famine subsided. Then they bought a tiny piece of God’s green earth.

“We will never go hungry again,” Brent’s father had vowed.

And Brent had not, until he had moved to SLD to work on his master’s degree at the University of San Los Diego. For a year, he lived in the smallest apartment allowed by law and bartered most of his energy, travel, and food credits to pay for his tuition.

Hunger returned. As usual, it awoke him.

He rolled from his bed and walked four steps to the kitchen. Three half full jars of olives sat next to an empty texturized vegetable protein container turned black by invading ants. Brent wet his finger with saliva and poked it into the TVP container until a dozen ants climbed onto it. He dislodged the insects in his mouth and chewed what he called LIP, Living Insect Protein. The ants tasted bitter, almost acidic.

If I had some chocolate, I could put a chunk of it in the empty TVP container and cook it in the microwave and make chocolate covered ants.

He abandoned his midnight snack after the computer came to life and said, “Incoming e-mail.”

Brent sat back down on his bed, which doubled as a chair for his kitchen and computer station. The message read:

Hello:

Got your letter. Hope you feel better. Some time other than next year would be best for me to visit. Hope to fly solo soon. Pilot training is a monumental achievement. Maybe finally for us the future can include some short trips by air. Sure hope so.

Roger Z

The letter Z used in the last name told Brent the message contained another hidden one written in code. The greeting of Hello alerted him that Code 5 would reveal the e-mail’s hidden message. Brent ran his hand under the mattress and found the small folded piece of paper containing the twelve codes he and the e-mail’s sender used. Code 5 required him to underline the first letter of the first word in the first sentence, the second letter of the second word in the second sentence, the third letter…

He applied the code until the message now read:

Hello:

Got your letter. Hope you feel better. Some time other than next year would be best for me to visit. Hope to fly solo soon. Pilot training is a monumental achievement. Maybe finally for us the future can include some short trips by air. Sure hope so.

Roger Z

Then he pieced the underlined letters together. “G, o, h, o, m, e.”

Fear replaced hunger. “Go home.”

He spent the rest of the night downloading computer files to the computer in his glasses and then emptying his desktop computer of every bit and byte it contained, including its operating system.

At dawn, he packed a small carry-on backpack. Holding his nose, he ate the olives and drank their brine. Then he took the elevator to 1-U and Big Al’s apartment.

Every living complex contained at least one, the King Mole who traded in credits and made a better than average living doing so. For Brent’s building, Big Al, a 255-pound transplanted New Yorker, was king. Some claimed he even bartered with the elite who dwelled above ground, a rarity for a King Mole.

Big Al grumbled because someone dared to call on him before 9 a.m., the normal start of his illegal workday.

“What do youse want? It’s too early. Go away.” Big Al yelled at the door after Brent’s pounding roused him.

“It’s me, Brent.”

“Brent, sment. Come back later after I get out of bed.”

“Please, Big Al, it’s an emergency.”

“Everything’s an emergency for everyone these days.” Big Al ordered his computer to open the door and Brent stepped into a studio apartment twice the size of his.

Big Al told his wife to go back to sleep as he propped his and her pillows behind him to sit up in their king-sized bed. He eyed his unwelcome visitor after wiping crusty yellow matter from his eyelids. “It’s going to cost you extra for waking me up like you did.”

“I need to leave in a hurry for home. How many transportation credits can you give me for the three days of rent credits left for this month?”

“What floor you live on?”

“Down on 35-U.”

“Those apartments are only 120-square feet. I can give you 280 travel credits. Take it or leave it.”

“But that will only get me to Texas. Here. How much for all of my stuff inside of it?” When Brent pushed the frame of his glasses a hologram of his apartment appeared in front of Big Al’s large red nose, its capillaries destroyed by too much alcohol drunk during the electronic pawn broker’s fifty years.

“What else you got? A bed and a table with a computer is all? That’s it? Where’s your TV?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Okay. Since it’s you, I can give you another 300 credits. But that’s all. No more.” Big Al returned his wife’s pillow under her head and lay back down on his.

“But the computer cost me 500 credits. You know that. I got it from you.”

“You’re breaking my heart. Take it or leave it.”

Brent pulled out his FSIN card. He had intended to mention the computer no longer held the operating system it had when he bought it from Big Al. But now, he no longer cared. “Okay. You win, you shyster.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, punk. Computer, transfer lease and contents of his apartment into my name and transfer 550 credits—”

“No, 580 credits.”

“You just lost 30 credits for besmirching my fine reputation by calling me a shyster, wise guy.”

Brent cursed. “Okay, okay.”

“Boy, you are really a pain early in the morning. Computer, put 550 credits onto monkey face’s card here.”

A beam shot from the computer onto Brent’s card.

“Now get on out of here. I need some more sleep. Today’s my day to go to the track. They’re running cheetahs today. Computer, give me a dose of melatonin.”

A mask attached to a clear hose dropped from a rectangular cabinet fastened to the ceiling above his bed. After covering his nose and mouth with the mask, Big Al inhaled deeply. He was snoring before Brent reached the hallway.

As Brent exited his living complex and walked to the closest stairway to the underground train, he wondered if he would be able to return to SLD to continue his training of city dwellers in the art of urban survival. They must be calling me back home to give me my next assignment in person, he thought. It’s too risky to give it to me by phone or email.

He ducked as two drones buzzed three feet over his head. They stopped, one in front of and the other behind an ancient fuel burning car. Its driver stomped on its brake pedal.

“Pull the car to the curb,” both drones’ speakers relayed the order from SLD Pollution Control’s headquarters, fifty-two miles to the west. After the driver had parked her car at the curb, the drone hovering inches from her back window shot up into the sky and flew west to its next assignment. The one hovering in front of her windshield moved to the driver’s side window.

“Your car has been disabled by my controls,” the pollution control technician said through the drone’s speaker. “It will be towed away at your expense because our sensors indicated that it is a gross polluter.”

The sobbing, trembling woman exited her car, her only means of transportation for the last twenty-four years. “But I have a doctor’s appointment. How…?” Her sobs choked off her plea.

“You may take the subway trains to your destination. Good-bye.” The drone rose thirty feet and continued its preprogrammed route, searching for other violators.

Brent walked over to the crying woman. She reminded him of his mother.

“Ma’am, I’m heading toward the subway myself. May I walk with you there?” He gently held her shaking right forearm in his hands to steady it.

“Would you, please? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have the credits to get my car repaired, let alone pay the towing charge.”

Forget SLD, Brent thought. I’m not coming back here even if they say they’ll pay me next time.

10

Because his trip involved crossing state lines, Brent encountered a human being at SLD’s Central Station. She seemed more robotic than any android Brent had met, which led him to believe she was a new generation of androids being introduced as TSA agents.

“Destination?” the agent asked him.

“It’s Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, Kentucky.”

“Purpose of trip?”

“Cave exploration.”

“Do you possess cave exploration rating and license?”

“Yes.” A copy of the license materialized as a hologram from his glasses. It could project no further than the bullet, germ, and laser proof cocoon encasing the TSA agent.

“Please hold your FSIN card up to the glass.” Brent obeyed and she scanned it. “Is your trip related to research for the degree you are working on?”

“What difference does that make?”

“The government is authorized by the Constitution to regulate all interstate commerce. Your planned crossing of state lines makes you interstate commerce. Answer the question or your trip will be denied.”

“It’s recreational and educational. I’m killing two birds with one stone.”

She turned and stared at him from an angle, searching for any telltale sign. “Using the word killing is forbidden on all modes of transportation regulated by the TSA.”

“I’m sorry. I’m tired. I forgot.”

“Enjoy your trip. Next in line, step forward please.”

“Thank you.” For nothing.

Brent walked through the probe scanner, which searched passengers for weapons, including chemical and biological agents, explosives, and body readings outside accepted limits. A red light blinked and a buzzer sounded as Brent exited the scanner.

“Follow me, please.” A uniformed TSA agent led him to a side room. Its steel door locked behind them after they stepped inside. “Remove your clothing.”

Brent obeyed and shivered while the agent shook his clothing and turned its pockets inside out. She handed them back to him and then searched his carryon bag. While Brent repacked it, she read from a plastic card.

“Because your blood pressure and pulse rates were high, we are required to ask you the following questions. Do you have a medical condition?”

“No.”

“Are you…” Twenty questions and answers later, Brent caught his eastbound train seconds before its doors shut. He dozed off as it reached its maximum 350 mph speed in the desert east of San Bernardino.

Seated next to him was an eleven-year-old boy whose parents chatted across the aisle. His seatmate’s restlessness woke Brent. The boy kept leaning over him to get a better view.

“Hey, mister. Are we in Arizona yet?”

Brent glanced to his right and saw the morning sun’s rays dancing off of the Salton Sea. “Almost.”

“All right.” The boy turned to his father. “Hey, Dad. Give me the map so I know when to get ready to start shooting at them.”

“Okay, son.” The suit clad man opened a briefcase emblazoned with an official looking seal. “Here you go.”

Brent peeked at the two-foot-square map the man gave his son. He squirmed when he saw a seal in its top right corner matched the one on the briefcase. It read: House Committee on Terrorism.

“Hey, mister. Where are we on this map?” the boy asked.

Brent studied the map and then looked through the window. A small portion of the Salton Sea was still visible. “We must be right about here.” He tapped the boundary line separating California from Arizona on the full color map.

“Yay. We’re almost in rebel territory.”

Brent had read the news stories of Congress debating whether to strengthen the Internal Terrorism Act of 2052 because of “rebels.” It had been enacted to restore order when famine first hit the largest cities, then the smaller ones, and lastly, rural areas. The act’s definition of terrorism was broad, including the “hoarding of food.”

Now, forty-three years later, pockets of resistance grew against living lives monitored by robots, androids, computers, and the bureaucrats who controlled them. Moving from Tennessee to San Los Diego to attend college was Brent’s cover story, told even to friends such as Tim Beheard. His real mission included teaching survival skills to rebels scattered throughout SLD.

But regulations prohibiting more than two visitors at a time in any residence had limited Brent’s training sessions. Instead of equipping the hoped-for 5,000 with survival skills, he had trained almost 700 before the coded e-mail ordered him to return home.

“What was that you said about shooting, kid?” Brent asked.

“Dad told me that we’re bound to hit some rebel agitators before we get to D. C.” The boy pointed to the seat in front of him and pulled Brent closer with his other hand.

“The woman in front of us looks like a rebel,” he whispered. “Look for yourself and tell me what you think about her.”

Brent’s eyes widened until more white than color showed. “On our train?” He stretched far enough to catch a glimpse of the suspect and saw a woman dressed in red jeans and wearing an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. Brent nodded as he sat back down. “I think you’re right, partner. I sure lucked out by sitting next to you. My name’s Brent. What’s your name?”

“William.” Satisfied no one was peeking, he pulled a cylinder the size of a lipstick tube from his white shirt pocket and pointed it at the window. “The rebels will be sorry. Just wait and see.”

Brent studied the metal object, unlike any of the weapons he had ever seen or heard of. “What’s that?”

“It’s a Minder Blinder. One blast can temporarily blind the bad guys. The second blast messes their heads up so they can’t think right and remember what it was that they wanted to do to you.”

“What’s your dad do?”

“He’s a congressman.”

“Hey, why don’t we switch seats so you can get a better aim at any rebels who might attack our train?”

“All right.” William stood and almost landed in Brent’s lap in his haste to gain the better vantage point. “I wanted to ask you to trade seats when we first got on the train, but Mom said it’s not polite. You’re all right, mister.”

Brent settled into the aisle seat as William pressed his face against the window. “That’s quite a boy you have there.” Brent spoke to a man consumed by his work.

“Huh?” The father glanced up from his open briefcase as the computer buried in the frame of Brent’s glasses zoomed in on the document he held and recorded an image before the briefcase closed on it. “Yes, we’re very proud of him.” He squeezed his wife’s hand.

“I’m Brent Fulsome.”

“I’m Representative Larry Turner. This is my wife Toni. She runs my campaigns. We like to keep it in the family.” She smiled and waved at Brent. “How do you like my train?”

“Your train?”

“That’s right. Congress is working on a bill to nationalize the entire rail system. Once we do, the trains will really run on time. Just wait and see.”

Their conversation danced around controversy, two strangers trying to be cordial until the noon meal was announced.

“Well, we’ll be heading to the dining car in ten minutes. Care to join us?”

“Thank you, but I like to snack.” Brent lied as he pointed at his bag, stashed on the rack above them. It contained no food.

“Well that’s one thing that will change when we nationalize the railroads. We’re making it mandatory for them to include meals with every fare that’s for trips over 1,000 miles.”

“But won’t that make the tickets really expensive?”

“Nah. We’re subsidizing all of that through the Food Credit Program.”

Brent sighed and pointed at the desert scenes rolling by them. “That’s the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge over there. Have you ever visited it? It’s a beautiful place.”

“No.”

“There’s signs posted everywhere there that say, ‘Do not feed the animals or they will become dependent on handouts and become unable to care for themselves.’ Sometimes I have to wonder if the government has more sense in the way it treats animals than the way it treats humans.”

The politician shrugged. “Look how many people died during the Great Famine. The only way we ended it was to set up the Food Credit Program to keep people from wasting food ever again.” He studied Brent’s hand before wiping his own with a sanitizer tissue. His broad smile revealed genetically engineered incisors and molars.

“I didn’t mean any offense, Congressman. I lost family members during the Great Famine. It’s still a pretty touchy subject for me.”

Thankful that Brent had given up his seat to his son, which meant no longer enduring William’s constant interruptions, Rep. Turner offered to buy Brent’s lunch. Brent relented.

The dining car’s upper third consisted of glass, which allowed the diners fantastic views of blue sky, sand so hot that heat waves distorted the air above it, and green cactus, gray sagebrush, and other vegetation deserts produce. Brent and his hosts were halfway through their meal when the train slowed at the outskirts of Phoenix.

“Look, Dad. Is it them?” William pointed at an overpass the train approached. Along the top of the concrete crossing, figures jumped and danced.

“I don’t know, son. Waiter, who are those people up ahead?”

The waiter craned his neck to see. “Looks like jumpers, sir. Nothing to be alarmed about. The engineer will deal with it.” He turned to resume his taking of orders.

“Jumpers. I’m ready for them.” William pulled the small metal cylinder from his pocket.

As the train passed beneath the overpass, a series of, “thump, thump, thumps,” landed on the dining car. By the time it emerged from beneath the ¼-mile wide overpass, nine jumpers clung to the dining car’s top. Boots, knee and elbow pads, and gloves embedded with super strength suction cups allowed the jumpers to move as if they were spiders above and to the sides of the diners. The male jumpers leered at female diners; the female jumpers winked and puckered their lips at male diners.

Diners ran for the safety of the passenger cars. There, the jumpers could be heard and not seen, their antics blocked by shades pulled down to cover the windows.

William readied his weapon. “This is William Turner. Request voice identification verification so my gun can shoot.”

“Targets must first be identified as threats.”

William pointed it at two of the jumpers.

“Targets deemed sufficient risks to your safety. Voice identification verified,” the cylinder answered. “Facial, eye, or palm identification also required.”

William brought the weapon close to his right eye.

“Eye identification verifies.”

William aimed at the largest jumper, who banged his tungsten helmet against the glass dome until enough of it shattered for him to poke his head into the car. The head banging had produced a bloody nose. Drops of thick, red blood mixed with yellow green mucus dripped from the invader’s nose and saliva from his mouth as he screamed at the remaining diners, seated at a table for four.

“We’re zomboids! Half human and half android and 100 percent crazy. We’re going to eat all of you alive one at a time so the rest have to watch and wait for your turn.”

“Oh no you’re not, Mr. Rebel man. Fire!”

The beam split into two, three inches from the jumper’s face, and entered each eye.

* * *

When the monitor on his console first alerted the engineer that “moving objects are attached to the dining car,” he contacted dispatch at Phoenix Central Station.

“Phoenix Central, this is Trip 10990 from SLD.”

“Go ahead, 10990.”

“Sensors indicate nine Unidentified Crawling Objects have attached themselves to dining car. Please advise.”

“And I thought it was going to be a nice slow day for a change. That’s nine UCOs on your dining car exterior?”

The engineer recounted the moving blobs of light darting about the digital schematic of his train. “Make that eight. One must have fallen off.”

“Okay. Slow train to twenty miles per hour. A drone and rebel sweeper will be there shortly.”

“Please hurry. Sensors indicate one of the UCOs has gained partial entrance through the roof of the car.”

“Affirmative. Control and containment units are on their way.”

The drone arrived first. After matching the train’s reduced speed, it hovered above the dining car and issued the standard warning for such an incident.

“Attention. You are in violation of the 2052 Internal Terrorism Act, which prohibits any action or verbal threat against any mode of public transportation.”

One of the jumpers tore off her helmet and threw it at the drone. It dropped a foot to avoid the helmet as it sailed past.

“Now you are also in violation of seeking to obstruct a drone in the performance of its duties. All of you must exit the train at once and wait for the rebel sweeper to transport you to the detention center.”

“I ain’t no rebel.” The helmetless woman cursed. “I’m hungry, you damn machine. Food for the starving people like me.”

“You leave me no alternative.”

The three-foot wide drone opened its plastic belly and a six pound cube of clear jelly like material splattered onto the shiny dome of the dining car. Within seconds, the quivering cube dissolved. As the slimy film spread across the dome, it removed the grip of the suction cups attached to the jumpers. One by one they slid down the dome’s sides and bounced off of the gravel berms supporting the railroad tracks. A mile to the west, a rebel sweeper lumbered toward them, the jumper who had fallen off earlier already inside of its metal chamber.

The jumper whose head sat anchored inside of the class dome cursed. After the gel released the suction cups holding the rest of his body to the dome’s exterior, it began to flop up and down like a fish snagged on an angler’s hook. While his body thumped against the glass, thin lines grew into cracks that spread as when one steps onto an ice covered pond incapable of supporting the unwelcome weight.

“It’s going to break.” Brent pulled William under the table as his parents also ducked for cover.

The glass hitting tables and floor reminded Brent of the sounds of hail shattering windshields. The sound of the jumper’s body landing on the hard floor sickened him.

The jumper rolled onto his back and moaned. “What happened? Where am I?”

William sprang from under the table and surveyed his trophy. He took a photo of “his kill” to show classmates. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Rebel, for disturbing our dinner.”

“Why can’t I see?” The jumper blinked, rubbed his eyes, and blinked again.

“Because I blinded you with my Minder Blinder. Now I am going to fix your mind.”

Brent yanked William’s arm, which caused the beam to hit broken glass and tile floor instead. “That’s enough.”

After crawling out from under the table, Mrs. Turner screamed. “He’s still alive.” She pointed at the jumper before grabbing William and running for the door to their passenger car.

Rep. Turner stood and brushed off his hand-tailored suit. “Looks like he’s not going anywhere.” He sneered at the groaning figure, still rubbing his eyes and blinking. “Dumb rebels. They’re all the same. Every last one of them.” He stomped off in search of his family, pausing at two tables to finish off someone else’s gin and tonic and another’s whiskey sour.

Brent undid the chin strap and slid the helmet off of the rebel’s head. “You’re going to be okay. Good thing you were wearing Tefbar. It kept you from breaking any bones, best I can tell. What was all that about you being zomboids?”

The rebel sighed. “That’s our way to scare off the passengers so we can steal their food.”

The train began to slow to a stop.

“All we wanted was something to eat. Think I could have something real quick before they take me away?”

“Sure.” Brent searched for a plate holding food not covered by glass. By the time he returned with one, the rebel was sitting up. Within four minutes, he devoured three plates of partially eaten food.

As the train lurched to a stop, Brent saw the rebel sweeper parked to the train’s left. Inside of it the other eight jumpers nursed their injuries from falling off the train. “Afraid it’s time to go.” Brent helped the dazed, but now full, jumper to his feet. His vision slowly returned.

“Is that a sweeper out there?” He pointed at what appeared to be a large gray blob to his still unfocused eyes.

“Yeah.” Brent guided him out an exit door and positioned him by the twenty-foot long, four-foot wide appendage that sucked the last jumper into the rebel sweeper’s cavernous belly.

When Brent returned to his passenger car, his every pocket bulged with sugar and cracker packets, enough calories to last the rest of his trip. He nodded while Rep. Turner lectured him during the final five miles to Phoenix Central Station.

“That was a perfect example of why we need to strengthen the Internal Terrorism Act. Those lousy anarchists didn’t even let us finish our meal. And look at how shook up my wife is.” He pointed across the aisle, where Toni held William’s right hand in both of her trembling ones. She had declared the window seat as “too dangerous” for him.

“Anarchists? I thought you trained your son to call them rebels.”

Rep. Turner lowered his voice to a nervous whisper. “I probably should not have let you know but that’s the new category we’re trying to get added to the bill that I’m co-author of. Instead of just subversives and rebels, we need to call the most dangerous terrorists anarchists.”

“Oh. You mean like Muslims who kill for Allah?”

Rep. Turner blanched. “Quiet, you fool. What you said is not religiously correct one bit. There’s a whole bunch of Muslims in my district. If they found out that I let you say what you just did, I would lose the next election.”

“So my freedom of speech means less to you than your getting elected again?”

“For someone who looks intelligent, you sure are stupid. You ever go to college and take any philosophy or government courses?”

“I got a degree in cave exploration and mapping.”

“That explains it. My degree was in government. Ever hear of Plato?”

“The Greek philosopher who wrote The Republic?”

“Yeah. He got it nailed down tight even though he lived thousands of years ago. If citizens don’t conform to what the State’s rulers decree, then they need to be educated to straighten them out. If that doesn’t work…” He ran a forefinger across his neck. “It’s like he said, it’s much better to have a bad dictator than it is to have a bad democracy. And that’s what we have, a bad democracy getting worse by the day.”

“So to protect the elite like you and your family from subversives, rebels, and anarchists, you get to carry Minder Blinders like the one William used back in the dining car? What about the rest of us?”

“It’s cheaper than having Homeland Security or Secret Service agents travel with us everywhere we go.”

“So if you revamp the Terrorism Act I’ll be able to get a Minder Blinder to protect myself too? After all, you’re inventing a whole new category of bad guys I have to defend myself against.”

“No can do. The anti-weapon lobby won’t allow that. Only a select few are authorized to carry it.”

“Arriving at Central Phoenix Station,” the announcement echoed. “All continuing passengers please exit to board another train because repairs need to be made to this one. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

“Well, nice to have met you.” Rep. Turner offered the limp handshake he reserved for political enemies.

“I sure have learned a lot while traveling with all of you.” Brent smiled as he thought of the document he had photographed when they first met. “Especially from that bright boy of yours. He’s a real pistol. Are you going to be waiting for our replacement train? Maybe we can talk some more?”

“We’re going by plane the rest of the way.” He stepped on Brent’s foot as he hurried to the aisle. “My wife says she’ll never ride a train again. Damn those jumpers. What’s this country coming to?”

11

Tim Beheard joined The White Knuckle Club and did not release his grip on the two arm rests supporting his sweaty arms until the jet reached its cruising altitude of 71,000 feet.

“This is your first time flying?” Bud asked. “Relax. It’s only a seventy-minute trip from L.A. to Rapid City.”

“I never had a reason to fly before I met you. I wish the plane wasn’t so crowded.” He gestured at the other 611 passengers.

“If you hadn’t mentioned your DIPPER rule for avoiding libel to my father, we wouldn’t be making this trip. I think it’s a big waste of time.”

Tim pressed the overhead switch to summon a flight attendant. “I’m not so sure. You notice how skeptical your dad is? Besides, my editor when I worked at the Times had an ironclad rule: two independent sources for every important fact in every story.”

“Hey, I know. Dr. Graves can be your second source. Make sure your device that tells if someone is lying is turned on while we talk to him.”

Tim saluted the one who “was always right no matter what,” his customer. “If it turns out that my second source is Dr. Graves, who is the villain of your tale, so much the better. If nothing else, I can at least pick up some background details about him.”

“May I help you, sir?” The pretty brunette flight attendant’s smile did not dispel Tim’s anxiety.

“Can I get something for my nerves?” He held up his shaking hand. “I can’t get it to hold still.”

“We have just the thing for that.” She tapped the overhead compartment and a mask attached to a hose as thick as a pencil dropped to face level. She helped Tim adjust it. “Breathe deeply. Think pleasant thoughts about your destination. South Dakota is beautiful this time of year. You’ll love it.”

Within thirty seconds, Tim’s worries about flying and finding the right sources were replaced by peaceful slumber. He did not wake up until the plane’s fat tires left part of their tread as black marks on Rapid City International’s two-mile long runway.

“What’s that?” Tim tensed as plane touched Earth. “Are we in a thunderstorm?”

Bud chuckled. “Welcome to South Dakota.”

Twenty minutes later, Tim enjoyed watching fields of corn and soybeans, and rangeland filled with cattle, bison, and beefalo roll by the shuttle bus taking them to Cheyenne River Standing Rock Casino.

He fidgeted while the question he meant to ask earlier spilled out. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. What exactly was your relationship to Elani? I have to know if I’m headed for a showdown with a jealous husband.”

“You’re a dirty old man. We were friends, nothing more than that. The poor woman was starved for conversation. Dr. Graves was always content to talk to his plants and computers and robots all the time instead of his wife.”

“Sorry. See this scar?” He pulled his graying black hair back.

“Yeah.”

“Got that when the husband of one of my clients thought I was going after his wife.”

At the casino they took a taxi.

“That’s the Graves’ place over there.” Bud pointed at a giant sequoia redwood grove a mile away.

“I thought redwoods only grew on the west coast.”

“His father planted genetically modified seedlings out here back in the 2030s.”

The driver dropped them at the edge of the Graves’ small ranch, which was surrounded by a forest of non-native trees. “Dr. Graves does not like visitors. You have to walk the rest of the way,” the cabbie said.

Because of the redwoods, no structures could be seen from the road. To Tim, it felt as if he had stepped into a fairy tale land while he followed Bud down a narrow winding dirt driveway snaking through the grove. An open space of two acres surrounded the house, greenhouse, and large garden, but crisscrossing shadows from the gigantic trees blocked much of the sunlight.

Before they reached the walkway, Dr. Graves opened his front door. “The computer said we have company. Hello, Bud. And who might this be? Your manservant perhaps?”

This really is from the Brothers Grimm. He’s the wicked witch and we’re his next meal. Tim took a step backward.

“This is my colleague, Tim Beheard.”

“Colleague is it? My, my, I wonder what sort of mischief you are up to now.” Dr. Graves turned to Tim. “He always was an unpredictable employee.” He turned to the hoverbot. “Scan them.”

“Three electronic devices detected.”

“Please place them in the hoverbot’s basket for safe keeping,” Dr. Graves said. “One thing I value more than any other is my privacy. You don’t want to compromise that by recording our conversation, do you?”

Tim and Bud obeyed and then followed Dr. Graves into the den, alleged meeting place of The Club. Oh, The Club might be real enough to these two weirdoes but how am I going to know for sure without my truth meter to monitor Dr. Graves, Tim wondered.

The mood of the home seemed lonely, almost sterile.

“Do you prefer water or iced tea?” Dr. Graves broke Tim’s examination of his home.

“Water is fine for me,” Tim said.

“Kefir water or well water?”

“Kefir water? Never heard of it.” Tim blinked.

“It contains millions of bacteria beneficial to the digestive system.” Dr. Graves patted his stomach, bloated by the yeast growing there because of his over imbibing of kefir, which he cultured with cups of sugar and honey.

“Iced tea for me.” Bud sat down next to Tim on the twelve-foot long buffalo hide couch, a gift from Chief Red Bear.

“Black, orange, green, or herb?”

Bud fidgeted. Dr. Graves knew his preference. “Green, as usual.”

Dr. Graves settled into his easy chair and activated his favorite feature. “Massage setting ten.” The chair’s vibrator resembled a large cat’s purr as it massaged his backside from head to toe. He said nothing until the hoverbot delivered the refreshments. “So what brings you back? Hoping to see Elani?”

Bud swallowed an ice cube and endured its coldness after it lodged in his throat. Why couldn’t people leave her out of this? Weary after days of trying to convince anyone who would listen about The Club, Bud abandoned his planned questions. “No. Tim is helping me to do research on The Club. He has some questions for you.”

“The what?”

“The Club. The six people you made me travel all over the earth to find for you. I still have the hemorrhoids from sitting on so many airplanes and trains to prove it.” Bud stood, bent at his waist and patted his rump, which he aimed at the one toying with him.

“The Club? I’m afraid the only club I ever belonged to was a golf club many years ago.”

“You liar. Let’s go to down to your basement right now so I can show Tim your lab.” Bud stomped to the door that led underground.

“I’m too tired from working in the garden.” Dr. Graves yawned, a signal that this little game of intrigue had run its course, at least for him. “Go to the basement, you little fool. Checkmate. Game over. I win. You lose.”

“Excuse me.” Tim followed Bud as the overhead lights automatically flickered on in the concrete basement. He bumped into Bud, who stood on the bottom step.

“Where did it go?” Bud asked.

“What?”

“His lab was here with lots of equipment.” Bud moved to the boxes stacked along one wall. Some of them were empty, others filled with odds and ends from the upstairs living quarters. He examined each box but none contained any of the equipment he remembered. Even the stainless steel tables were gone. “Maybe it’s in the garage.”

Once again Bud led the way, but only the jeep, hover cycle, and neatly arranged tools sat in the garage. His head bowed when he returned to his tormentor’s presence, who surveyed his domain from his vibrating throne.

“You seem somewhat stressed out, Bud. Perhaps you could use a session on my massager to relax your nerves.” Dr. Graves started to rise.

Bud’s stare pinned him back into the chair. “Where’s Elani?”

Dr. Graves smirked. “I wish I knew. You planted so much discontent in her that she has left me.”

“All I ever did was being her friend. She was going crazy living here, stuck out in the middle of nowhere.” Bud turned to Tim and then the hoverbot, hoping for anyone to believe his version.

“The follies of youth.” Dr. Graves nodded at Tim. “You surely understand my situation, Mr. Beheard. While Bud gave you a guided tour, I checked up on you and discovered that you are separated from your wife. My computer told me her name is Bethany. How tragic. Perhaps I can design you a substitute for her?” He pointed to a corner of the den. “Elani, we have company.”

A ghostlike apparition formed, five and a half feet tall, slender, with matching light brown eyes and hair. Bud dropped his half-empty glass of tea. The image both drew and repelled him as he went to the kitchen to get a rag to wipe up the spill. By the time he knelt to clean up his mess, what he thought was a hologram had solidified. Background objects were no longer visible through it.

Fascinated, Tim walked over to meet it. She greeted him first.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Beheard.”

Tim reached to take her extended hand but pulled his back after they touched. “It’s cold like ice. And how did she know my name?”

“Oh, the new and improved Elani knows all, hears all, and sees all. Unfortunately, her body temperature matches the real Elani’s mood toward me. It’s the major flaw yet to be worked out. My process turns a hologram into a solidgram by freezing the air space inside of the hologram’s outline.”

Bud stepped closer, remaining at what he believed to be a safe distance, ten feet from her. “She looks so much younger than the real Elani. That’s why I dropped my glass. At first I thought you have found a way to reverse the aging process.”

Dr. Graves laughed. “A little poetic license on my part, dear boy. Speaking of which, are you ready to abandon the poetic license you are so intent on taking against me and my private life? For decades, I’ve gone to great expense to remove all mention of me from the internet. Your overactive imagination, if it ever is transferred to the printed page, would surely constitute libel. Your spoken accusations today were slanderous. My computer has recorded every one of them if we have to go to court.”

“No one said anything about us writing a book.” Bud stuck out his chest, a gesture he had avoided while an employee in this house.

“Come now, dear boy. I observed you scribbling in that journal of yours while you worked here. Surely you must have literary goals that include me. Why else would you and your so-called colleague travel all the way here from SLD to bombard me with your stupid questions?”

Bud squeezed the damp rag until tea ran through his fingers.

Dr. Graves turned to Tim. “Perhaps you can explain the complexities of the libel law to him. As a private person, a higher standard of protection applies to me. If I were a public figure, you could print lies about me and get away with it, but I am not, and don’t intend to become public about my own personal business. If either of you dares to show a reckless disregard for the truth…” His fist jutted at them and rotated until its thumb pointed at the redwood floor.

Now he’s acting like he’s Caesar, Bud thought.

Tim backed away from the image of Elani as it faded. He moved to within a few feet of Dr. Graves, where he squatted down to look into his eyes. “So for the record, you never formed a group called The Club? Bud showed me an ad for it.”

“Oh, is that what Bud has been rambling on about? Alas, it never fully materialized. Those who applied all proved unwilling to dedicate themselves to any meaningful interaction with Elani. I hoped they could be surrogate children for her. Each of the six who met here went their separate ways. Poof. No club.” Dr. Graves waved his hands as a magician might. “I did not want to talk about it after you first brought it up because it pains me so to think about what might have been.” His cold grey eyes narrowed. “Besides, it’s none of your business.”

“What about your putting implants into them? I heard Elani ask for a volunteer to be first.” Bud tossed the rag on the floor and folded his arms.

“Such an imagination. Breast implants for the ladies? I thought you Asians liked females with small feet and small breasts.”

Adrenalin flushed to Bud’s head. “I know what I saw and heard.”

“The computer is detecting extreme anxiety from you.” Dr. Graves glanced at the monitor built into his chair’s arm rest. “Is anyone close to you ill, perhaps? My computer says that is the most likely cause of your anxiety.”

Bud walked backwards and plopped onto the couch. But no distance from his former employer seemed far enough. The solidgram may have had Elani’s appearance, but it radiated Dr. Graves’ personality, one always able to discern others’ weaknesses.

“His neighbor is at the healing center,” Tim said. “They’re really close.”

“Oh?” Dr. Graves tapped on the monitor. “The neighbor right next door to the west of your parents’ house? According to my computer, she is your oldest neighbor.”

Bud raised his head enough to see his tormentor. My parents’ house. He makes me sound like a little kid because I live with them.

Ignoring his mother’s often stated advice of, “A fool proves he is one by his anger,” Bud pointed at his tormentor. “See how he can find out anything about anybody? He demands his privacy, but respects no one else’s.” He nodded, hoping to convince Tim.

“But it’s all available information, for a fee.” Dr. Graves shrugged. “Stop being so paranoid. Ah, here it is, Roberta Kleindiest is your sick neighbor’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Oh dear, I’m so very sorry. She was taken to Level 5 Care.”

“What’s that mean? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s euphemistically called end-of-life treatment, I’m afraid. Such patients check in but they never get to check out of the healing centers. Very effective use of triage. My father helped to pioneer it.”

Bud’s head drooped as he tried to hide his tears and quivering chin.

“Oh, come now. You must be a big boy. At least she’s out of her misery. That’s enough, chair.”

The chair responded by shutting off its vibrator and lifting Dr. Graves to a standing position. “Perhaps you should take Bud to the casino’s hotel so he can rest.” He winked at Tim. “He appears to be overwrought. Without the real Elani here to act the role of gracious hostess I can’t have you stay here. Oh, that reminds me. Bud, do you have any idea where Elani might have run off to? You two were so close I thought you might know her whereabouts.”

Bud shuffled to the front door where Tim waited for him. “She used to talk a lot about her sister in Atlanta.”

“Really?” Dr. Graves opened the door and waved goodbye as his visitors stepped onto the porch. “Perhaps it was not a wasted trip after all. I’ve called her sister twice and she says Elani is not there. Now I know she is. Excuse me, I have to try and contact her.”

The door shut.

After collecting their electronic devices from the hoverbot, Tim and Bud followed it to the road to wait for the taxi it summoned for them. The hoverbot then sped back to its master’s side.

“Is Bud still talking about The Club?” Dr. Graves asked.

“Yes, he is. He kept trying to convince Tim Beheard of its continued existence. He said you want to rule the world by using Mr. Africa, Mr. Americas, Ms. Asia, Ms. Europe, Ms. India, and Mr. Pacific Islander as your puppets.”

“What was Mr. Beheard’s response?”

“He kept glancing at me and changed the subject.”

Dr. Graves patted his hoverbot on its back. “Good work. Mr. Beheards is smart, the brains of that pair of clowns. He knew you were monitoring their conversation for me.”

“Is there anything else you need? I have to recharge soon. Twenty minutes of power remain in my batteries.”

“Make me a tonic before you plug yourself in.”

“Yes, sir.” The hoverbot glided to the kitchen.

“Computer, what is the occupation of Tim Beheard?”

“He is a writer.”

“Put Plan B into operation.”

“Yes, sir. Initiating Plan B. Anything else?”

“Call Elani’s sister in Atlanta for me.”

A moment later, his sister-in-law’s face appeared on the screen covering a wall of the den.

“I have no time to listen to any more of your denials of knowing where Elani is. Tell her she can meet me at the lodge after she finally comes to her senses.”

“You’ll be there on vacation?”

“No. It’s to be our new home. I’m selling this one. As usual, her lover boy Bud is causing too many problems, so many that we have to move. Bud is just a love starved, naïve little worm, but I don’t like that writer friend of his one bit. He reminds me of the writer whose lies made my father kill himself.”

12

During his unexpected five hour layover at Phoenix Central Station, Brent Fulsome fretted for the first four hours. Then he broke protocol and sent a coded message by email:

Hi:

We are stuck waiting for replacement train. Very high temps here. Well, see you later.

The unsigned email would alert its recipient to use Code 7: Underline the first letter of the first word of the first sentence; the first letter of the second word of the second sentence, the first letter of the third word of the third sentence. Doing so would spell out the hidden message and Brent’s concerns: w, h, y.

Why?

Why was he being summoned home? Maybe Tim Beheard’s and Bud Lee’s big mouths had compromised Brent’s mission of training dissidents on how to survive the densest urban jungle of the Americas, Central, North, and South – SLD?

Maybe…

Brent tapped his foot while he waited. Protocol required such coded messages to receive a reply within a half hour. He kept checking the hologram screen beamed from the frame of his glasses. Finally, a message appeared:

Brent Fulsome:

Our records indicate that you have reached the limit of your email credits for the month. We regret to inform you that no more outgoing or incoming messages will be available until…

He stopped reading and cursed. Now he would have to wait for an answer in person, which could be days, maybe a week away, depending on how far he would have to walk.

* * *

The rest of his train trip through Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas, proved uneventful, no jumpers or rebels attacking his train, nor anyone from Congress for him to try and gather intel. Brent disembarked in Mayfield, Kentucky, cleared Homeland Security’s checkpoint for interstate travelers, and spent the last of his transportation credits to take a Bluegrass Tour Bus as far as Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Half of his fellow passengers on the solar powered bus were veterans. Because the sun was hidden by clouds, the bus’s batteries produced a forty-two mile per hour top speed. The veterans did not seem to mind the slow pace. Their rowdiness and drinking from bottles hidden in brown paper bags kept Brent awake.

“Where you headed to, buddy?” A grizzled man who looked at least eighty years old asked Brent. Curly sideburns and patches of white hair remained on his head. No way could any spy android look this authentic, Brent thought.

But what if the boys at NSA had cracked his code used in emails? If so, they would have at least one android tailing him. He glanced at the passengers closest to them and decided to only speak about what the TSA had probably already passed on to the NSA. “To do some cave exploration down at Big South Fork.”

“Well, you picked the right state for caves. Me and my buddies are just passing through. We’re going to the dedication.” He pointed at his baseball style cap. Proud Middle East War on Terror Veteran was embroidered across its front.

“Which war did you fight in? There were so many of them against terror.”

“The one in Israel. It was a real nasty one.”

“Before my time, but I read about it. About time they built a memorial for all the ones who fought and died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and…” The single tear running down the old veteran’s cheek shut Brent up. He reached over and patted the wrinkled hand, its joints twisted by arthritis. “…and for the ones who survived those wars, like you. Thank you.”

“Thanks, sonny.” He wiped the tear away. “You’re the first stranger that ever thanked me in person. I was just thinking about Danny and Glenda and Jason and Charlotte. They were in my company, but didn’t survive the war. One of them is buried at Arlington. After the memorial dedication I’m going to visit that grave. It was a bad war. If you got hit by one of the lasers anywhere on your body, you were a goner real quick. But why did they have to use chemical and biological agents against us? Dying that way is torture.”

The veteran grew silent, quiet enough that Brent slept the rest of the way to Bowling Green.

* * *

Brent walked from the Bowling Green, Kentucky, bus depot to the outskirts of the city before anyone offered him a ride. At first, he did not want to touch the car idling on the road’s shoulder.

“Get in before I change my mind,” its driver said.

Brent slid into the front seat and balanced his pack on his lap. “Thank you, officer.”

The uniformed deputy inspected him. “You weren’t hitchhiking, were you? If you were, I have to haul you back downtown and lock you up.”

“No, sir. I was just walking.”

“Good, because I’m headed home for supper and am in no mood for any more official business. You hungry?”

“I guess so.” Brent had eaten the last of his sugar-laced cracker sandwiches six hours earlier.

After spending the night at the sheriff deputy’s small farm and eating breakfast the next morning, Brent was dropped off by the highway headed east with a final admonition.

“Watch yourself, Brent. We got a report of someone who set off some alarm bells for Homeland Security back at SLD Central Station,” the deputy said. “He even looks like your twin.” He pointed at the monitor embedded in the car’s dashboard as a photo of Brent materialized.

“Afraid my vital signs were outside normal accepted limits that day, deputy.”

“Same thing happened to me once when I had to fly. Made me so mad that now I drive everywhere, no matter how far away it is I’m going. You should start doing the same. Damn feds are so busy harassing innocent people like you and me that the real bad guys get away with murder.” The deputy pulled a bag from the back seat. “Kathy packed you something for the road.”

“Thanks.”

So it went during the last leg of his trip. Some walking mixed with rides from a teen proud of his first driver’s license, a farmer hauling produce to market, and truck drivers.

A truck driver picked him up at a truck stop outside Somerset.

“You sure you only want to go as far as Big South Fork? I’m going all the way down to Atlanta to deliver my load.” The driver pointed his thumb at the ninety-foot trailer swaying behind them. “Let me know if you change your mind. You look too tense and worried to be going off cave exploring like you said you were. You ain’t a runner are you?”

Brent tensed. Technically, he broke no laws back in SLD. He had never met with more than the legal limits allowed to congregate. And his survival training did not include any offensive tactics. “Me? A runner?”

“Yeah. You remind me of some runners I gave rides to before. They usually get caught if we cross any state lines, though. I figured maybe you might be planning on sneaking into Tennessee.”

Brent’s tenseness did not lessen until he exited the cab twenty minutes later. “Thanks.”

The driver gave him a thumb up and began to guide the transmission through its twenty-five gears. His luck for free rides ended, Brent walked two miles to the northern most entrance to the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area as he counted thirty-nine cars that did not even slow down as they passed him.

Pine, oak, ash, and hickory trees on either side seemed to grow denser, while the sounds of the creatures they hid grew louder. His transition from the always dirty crowded concrete and asphalt canyons of SLD to a two-lane road meandering through forest seemed to him a baptism into freedom.

A ranger stepped from his small shed at the park’s entrance to greet him.

“You’re the first one I’ve ever seen hike into the park. Most folks wait until they’re inside before putting on their hiking shoes.” He studied his electronic clipboard. “You Brent Fulsome?”

“Yeah.” Brent tensed and wondered if Rep. Turner had turned his name in as a subversive or worse yet, an anarchist.

“Homeland Security alerted us after you failed the security check back at SLD. Afraid you have to step inside.” He tapped the microphone embedded in his uniform’s collar. “Smoky, I need you to cover the gate for me.”

Brent took a step back when a bear exited the office thirty yards from the gate. It wore blue jeans and the same style hat the human ranger wore. Sensing Brent’s alarm, the bear switched on its preprogrammed introduction mode.

“Greetings. My name is Smoky Bear. We hope that your stay here at Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area is a pleasant one. To ensure your safety and that of your fellow campers, please only use the automatic fire devices that are situated at each campsite. Doing so will protect your furry and feathered friends of the forest. Only you can prevent wildfires.” The bear walked to his post at the gate.

Thirty questions and answers later, the ranger turned into salesman. “You sure you don’t need any equipment, food, or protective gear, Brent?” he asked as they walked to the gate.

“No. It’s all right here.” Brent patted his bulging backpack, which held the last of the high calorie bars the deputy’s wife had packed for him.

“Okay. Here’s your GPS unit.” He handed the silver colored matchbook-sized device to Brent. “We can hone in on you above ground anywhere here in the park. The signal fades if you go deep enough underground, but we can read the computer record to find your last signal if you go missing. Might be a while before we can launch a search and rescue to come get you, though.” He shrugged. “Budget cuts.”

“Maybe you can send Smoky to save me.”

The bear tipped his hat. “If I can be of any further assistance, you may contact me by dialing Smoky Bear into your communication device followed by Big South Fork.” He returned to hibernation mode, waiting for the next guest to arrive.

“He’s looks exactly like the bears at SLD Zoo,” Brent said. “Except they only wear fur.”

“Yeah. Top of the line android. Cost us a small fortune. The calculator punchers up in Washington, D.C. even took it out of our budget. We laid off a human when Smoky showed up. If he works out, they’ll order some more for other parks.”

* * *

A shuttle bus dropped Brent near a cave entrance a mile from the Kentucky Tennessee border. The opening had been widened by dynamite after its discovery seventy years earlier by a Boy Scout earning his hiking merit badge. This was Brent’s third descent into the cavern.

It would require none of the ropes or climbing equipment used during his previous two expeditions.

He donned a thin body suit for protection from bat guano, mud, and dust, some it thousands of years old. His plastic helmet projected a laser beam illuminating a path fifty feet long and eight feet wide. Brent stopped in a chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites. The oldest ones joined at their ends, creating gnarled hourglass shapes of fantastic colors.

Brent paused to soak in the beauty.

He pulled a miniature rover from his pack and programmed it to travel as far as possible into the cave. No bigger than his hand, the device could find passageways to take it miles into the silent darkness, and even journey through small fissures into connecting caves. After attaching the GPS unit to the rover, Brent set it down and watched its rubber treads propel it forward until it rolled beyond his helmet’s beam of light.

Brent retraced his route to the entrance of the cave and waited until the first stars and a half moon appeared. The tiny compass embedded in his ring directed him, and he followed the luminescent arrow marked S on its tip.

By dawn, he had traveled far enough into Tennessee to slow his pace. He wondered if the transponder worked well enough to ensure his pickup. A mile later it flashed a signal to halt, so he abandoned the dirt road and crouched behind a blackberry thicket. Twenty minutes later, a sweet voice roused him from his slumber.

“Brent, let’s go.” His sister-in-law shook him.

He stared at her with half-opened eyes, unsure if he was still dreaming. “Gretchen? Why did they send you?”

“It’s your wife, Brent.”

“Mary?”

“She’s sick, real sick. The doctor is afraid she might be dying. She caught that strange new disease.”

13

Chief Red Bear bore two titles: chief of his reservation and chief operating officer of the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Casino and instigator of any events he could dream up to draw customers. Thirty-three years earlier he became the driving force to unite the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation into one large entity extending from western South Dakota into North Dakota.

His timing could not have been better.

In 2064, President Charleston had pushed her Native American Rehabilitation Act through Congress and signed it into law while representatives from 494 tribes watched behind her. In effect, the act removed all federal oversight of Native American lands and returned total control of them to tribal councils.

“We lost our lands for almost 200 years to the white man,” Red Bear had said to his tribal council after his election as chief. “The land given back to us is just principal; we are still owed a lot of interest, 200 years’ worth. We’re going to collect every penny of it.”

* * *

Chief Red Bear glanced up from last month’s income statement and balance sheets. Not bad. Keep that interest rolling in, kemosabe. This month would be even better.

Next week’s 2095 Old Time Motorcycle Rally would be the biggest money maker for the reservation this year. Chief Red Bear thought back to the first informal rally he had organized thirty years ago when carbon emitting vehicles were banned from being ridden in states other than where they were licensed.

The bikers who showed up at the Sturgis, South Dakota rally that year either came without their beloved hogs or brought them on trailers towed by non-carbon emitting vehicles. But the bikes from out of state could only be displayed, not ridden.

The restriction caused a near riot until Chief Red Bear rode into Sturgis on his classic 1947 Harley Davidson FL Knucklehead. The cursing, beer bottle throwing mob of tens of thousands of bikers facing off against the outnumbered sheriff’s deputies and state police pointed when the chief roared up to a cop and asked to use his bullhorn.

The throng quieted as the chief climbed atop his parked bike and spoke.

“I don’t blame you for being bent out of shape because you can’t ride your bikes across state lines anymore unless they have electric motors.”

“You got that right, man. That new law sucks.” A biker’s reply brought forth thunderous cheers.

“Well, I can relate. The white man did not honor treaties made with my people, so I understand how you feel. But I’ve slowly learned to forgive whites like you for what your ancestors did to my people. That’s why I’m inviting you over to my reservation. You can ride your bikes there because we are a sovereign nation and are exempt from the law that is keeping you from riding your bikes because they have out of state tags.”

He handed the bullhorn back to the cop. As he slowly rolled through the narrow passageway between the sweating leather clad bodies, cop and biker alike patted him on the back and thanked him.

That summer, tales of fun on the reservation followed the bikers back home. Word also spread that after Chief Red Bear had been made an honorary member of seventeen motorcycle clubs, he had invited them to return again the following summer.

Never one to let a need go unmet, the chief had advertised nationwide for the 2066 First Annual Old Time Motorcycle Rally, with the opening day set for the day the Sturgis Rally ended. Each succeeding year attendance grew. He expected a half million bikers to arrive at the reservation next week for the 2095 rally.

But Chief Red Bear wanted something for everyone. So he had organized buffalo hunts to keep the four herds on the reservation down to levels the reservation’s prairie land could sustain. Families enjoyed 100-mile long wagon train rides that transported them 240 years back in time as they hit the trail in replicas pulled by animals some of them had never before seen.

Something for everyone, Chief Red Bear thought while he scanned the large calendar covering half of his oak desk. April to October was the busiest period.

Every April 1 brought in the fools willing to endure the remnants of chilly high prairie winters and each Halloween brought out the jokers whose costumes betrayed their foolishness. The frigid Dakota winter now ran from at least the first of November to the first of April as the unpredicted mini ice age entered its second decade. During winters, local residents prowled the casino’s games of chance and buffet tables for the daily off-peak season specials.

For others, the draw was entertainment year round, mostly bands, singers, and comedians who had peaked long ago.

Not that the chief hated whites and wanted to take revenge by parting them from their money. He even considered one white “my best friend.” He smiled when that one’s face appeared on his visionphone.

“Dr. Graves wants to speak to you. Are you available?”

“He must have gotten the bill for the gambling credits we extended to Mrs. Graves last month. Put him through.”

“Chief Red Bear, the time has come.”

He had never seen his friend looking so desperate and helpless. “For what, Dr. Graves?”

“To sell out. I need you to buy my land and house. Now. Today.”

Chief Red Bear always turned down gamblers who wanted to trade property for “more credits because I’m about to get hot.” His gaze traveled to the large tintype of his ancestor standing next to an ancestor of Dr. Graves.

He focused on the photograph’s peace pipe. A long plume of smoke drifting from its bowl had been captured because of the minute long exposure time required for the archaic photographic process. The eagle feathered Native American was passing the pipe to the buckskin-clad white man. They smoked it to seal the sale by the former of forty acres of prairie land to the latter. For Dr. Graves to abandon his inheritance seemed unthinkable to Chief Red Bear; it bordered on sin.

“Whoa there, partner. It can’t be all that bad. I’ve told you before that you have to stop being Dr. Gloom and Doom.”

Dr. Graves’ tale lasted three minutes and ended as he shed crocodile tears. “You’re my last hope of ever getting Elani back again. I can’t live without her.”

For the chief, it was not a matter of losing money if Elani never returned to his casino. His hotel already needed expansion. The Graves’ home could be rented out as a lodge to show business types seeking an isolated getaway from the madness inflicted by managers and fans. But he did not want to lose the one he considered his best friend.

“I really hate for you to go…”

“Please, chief, it will take much too long if I have to sell to some stranger. Besides, who wants to pay the realtor’s commission?”

Chief Red Bear punched a button to summon his lawyer. Its once shiny red surface had faded to pink from being pushed thousands of times. “Okay. The paperwork will ready for you to sign in an hour.”

* * *

Every guard nodded, smiled, and greeted Dr. Graves without performing the routine searches required at their checkpoints. Dr. Graves rushed through the fourth door held open for him and into Chief Red Bear’s seventh-floor office.

It was larger than Dr. Graves’ home. Buffalo heads and hides and other artifacts from the chief’s ancestors adorned one wall, autographed photos of performers at the casino and the chief’s collection of “scalps” of the casino’s biggest losers a second wall. A third wall held a large monitor that could be subdivided into small rectangles to display what each of the 179 security cameras monitored twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

The fourth wall let the sun flood the room with light through nothing but glass, quadruple paned to withstand the high prairie’s long, frigid winters. The view allowed the chief to survey much of the southern part of his kingdom, which soon would include the towering redwood grove eleven miles to the south, as the eagle flew.

The lawyer fidgeted with an electronic pen by the desk. Chief Red Bear stood by the window. He motioned Dr. Graves to his side and then pointed at the redwoods.

“Everyone said your father was crazy when he planted those redwoods. They said they would never survive the climate here.”

“What did they know? Those trees were the rejects from the trees he genetically modified for his mission to colonize Mars. The best specimens were to be planted on Mars to help transform its atmosphere.”

“I know. Even though that mission failed, the redwood trees that he planted here have helped me to succeed.”

“Oh? How?”

“By the time I was elected chief, they were about 100 feet tall and I could barely make them out from this office. How tall are they now?”

“The last time I measured them, the tallest one was 214 feet high.”

“Every time things got tough and I felt like quitting, I would come to this window and stare at your redwood grove. And I would remember what my father told me when I was small: ‘Son, if our neighbor can make redwood trees grow taller than anything else around us for hundreds of miles, then you can grow this reservation into something great to help our people.’ Do you really have to move away? You’ve become more important to me than those redwoods. I did not realize it until after you called me this morning.”

Dr. Graves turned away from the pleading, moist eyes. “I have no choice in the matter. It’s all Bud Lee’s fault.” He turned to the lawyer. “What do I need to sign?”

“I ran a current market analysis on your land and dwelling. It came in at 4,897,381 credits. Is that fair?”

“Yes, yes. Now, where do I sign?”

The lawyer handed him a digital pad. “Here.” He pointed. “Because your land was bought directly from one of Chief Red Bear’s ancestors, there are other documents to sign. Sign here…and here…and here. State law requires me to tell you that this transaction has been visually recorded to verify you as the signer.” The lawyer nodded and edged toward the door. “That should do it. Once the deed has been recorded, you will receive the agreed upon amount.”

“I need it today.” Dr. Graves planted his flabby rump on the huge oak desk and jumped after its sharp corner mashed flesh into his pelvis.

“But I don’t think that we can…” The lawyer paused when the Chief waved his hand. “Which bank do you want the funds transferred to?”

“My bank located in Switzerland. The transaction is to be off the books. That should be no problem because of the autonomy that the Native American reservations have finally been given. Chief Red Bear has transferred funds to it before for me. He will give you the routing numbers.”

“But…”

“Get everything ready for the transfer and come back here after Dr. Graves has left for the day.” The chief waved his reluctant helper out of the room.

“Yes, sir.” The lawyer waited until he was in the hallway to shake his head. Such an off-the-books transaction meant the Feds would not be receiving their eighty percent capital gains tax on the sale. A good real estate lawyer could argue the sale was exempt because the Graves’ property was surrounded by the reservation. Scenes of sitting in a courtroom seated next to such an attorney played out in the lawyer’s mind.

Back inside the office, Dr. Graves pulled out his FSIN card and waved it at the computer embedded in the desk. “Book me on the next flight from Rapid City International to Laredo, Texas.”

“Authorize transaction,” the Chief said. “Charge it to me instead.” He turned to Dr. Graves. “Laredo? You tracked down Elani to there?”

Dr. Graves marched to the door. “No. I have to check on some donations that I sent there. Then I’ll go on into Mexico and leave from there. Doing so is much less complicated than leaving from America. Mexico is so much friendlier when flying internationally.”

“But I was hoping you might spend a few days here at the hotel as my guest.”

“Perhaps some other time. Oh, I almost forgot. Take good care of my hoverbot. He began crying when I told him he has to stay behind. Even artificial emotions can be such a bother sometimes. They’re getting worse than human emotions.”

14

When Tim awoke, the bed four feet from his was empty, its sheets and blankets rumpled, its pillows on the floor. Relieved for a break in what Tim now labelled The Never Ending Conspiracy, he stumbled to the bathroom. During the longest and hottest shower of his life, Tim replayed how he had tried until midnight to reason with Bud. But the harder he tried, the more convoluted Bud’s conspiracy theories became.

Forget Dr. Graves, Bud, The Club, and everything else while I’m at it. If I had any sense, I’d chuck all that and SLD and move here. What a feast that buffet was last night. Casinos always need a good PR man. I’m their boy. Tell me what you want and I’ll have press releases on the way to every daily in the country before you know it. Not convinced? I’ll work for room and board until you are.

Tim’s daydream faded while he rode the elevator and images of his wife and two children crowded out living an easy life working for the casino. Sights and aromas of the breakfast buffet took control. When he exited the serving tables stretching the length of the dining room, his tray overflowed with buffalo steak and eggs, a bowl of something called grits, a plate of fresh fruit, and a stack of buckwheat pancakes swimming in melted butter and maple syrup, imported from a New England Native American tribe, food unrestrained by nonexistent food credits.

It took him a few minutes to find Bud, hunkered down at a corner table, one of the 582 in the Wild West themed dining room. After setting down his tray, Tim fired imaginary six-shooters at murals of Sitting Bull, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Crazy Horse.

“I’d almost given you up for dead.” Bud did not look up from his ring computer.

Tim slowly chewed a forkful of buffalo steak. When Bud frowned, Tim pointed at his mouth, swallowed, and took a sip of wheatgrass juice, all calculated to buy time without conversation.

“Last night you said you needed to sleep on it before deciding whether we go back out to talk to Dr. Graves again. I think I fixed your truth meter so his computers won’t detect it.” Bud tossed the pen sized device to Tim, who wondered if it would ever work again.

“His hoverbot will remember exactly what we handed over when Dr. Graves asked for our devices yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, he won’t even open the door if we go back out there.”

“At least we let him redact like your dumb DIPPER rule requires. He knows what’s coming. Now we don’t even have to show him the manuscript after it’s finished, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“I land an agent who gets me a publisher. Then the publisher’s lawyers can worry all about that redaction stuff. Here. I made up a chapter outline for the book. It starts off with me, of course.” He handed him a paper as he moved to the buffet.

Tim read it until a waitress refilled his coffee cup. “Excuse me, but are you for real? They have droids now with real human skin.” He gazed at a face he thought rivaled Pocahontas’ beauty.

She pointed at the wedding band on his finger. “Nice pickup line, sir. I’m afraid I don’t compete with wives.”

Tim’s face turned crimson.

“Oh, I love turning white men into red ones.” She laughed. “Yes, I’m real.” She winked and walked away.

Bud returned to the table. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“Not a bad outline.” Tim turned to soak in the relaxed atmosphere. In SLD, the thousands of seated diners would have been crammed into a room a quarter of the size of this one. “Why did you ever leave here?”

“I already told you, because Dr. Graves fired me.”

“But you could have gotten a job here at the casino or hotel instead.”

“It’s not what my father wants.” Bud shifted on his chair and stirred his small bowl of oatmeal. “I only took that job with the Graves to get away from my dad and his plans for me.”

“What plans?”

“My father wants me to work for him”

“I wish my dad ran a business like that for me to step into. He worked the docks as a longshoreman.”

“And marry the daughter of his business partner in China.” Bud tapped his ring until a smiling face hovered above it. “This is her.”

Tim’s eyebrows arched. “Wow. Not bad.”

Bud shut off the hologram. “It is too bad. My marrying her is just another business transaction for our fathers. I…I want to live my own life.”

Tim thought of his own son, two years younger than Bud but possessed by the same kind of desire to be independent. “You better book us a couple seats on the next flight back to SLD. We need to talk to your father. If he thinks it’s okay for us keep going on this book, then I’m in.”

15

“Sir, our records indicate that you needed to use gas calmer on your flight to South Dakota,” the blonde flight attendant said. “Unlike that other airline that you flew on your trip from SLD to Rapid City, we here at Midwest Airlines are more proactive. To ensure your comfort during your flight back home, our onboard chef android has prepared this for you.”

Tim stared at the plastic glass in front of his face. “What is it?”

“A special tonic of non-GMO, 100 percent organically mixed herbs in a solution of High Prairie Spring Water, the brand of water that buffalos, deer, antelope, and prairie dogs prefer,” the flight attendant held the drink under Tim’s nose. “I use it myself sometimes,” she whispered. “Especially if the satellites forecast any solar winds or incoming meteors.”

Its sweet intoxicating odor helped Tim to swallow it in two gulps. He turned to thank the flight attendant, but she was now twenty feet further up the aisle offering the same concoctions from the cart that she pushed.

Because their tickets were purchased four hours before the jet left Rapid City International, he and Bud filled the last two empty seats. Bud flew in first class, Tim at the rear of the plane, near ten bathrooms that emitted stinky odors after users exited them. Tim’s seatmate, a sixteen year old girl, proved talkative.

“Was this your first time at the rez?” She combed her long black hair with her left hand as she gazed into the hologram of her face projected by the computer embedded in the gold metal stud above her right eyebrow. “Or did you do the Mt. Rushmore, Black Hills trip?”

“The rez? What’s that?”

She stopped combing and told her computer to project the album of 273 photos she had taken during the last week. It displayed them on the back of the seats in front of her. “You know, The Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation, the rez. That’s what the kids who live on it call it.” She expanded one of the thumbtack sized photos until it became two feet square. “That’s Randall. Isn’t he wonderful? He lives on the rez.”

Tim studied the photo of the full blooded Sioux. “Looks a little bit too old for you.” He remembered similar talks when his daughter attended high school.

“He’s only twenty. I’m almost seventeen. After I finish school next year he’s getting me a job at the casino. Then we can get married.” Her faraway look told Tim that although her body was 80,000 feet above Colorado, her heart remained in South Dakota, stolen by Randall. He wondered if the theft would prove to be permanent.

“It was my first time there,” Tim said.

“We go back every summer.”

“Every summer? Wow. What do your mom and dad do?”

“Oh, he’s an engineer for a company working on that Mars Colony thing. Mom owns a nursery.”

“Really?” Tim glanced at the man seated across the aisle. Lining up a story about the Mars Colony seemed wise because he was certain Chan Lee would withdraw his support of son Bud’s “best-selling expose,” how Bud now described the book. Tim nodded at the man. “That your dad over there?”

“No. He and mom always stay for the motorcycle rally. It’s the same every year. The first week we ride the wagon train. That’s how I met Randall last summer. He’s one of the Indians that attack the wagon train. Dad loves shooting blanks out of some old rifle at them. After he first met Randall, he told him that if he wasn’t careful he would use a shotgun to chase us into a church. Isn’t that so silly? I can’t get pregnant. I got fixed when I was born.” She patted her abdomen. “Dad and Mom put the credits they got from the government for having me sterilized into a trust fund that I get at age eighteen. Daddy says that the returns and interest have made it grow to almost a million credits by now.”

“So you don’t like motorcycles and left early?”

“I have to get back home for summer school so I can graduate early and move to the rez to live with Randall forever and ever.” She told her computer to expand dozens of photos of Randall in white T-shirt and blue jeans and costumed as a 1800s Sioux warrior mounted on his black stallion.

Two more possible stories churned inside of Tim’s head. One could detail how “the rez” in South Dakota offered something for everyone: wagon train rides, motorcycle rallies, buffet lines as long as a football field (well, almost a third of a football field, Tim thought while reining in his hyperbole), and a casino with every game of chance and even on site Gamblers Anonymous counselors, if the betting got out of control.

The second story could be about the first wave of Fixed Babies coming of age. A lead paragraph took shape while Tim nodded at the photos of Randall: The first of the so-called Fixed Baby Generation is coming of age. Who are they? And more importantly, where are they headed?

The National Population Stabilization and Quality of Life Enhancement Act of 2077 paid parents 150,000 credits for each child they had sterilized at birth. It was amended to pay for only two procedures after some couples and single mothers tried to produce a baby a year to collect enough of the government pay outs to last a lifetime. Actuaries had calculated that any addition beyond two children to the food credit and health care programs was not cost effective, even if they could never reproduce.

Tim wondered how society had fragmented. Dr. Graves was a prime example, Tim thought as he recalled America’s transformation.

In 2014, the President had mollified fears with a mandate of having private companies, instead of government agencies, collect and store data on all phone calls and emails.

But the private companies proved much more adept at the data collection than the government. No longer burdened by that task, tens of thousands of governmental employees were reassigned and spent their workdays sifting through the data. The monster had grown for the last eighty-one years and now it categorized each of America’s 489,205,446 citizens as low risk, potential risk, medium risk, high risk, subversive, or rebel. Each of those categories had dozens of subcategories.

Anonymity and privacy, the words came to Tim after he realized the jabbering girl he had been sitting next to for forty minutes remained somewhat anonymous because he still did not know her name and probably never would. Societal norms now allowed name exchanges if a third party introduced two strangers. But her life was an open book, as if Tim had become her confessor.

In between her detailed descriptions of Randall, Tim sent off messages by his smart watch to two editors in SLD, querying them about his two story ideas.

He refocused on her. Maybe she would feed him more story ideas before they landed.

What had Bethany said before their marriage soured? “Tim, why can’t you see how God is sovereign? He put you and me together to be one.”

What if Someone up there really is watching out for me? Tim wondered.

Of the 705 possible passengers to sit next to, he had ended up by the perfect source: a SLD teen, worldly wise beyond her years and appearance.

* * *

Dress for the meeting with Chan Lee was business attire, Bud informed Tim, as they went through Customs at L.A. International Airport. “Meet me there at 7 p.m. sharp.”

“Right, boss.” Tim watched the customs agent rifle through his suitcase.

“Anything to declare? Any alcohol, buffalo or other game meat?” The agent watched Tim for telltale signs of nervousness.

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you have any contraband, such as fireworks, weapons, or illegal drugs?”

“No. If we just came from South Dakota, why is Customs checking our luggage?”

“According to your stated purpose of trip and expenditure records, you spent time at Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation. What is allowed there is not allowed here.” She closed his suitcase. “Next in line.”

Tim’s immersion back into SLD continued while he rode the subway to his living complex. No one on the train smiled or carried on a conversation. Acknowledging other passengers consisted of elbowing past them to try and find a space in the standing room only sections of the rail cars.

The first heartfelt greeting he received came from his cat as he entered his apartment because her dish held crumbs. Moose rubbed his hands with her face as he poured dry food into her bowl. The smell from her litter box made Tim wish he were back in South Dakota inhaling the kind of fresh air never available in SLD.

“What’s wrong with Charles? It looks like he didn’t clean out your box at all.” Tim dumped the nasty mess into a plastic bag and made a mental note to chastise his son. He frowned again when he found his son’s note taped to the bathroom mirror. It read: Mom told me to bring your blue suit home so she could get it cleaned. Charles.

“Oh, man.” Tim dreaded a rematch against Bethany and calculated what sort of gift might buy enough temporary peace to avoid one. He did not find the second note by the door until he was exiting his apartment. He dusted off the impression his shoe had made on it when he had arrived home. The small envelope was addressed to Bud, but Tim opened it, anxious for anything to better understand his client.

The enclosed note was short:

Dear Bud:

Thank you for getting us a place to live in.

Love,

June

Tim placed the note back in the envelope. He did not notice when it missed his pants pocket and slid to the floor.

* * *

The ride from L.A. Central to L.A. North Central allowed Tim to plan the rest of his day:

Give Bethany gift

Put on suit as fast as possible and leave

Meet with the Lees

Graciously accept payment from Chan

Go home

Start working on Fixed Baby article

Task number four was uncertain. Tim hoped Chan Lee would be willing to give him a little extra for latching onto his son’s impossible dream. Tim was Sancho; Bud, Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha tilting at windmills. If there was no payment, tough luck, Charlie, that’s the way the fortune cookie crumbles, Tim thought.

Armed with a box of wrapped chocolate, Tim rang the bell to his former home at 6 p.m. He had no choice; Bethany changed the locks after he had moved out. Her smile disappeared as she unlocked and opened it.

“Sweets for my sweet.” He handed her the gift. “Sorry, but I need my suit again. Big meeting with my clients.”

“It’s in the room.” She carefully unwrapped the box, planning to reuse the ornate paper and green ribbon.

“In a rush. Meeting is at seven.” Tim hurried off to change. He was knotting his tie when his eighteen-year-old son Charles joined him without knocking.

“Hi, Dad.” He tossed his head until his shoulder length brown hair revealed his puffy, bloodshot eyes.

“Hey, Charles. Thanks for feeding Moose while I was gone. Litter box smelled pretty stinky, though.”

“I was in a hurry, I guess.”

“How do I look?” Tim pulled on the coat.

“Just like you always did whenever you went off to work on your stories. Mom says that you’re working on a book now.”

“Looks like that’s in the toilet.” Tim held a forefinger to his lips. “But don’t tell your mother.”

“You two ever going to get back together?”

Tim took his hand from the doorknob. “I doubt it. But I still love you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, sure, Dad.” Charles’ shoulders sagged as he shuffled by his father to his room.

His son’s disappointment seemed to ricochet until every bit of it caught Tim in his gut. His pain went from physical to emotional as the walls seemed to contract onto him. How he hated this place where his wife tried to imprison every memory of him. But his son’s words deflated his desire to be right, the innocent party in a relationship torn apart.

When he entered the living room, Bethany offered to share her gift. He picked the darkest piece of chocolate to match the darkness engulfing his soul. It began to melt in his hot sweaty fingers as he stared at it and cleared his throat.

“Bethany, will you forgive me?”

She recoiled from what seemed as an invisible punch to her solar plexus. During her fifty-two years since professing faith in Jesus Christ, she forgave many people, some more than once, but always unilaterally, silently, without telling the recipient. This was the first time anyone had asked her for forgiveness. Scenes of hurts that had pierced her soul flashed in rapid sequence through her confused mind.

“Are you asking me so we can get back together again?” That scenario terrified her more than granting forgiveness.

Tim stopped staring at the now gooey piece of chocolate he had squeezed into an odd shape. “No. I just want to make peace, some kind of peace, with you and our kids.”

* * *

Although no dinner awaited him, Tim did receive Nora Lee’s hospitality in the form of tea and almond cookies. After small talk, Chan convened the meeting to decide the fate of his son’s dreams. He pointed at Tim’s watch.

“Why do you wear such an old and out dated computer watch?”

“My grandpa passed this down to me when I turned ten. He said it was state of the art when he bought it back in the 2020s. Sure, it can’t project holograms or interface with robots and androids because its software is probably sixty years old. It’s slow but it gets me by.”

“So you wear it to honor the memory of your grandfather?”

Tim cocked his head. “You know, I think you’re right. I never really thought of it that way before.” He patted the watch’s screen.

“Perhaps that is why I am so insistent on the path I have laid out for my son. I want him to also honor his grandfather.”

“I will honor him in my book, Father,” Bud said. “And you. I plan to tell of how both of you taught me to seek truth.”

Chan pursed his lips. The recipient of many rash promises from family members and employees alike, he had spent hours wondering why his son would trade security for such a high risk venture. “So, how was your visit with Dr. Graves? Did he offer his opinion of your book?”

“He lied, exactly like I knew he would,” Bud said. “He even denied The Club existed until we mentioned the ad he ran to find prospective members for it.”

“Surely you have developed skills and possess a sense for whether people are telling the truth or lying, Mr. Beheard. What was your impression of Dr. Graves?” Chan asked.

“He struck me like someone who values his privacy more than everything else. I think he mainly put The Club together for his wife’s sake, to give her something to do besides gamble so much. I asked around about the Graves at the casino. She loves to gamble.”

“And what is your honest opinion of my son’s conclusion that Dr. Graves placed implants in The Club members in order to control them and use their influence to take over the world to some degree?”

Seeing Bud’s pleading expression changed Tim’s planned answer. He squirmed until his chair moved an inch to his right. “Bud is my client, so I have to try and help him achieve his goal of a book, whether I agree with the book’s contents or not. I hope you believe that, especially since you read that other book I ghostwrote.”

“Showdown in Hong Kong?” Chan asked. “I understand how the one whose name goes onto the cover of the book has the final say. To be fair to you, I am prepared to give you 12,000 credits for your services to this point. Publishing anything about Dr. Graves will likely result in a lawsuit by him. If I am involved by paying you to ghostwrite the book then Dr. Graves can sue me also. It is much too risky for me to get involved.”

Tim stifled the smile curling the end of his lips upward. He had expected 10,000 credits at most for him to walk away forever from Bud’s dream.

“But, Father.” Bud stood and waved his arms. “You’re not being fair to me. You believe Dr. Graves instead of me.”

He ran from the living room to the back yard. At first he threw pebbles at his father’s prized fish. Then he picked small unripe apples to bombard the pond, before moving to other trees holding riper fruits. By the time Tim and his father joined him, he contemplated whether to roll the trees planted in containers into the pond.

“We have reached a compromise during your absence.” Chan shook his head when he saw the results of Bud’s tantrum. “You will pay Mr. Beheard a 10,000 credit advance. Agreed?”

Bud stared at Tim, who shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. “I guess that’s fair, Father.”

“In addition, you and Mr. Beheard will share the royalties from the book’s sales. That way, I am not involved. If Dr. Graves sues for you two for libel, he cannot come after me because I made no payments to Mr. Beheard.”

Bud smiled for the first time since landing at L.A. International that morning. He bowed to his father and shook Tim’s hand.

“And you will also return my pond to its once pristine condition.” Chan swept his arm from side to side while he pointed. “Excuse me. I have other matters to attend to.” He returned to the house.

Bud lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “How did you get him to agree to all of that?”

“I didn’t. It was all his idea. It’s better than nothing.”

Bud rubbed his hands. “Well, you better go home and sleep off any jet lag you still have.”

“Why?”

“You still want another source besides me since Dr. Graves didn’t cooperate, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I’m going to give you one. He’s The Club member Dr. Graves called Mr. Americas.”

16

Brent Fulsome’s grandfather, Stuart Fulsome, died the same year Brent was born, 2052. Having lived forty-three years of one century and fifty-two years of another, Grandpa Stuart reckoned that made him an expert on most subjects, including Tennessee. He recorded his musings in his journal:

Tennessee is the most important state of all 50. That be so because it borders 8 other states, more than any other state ever did or ever will unless they decide to chop some of them up into pieces. But that ain’t all. We got Nashville and Memphis. Nashville exports country music all over the world. And Memphis? Birthplace of the blues and rock and roll. What other state has all that for bragging rights?

Stuart’s love of Tennessee and music passed to the next generation. All eight of his children played instruments or sang. Brent’s’ father played mandolin and his mother played piano for the church choir.

Brent and his sister-in-law Gretchen sang while she drove him to his wife’s sick bed.

Rock of ages

Cleft for me…

They did not stop singing until they reached the gravel parking lot of a small medical clinic in a city of about 5,000 people. Its sole doctor met Brent in an empty waiting room filled with more sorrow than hope, more loss than recovery.

“What’s wrong? Where is she?”

“It looks like a genetically modified plant organism has formed a symbiotic relationship with certain bacteria that live on our skin. Those infected by it very rarely recover,” Dr. Farrington said. “So far there is no known treatment.”

“Why isn’t she at a healing center instead of this clinic?” Brent’s expression went from fear to anger as he waved his hands at peeling brown paint on the walls and ceiling.

“The last patient with this who I sent to a Knoxville healing center was transferred to an isolation ward somewhere and we never saw him again. I did not want to do that to your family.”

“Family?”

“I’m afraid your daughter is infected now too. I didn’t know how contagious it is. Follow me.”

He took Brent to a cramped room and removed two protective suits from a locker. Brent felt claustrophobic after he slid into the rubber gear from head to toe. After adjusting the oxygen settings on the tanks attached to their backs, the doctor led Brent into a small room with two beds.

They alternated between each bedside. Brent tried to communicate with his unconscious wife Mary and console his frightened daughter Karla. The doctor checked the blisters covering most of Mary’s skin and almost a quarter of Karla’s. He increased the drip rate of the IVs attached to his patients and led Brent out of the tiny ward.

Brent thought he was a water moccasin shedding its skin as he took off the suit that had protected him from his wife and daughter.

The next evening Mary died.

Because the funeral workers feared contamination, Brent helped Dr. Farrington place her rigid body in a coffin designed to contain the microorganisms that had killed her. The casket remained sealed until it slid into a chamber for cremation at the town’s lone funeral home. Brent objected to the lack of tradition.

“No wake or funeral service or even a memorial service. Why?”

The exhausted doctor told him to sit in an office large enough for one healer and anyone who needed healing. “There was no choice. We can’t afford to let the authorities know that I didn’t send Mary to a healing center. If they find out, I’d lose my license. Then this city would get medical care from a nurse android. You know that they come preprogrammed to ration the care they give.”

“What? I didn’t know they might yank your license. I’m sorry.”

Dr. Farrington coughed and fumbled with the stack of worn medical books he preferred over any computer. “We have to decide what to do with Karla.”

“What do you mean?”

The doctor turned on an antique music player and cranked up the volume dial until a Beethoven symphony convinced Brent he was seated in the midst of the string section of a symphonic orchestra. He leaned forward to hear the one who had delivered him from his mother’s womb.

“Can’t be too safe these days. Never know who might be eavesdropping on us. What I tell you now, you did not hear from me.”

Brent nodded and moved his chair closer to hear the doctor’s lowered voice.

“I’ve heard through the grapevine that standard protocol now is to keep the patient alive at the isolation units they use to study any new disease.”

“So they can heal them, right?”

“Maybe a year ago it was that way. But now, they experiment on them to see if they can develop a cure, or at least a treatment to contain the pathogens. If the patient appears terminal, they even infect them with something else to run other experiments. No way was I going to let that happen to Mary. Besides, you would have never even seen her body after she died if I sent her off to a healing center.”

“So you’re keeping Karla here, too, then?”

The doctor frowned. “This disease is very painful, worse than shingles. Treating your wife and daughter has almost depleted my pain killer supply. I won’t get a new shipment in until next month sometime.”

“I’ll get them for you.” Brent started to rise.

“That’s too risky. We don’t want the feds cracking down on us if they catch you.”

“So you want me to sit by and watch Karla die?”

“Of course not.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a 102-year-old .38 caliber revolver. “It has two bullets. Either you shoot Karla in the head and heart, or she dies a slow, agonizing death.”

* * *

Offered an alternate plan, Dr. Farrington relented after an hour of argument and reflection. Brent’s alternative included a third bullet and the doctor’s promise not to try and find their bodies.

“Don’t worry. We’re going somewhere that no one will come across us. How long do you figure the germs can survive on a dead body?”

“Probably a few days, maybe a week at the most. That’s how long they lived when I cultured them on a cadaver.”

“Okay. Just make sure no one goes looking for us for at least a week.”

* * *

Once again, Brent’s sister-in-law drove, this time under cover of night. Gretchen delivered Brent and Karla to a place unknown to her. It was 300 yards from Brent’s favorite cave, the first he had explored as a child.

“You sure you’re doing the right thing?”

“There’s no other way. Besides, when the feds never find any trace of me in that cave up at Big South Fork, they’ll probably declare me dead. I have to stay off their radar.” Brent placed his FSIN card in the waste disposal opening of the dashboard. A laser vaporized it.

Karla was encased in a protective suit, its oxygen tank down to a one-hour supply as Brent thanked his sister-in-law.

“Do you want me to wait, in case you change your mind about using the third bullet?” Gretchen asked.

“No. If I chicken out, I’ll walk back.”

“But it’s ten miles.”

“I’ll need time alone.”

Brent lifted Karla out of the 4-wheel drive truck. His daughter stirred and wrapped both of her emaciated arms around his neck as he held her 74-pound body and cradled it. She hung limp and semi-conscious from a last dose of pain killers administered twenty minutes earlier.

Gretchen wept. She tapped the switch for the truck’s eight high beam lights to illuminate the trail and watched until darkness swallowed her brother-in-law and niece.

17

Tim did not remember the note for Bud he had found on his apartment floor until their train was halfway to San Diego. He wiped the blue envelope on his pants before elbowing Bud, who was reading emails from his ring computer.

“This was in my apartment when we got back from visiting Dr. Graves.” He handed it to him. “Sorry about the dirt on it. I didn’t notice it at first and stepped on it.”

Bud smiled as he read it.

“Good news?”

“Just something from June.” He tossed the envelope on the floor near an open vent. Its sensor activated a vacuum that sucked it to the trash storage compartment underneath the rail car. Bud folded the rose colored stationary and slid it into his pocket.

“So what did she say?”

“She thanked me for our church finding her family a place to stay.”

“Oh. That’s real good of you.”

“Pastor has been preaching a lot about loving our neighbors like ourselves and…” Bud blushed.

Because it was Friday afternoon, the express train’s riders filled it to capacity. After a five-minute stop in San Diego, it continued on to Mexico. When it slowed to a stop at the border station, an announcement caused Bud to punch the seat in front of him.

“We have a temporary imbalance of travelers to and from Mexico. Therefore, only passengers who are age thirty and older can continue on across the border at this time. Those under age thirty must depart the train and wait in the station until border crossing equilibrium has been restored. We apologize for any…”

Bud stepped into the aisle. “Wait for me in Ensenada. I’m afraid what might happen if you wait in Tijuana for me.”

Tim saluted him and nodded off into a nap. His dream of Bethany ended when a robot conductor’s metallic cold touch woke him. “Sir, a Mr. Lee instructed me to have you exit the train here in Ensenada.”

Tim hauled his twenty-pocketed suitcase from the rack above him and joined three others at the door. A blast of hot, dry air greeted them, followed by the station’s vendors competing for customers.

“Get your map of Baja California here.”

“Taxi, senor? Taxi, senorita?”

A miffed woman held up her left hand and let the sun glint off her gold wedding band.

“Ay, carumba. Forgive me, por favor, senora. You look too young and beautiful to be already married. My taxi is your taxi, si?”

“Welcome to Mexico. Cold drinks for your thirst,” said a third vendor, the only one with something Tim wanted.

Tim finished a lukewarm soda by the time he exited the station’s front doors onto an unshaded veranda. In every direction the city seemed deserted. The sole movement came from an old man shooing flies away from his fruit stand or taxi drivers loading their fares’ luggage into the trunks of their gold or red colored cabs. Tim bought a guava from the thankful vendor.

“Always this dead here?”

“No, no, senor. It is noontime and summer. Siesta time, si?”

Tim felt a tug on his sweaty shirt sleeve.

“Hombre. I give you best tour of Ensenada, okay?”

“No thanks, kid. I’m just waiting for Bud…” The boy’s hurt expression reminded Tim of a similar look on his son Charles’ face. “How much?”

“For you, only fifteen American credits if you also eat at my mama’s café. Thirty credits if you do not.”

Over the next three hours, Tim learned more about his tour guide than Ensenada. His name was Manuel, age eleven, and he had two sisters and a brother. Tim concluded that the United Nations’ policy of two children per family did not yet affect most Mexicans’ loyalty to their church, which remained headquartered in Rome.

Manuel first took Tim to a museum featuring displays of Mexico’s two revolutions. The boy seemed enamored by his heroes of the first one, Poncho Villa and Emiliano Zapata Salazar, and told him tales of their exploits. He said the second one, which began in 2033, had been too bloody.

At the zoo, Manuel described each creature, most of them reptiles, from the nearby desert. Noticing Tim’s slowing pace, Manuel brought him to a beach to cool off from the day’s peak temperature of 109 degrees. When Tim refused to join the boy in the warm waters, Manuel ferried buckets of water and dumped them on Tim’s overheated body while he lay in the shade of a yucca plant.

“No mas, no mas,” Tim said after his fourth dousing with salt water.

Manuel returned the empty plastic bucket he had borrowed from a friend who built sand castles nearby. Tim once again dreamed of Bethany until a hand shook him awake.

“My tour now ends, Senor Tim. Now you can pay me thirty credits American or…” He bobbed his head toward town.

“Or I can eat at your mama’s café and get a discount.”

“Si, senor.”

Mama Corina’s café proved to be a welcomed break from sun and sore feet, which Tim propped up on the chair next to his. He ordered the special, a plate covered by a tostada, enchilada, rice, and beans. When a pepper burned his tongue and throat, Tim ordered a bottle of Barumba Beer, alcohol content unknown. He asked for it ice-cold, but it arrived lukewarm.

Manuel joined him after eating in the kitchen.

“So, do you give a lot of tours?”

“Only if a nice gringo like you visits our town.”

Tim slid dessert, a basket of Mexican pastry, to his new friend. “What does your father do?”

“He is on the mainland working at the marijuana plantation. The weed does not grow so good here in the deserts of Baja. My papa says Mexico cannot grow enough marijuana for your country.”

“Marijuana plantation?”

“Si. You know the song.” Manuel danced while he sang:

La cucracha la cucaracha

Ya no puede caminar

Porque la falta, porque no tiene

Dinero para

Marihuana pa’ fumar

Ya murio la cucaracha va la

Llevan a enterrar

Entre cuartor zopilotes

Y un raton de sacristan

Tim clapped. “What’s it mean?”

“That the cockroach cannot walk because it has no marijuana to smoke. My papa says anyone who smokes it becomes a cockroach.”

“So why does he work on that plantation?”

“There is no other job for him.”

Further conversation with Mama revealed how a Mexican family survived in a dusty, little city most tourists seemed to have forgotten in their rush to get to Cabo San Lucas.

Tim became so inspired by the family that he finished writing a story featuring it after returning to the train station while a full moon replaced the sun. He pressed the Send command on his smart watch. “Tell the editor to send payment for story to Bethany Beheard, FSIN Z1C-B5-A7N9,” he said to the device.

Exhausted by his day of touring, Tim fell asleep, one of the train station’s hard wooden benches serving as his mattress. Bud shook him awake at 5:30 the next morning.

“I thought I’d never get here. This is crazy. Whoever came up with the One for One Exchange?”

“I heard it was Mexico’s idea.” Tim yawned. “Sort of makes sense. Only one person can come north across the border for every one going south.”

“Our train doesn’t leave until 7:10. I’m starving.”

“Let’s go get some rancho huevos. I know just the place. Wait until you see Mama Corina’s daughter. She’ll take your mind off of that woman your old man wants you to marry.”

18

Two hundred and five miles to the south, Ramon Zappista’s 1963 woodie station wagon bounced along the rutted dirt road leading to his favorite haunt. Before joining The Club, he had spent a few hours a month at the beach. But since his return from the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation, his time with sand and surf increased. Today would be his eighth consecutive day of surfing.

When the breaking waves came into view, he floored the gas pedal, which sent his car’s wheels off the ground for part of the last quarter mile to the beach. He stomped the brake pedal and the woodie slid sideways. Two wheels sank into sand, the other two continued to smoke from the rubber left on the asphalt parking lot.

Ramon jumped from the car and said, “I love the smell of burning rubber in the morning.” He admired the fresh 100-foot long skid marks and then tugged on his eight-foot, six-finned surfboard and yanked it out through the frame of the woodie’s missing back window.

Only a beachcomber using his metal detector had arrived earlier than Ramon. He shouted a greeting, but Ramon ignored it, the ten-foot waves breaking 150 yards from the shoreline mesmerizing him.

Lying flat on the board, Ramon paddled over six waves before straddling the board and turning it toward the beach. He waited for his definition of “the perfect wave” and rode an eight-foot one until it dissolved into the foam being sucked backward from the beach.

By his fifth ride, he was one with the Pacific. Nothing could take him from the rhythm of the currents, tides, and waves. Sure, his phone in the woodie and the one back at his house were ringing, desperate calls from clients trying to connect so they could complete their projects. But who cares? Manana, manana.

Even the appearance of the lifeguard drone meant nothing to Ramon. It hovered by his face.

“You, on the surfboard. You must get to shore immediately. You are surfing outside posted hours.”

Ramon pretended not to hear the drone’s order. The hovering mechanical lifeguard repeated the order before issuing a final warning. “A detention drone has been summoned. If you are not on shore by the time it arrives, you will be arrested.”

Ramon laughed and repeated the warning and then pulled his swimming trunks down and pointed his bare buttocks at the drone. The antic caused him to fall, but the elastic tether tied between his ankle and the board bobbed him to the surface. He climbed back on his surfboard and rode the biggest wave of the morning, a twelve-footer.

Five minutes later, the whirring blades of a much larger drone snapped his head skyward.

It swooped above him and dropped a net over the violator. As he was lifted above the water his surfboard followed, still tethered to his ankle. A single laser blast from the drone severed the tether and Ramon watched his board break into two on the beach 200 feet below him.

Ordinarily, such a loss would have grieved him.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha…wipeout!”

The net swung in wide arcs while Ramon thrashed about playing air guitar and then air drums. He was still pantomiming to the instrumental song by The Surfaris playing in an endless loop in his head when the drone set him down in the detention center’s receiving yard fifteen minutes later.

* * *

Bud pushed his empty plate to the center of the small round table. “Best Mexican food I’ve ever tasted. Hope you plugged this place in your article.”

“Of course. So tell me about this source of yours that we’re going to see.”

Bud tapped his ring and a hologram of Ramon Zappista floated above the basket of warm tortillas. Tim thought he looked like a cross between soccer star Enrique De Soto of the Tijuana Tigers and Emilio Zapata, the rebel leader of almost 200 years ago.

“This guy is numero uno in the music business for Central and South America. And since half of all Americans are now of Latino heritage, he’s real big there, too.”

“Huh? Never heard of him.”

“That’s because he’s not a singer or in a band. He’s a producer. All the top acts and labels use him to produce their songs.”

“Okay. So how is that supposed to help Dr. Graves take over the world?”

“Through music. Weren’t you listening?”

“Music? How? By putting subliminal messages in the songs?”

“Who knows? What I do know is that he influences almost a billion listeners of music in Spanish. And check this out. Billboard says he’s going to open an office in Los Angeles to produce records in English. That means at least another two billion listeners. That, plus the Spanish speakers, is almost half of Earth’s population.”

“That’s your realm. I need to back up your story about The Club. At least part of it anyway.”

“You’ll see, once we get to his villa.”

* * *

The El Rosario Detention Center required a full time psychiatrist for those deemed loco en la cabeza.

Dr. Tito Bacero scanned the list of new detainees since his last shift. Two descriptions next to the names interested him.

One was an American tourist brought in last night suffering from “hallucinations and disorientation.” Dr. Bacero visited him first. After a one-way conversation, he ordered the lab results and saw that the man’s blood sample contained organic mescaline, the kind from cactus.

“Purge his system and release him with a prescription of these.” Dr. Bacero handed the chart to a nurse. She started an IV solution to speed the peyote’s removal from the tourist.

Next, Dr. Bacero went to the isolation ward and peered through the glass pane on the two-inch think steel door of a padded cell. He read the patient’s chart aloud: “Ramon Zappista. Age 27. Arrested for surfing during unauthorized hours. Uncooperative. Drug and alcohol tests were negative. No history of mental illness.”

Inside the cell, Ramon paced. Seven steps, turn, seven steps, turn; over and over. Nonstop words gushed through his mouth. To Dr. Bacero, they seemed to be a stream of consciousness dialog about anything and everything – the weather, surfing, music, women, money, and life in general. After he ordered a nurse to administer a large dose of sedatives, she summoned two orderlies to hold Ramon so the needle might not end up piercing her instead.

Dr. Bacero spent the rest of the morning visiting twenty-two other patients confined in the psychiatric wing of the center. He transferred three of them to the general wing and sent two to a hospital in Tijuana. By noon, the doctor’s stomach growled. As usual, he ate alone in his office and read medical journals. He drifted off into a nap until his computer interrupted it.

“Dr. Bacero, there are two visitors here for you.”

“What do they want?”

“They say they know Ramon Zappista.”

He took his feet off his desk and straightened his tie. “Bring up Ramon’s cell, computer.”

The monitor displayed Ramon, acting as he had four hours earlier.

“How many doses has he been given so far?”

“Two of 2,000 milligrams each.”

“Okay, have the visitors brought to my office.”

* * *

After introductions, Dr. Bacero asked how well Tim and Bud knew Ramon.

“He’s someone I met through my former employer,” Bud said. “When we couldn’t find him at his hacienda, his neighbor told us he had seen him flying by in a net hanging from a drone.”

“Do you know of any problems he was having? His mania is off the charts. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen in my thirty-six years of practice.”

“Ah…if I tell you, is it confidential? Or will you want to lock me up too, as an accessory?”

Dr. Bacero leaned forward. “Accessory to what?”

Bud unfolded his tale of working for Dr. Graves and ended with a diagnosis. “He’s possessed by his evil intentions for The Club’s members and the world. I think the implant is making Ramon act crazy.” Bud nodded and waited for affirmation but received none.

Dr. Bacero raised his hand to stop the words he thought were pregnant with paranoia. “Computer, scan patient in Room 17 for any foreign objects inside him.”

“Scanning.”

While they waited, Dr. Bacero turned to Tim. “And what do you know about Ramon Zappista?”

“Uh, I’m with him.” Tim pointed at Bud. “I…” He searched for a believable answer.

“He’s my research associate,” Bud said. The computer spared him any need for further explanation.

“Scan completed. No foreign objects detected inside prisoner.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Bacero tapped his fingers on his temple. “Would you like to visit him? Seeing you might trigger a response to help me evaluate him.”

The doctor led them through two locked doors and down a dark corridor to Room 17. He smiled when he saw Ramon sitting on the floor of his cell, the first indication his mania had subsided.

“Ramon, there is a visitor for you.” He positioned Bud at the window of the cell door.

“Hi, Ramon. I’m Bud. Remember? I worked for Dr. Graves and met you at his house during The Club’s first meeting.”

Ramon raised his bloodshot eyes, framed by grayish eyelids. “My doctor’s name is Dr. Bacero, not Dr. Graves. I bet he’s standing right next to you out there listening to every single word I say. Hey, man. I need some sounds. I’m going crazy because they got no music here at all. Do me a favor. Run out to my place. Dr. Bacero can give you the address. Get my music machine. The security code to get in the front door is 19 wipeout 74 hang 10. Got it?”

“I don’t need the address. Don’t you remember how I visited you there to get your DNA sample so you could apply for The Club?”

“Huh?”

Dr. Bacero elbowed his way to the window. “If I agree to let you have your music, will you cooperate with my therapy to make you well?”

“Si, senor. Yo estoy un chico bueno.”

* * *

The hacienda looked worse than when Bud had collected Ramon’s DNA sample ten months ago. Weeds now replaced the small patch of once carefully manicured buffalo grass in its front courtyard. Inside, every counter and table was covered by dirty plates, glasses, and silverware. Newspapers and magazines lay next to the chair facing a nine by twelve-foot screen. Scenes from The World Music Channel flashed on it. Tim covered his ears until Bud found the remote control to kill the sound blaring from the thirty small speakers hanging near the ceiling along the living room’s four walls.

“Talk about a bachelor pad.” He shook his head while shuffling through a stack of memos and contracts and unopened mail.

“What are you doing? You can’t go through his things like that, Tim.”

“Listen, Bud. So far, you’re batting about a dismal .120, not even enough to make it in the minor leagues. Ramon didn’t verify anything about your story. And now it turns out he doesn’t have any implant in him either. I’m helping you out by trying to find something to connect him to that Club story of yours.”

“Okay. But hurry up. We’re leaving after I find his music box.”

* * *

Ramon smiled as Dr. Bacero handed him the one-inch black cube. He cradled it as if it were his baby. When the sound of his favorite song began, he closed his eyes and lay down on the bed in the cell that had replaced the one with padded walls. Dr. Bacero motioned for Tim and Bud to leave so he could begin to try and unravel the mystery of Ramon’s mania.

* * *

The train ride back to San Diego seemed endless for Tim. Why couldn’t Bud shut up and enjoy the scenery for once?

“I’ll give you this much, Bud,” Tim said. “Ramon sure knows his music. That worksheet I found back at his hacienda proves that much.”

“What worksheet? Why didn’t you tell me about it before now? Was it connected to The Club?”

“Nah. He was working on isolating the hooks of the top 1,000 songs from 1963 to 1973. I bet he wants to use them whenever he sets up his office in Los Angeles.”

“Hooks? What’s that mean?”

“You know, it’s the part of the song that hooks the listeners and makes them want to hear it again and maybe even buy it, like those Mexican trumpet sounds on Ring of Fire or that sax solo on I Feel Good.”

“Who sang those songs?”

“Johnny Cash did Ring of Fire and James Brown sang I Feel Good.”

“Never heard of them.”

“That’s what’s wrong with your generation, you don’t know any of the great classic hit songs.”

“I listen to that radio station that plays songs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies sometimes.”

“But that’s when Johnny Cash and James Brown were big. Don’t they play any of their music on that station?”

“They play stuff from the 2050s, 2060s, and 2070s, not from the 1900s. Sorry, but songs over a hundred years old aren’t my strong point. That’s ancient history.”

Tim decided to educate Bud.

“Ramon’s list also had songs by Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Who, Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Jefferson Airplane, Supremes, Association, Temptations, and some groups I never heard of, like Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Talk about weird names. Must have been all the drugs they were taking back then.”

His laughter faded after he noticed Bud’s disappointed expression. “Look, it’s okay. Give me 100 more credits so we can call it quits.”

19

The blank screen seemed to mock Tim, daring him to fill it with words.

He had sold the stories about Manuel and his family in Ensenada and the one about escapes, wholesome and otherwise, available at Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation. But Bud’s crazy book idea that starred him, Dr. Graves, and The Club had been strike one, the story about the Mars project, strike two, and the one about the Fixed Baby Boomer Generation coming of age strike three.

Every editor contacted had sung variations on a theme: “We recently did a story on that,” or, “Sorry, but it does not fit our needs at this time.” Unscrupulous editors then assigned Tim’s two article ideas to one from their stable of writers. After all, “you can’t copyright an idea,” was a never ending mantra of the trade.

Moose jumped onto Tim’s computer table and nudged his cheek with her cold, wet nose. He pet her and asked, “You think I should become a travel writer, cat? It’s the only thing that I can sell any more.”

Washed up? No, at least not quite yet.

Streak of bad luck?

Over the hill? Tim went to the mirror in his bathroom and studied the wrinkles, gray hairs, and growing bald spot on his head. Turning sixty in a few months no longer seemed irrelevant. Maybe the life of a writer is a youngster’s game, he thought. That’s when he had enjoyed success at it, in his twenties and thirties, when all his stories had been published.

Now?

He did not like thinking about the present. He could not begin to draw Social Security at a reduced rate until age sixty-six; and at the full rate until age seventy, which seemed to be a lifetime away.

The rest of the morning he sent out resumes, a sure sign of a desperate, drowning man, he thought. He was ready to stop for his first meal of the day when his vision phone interrupted.

“Incoming call from Bud Lee.”

Because it had been a month since their trip to Mexico and his last contact with the one he nicknamed the dreamer, Tim hesitated. Moose decided for him by walking across the computer’s keyboard. One of the fifteen keys her paws touched accepted the call.

Tim coughed. “Hello, Bud. Long time no—”

“Tim, wait until you hear what I have planned now.”

Tim’s lightheadedness ratcheted up to dizziness. “Uh, can I call you back? I haven’t eaten all day long and feel like I’m getting ready to pass out.”

“Okay. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

Tim prepared scrambled eggs topped with imitation cheddar cheese made from soy beans. After dumping them on a slice of bread, he squirted catsup on them, “for my veggie serving,” and added a second slice of bread to “the meal that contains all the essential food groups.”

He ate slowly, while Moose crouched at his feet for any morsel that might fall her way. He then savored his last Choco-Calmer, a candy bar he hoped would help him to not be sarcastic or condescending to Bud.

“Hello?” Bud’s face filled the vision phone’s two-inch screen.

“What’s cooking, Bud? You find an agent for your book yet?”

“Not yet. But wait until you hear what I worked out with my dad.”

Tired from a nonproductive day topped off by an unexpected and unwelcome invitation to re-enter the rabbit hole he had descended into six weeks earlier at Barney’s, Tim tried to end the call. But scenes of working in an office somewhere under watchful eyes made him keep listening. Twenty minutes later, he agreed to Bud’s new plan.

Tim then called Bethany to make arrangements to leave Moose with her “for a while.”

“I need you to be the WIC, the watch-cat in charge and take care of Bethany and Charles while I’m gone,” Tim told his pet as he shoved Moose into her cat carrier, a cage she hated.

When released at the home she had grown up in, Moose ran for the first available hiding place.

* * *

The docks at Long Beach looked even more crowded than the last time Tim had visited them, eleven years earlier, while researching a story about the Asians being smuggled into America on ships originating in China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. His expose had resulted in greater security and more customs agents at the United States’ busiest port.

Bud had described the ship as big, but Tim blinked when he first saw it.

The China Queen was one-third of a mile long and boasted a top speed of fifty-two knots an hour. It was capable of carrying up to 17,203 metal shipping containers filled with aluminum, glass, paper, plastic, steel, wood, and anything else that could be recycled for reuse by China’s 1.6 billion population. Ever since Russia had completed its Trans Russian pipeline running thousands of miles to China, the U.S. no longer supplied oil to China, but recycles brought top dollar and had become America’s number one export.

Its nine-man crew monitored the computers controlling the vessel’s speed, course, and internal temperatures, a pleasant 72 degrees in the cabins, galley, mess, and bridge, and 58 degrees below decks. Destination for this trip: Hong Kong.

Ordinarily a routine crossing of 6,363 nautical miles, on this voyage there would be a slight detour to deliver two passengers. The captain met them on his bridge as his ship’s nuclear powered engines steered the behemoth westward from the harbor.

“Welcome aboard.” The captain bowed. “Your cruise will be enjoyable if you do not interfere with any of the crew’s duties. Please make any of your requests for anything known to my first mate or me.”

* * *

By the second night at sea, Tim’s body still struggled to adapt to the ever present sensation of forward and side-to-side movements. His dreams responded with vivid symbols that awoke him at 2:11 a.m. Unable to doze off, he climbed from his bunk into his boots and left Bud asleep in their 80-square-foot cabin.

Once on deck, he clung to the four-foot high steel rail between him and the inky darkness and waves 130 feet below him. He decided a couple of laps around the upper deck would tire him enough to get at least a few more hours of sleep. As he rounded a corner near the ship’s bow, movement below on a lower deck stopped him.

Tim counted five shadowy figures near the bow’s tip. One wore the distinctive cap of the captain. The others worked in pairs. They took turns moving to a shipping container. Each pair of workers removed objects shrouded in some sort of black material. After carrying each one to the rail, they paused while the captain read something from a book. Then they slid each object over the rail into the sea.

Tim counted forty-three bundles being tossed into the sea before the routine ended. Whatever slid overboard ranged in length from about three to six feet long, probably bodies, he concluded. Full of questions for Bud, Tim crawled to a bend in the rail. Once around the other side of the rectangular structure with the recreation area, he would be out of sight of those gathered at the bow. He turned the corner and bumped into a crewmember pulling watch.

The wiry sailor gawked at Tim, and then yelled at those by the bow. He shouted something in Cantonese to them and the captain answered with an order.

* * *

Taken to the captain’s quarters, Tim tried polite conversation. But compliments about “the wonderful boat that you run, Captain” brought no answer, not even a change of expression. The captain’s stoic manner reminded Tim of Chan Lee when he had brokered the deal exempting himself from any part of his son’s book. Even the arrival of a yawning Bud did not alter the captain’s displeasure. They conversed in Cantonese without translation for Tim.

After five minutes of discussion, the captain rose and left. His bow at Tim appeared so slight and rushed it seemed more of an insult than show of respect.

“What’s going on? Am I going to have to walk the plank?” Tim asked. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. Look, I hope you told him I’m not going to tell anyone about what I saw them doing, okay?”

“You got that much right. You do and you just might end up falling overboard. He wants all of our communication devices until we go ashore.” Bud held out his hand. “Give me your smart watch.”

Two days passed before a crew member assigned to Tim stopped following him. At night, another stood guard outside their cabin. Then the guard duty ended.

“They run out of bodies?” Tim asked.

“Very funny, wise guy,” Bud said. “Look, some Asians do not like California laws about having to be cremated once they die.”

“Tough luck. There isn’t any room left to bury people in that state anymore.”

“So, for a fee, my father lets survivors have their family members buried at sea.”

“The U.N. would have a hissy fit if they found out. Polluting the ocean is a major no-no for them.”

“I know.” Bud shrugged. “But tradition trumps global correctness. Isn’t that what your friend Brent said?”

* * *

Tensions aboard the China Queen faded after the Marshall Islands came into view the following day. Because of her size, the ship could not dock at any of the many island’s ports. So a fishing boat met it two miles from land. This time the captain bowed fully to bid farewell to the two so disrespectful of his command. He uttered something to Bud.

“What did he say?” Tim asked.

“May you live in interesting times,” Bud translated.

Tim smiled and extended his hand. “Thanks, Captain. Hope there is no hard feelings.”

The captain did a hasty about face and marched to his bridge.

The fisherman taking them to the islands’ capital knew minimal English. But that did not keep him from extending his palm once they docked. Bud pulled a faded fifty dollar bill of the paper currency preferred by many of the islands’ inhabitants.

At their hotel, Tim complained that the island was swaying, just as the ship had.

“It will take you a day or two to adjust,” Bud said. “My dad took me on my first ocean voyage when I was five.”

That afternoon, Tim toured the island, taking notes on every beach and business geared for tourists, because an editor back in SLD had proved agreeable to any story, “if they are interesting like the ones you did on South Dakota and Baja California.”

Tim’s absence allowed Bud to begin searching for Ahomana, otherwise known as Mr. Island Nations, the name given to him at The Club’s meeting. While Bud went from the office to his home and to his business in pursuit of Ahomana, he prayed he might reach him before Dr. Graves could disable him, probably by remote command to his implant. He wondered if that had caused Ramon Zappista’s mania.

Crazy people just don’t communicate very well, he thought as he climbed into his third taxi since arriving. And at the rate I’m going, I don’t know who’s making me crazier – Dr. Graves, Tim, or my dad.

20

Ahomana had returned the day before from a trip to Japan to meet with officials about their nation’s possible entry into the Island Nation Federation. After listening to his pitch, they smiled, bowed, fed him sushi and rice, washed down by sake, bowed again, and said, “sayonara.”

“They don’t want to join the INF because they’re afraid they will become a cash cow like Germany did for the European Union seventy years ago.” As he gave his report, Ahomana did not focus on the INF president, an Australian whose face filled his vision phone’s screen. “And Indonesia doesn’t want their Islamic culture tainted by infidel nations like yours and mine.”

“Keep after them,” she said. “I’ll put some pressure on them at the Pacific Pan Regional Conference in Manila next month. Have to sign off. Duty calls. See you in Manila.”

Ahomana waved goodbye and tapped the button linking his computer to cameras on twenty-seven of the Marshall Islands’ most populated islands. The scenes of beaches, palm and breadfruit trees, crystal blue waters, and occasional smiling face removed the stress of his failure with the Japanese. He was tiring of being Ambassador-at-Large for the Island Nation Federation and had wanted to tell its president that before she ended her call. In his estimation, he had become a salesman.

And I don’t even get a commission or salary, just all expenses paid.

He remembered happier times as a boy fishing with Grandfather, who taught him how to respect, fear, and love the world’s largest ocean. His secretary cut short his daydream of simpler days.

“Here are the three letters for you to e-sign.” She handed him the device into which she dictated all of his correspondence. “You have a meeting tomorrow at the Rongelap Chamber of Commerce.” She noticed his far off gaze, as if he were a million miles away. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Huh? The chamber of commerce meeting…”

His ability to retain essential details amazed her. “Oh, and an American came by looking for you, a Mr. Bud Lee.”

“Who?”

“Bud Lee. He says he needs to meet with you.”

Ahomana looked at the clock his grandfather had built from mahogany, an antique with slender black arms and rotating second hand. “Don’t be like people who live a day at a time,” his grandfather had said. “Live each second of every day.”

“What should I tell Mr. Lee?”

“Have him meet me at The Coral Reef. I’m starving.”

* * *

Ahomana frowned at the two Americans seated at the table he had reserved. I wonder what kind of scam they want me to buy into. Any time there’s two or more of them, it’s not good.

“Hi, Ahomana. This is Tim Beheard.” Bud stood to introduce them.

“And I guess you are the mysterious Mr. Lee my secretary told me about?”

“Yes. Remember?” Bud turned his head, hoping a profile might jog his memory. “I’m the one who met you at Dr. Grave’s house.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Graves, at the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation.”

“Oh yeah, right. I was there on a quick trip a few months back. Some promoter wanted to bring a casino here to the Marshall Islands. He kept me pretty liquored up so it’s all sort of blurry. Please forgive me if I don’t remember meeting you then.”

Bud spent the meal detailing his earlier visit to the islands to collect Ahmona’s DNA sample and The Club’s meeting. His host shook his head each time Bud punctuated his story with, “Remember?”

His stomach satisfied with sea bass, roast chicken, breadfruit, and coconut ice cream, Ahomana motioned to the waiter for the check.

“That’s quite a story, Mr. Lee. But honestly, I don’t remember being a part of any of it except some time I spent at the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation’s casino. Maybe you have me confused with another Islander who you met. You know what they say: ‘We all look alike.’” He winked at Tim, who tried to hide his laughter.

“Do you mind if I scan you for an implant? Dr. Graves put one into all six members of The Club. I think that’s what is keeping you from remembering.”

He patted his stomach and sighed. “Good thing you asked when my stomach is full so I’m in a good mood. But let’s go outside. Other people need our table.” He nodded at those crowded in the waiting area.

The sky seemed to be on fire as the bottom of the sun touched the horizon, where the reddish blue sky met the calm pale blue waters. Ahomana watched the sunset while Bud ran his tiny scanner over his 300 plus pound frame.

“I don’t get it. It’s only showing what it says is a piece of fishing hook in your leg and nothing else.” Bud cursed, the first time Tim had heard such language from him.

“Look.” Ahomana placed his right hand on Bud’s shoulder and turned him toward the sunset. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight…”

“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” Bud slinked away and found a bench and sat down.

“Your friend is typical of Americans who visit here. All stressed out, too busy to enjoy what is really important in life. Bud acts so serious all of the time.”

Tim nodded. “He thinks he’s on a mission for God.”

“Listen, I know the perfect place to take both of you to fix your perspectives. Meet me at the airport at 7 a.m. tomorrow.”

* * *

Tim convinced Bud to accept the invitation, instead of leaving the islands.

Bud grumbled as Ahomana, dressed in traditional native garb of a loose fitting ankle-length cloth wrapped about his waist, met them. His chest was bare. During their two-hour flight in a four-seat, twin engine plane from Majuro to Rongelap, Ahomana described his nation and its people.

Tim listened to glean background for his current story. Bud pretended to sleep, stretched out on the back two seats.

“First the Spanish came to our islands, then the English and later on the Germans and Japanese. But we lived in peace until World War II. Then the Japanese used us as a strategic base of operations. The Americans came and defeated them, but instead of going away after the war and leaving us alone, they stayed and used some of our islands for conducting tests of their atomic bombs.”

He told how the first blasts had exposed U.S. sailors and civilian scientists to radiation, and a later bomb’s larger than expected fallout traveled to an island group to the east of the test site.

“First, they evacuated those islanders after they got sick from the radioactive fallout. Then, they brought them back to live on that island. Next, they evacuated them again.” Ahmona’s voice broke. “Some of my ancestors died prematurely because of all that.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks. “Did you know only about one out of seven of America’s atomic bomb tests were detonated here but about eighty percent of the bombs’ entire total yield happened here on our islands? Too much radioactivity and fallout on us.” He shook his head.

“How big is the population for your nation?” Tim asked.

“Almost 100,000.” Ahomana wiped his cheeks with his calloused hands. “Many are expatriates from America.”

After circling over the islands of the Rongelap Atoll and reciting the names of each as if they were his children, Ahomana set the plane down on an airstrip that seemed to begin and end at the waters’ edge. Its residents hosted a feast favored by islanders of the South Pacific: fish of every shape and size, a five-foot long pig roasted by burying it under glowing embers, and vegetables and fruits harvested from their yards that morning.

Bud and Tim longed for a nap to help digest the meal, but Ahomana offered another suggestion.

“You two are finally beginning to relax a little bit and even look younger than yesterday. How about a tour of Monkey Island?”

Before they could decline, he led them alongside a dirt road for a quarter mile to a pier and introduced them to a wiry fisherman and his boat. Its twin diesel engines moved the craft so rapidly Tim thought it would take less than an hour to reach their destination. Instead, it took five hours because Ahomana monitored the sonar equipment in the boat’s cabin for schools of fish.

He ordered the captain to drop the anchor above the most promising schools and they fished while the boat rocked in the swells hitting it every thirty seconds. Neither of the guests held a pole, they instead clutched the rail and vomited or retreated to the cabin and buried their heads on a small table. When the boat anchored 140 yards from a tiny island, their dizziness subsided.

Ahomana plopped a four-man raft into the water and helped Bud and Tim climb into it. “Oh, I almost forgot. No electronic devices allowed on Monkey Island in honor of the dead buried there.” He collected and bagged their links to the world and tossed the gunny sack to the grinning captain, who handed him a bag of flounder, cod, bass, and a baby shark.

“Why isn’t your friend coming ashore?” Tim asked after the raft beached on a stretch of sand.

“He thinks it’s still too radioactive. But the last readings I took here with my Geiger counter indicate that a weeklong stay once a year is not harmful.”

“A week? We have to leave before then,” Bud said.

“Don’t worry.” Ahomana took them across the beach and into the island’s sparse vegetation of palm and breadfruit trees. He stopped in front of a bronze memorial supported by chunks of mortared coral erected and dedicated in 2001. Its words glinted from the sun’s setting rays:

Here lies Kong, monkey king of Monkey Island and the soldier he befriended, Private Jason Dalrumple, U.S. Army, 1941 to 1946.

“His widow sent Jason’s ashes to my great grandfather and he buried them there.” Ahomana pointed at the rocks and coral covering the graves. “The monkey troop here all probably died from the radioactive fallout.”

Neither Bud nor Tim regained an appetite as darkness fell and a fire seared the fish Ahomana had impaled on sticks anchored in the sand.

“Here, at least drink some of this so you don’t dehydrate.” Ahomana handed them coconuts with punched holes large enough through which they could drink their water. “The way you guys were barfing on the way here, I’m surprised you haven’t passed out yet.”

After dinner, Ahomana retrieved three thermal blankets from the raft and showed the others how to stay warm by positioning their beds of sand and palm fronds near the fire. When Bud awoke an hour later, he stumbled to the water’s edge to urinate. A feeling of being disconnected overwhelmed him and he stepped into the waves. A voice stopped him.

“You might make it to the boat if…” Ahomana joined him. “…you don’t die from stepping on a stone fish or from getting attacked by a shark or barracuda. You really don’t want to become fish food, do you?”

“Then let me take the raft instead. I really need to check on how my father’s stock is doing and if there are messages from him or my mom or—”

“You’ll live. If it makes you feel any better, I acted the same way you are the first couple times my grandfather brought me here. He said I went through withdrawals from all of my electronic idols. Here’s something to read if you still can’t sleep.” He handed Bud a book.

Instead of returning to the campfire, Bud walked down the beach until he found a small sand dune. He rested his back on it and looked up at thousands of more stars than he had ever seen in SLD or South Dakota. For the first time, he felt small, insignificant in a vast universe.

He returned to the fire and read the slender book by Jason Dalrumple about his extended time on Monkey Island by delaying his rescue as he had shirked his duty of fighting in a world war that had begun to consume his soul. A sentence from the last page caused Bud to begin questioning his own motives: “In the end, it’s just you and God; and He always wins because He is the Creator.”

* * *

Ahomana wanted to stay for two days on Monkey Island. But Bud’s nonstop restlessness, caused by his separation from his electronic umbilical cord stretching from his soul to the rest of Earth’s inhabitants, cut the campout to one night.

On the long boat ride back to the island with the airstrip, Ahomana watched his pair of visitors gaze at their electronic devices. He sat next to Tim.

“What are you reading so intently?” Ahomana asked him.

“I have to do research on Vietnam before we get there,” Tim said. “There has to be at least one story waiting there for me.”

“You remind me of the way I used to be.” Ahomana shook his head. “I was married to my work like you are to yours. But ever since my trip to visit that Indian casino it’s like I’ve learned to forget.”

21

Chan Lee underwrote his son’s trip to the Marshall Islands and Vietnam, “for two reasons, one business and one personal.”

First, Bud was to travel on one of the freighters used in his father’s import and export company, “so you can learn more about my business. You are the only one I trust to take my place when I retire.” Second, he was to continue on to Vietnam, “So you can explore a possible new market for us and meet your bride-to-be. I have also ordered the freighter’s captain to drop you off at the Marshall Islands to seek new business for our company.”

* * *

Because Bud and Tim landed in Vietnam a day later than planned, Bud’s intended bride pouted as she met them at the airport. Her chaperone’s face radiated even more displeasure. They conversed in Mandarin about how unreliable Americans were.

Even Tim could interpret the frowns and tones, if not the words. But Ling’s smile, slender body, and waist length ebony hair tossed gently from side to side helped to soften the tense introduction, Tim thought. Mrs. Lu, Ling’s chaperone, reminded Tim of a descendent of Chinese royalty that had appeared in Showdown in Hong Kong.That character had been as deadly as she was mean.

Their meal did not fare any better.

When Bud tried to order a dinner for four, Mrs. Lu objected and ordered what she deemed worthy of her and Ling. Bud shrugged and reordered a dinner for two. While Bud and Tim ate pork fried rice, chicken chow mein, and broccoli beef, the other two feasted on pressed duck, fried perch, and jumbo prawns. Two separate pots of tea were required, one with black tea leaves, the other, green.

Tim waited until they parted company at Ling’s hotel room before asking about the hostility and missing courtesy he thought was part of the Chinese culture.

“My guess is they’re testing me,” Bud said. “It’s her aunt’s way of deciding if I’m worthy of her niece.”

“So is it done this way all the time? It sounds like Chinese torture.”

“Who knows?”

The charade lasted one more day. Then Auntie informed Bud, “I and Ling must return home. Good-bye.” She shut the door to their room. While Bud waited in the hallway to accompany them to the airport, he sent Tim to meet Bud’s first prospect for his father’s business, Minh Pham, to explain his unexpected delay in meeting her.

* * *

Minh Pham’s smile relaxed Tim. What a difference from those two Bud is stuck with, he thought.

“Would you like to see some of our countryside while we wait for Bud Lee to arrive?” she asked.

Tim’s eyebrows shot upward. “Anything around here that’s interesting? You see, I’m a writer and need to send off another story to my editor back in America.”

“I understand. Let’s go.” Minh led him to a 4-wheel drive Jungle Cruiser Tim thought should be renamed Jungle Bruiser because it carried so many dents and scratches.

She drove through an endless throng of pedestrians, bicycle riders, buses, trucks, motor scooters, and occasional cars, all adhering to unwritten rules of the road. Tim marveled how so many of the vehicles used only petrol. Because of their fumes, his eyes burned. The traffic did not thin out and air clear until they reached the city’s perimeter and water buffalo cooling off in rice paddies replaced the mass of humanity. Now, few vehicles and pedestrians traveled in either direction.

“So, what do you think of my country?”

“A land of contrasts,” Tim said while steadying himself against the jarring motion caused by potholes. “So peaceful out here and so crazy just a few miles back that way. And I thought SLD was crowded.” He turned and studied her. Somehow, she appeared different from the other Vietnamese women he had seen since landing in Vietnam. Her hair was not as jet black or straight; her complexion and eyes not as dark, her lips not as thin. He blushed after she noticed his examination of her.

“Why are you staring so much at me?”

“Ah…” Tim tried to conjure up a question interesting enough to change the subject. “…I was wondering…”

“About my appearance?” Her laughter further tightened his constricted throat as he fumbled with the canteen attached to a bracket welded to the metal dashboard. “That’s okay. I can explain if you wish.”

Tim nodded and swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm water fortified by purification tablets for his sake.

“I’m a descendant of a war baby.”

“War baby? What’s that?”

“You have read or heard about America fighting here against the communist North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong during the 1960s and 1970s?”

Tim remembered the single paragraphs about the war from his history textbooks. “Only a very little bit.”

“Millions of American soldiers came here during the war. Some of them fathered tens of thousands of war babies. My great, great, great grandfather was one of the war babies. He was born in 1973.” She tapped the button to the glove compartment and found a small photo album that she dropped onto Tim’s lap. “That’s him on the first page as a baby.”

The faded photo showed a baby with brown hair, very pale yellow skin and hazel eyes that sometimes would reflect his father’s blue eyes and, more often, his mother’s dark brown ones throughout his lifetime.

The stranger seemed to age rapidly while Tim turned the album’s crinkled, yellowed pages. Tim watched him grow to toddler, then small boy, teenager, and young adult before middle age set in. He was in his sixties when his mother took her last photo of him. The last picture showed him at rest in his coffin. His folded hands, wry smile, and wispy gray and white beard gave him the appearance of a monk, Tim thought.

“So that was how many generations back?”

“Six. So I am one/thirty-second white since my grandmother married a European businessman from Denmark. Does it show?” She turned so Tim could better see her face.

“Barely. Is it an issue for you? Do your fellow Vietnamese hold it against you?”

“Mostly just the communists who still hate the United States. But war babies born when my great, great, great grandfather was suffered the most. They were shunned their entire lives.”

Thirty kilometers from the city, she pulled onto the road’s narrow sloped shoulder of dirt.

After placing a wooden block in front of a back tire, she handed Tim a pair of rubber boots that extended three inches above his knees and led him into a rice paddy. She stopped in the middle of it and yanked what looked to Tim to be a blade of long slender grass from the muck anchoring it beneath the water. Tiny rice kernels fell into her palm after she rubbed the blade.

“This is our newest variety, very high calorie and high density nutritionally. Did you know we supply China with almost twenty per cent of its rice?”

“That much?”

“Yes. The hungry dragon to the north has tried to devour my much smaller country many times over the centuries. Now it must remain content to only devour a portion of our rice. For a fair price, of course.”

While they walked back to the road, Tim’s foot bumped into an object and stubbed his toe. He reached into the muddy water and pulled out a piece of jagged metal half the size of his hand.

“What is it?” He washed off the top layers of mud until parts of it reflected the sun’s rays.

“Computer, analyze object.” Minh ran her golden bracelet over it.

“Preliminary analysis indicates an age of approximately 130 years. Origin appears to be of American manufacture. Metallic composites are typical of those used in U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force helicopters of that era.”

“Amazing.” Tim bounced the object in his hand and smiled. “I have a neighbor who’s about ninety years old. He’s told me stories about how his grandfather was a gunner on helicopters during the war here. This will mean a lot to him.”

Happy and inspired by Tim’s’ find, Minh drove on to a site an hour farther north. Jungle now surrounded the road instead of rice paddies. At times, the trees met over the road and formed a green canopy.

Minh engaged the Jungle Cruiser’s 6-wheel drive after she turned onto a dirt road with ruts and holes, three feet deep at times. After four kilometers of inching along in first and second gears, they came to a small clearing hacked into the jungle by machetes.

A solitary figure worked under a tent, its walls raised to allow enough circulation so he did not faint in the ninety-five degree air saturated with moisture so thick Tim thought he waded through it.

“Mr. Jorgenson, this is Tim Beheard. I believe he has some questions for you.” Introductions made, Minh returned to her jeep for a nap.

“Minh said you are recovering remains of soldiers who died last century?”

Jorgenson wiped part of the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “Yeah.” He pointed at the piles of bone fragments and teeth on his makeshift table. Two skulls grinned at the visitor. “I started out thinking I’d just find remains of Americans. But so far there’s been a lot more remains of South Vietnamese Army, Vietcong, and NVA soldiers.”

The rest of Tim’s afternoon consisted of the anthropologist describing his hopes and methods of bringing at least partial closure to the descendants of those who had been classified as Missing in Action, or Killed in Action but no body recovered.

“If the immediate family could not get closure, at least their descendants can. Better late than never,” Jorgenson said.

In three years, he had discovered 12,839 sets of remains, some in the jungle, and others in watery graves of rice paddies, rivers, or streams. Students from Vietnamese universities examined them and used computer programs to match DNA samples. Then the carefully boxed remains were delivered to descendants.

“I’d get nowhere without this.” Jorgenson patted the device that resembled a metal detector. He described how it searched for the calcium and other telltale elements of deceased humans. Its range was six feet through loose soil, twenty feet through water, and two feet through dense clay.

* * *

Dusk had thinned the mass of humanity from Ho Chi Minh City’s streets when Tim and Minh returned to meet Bud at a restaurant. More tired and dehydrated than hungry and in no mood to listen to Bud’s sales pitch about his father’s company, Tim returned to his hotel room.

Miffed because Ms. Asia did not recognize him, Bud waited until he had embellished the benefits of his father’s company to Minh before he pulled out his ring computer to jog her memory of The Club.

“By any chance have you ever met this man?” He showed her a photo of Ramon Zappista taken while visiting him at the Rosario Detention Center in Baja California.

“No. Who is he?”

“Ramon Zappista. Does his name sound familiar at all?”

“No. Should it?”

“How about him?” Bud replaced Ramon’s image with one of Ahomana.

“Oh, that’s Ahomana.”

“You know him?” Bud’s eyes widened.

“I’ve only read about his work with the Island Nation Federation. Are these two customers of your father’s company? Do you want them to give me testimonies about how happy they are doing business with him?”

“No.” While Minh finished her simple meal of rice and vegetables, he wondered what direction to take his inquiry. But the beauty Minh radiated kept distracting him. She possessed poise and calmness, even peace, a virtue he had sought for years but failed to achieve. The longer his soul absorbed her peace, the more he craved it.

“You seem to be studying me like your friend Tim did this afternoon.” Minh broke the silence. “Are we Vietnamese women that mysterious to you Americans? Or are you just trying to persuade me into having my government do business with your father?”

Bud blushed and then stammered. “I…I hope you…I…think…”

When she reached over and touched his hand, Bud wondered if the sensation of electricity traveling up his arm betrayed her as a short-circuiting android. The feeling reminded him of the small scanner he carried. He decided to gamble. Whether she became a customer for his father no longer mattered to him. Exposing Dr. Graves’ evil plot did.

“Tim told me about how he found a piece of helicopter in a rice paddy.”

“Yes.”

“I’m concerned that some fragments might have penetrated your skin, maybe as a child when you walked barefoot. Or perhaps some bully threw something at you and part of it lodged in you.” He stared at the small scar on her upper arm. “That scar might be from such an incident.”

She pulled back from him and reflected for a moment before laughing. “You are even stranger than Tim. You Americans are so funny and mysterious, like you are always hiding something or other. Go ahead and scan me, Dr. Bud Lee.”

He rose and moved next to her chair. After running the scanner across every inch of her body twice, he grumbled and sat back down.

“Will I live?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. It showed nothing. I thought that …” He bit his lip to keep from asking her about The Club and Dr. Graves.

* * *

Tim was working on the conclusion to his story when his smart watch buzzed. The blurry features of a miniature Chan Lee staring up at him straightened Tim’s slouch.

“Is Bud there? I can’t reach him and have been trying to get him for hours.”

“He’s having dinner with someone who runs the farming co-ops that grow rice for export to China. Bud said he thinks she might be willing to get the government to send rice to America in exchange for boatloads of your recyclables.”

“I’m happy to hear that. But what about his first in person meeting with Ling?”

Tim described how he and Bud had endured “the cold shoulder treatment from beginning to end.”

“Did the chaperone look like this?” Chan focused his vision phone’s lens on a photo of a sour faced woman dressed in the traditional embroidered silk gown worn by China’s elite.

“Yeah. That’s her. She looks even meaner in person.”

Chan sighed. “That is her Aunt Bai Lu. She has a very close friend with a son whom she is convinced is the right one for Ling.” He shrugged. “I suppose Bud wasted his time on the Marshall Islands talking to the one he calls Mr. Island Nations or Ahomana.”

“Afraid so.”

“I have a feeling he might turn my intended trip for him into an around the world hunt for his alleged members from The Club. If that happens, I think the results will be the same as they were for the first two that you both visited. But at least maybe Bud can then grow up and work for me full time instead of trying to write a book.”

* * *

When Bud stumbled around their hotel room shortly before 2 a.m., he woke Tim.

“Your dad called and wants you to call back.”

“It can wait.” Bud’s dreamy far off gaze caused Tim to prop himself up on an elbow in his bed.

“Have you been drinking?”

“No. Just talking to the most beautiful woman in Vietnam. No, the most beautiful one in the whole world.” Bud slipped beneath the covers of his bed and stared at the ceiling.

“Huh?”

“Isn’t Minh wonderful? Aren’t you glad you got to meet her, too?”

Oh oh, he’s found someone on the rebound, Tim thought.

“Listen, Bud. Breaking up like you did with Ling can be hard. Even if you didn’t have any feelings for her, getting rejected like that is never easy. When I first separated from Bethany, women everywhere started to look fantastic and lust replaced logic for me. You need to watch your step for a while until your emotions settle back down to normal, okay?”

“What?”

“Forget it.” Tim turned off the light on the nightstand between the two beds as he remembered acting even more foolishly after his first date with Bethany, on a night that seemed like a lifetime ago.

Four hours of no sleep and nonstop memories later, Tim stumbled to the bathroom.

22

Tim finished his rewrite while sitting at the airport. He reworked the statistics and moved them up to his lead paragraph to impress his editor, a no nonsense woman with a master’s degree in English. He hoped his opening would hook her:

Hidden in all of the glitz and motion of Vietnam’s larger cities are university labs where mysteries from long ago are being solved. Here, dozens of students sift through remains of warriors from battles fought at least 120 years ago. And one by one, the mostly forgotten soldiers are reunited with their descendants.

The figures are staggering. The number of those missing in action (MIA) or killed in action, no body recovered (KIA, NBR) are a grim reminder of a war most Americans have forgotten. While we helped win WW II in the 1940s and fought to a stalemate in Korea in the 1950s, many believe we lost the war fought in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. There are about 300,000 communist North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong, 185,000 South Vietnamese Army, and 2,000 American troops classified as MIA or KIA, NBR.

The article detailed Jorgenson’s work and profiled some of the descendants who had received the remains of their ancestors. Tim concluded his story with his new beliefs:

Vietnam was perhaps our most painful war. My research uncovered cases of returning American soldiers from that conflict who were spat on, cursed at, shunned, and despised. Many of them would later suffer debilitating illnesses and premature deaths from exposure to defoliants such as Agent Orange, which were sprayed from aircraft to remove the jungle growth that hid the enemy so well.

So was it worth it?

Ask the descendants of the over one million Vietnamese that fled their homeland after the war ended in 1975 and settled in the United States. They benefited the most from the deaths of almost 60,000 American men and women in Vietnam. If you can, go read some of their names on their memorial in Washington, D.C.

I plan to.

Tim sighed and pressed the send command. Once again, he asked that payment for the article be sent to Bethany.

“You sure we’re doing the right thing?” Tim asked Bud.

“If we travel cheaply, what we would spend flying from here back to SLD will take us as far to either Cairo or Rome, depending on how it goes,” Bud said. “I’ve run the figures twice.” He patted his ring computer. It displayed an image of Minh Pham every time he turned it on, which was now four times as often.

“You really think it’s worth chasing down those other people?”

“Look who’s being the pessimist now. Just because the first three claimed they don’t remember Dr. Graves and The Club doesn’t mean the other three won’t.”

“First three? We’ve only talked to Ahomana and Ramon so far. Why did you say three just now?”

Bud looked away and shuffled his feet. “Ah…”

“You’re holding out on me. If I’m going to be your ghostwriter I have to know. Who’s the third one?”

“Minh.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me until now?” Tim leaned from his seat until Bud could no longer avoid eye contact. “You sure fooled me into thinking she was just a potential customer for your old man’s company.”

“It didn’t seem necessary to tell you because she doesn’t remember anything about joining The Club either.”

“Did you scan her for the implant you think Dr. Graves put inside her?”

“Yeah. There was nothing there.”

“Nothing? Listen, kid. Even if the remaining three all agree with you, that means only half of your story is verifiable.”

“It’s not your book. It’s my book. You are just the ghostwriter. Don’t forget it.”

They did not speak any more during the ninety-minute flight to Mumbai, India. Because a computer controlled this flight from take-off to landing, with a human co-pilot on board in case of computer malfunction, Tim rejoined the White Knuckle Club as he clutched his armrests.

* * *

Tim thought nothing could surprise him after roaming some of the back alleys and seeing the underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City. But India proved to be more of a culture shock for him. Open space seemed limited to the waters of the Arabian Sea to the west of Mumbai.

The driver of the petrol powered cab noticed his anxiety while he ferried them from the airport to a downtown hotel. Bud nodded off on the back seat. “Your very first time in my country, sahib?”

“Yeah. You have some kind of festival going on that brought a lot of pilgrims here? Is that why it’s so crowded?” Tim pointed at crowds four times denser than those he saw in Ho Chi Minh City.

“No, no festival going on here now. These are my fellow citizens of Mumbai going off to work, school, or the market.”

When the taxi stopped at an intersection, Tim noticed a line of beggars sitting on mats next to what appeared to be a factory. “What’s their problem?”

“They are from the lower castes. My country outlawed the caste system but it still continues, unofficially. They are the poorest of the poor.”

At the hotel, Tim climbed under the bed covers and ignored Bud’s invitation to meet The Club’s Ms. India, Surjet Raahi. When Bud persisted, Tim groaned.

“I have a headache. Tell her I need a story about this God-forsaken place. If she has one, I’ll talk to her tomorrow. You slept on the pane and in the cab. Let me get some sleep now.”

* * *

Surjet Raahi shook her head when Bud showed her photos of Ramon Zappista, Ahomana, and Minh Pham. Businesslike, she cut their meeting short before Bud could ask her about The Club. Her history lesson perplexed him.

“I appreciate some of what you foreigners have done for my nation, Mr. Lee, like eliminating the practice of widows being burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres. And thanks to foreign organizations, slavery as practiced here in India is almost a thing of the past. But I’m afraid you have chosen a poor time to visit me. I must get back to my work now.”

As he shook her hand farewell, Bud recalled Tim’s request.

“I’m travelling with a friend who is a writer. He is very curious about your Arabian Sea Reclamation Project.”

Surjet did not look up from the construction report requiring her review by 8 a.m. tomorrow, less than twelve hours away. “Have him call this number tonight to speak to the chief engineer on that project. As you can plainly see, I am much too occupied to meet him in person.” She slid a business card across her desk and eyed the door.

* * *

As the sun rose next morning, Tim stood in front of his hotel. Slow to adjust to the constant shift in time zones, he yawned and slumped onto a bench. He awoke as someone shook him fifteen minutes later.

“Mr. Beheard? Are you Mr. Timothy Beheard?”

“What?” He squinted at a young girl whose face seemed to morph from elfin to angelic and back to elfin. Her bright blue eyes and long braided blonde hair were the first Tim had seen in India.

“Let’s be going. Papa is waiting.” She tugged on his shirt sleeve and led him to a taxi with windows rolled down because the sticky air’s temperature had only dropped by eleven degrees overnight.

Papa was Hans Guenther; the angelic elf his eleven-year-old daughter Corrie.

A trace of their native Dutch accented their English. Both cordial, their introductions to Tim lasted the entire eight-mile cab ride. By the time they boarded a freight train at Mumbai’s main station, Tim believed he had heard most of their life stories, especially Corrie’s. They settled into the long train’s lone passenger car, which was hitched to the last of the diesel powered engines.

“Seventeen engine cars to the front of us, 417 freight cars to the rear.” Hans long ago had learned of writers’ demands for details. “It is a very old train and breaks down more often than our modern trains in Holland.”

“When I talked to you last night, you didn’t mention anything about a train ride.” Tim watched the city roll by his window. “How far are we going?”

“To the highlands north of here to drop off our load and pick up a load for the return trip.”

“Load of what?”

“Did you see the dikes being built out in the sea when your plane landed?”

“Yes.”

“We are reclaiming the land there. After the dikes go into place, we pump the sea water to plants and separate out the salt from the nutrients that can be used for fertilizer. Northern India is still by far the most populated region of India. They need all the fertilizer we can deliver.”

“What do you haul back on the return trip?”

“Rock and gravel to build the dikes. I have to inspect it to ensure it’s the right size and composition. Inferior materials equal eventual dike failure, flooding, and God only knows how many deaths.”

Tim’s innate skepticism did not surface until his third cup of coffee, imported from Holland, the most delicious he had ever tasted. His doubts came to full bloom when the train broke down. He and Corrie watched through open windows as Hans took charge.

“Uncouple it,” Hans ordered the train’s crew as he pointed at a freight car with a broken front axle. Once severed from the train, the crew inserted inflatable air bags under the damaged car. A rubber air line from one of the train’s engines filled the bags in five minutes, which toppled the damaged car off of the tracks. The delay lasted twenty-three minutes.

“Isn’t that an expensive mess to clean up?” Tim pointed at the upended car after Hans rejoined them, most of its contents spilled on the ground.

“By the time the train with the crane comes to retrieve the damaged car, the fertilizer will be gone. The locals will have hauled it off by then to sell or use on their farms.”

“But can your dikes withstand a major typhoon?”

Hans removed his spectacles and wiped fertilizer dust from them. “Typhoon, yes. Tsunami?” He held out his hand and wiggled it. “Depends on how big the wave is. At least that’s what the computer models tell us.”

A fan of Kipling’s tales, Corrie pointed out some of the spots he had written about 200 years earlier. She also retold seventeen of his stories during the round trip. By the time they pulled back into Mumbai late the next evening, Tim believed he knew more about Rudyard Kipling than The Arabian Sea Reclamation Project. Although it was late, Hans insisted on treating him to dinner.

The small café prepared some of its food as it had been for centuries in India. Into a four-foot high beehive shaped oven went dough, flattened and sticky enough to cling to the inner walls heated by a closely watched bed of coals along its bottom. The various curries and kabobs cooked atop a stove fueled by natural gas. With a three-foot brick wall separating dining area from kitchen, patrons could watch the entire meal preparation.

“They don’t even have a microwave.” Corrie said. “But the food tastes better here than the places that use microwaves.”

While they ate, Hans described the long range goal of his project. “Once we have finished the initial stage of reclaiming land here at Mumbai, we will continue on south to the tip of India and then work northward on the east coast of India.”

“How long will it take to finish the project?” Tim asked.

“Longer than I will live. But Corrie might see its completion. There is no other way. India is now the world’s most populated nation. Either they get more land or millions, maybe hundreds of millions, will die from famine.”

23

“So how did it go with Ms. India?” Tim brought up the subject Bud had avoided.

Bud shifted in the ferry’s deck chair until it creaked under his restlessness. “It was no use trying to sell her on my dad’s import/export company. She was too busy. She said she didn’t recognize the pictures I took of Minh, Ramon, and Ahomana. But I didn’t get to scan her. So I think she probably has the implant still inside of her. Maybe Dr. Graves contacted her and told her to get rid of me.”

“Speaking of Minh, why didn’t you get interested in her at Dr. Graves’ house if she’s the most beautiful woman in the world like you claim?”

“My only contact with her there was while she was asleep and I took her to the casino to catch the shuttle to the airport. It’s not just her looks. It’s what she says and how she says it.”

“Does your dad know why we’re going around the world in less than eighty days, just so you can track down The Club members?” Tim hoped enough false sincerity accompanied the question to which he already knew the answer.

“Probably. At least he was happy when I talked to him this morning. I told him how I lined up two potential prospects in Mumbai for his business. It was the first time I remember him say he was proud of me.”

The waters of the Arabian Sea were calm, allowing the ferry to maintain its maximum speed of fifty-seven knots per hour as it hovered above the waves. But as the outline of the coast of Africa came into view, an alarm sounded until all 1,862 passengers and thirty-five crew members had heard it. From his wheelhouse, the captain issued instructions, first in four Indian dialects and then English.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our radar indicates an unknown vessel is approaching us. For your safety, please move from the outer decks to inside of one of our sheltered rooms.”

Bud and Tim joined a group lined up by the window of the lounge.

“Don’t worry.” One passenger said as he rapped his knuckles on the window. “It’s two inches thick and bulletproof. Only the strongest lasers can penetrate it.”

A few passengers who regularly made the crossing between continents clapped when a tall man took up a position on the outside deck. “It’s Pardeep,” one of them said.

The name was whispered from child to child.

“Who is Pardeep?” Tim asked.

“He’s an undercover sea marshal,” said the one who had spotted their protector. “Best shot I’ve ever seen. You’re safe if he is on board. He puts on quite a show, from what I’ve heard.”

“There they are.” An eight year old girl perched on her father’s shoulders yelled.

Pardeep removed his coat, folded it, and draped it on the rail. This exposed the tan leather holster strapped under his left armpit. He pulled a weapon the size of his hand from it and aimed. The first laser blast skipped off the water and missed the speedboat carrying four pirates armed with laser rifles capable of shorter ranges than Pardeep’s state of the art gun.

When Pardeep’s second shot burned a hole into the speedboat’s bow, waves pushed salt water into the hull’s cavity. The extra weight caused the boat to spin sideways, exposing its full length broadside to the ferry. Pardeep’s laser gun drilled four more holes an inch above the speedboat’s water line. The pirates dropped their weapons and began bailing water as the driver of the boat cut the engines to a speed of ten knots and turned it toward shore.

Before the captain could announce that it was safe to return to the outer decks, a throng surrounded Pardeep. Some of his admirers offered to buy him dinner ashore or a drink at the ferry’s well-stocked bar.

* * *

After docking at Lamu, Kenya, the ferry’s passengers filed down its nine gangways and through the customs office next to the pier. The process of entering Africa separated Tim and Bud for a half hour. When they met outside the customs office with new visas, Bud was mumbling.

“What’s wrong?” Tim asked.

“Remember how I was supposed to meet Mr. Africa in Nairobi?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s been called away on some type of emergency to Uganda. I checked out the possibilities and can only reach him by bus. You sure you don’t want to come along?”

“No way. I’ll meet up with you later. I’ve got a date. With my daughter.”

* * *

Almost a decade had passed since Tim’s daughter Karen left home to fill her need for adventure. After travelling through Europe and Russia, she ventured to Africa. There she found a connection to nature to fill her void, at least partially. Now twenty-nine, she had not seen her parents or brother in person for seven years when she returned to SLD for a short visit one Christmas.

After Tim’s call from India, she busied herself planning an adventure for his two-day stay at her wildlife preserve.

Speaking by vision phone to Karen occasionally had been easy for her father. Whenever the conversation became uncomfortable for him, he would say, “Sorry, have to go. I have an incoming call from an editor,” or some other lie.

But having to answer her inevitable questions of, “How’s Mom? How’s Charles?” in person unnerved Tim. He wondered if her expression would betray her hope of reconciliation for her parents or if it had been replaced by a cynical look she had learned from him.

Tim took a deep breath as he followed the other passengers off the train. His daughter’s sweet voice welcomed him.

“Hey, Dad. Over here.”

She looked the part of a great white huntress, the heroine in a book Tim longed to write. Short black hair protected by a broad brimmed jungle hat made of white canvas like material; matching top and shorts with a total of ten pockets, all bulging; and boots rising above her ankles laced by rawhide strings.

Tim disliked being a tourist betrayed by his jeans and short sleeved shirt resembling moist sponges because their material retained his sweat instead of evaporating it as Karen’s clothes did. He longed to be as poised and cool as Karen.

Her Range Rover was a smaller model than the vehicle Tim rode in to view the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. But it contained state of the art GPS and computers that allowed Karen to track animals smaller than her hand.

“It’s about a two hour ride to my reserve.” Karen said as she put the vehicle into gear and pulled away from the station. “How’s Mom doing?”

Tim stared straight ahead. “Your mom is fine, feisty like always.”

“She called and told me how you sent the money you made from your last four stories to her. That was nice of you. She said so, too.”

“Yeah, I thought she might like that.”

“So are you two getting back together again?”

Enough of Karen’s teeth appeared so her Mona Lisa smile now became a crocodile’s instead, Tim thought. What do you say to a daughter whose heart always absorbs the joy and pain of those around her?

“Anything is possible, I guess.”

Karen’s smile broadened, which relieved Tim because she now resembled the Cheshire cat from the book he had read to her during happier times. It made him feel old to have a daughter who was almost thirty.

“How’s Charles doing?”

Tim shrugged, hoping his body language would put an end to her questions. “We went mano a mano the last time I saw him.”

Karen whistled. “Hand to hand? Who won?”

“Who knows? There are never any winners whenever I try to help him out. Only losers.”

“He called me, too. He said he was sorry that he yelled at you.”

“That’s okay. I still love him, just like I love you and your mom.”

Tears blinded Karen’s vision, so she pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road. She buried her face on Tim’s shoulder.

“I love you, too, Daddy. Thank you for coming to visit me. There’s so much I want to show you. I can’t wait.”

24

Getting to Tor Baruti’s location drained Bud. The bus to Kampala, Uganda was forty years old and its maximum speed forty-seven miles per hour. It seemed to hit every pothole and bump on the narrow asphalt road, which jarred the passengers, the lighter ones bouncing up and down, the heavier ones swaying like metronomes. While the Africans slept at will, Bud only managed short catnaps.

Every part of his body ached as if he had the flu when he stepped foot in Kampala. He silently cursed transportation he thought belonged in the last millennium.

Mr. Africa hesitated between approaching Bud or a white man who exited the bus, so Bud used his indecision to begin his interrogation.

“Hi, Tor. I’m Bud Lee. Remember how I met you at Dr. Graves’ house for The Club’s meeting?”

“Who? What?” Tor’s smooth forehead turned into wrinkles that looked like shallow furrows as he shook Bud’s hand.

“You know, at the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, America.” Bud slowly enunciated each word, certain that one of them would trigger Tor’s memory.

A broad smile replaced Tor’s confused expression. “Yes. I remember the casino there and losing money and drinking too much. Maybe that is why I don’t remember you?” He patted his head. “The alcohol destroyed memories of you, perhaps? My pastor says not to drink, but like you say in America, ‘when the cat’s away, the mice will drink all day.’”

Weary and close to fainting from the most intense heat he had yet endured, Bud decided to play what he called “my ace in the hole.”

“Can I scan you? I think there may be an implant in you that you don’t remember about either.”

Tor shrugged. “Go ahead. But only if you agree to visit my work.”

“Sure, sure, it’s a deal. Whatever you say.” Bud passed the scanner over Tor’s six-foot, four-inch, and 220-pound frame. He stood on tip toes and stretched to reach the crown of his head.

“Did you find anything?

“Nothing. I don’t understand it.”

“I could have told you that you would not. Now let’s go get you scanned.”

* * *

Bud answered forty-two emails during the three hour drive to the camp. At the first gate, he walked through a full body scanner calibrated to tell its operator the minutest detail, even the composition of the six fillings in Bud’s teeth. At the second gate, Bud and Tor entered a concrete building with a corrugated metal roof.

They showered.

Then they walked naked through a sonic ionizer. Its waves killed any remaining bacteria or viruses the antiseptic soap had not removed. The sanitized pair donned protective suits with material so thick that they communicated via two-way radios embedded in helmets. Dry ice packs cooled the suits so the wearers could endure the ninety-seven degree temperature after they stepped outside.

“Sorry for such primitive measures.” Tor’s voice crackled inside Bud’s helmet. “But all of our equipment consists of cast offs from the U.N. or missionaries who have come to Africa. I think you Americans call it, ‘operations on a shoe string budget,’ don’t you?”

Within minutes, Bud discerned the triage nature of the camp.

Its perimeter was square, two miles long for each of the four sides. In the first section Tor took Bud to, those still able to help each other went about their daily routines. Some toiled in gardens supplying vegetables and fruit for the camp. Free ranging chickens kept down the insect population and provided eggs and meat.

Others worked in a shop crafting beds, chairs, and other pieces of furniture. And the bravest of all toiled in the camp’s hospital and dispensary, caring for the sick and dying. Many of the dwellers in the first section greeted Tor by name.

In the second section were those unable or unwilling to take part in providing for their neighbors.

Bud noticed how these people gathered by age, with younger children playing games appropriate to their size; some teens playing pick-up games of basketball on an outdoor court with a floor of six-inch thick concrete or soccer on a field of dirt packed so hard that little dust rose from it as players attacked net and goalies. Other teens sat jabbering or going through courtship rituals. The adults tended to sit alone or in pairs. Few in the second section of the camp greeted Tor.

Bud tensed when he saw the ten-foot high concrete wall, 300 meters by 500 meters, with towers every fifty meters along its perimeter. “What’s in there?” Bud pointed at the enclosure.

“The criminals,” Tor said. “Some of them were criminals before they arrived. The rest broke our rules after they arrived here. Either way, we must lock them up to keep peace here.”

Bud continued to walk to the prison.

“I’m sorry but you can go no further. Our guards are very professional.” Tor pointed at the nearest guard tower. Leaning against a rail, a uniformed guard pointed her laser rifle at Bud. She returned it to a rack after Tor waved and gestured that they were leaving.

“Well, time to go.”

Bud followed Tor back to the building where they had suited up an hour earlier. They removed their suits and placed them on hooks in the sanitation chamber. Sensing the bacteria and viruses on the suits, the chamber started its twenty minute process to render them harmless. Once washed from the suits, the organisms then exited down a drain to a chamber where a laser vaporized the water. The steam produced would be analyzed before its release into the atmosphere.

Next they went through an airlock.

In the adjoining room, they walked through the ionic sanitizer. Its waves raised goose pimples over much of Bud’s body. He thought his hair, dyed brown to set him apart from the black hair found in the rest of his family, stood on end. It flattened out under the hot water of the shower.

“Two showers in one day,” Bud said as he dressed. “Hope I smell good enough now. The way I’ve been sweating since I got to Africa, I don’t think my deodorant pills are working.”

Tor laughed. “You must be hungry. Let’s go eat.”

The dining facility served food cafeteria style. But instead of the local African fare Bud expected, every stainless steel pan held dishes of Chinese origin. One line consisted of Mandarin style items, the other Cantonese style.

After filling their trays, Tor and Bud sat at a small table in the corner. The other nine tables held camp staff who were either coming on their shift or going home after their workday.

“Do you mind if I pray first?” Tor asked.

Bud’s fork stopped at his open mouth. “Uh, no, go ahead.” He dropped his fork on his plate and bowed his head.

“Dear Father in heaven, thank you for Your endless supply and for this food. And thank You for sending Bud here. Amen.”

“Amen.” The sincerity of the simple prayer impressed Bud. “How many patients are in your camp here?”

“About 1,200 or so. What did you think of it?”

“I was really surprised at how docile all of them seemed.”

Tor nodded. “The ones who can’t come to terms with their illnesses end up in our small prison.”

“Don’t some of them ever try to escape?”

“Only the very foolish sneak away. This camp is surrounded by miles of jungle and range land that is reserved for lions, hyenas, zebra, and wildebeests. The big cats enjoy a change in diet if one of our patients walks away from the camp. And then there are the snakes…”

“What exactly is wrong with the patients?”

“Everything. Some have the flu. Others have cholera, polio, Ebola, pneumonia, AIDS, or diseases the scientists have not named yet. But they all have one thing in common, no, two.”

“What?”

“First, the viruses or bacteria that they carry are super strains that are untreatable. Second, they can never leave the camp.”

“Never?”

“Not unless some doctor invents a cure for the mutated organisms that are killing them.”

“It doesn’t seem fair.” Bud remembered his neighbor Mrs. Kleindiest and her one way trip by ambulance to the healing center.

“It is too great of a risk that what they carry will spread. We learned a lot from the Plague of 2047 and the Flu Pandemic of 2066. Containment is the only proven effective way to keep the super strains of diseases from spreading worldwide. It’s happened before and can happen again.”

Bud savored each morsel of beef chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, and pork fried rice. He laughed as he cracked open his fortune cookie and read the slender slip of paper.

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘you will soon find the answer you have been seeking.’ What does yours say? That you will meet a nice stranger from a distant land?”

“I don’t believe in luck, good or bad.” Tor shoved his tray far enough forward so that he could place his elbows on the edge of the table and rest his head in his hands. “Your showing up here is not merely good luck, it was divine providence. When I received your e-mail that you wanted to visit me, I checked you out online at People Discloser. For a small fee it told me that your father is Chan Lee, President and CEO of Lee Imports and Exports. So I must ask a favor from you, if you don’t mind.”

“What?” Bud finished his fourth glass of iced tea. He envisioned a sale of his father’s services without even having to make a pitch. Perhaps Tor’s camps could add plants to turn recyclables imported from America via his father’s ships into useful objects. If this was divine providence in action, so be it, Bud thought.

“When you return home, please ask your father to make a donation to our camps. We have thirty-eight of them spread throughout Africa, and five more planned for construction. According to People Search, your father’s income is so great he will be able to write off seventy percent of anything he donates.”

* * *

When an elephant tries to incite others in its herd to violence, preventative measures must be launched, Karen Beheard told her father. Its hunter must be fierce and brave, unflinching, despite risks of being gored by tusks or trampled underneath hooves large enough to crush any creature of the African jungles, mountains, or plains. Karen decided such a task could best be accomplished by the father who loved her enough to spend time with her. She now called him bwana.

Tim remained uncertain.

“You sure we should be doing this?” He scanned the plains for elephants while Karen steered her Range Rover to the locale of the elephant’s last sighting by an overhead satellite. “I mean, I’ve never even fired a gun since California outlawed them when I was a teenager.”

“You’ll do great, Dad. Don’t worry. Think about what a great first person story you’re going to get to write. Oh, Mom called last night and asked me to tell you that you can keep the money you make on any more stories you write during the rest of your trip around the world. When she saw how gaunt you looked in the photo I sent her of you and me with the lions and giraffes, she said that you aren’t eating enough.”

“It doesn’t matter how much I try to eat. Ever since we left from Long Beach, food has been coming out of both ends.” He patted his rump and poked his finger in his mouth as if he were vomiting. “Besides, the way I sweated in Vietnam, India, and here, I’ve probably lost at least twenty pounds just from water loss.”

“It’s all the salt, Dad. You use way too much. When are you going to cut down so you can lower your blood pressure?”

The jeep’s computerized radar system beeped out its findings as it pinged off of eleven large objects in the stand of trees to the left of the road. Karen studied the temperature readings of the blips blinking on the screen in the dashboard.

“That’s them all right. Get ready, bwana. It’s almost show time for you. You have a date with a herd of pachyderms.”

“I thought it was only one elephant. And you wonder why my blood pressure is so high.”

She stopped the jeep 300 yards from the stand of trees. Rifle in hand, Tim dragged his feet and followed her to the shady grove.

Anything to slow down all this foolishness. Why did I ever let her talk me into all this craziness?

His stay had been enjoyable. But hunting big game? “No thank you, very much,” Tim had said before asking if his daughter thought her request fell under his, “other duties as required.” He removed his helmet and tried using it to fan away some of the heat clinging to him.

“They like to rest in the shade during the heat of the day,” Karen said as she lowered the hands-free binoculars from her jungle helmet’s visor to a position in front of her eyes. She ordered the binocular’s computer to focus on any objects that matched elephants’ body heat signatures. “We’re getting pretty close now. Is the safety off on your gun?”

Tim’s hand shook as he flicked the safety to its off position. He started to count his steps to try and calm his trembling arms. Step number sixty-three ended in a croak.

Ninety yards in front of them, the largest living thing Tim had yet seen crashed through the trees. The smaller trees snapped in two. The bull elephant raised his trunk and tusks and sounded a roar that seemed to flush the last of Tim’s moisture through his skin’s pores.

“Here, you shoot him. I can’t do it.” He shoved the weapon at Karen.

“No, Dad. If I shoot him, your story won’t be exciting enough. Do like we practiced. Get down on one knee; brace the rifle up against your shoulder, aim, and fire.”

As the elephant began stomping in their direction, Tim obeyed his daughter’s orders. Through the rifle’s scope, the raging beast appeared to be five feet away.

“Fire, Dad, fire.”

Tim squeezed the trigger. A second later, the elephant stopped and howled when the projectile penetrated its thick hide. Then he continued his charge at those who dared to trespass on his herd’s territory.

“Fire again, Dad!” Karen’s calm voice faded, replaced by a wavering yell.

Tim obeyed.

Once again, his prey bellowed at the pain the two-legged interloper had shot into him. The elephant’s pace slowed. Twenty feet from the hunters, his knees buckled and he tumbled to the ground, which sent clouds of dust at the hunters. He tried to trumpet a farewell to his herd.

“Good shooting, Dad. Not bad for an amateur.” Karen hugged Tim after he rose from his firing position and handed her the gun.

“It’s a good thing I’m so dehydrated or I probably would have wet my pants.” Tim pinched the white trousers Karen had outfitted him in.

After taking pictures of Tim kneeling, his hands on one of the elephant’s tusks, Karen scanned the beast. “Looks like he has an abscess next to one of his teeth. No wonder Ulysses has been in such a foul mood.” She activated the tiny two-way radio she had sewn into her shirt’s lapel. “Ranger Karen Beheard to base.”

“Base here.” The response seemed to originate from her collar bone.

“Tell Dr. Lippinchild to fly out to us to operate on the elephant who’s been a bad boy. He’s fully sedated and sleeping like a baby.”

Then she pulled the half-inch long, empty tranquilizer darts out of Ulysses’ hide.

25

After meeting him at the bus station in Nairobi, Kenya, Bud listened impassively to Tim’s tale of, “going on a safari with my daughter Karen.” This miffed the hunter who had brought down a charging bull elephant, not as a trophy, but a hurting animal in need of a veterinarian.

“What’s wrong with you? You aren’t even listening to me.”

“I’m out of credits.”

“How much do we need? Where does this last Club member live?”

“She’s in Switzerland. To fly from here to Geneva is 658 credits for each of us. And that’s the cheap seats.”

Tim remembered that Bethany had said he could keep the money from any future stories during the trip. He asked his smart watch for his current bank balance.

“Fifty-one credits.”

“Looks like payment for my safari story hasn’t hit my bank account yet. I’m afraid we’re stuck here unless you call your dad to bail us out. In the meantime, we can go back and stay with Karen until he sends you the money.”

“Perhaps I may be of help?” Tor Baruti said as he stepped closer. “Instead of dropping you off at the airport like originally planned, you can fly with me to South Sudan. I have a friend there who is going by boat to Egypt. If you fly out of Cairo it would cost much less than leaving from here.”

* * *

Tor’s single engine plane was forty-six years old. Bud wondered how it stayed aloft at a speed producing an illusion of hovering over Africa. The pilot’s constant yawning instead of focusing on the plane’s instruments also worried Bud.

“The Nile has its origins in the mountains to the south of here,” Tor said. “We call the river that flows from there the Bahr al-Jabal, which means the Mountain River in English.”

As the plane descended to a small landing strip at Bor, South Sudan, the sun glistened off the shallow waters of a swamp stretching for hundreds of square miles.

“That is the Sudd, one of the largest marsh areas in the world,” Tor said. “It will be the hardest part of your journey.”

* * *

Tim blinked when they boarded the thirty-four foot long boat. He had expected a modern craft with comfortable sleeping quarters and a galley stocked with plenty of food. Instead, two thin mattresses lay on the cabin’s dirty damp floor. Boxes of canned food sat, piled between the mattresses, to ensure privacy, Tim thought. No stove, refrigerator, or TV. A porta-potty foretold a “roughing it” experience.

Maybe it’ll make for a colorful story. I can title it Traveling the Nile in Style.

“Welcome aboard, I’m Monday. This is my cousin Patience. Tor said that you two need to get to Egypt?”

“Yes, how much?” Bud asked.

“Since you two are friends of Tor, you get a discount. It will cost you only 200 American credits each for lodging and all of your meals.” Monday pointed at their accommodations.

Tim checked his bank account and smiled. He ordered his smart watch to transfer 400 credits to Monday’s bank account in Lagos, Nigeria. While Monday piloted the craft toward the 300 mile long stretch of swampland, Patience explained the two passengers’ duties, including use of a laser rifle, if necessary.

“But if we’re out on the water, elephants and lions can’t get to us, right?” Tim asked.

Patience smiled. “The water holds beasts of death also. We have to cover each other while we jump into the water for a quick bath. Otherwise, crocodiles or hippos might grow angry at our invasion of their waters.”

Her skin glowed as it reflected the midday sun. She wore a blue bandana over her black hair, cut short to give insects of the Sudd fewer places to hide.

After they entered the swamp, swarms of huge mosquitos attacked them. Patience gave Bud and Tim a homemade pungent lotion to repel the blood suckers. Her poise reminded Tim of his daughter. Karen’s image now smiled at him each time he turned on his smart watch.

Monday wore a tattered hat a merchant marine captain had given him when Monday worked the docks that jutted from Nigeria into the South Atlantic. Dark glasses protected his eyes from the constant glare of the sun. His smile punctuated most of his comments.

“We work with Tor. He receives strange donations at times, like this boat. We are delivering it to the lake behind Aswan Dam to sell it. The buyers want it for their tourist business. I will tell them how it will make an excellent fishing boat.”

To save time, Monday turned from the shallow waters of the Sudd into the deep water channel bisecting the 200-mile wide swamp. The first passing vessel was a crude oil tanker bound for the refineries south of the wetlands.

“Underneath the Sudd, they have found enough oil reserves for most of Africa’s petrol needs,” Monday said as he waved at one of the tanker’s deckhands. When the deckhand shouted something to Monday in his native tongue. Monday’s smile faded.

“What’s wrong? What did he tell you?” Bud cracked his knuckles, a habit he displayed if he believed a situation might be going bad.

“They spotted pirates about an hour ago. Patience, get the laser rifle out.”

“Pirates?” Tim’s head rotated in a 360-degree arc. “Tor didn’t say anything about pirates being out here.”

“If he had, you wouldn’t have come along and we would not have enough money for petrol to get us to Egypt. Patience is a crack shot. Have faith.”

“You sound like my wife.”

“Oh, she is a Christian like Patience and me? Do you listen to your wife whenever she tells you to have faith?”

Scenes of their increasing arguments before their separation replayed in Tim’s mind. “Sometimes.” Oh, I listen all right, Tim thought. But that doesn’t mean I end up doing what she says I need to do.

* * *

As the sun neared the horizon, dinner consisted of cans of pork and beans washed down by lukewarm sodas. Bud objected when Patience threw the empty cans, paper plates, soiled napkins, and plastic silverware overboard.

“You’re polluting the swamp because of your litter.”

“We need to lighten our load to save fuel,” Patience said. “The lighter our load is, the better chance we have to outrun any pirates up ahead. Every little bit helps.” She reached for dessert, a package of cookies.

Her simple bow saved her life. The laser burst meant for her head burned a sixteenth-inch wide hole into Monday’s upper leg instead of Patience. Monday lost his grip on the wheel and collapsed to the deck. As they bent over him, blood squirted onto Tim and Bud.

Patience grabbed the pilotless wheel and spun it toward the channel’s deepest waters. Her quick action kept the boat from beaching on the thick patches of decaying vegetation next to the muddy bank. She gunned the engines to their maximum rpms while laser bursts flew past her head. Monday shook his head when Tim unlatched the first aid kit.

“There is no doctor out here in the Sudd. Without one I am finished. The laser went all the way through my leg.” He rolled up his pants enough to reveal the exit wound. “Is the pirates’ boat gaining on us?”

Bud poked his head above the rail. “Yeah, they’re closing in pretty fast.”

“They will kill Patience and me and hold you two for ransom if they catch us.” Monday turned to Patience. “Give me the grenade.”

Bud and Tim backed away when a grenade rolled to his side. “Help me up to the back rail.”

The two passengers each grabbed an arm and pulled Monday to the stern. They shouted as he did a half flip into the wash from the boat’s propeller. His body bobbed as he waved to the pirates’ vessel.

Slowing enough not to run over him, the pirates’ craft pulled alongside Monday as two laser rifles threatened the water-bound target. One of the three pirates noticed the grenade after it bounced onto the wooden deck. She was halfway over the rail when the boat exploded in a ball of yellowish orange flame.

Hoping to hide the tears streaming down her cheeks, Patience did not turn around to see the burning wreck. But the sound of the explosion caused her to throttle back to normal cruising speed. Bud stood transfixed, his hands clutching the boat’s rear metal rail.

Tim stumbled forward. “Aren’t you going back to pick up Monday?” He clutched her shoulders from behind. “We have to help him.”

“There is very little chance he survived the explosion.” Her exaggerated shrugs freed her shoulders from his grip. “Even if he did, you heard what he said. After the laser hit him, he was a dead man because there is no doctor out here in the Sudd. Anyway, the explosion might draw more pirates from the swamp, where they live like rats, and out into the channel. Monday would want us to get away. Surely you understand?”

Tim turned and cursed at the funeral pyre, which seemed ironic because it contained both Monday and the pirates who had killed him. “Then why did you slow back down?”

“To conserve fuel. We burned a lot of petrol during our run to get away from the pirates. Now I’m not sure if we will have enough to make it to the next place with petrol for sale.”

“What happens if we run out of fuel?”

“Please pray we do not.” Irritated by the questions, she gave Tim an assignment. “Use your smart watch to calculate our new rate of fuel consumption.”

As she read off the new weight of the boat and its contents and the number of gallons of gas remaining in its tanks and the minimum speed needed to keep it from drifting onto one of the channel’s muddy banks, Tim punched the numbers into the watch. He frowned at the results.

“According to this, we can go another 239 miles before we run out of gas. Will that get us to the place that has petrol?”

Patience pointed at the GPS unit on top of the console that stretched to either side of the wheel she held. “Put in Lake No Refueling Center for the destination and current position for the starting point.”

He obeyed. “It says 255 miles.”

“Throw the mattresses overboard and then everything that belonged to Monday. It’s there.” She pointed at a pile of belongings.

Tim tossed the one comfort for he and Bud during “our cruise from hell,” the name they had given their journey an hour after stepping aboard. He hesitated before he reached for Monday’s sea bag.

“Don’t you think we should go through Monday’s things to see if there’s anything to return to his family?”

“The sooner you get rid of it, the sooner we begin to save petrol. Then, start bailing any water we took on during our run at full speed.” She barked out her orders, keeping her back turned.

Her tears did not cease until daylight replaced darkness.

* * *

Lake No’s slow moving currents helped little after the boat’s fuel tank ran dry. So captain and passengers rotated between paddling with makeshift oars fashioned from the planking inside the cabin and steering the boat during the last seven miles to the refueling station. From there, the lake gradually narrowed into the beginning of the White Nile.

As they floated northward, Patience pointed out where the Blue Nile joined the White Nile, turning it into the Nile. Khartoum’s alternating mosques and churches seemed to challenge one another. Patience told the story of English General Charles Gordon’s doomed attempt to rescue those trying to flee from Khartoum and the Mahdi attempting to conquer the world in the name of Allah, who had slaughtered the city’s men, women, and children two centuries earlier.

Tim recorded the story, his journalistic skills still sluggish because of the trauma of Monday’s murder. Bud continued to stare from the boat’s stern, as if his intensity would somehow resurrect Monday. Patience groaned when she learned that the batteries for her phone were dead.

“Can I borrow your smart watch to call Monday’s family?” she asked Tim. “Now that we are out of the Sudd, we should have reception once again.”

As Tim handed her his watch, Patience tried to compose the way she could tell Monday’s wife that she was now a widow.

* * *

Thousands of miles to the northwest, Dr. Graves’ computer informed him that “Tim Beheard’s smart watch is being used to make a call from Sudan to Nigeria.”

Dr. Graves cursed. “The fools. Don’t they know that they have to continue their journey to Switzerland to visit Patrice Oldefarmer? That way that nosy Tim Beheard will have met all six of The Club members and finally realize that Bud Lee has led him around the world on a worthless expedition. If Tim is calling Nigeria, it must mean that he has convinced Bud to fly from Nigeria back to their homes instead.”

“Perhaps Mr. Beheard has decided to part company with Mr. Lee?” the computer raised the scenario it calculated to be more probable.

“Who cares? I must have them meet with Patrice Oldefarmer. That will make their investigation into The Club members complete and certainly derail their inane misguided plans to expose me. Go ahead and block the call so they cannot make arrangements to leave from Nigeria to travel back to SLD.”

“I have blocked his call,” the computer said. “Brilliant maneuver, almost as brilliant as having me install your software program into his smart watch while he and Bud Lee searched your house. I calculate a seventy-eight percent chance that my blocking of his call to Nigeria will accomplish what you desire. Would you like to play some chess?”

* * *

Eleven days after entering the White Nile, the weary trio entered Lake Nasser, the immense body of water held back by the Aswan Dam. Told how the misadventure of pirates had caused their late arrival, the buyer for the boat tilted his head and shrugged.

“Did the pirates damage the boat in any way?” He scanned the boat’s hull.

“No.” Patience’s top teeth bit into her trembling lower lip to hide her thoughts. We damaged it, fool, to make oars to stay alive, you ingrate.

Tim watched the transaction from the dock to which he had tied the boat. Bud sat next to him and read his incoming emails. He had said and eaten little since Monday’s death.

After ten minutes of haggling over the missing planks, the buyer transferred a lowered price to the Nigerian office that ran two of Tor Baruti’s camps for those who were quarantined. Patience jumped from the boat and landed next to Tim. She carried nothing from the two suitcases she had started the trip with, they and their contents jettisoned to save fuel.

Tim stood and grabbed her arm as she stomped away. “How do we get to Cairo from here?” He pointed at the two ramshackle structures at the dock’s end. “It doesn’t look like this is a regular stop for taxis or buses.”

“I don’t know. Ask him. The man is so cheap I can’t stand being near him.” She continued to look for a bathroom.

Tim called down to the one on the boat, who fiddled with its controls while he pretended to pilot it. “Sir, can you help us?”

The buyer glanced up.

Tim could see his reflection in the dark glasses hiding most of the stranger’s face. A thin black mustache covered the corners of a mouth forever creased by more frowns than smiles. He removed his white Panama hat and used it to fan himself, the only breeze for miles. Dressed in a white coat with matching shirt and pants, he appeared to be a displaced snowman to Tim.

“I can drive you to the nearest bus stop, if you wish.” He paused. “For a small fee, of course.”

26

Because Cairo had descended into violence four days earlier, the boat’s buyer counseled the trio of weary Nile travelers to avoid it.

“Those who do not believe in Allah and his holy prophet Mohammed, such as you, would not be safe in Cairo at the present time,” he said. “But, Allah be praised, there is a bus that runs to Israel from where I am dropping you off. You can continue your journeys from there, yes? Perhaps one day you can return as tourists and fish from the boat that you have delivered to me. Here. These are for you.”

He pulled three brochures from his coat pocket and handed them to Tim to distribute. They announced “The Adventure of a Lifetime While You Fish on Beautiful Lake Nasser.”

Getting to Lake Nasser alive is the real adventure, Tim thought as he shoved the brochures into his pants pocket.

* * *

Only Patience accepted their change in itinerary without complaint, claiming it was an answer to prayers she had uttered since Monday’s murder. While their bus sped down the highway connecting Egypt to Israel, she described his plans.

“Monday promised to take me to the Holy Land with his family next Easter. Now I must go on there alone and take photos to send to his family.”

“Monday had children?” Tim asked.

Patience pulled a tattered photo from her wallet, the lone possession she had not tossed overboard into the muddy Sudd. “These are his four children. They are my second cousins.”

Tim stared at the images of the smiling sons and daughter, now fatherless.

The desert of the Sinai gave way to a series of kibbutz that had transformed sand and rock into farms and orchards. When Jerusalem came into view, its walls gleamed and the golden Dome of the Rock seemed to be on fire from the setting sun’s rays. Patience took dozens of photos.

After departing the bus on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the trio separated.

“I must look up a friend of mine from Nigeria who lives here in Jerusalem,” Patience said. She took a business card from her wallet and gave it to Tim. “Take this card to the address on it. They will take care of you and Bud. Goodbye.” She blended into a crowd passing through one of Jerusalem’s gates.

“Thank God, she’s finally gone,” Bud said.

“Welcome back to the land of the living.” Tim smiled at Bud before turning to ask a stranger how to get to the address on the business card. Satisfied, he turned back to Bud. “It’s close enough we can walk to it from here. Like I was saying, you haven’t said two words since…since…”

“Since Monday got killed?” Bud picked up their pace.

“Yeah.”

“What did you expect me to do? Blab about everything while Patience could hear it? No way.”

“What?”

“Don’t you get it yet? Both her and Monday called Tor Baruti, ‘Mr. Africa.’”

“So?”

“That’s the exact same name Dr. Graves gave him after Tor joined The Club. The only way Monday and Patience could have known that Tor was Mr. Africa is if Tor told them.”

“But I thought you said Tor didn’t recognize the photos of Surjet, Minh, Ahomana, and Ramon that you showed him.”

“He was lying to me. I just know it. He lied, the dirty weasel. He can forget about me asking my dad to donate to him.”

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence. If Patience heard you say this stuff about Tor, she would have punched you out. She’s sold out to him and his quarantine camps.”

“Ha. Let her try. I survived Dr. Graves’ hit on us. What can she do to me?”

“Dr. Graves’ hit on us?”

“Yeah. He sent those pirates after us to kill us, not to hold us for ransom like Patience said. I bet the implant in Tor malfunctioned and quit working and that’s why it didn’t show up when I scanned him. And then he contacted Dr. Graves about me snooping around. Dr. Graves ordered Tor to send us on that Nile trip and have us killed while we were out in the middle of nowhere. Tor hired the pirates to do the hit on us.”

“No way. Why would Tor want to get Monday and Patience killed too? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“The problem with you is you don’t know how to think like a criminal. They were expendable, collateral damage. I bet old Dr. Graves gets constipated big time when he finds out how we’re still alive.”

Tim shook his head. “I liked you better when you quit talking.”

* * *

Their destination was the Jerusalem Mission, a Christian ministry with a small hostel offering inexpensive lodging for pilgrims touring the land where Christ had walked.

Its hot showers removed the last of the dirt and grime that bathing in the waters of the Sudd, Lake No, the Nile, and Lake Nasser had not. The long shower put Tim into a mood to spin his version of their sixteen-day journey. While Tim typed away on the hostel’s computer in the recreation room, Bud grilled one of the Jerusalem Mission’s staff to find support for his ever expanding conspiracy.

“You must remember that it is not just the Antichrist we need to be on the lookout for in these last days,” Cheryl, a transplanted American who had worked at the mission for five years, said. She wore her long black hair braided in a style to make it appear she was Jewish. “The Bible tells us there is more than one antichrist in our midst. We must beware.” She opened a Bible, its red leather cover faded and pages crinkled from years of use. “Here it is. Read it for yourself.”

Bud focused on the verse next to Cheryl’s finger and read aloud. “Dear children, this is the last hour, and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.”

Bud lifted his head and stared into the brightest blue eyes he had yet encountered. He thought they beamed a light not of this Earth. He hoped his quizzical expression would elicit further explanation of the verse from First John Chapter 2.

“Right there.” Cheryl’s finger tapped the page. “See how it says ‘many antichrists?’ Too many Christians are waiting for the big antichrist to show up. Meanwhile they are blind to all of the other antichrists who are working their evil deeds to further Satan’s kingdom. They are the tares among the wheat, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, false prophets and false teachers tickling billions of unwary fools’ ears.”

Bud’s mouth widened while his understanding of Dr. Graves moved from crazy mad scientist to antichrist, perhaps not the Antichrist, but at least one of the lesser ones.

Three hours later Bud staggered to the small room with two bunk beds. He shook Tim and whispered so as not to awaken the two strangers asleep on the other bunks’ soft mattresses and pillows.

“Huh? What’s going on?” Tim rubbed his eyes.

“How soon are you going to get paid for your trip down the Nile story?”

“I sent it off before I went to bed. It’ll take a day or two for the money to hit my bank account. Why?”

Bud rubbed his hands together. “Good. That’ll give us time to take the tour with Cheryl tomorrow.”

* * *

The next day, the tour of Jerusalem and area around it thrilled Bud and bored Tim. Worse yet, the cost for it depleted Tim’s bank account to fourteen credits. He was growing weary of living hand to mouth. Bud called it “stepping out in faith, brother,” one of many phrases he now uttered since meeting Cheryl.

Joining them on the bus tour were thirty other pilgrims, most from Europe and America, all of them staying at hotels with better rooms than where Tim and Bud slept. Their dress and manners served to set them in a class above Tim, who believed he was an outsider. Bud sat on a front seat to be near Cheryl, who stood and provided narration.

“It was in these very fields we are passing where the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds and announced the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” Cheryl spoke into a wireless microphone.

Seated next to a woman who Tim guessed to be in her late thirties or early forties, he pretended to sleep. His seatmate elbowed his ribs.

“Wake up, sir. Listen to what the young lady is saying. It’s fascinating. Is this your very first time to the Holy Land?”

“Yes. How about you?” Tim asked.

“This is my fifth visit with our ladies missionary society.” She continued to take photos and posted them to her Worldlink page, a social media network with five billion subscribers. “I can’t wait to get back home to give my presentation to our ladies Bible study. Where do you go to church?”

Tim gulped. Since living apart from Bethany, his church attendance had gone from minimal to nonexistent. Afraid admitting it would invite a daylong effort by this fervent servant of the Lord to restore this wayward soul, this… backslider; he formed a white lie, a half-truth to deliver him.

“You see the young guy up at the front?” He pointed at Bud.

“The black gentleman?”

“No, on the other side of the aisle. The Chinese American. His name is Bud Lee. He took me to visit his church back in SLD. Then he invited me to join him on this trip.”

“SLD? Praise the Lord, brother!” She slapped Tim’s shoulder. Tufts of black hair poked out from a blue hat matching the color of her fiery eyes. “Most of our tour group is from three SLD churches. You know what they say: ‘when you stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.’”

For the next five minutes, she pointed at her traveling companions and recited a brief biography of each one.

Tim welcomed a respite from her chatter when the passengers exited the bus for a walking tour of Bethlehem, embellished by Cheryl’s vivid descriptions of baby Jesus, the Three Wise Men, Mary and Joseph, and King Herod. He pulled Bud aside when it was time to re-board the bus.

“Let me trade seats with you, Bud.”

“I can’t. Cheryl needs me. I get to hold her script and turn the pages for her while she tells everyone about these cool places.” He waved a thick binder labeled Tour Notes under Tim’s nose.

“Great.” Tim murmured as he returned to his seat.

“Sounds like you’re praying, brother. Is your friend as spiritual as you are?” his seatmate asked.

“He’s a whole lot more spiritual than I am or ever will be. Let me tell you about his church back in Venice Beach. His pastor is what Bud says is ‘a man of God.’ I never heard that phrase until I met Bud.” Tim launched into flowery descriptions of Venice Beach Tabernacle and Pastor Tully.

“You don’t say. Sure sounds like a church that’s really on fire for the Lord.” She lowered her voice until only Tim could hear her. “You have to introduce me to Bud. I have a daughter who is about his age. It’s so hard finding suitable young men these days.”

Tim smiled. Best to let Bud explain to this matchmaking mom about his current infatuation with Minh Pham. This traveling companion for the day was not the type to be denied. Besides, introducing them might move her forward in the bus to be closer to him.

Tim smiled. The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways.

They stopped next at the location Cheryl claimed to be the site where twelve-year-old Jesus had astounded the teachers of the law in the temple. Cheryl said recent discoveries by “the world’s top archaeologists now pinpoint almost of all of the exact locations of major events recorded in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

Next, the pilgrims marched into Jerusalem waving palm branches and yelling, “Hosanna. Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the King of Israel!” Cheryl assured the jubilant throng that they walked where Jesus had when He entered Jerusalem days before His death.

Then their mood grew somber after they joined dozens of others to walk the route where Christ had carried His cross to Calvary. Tim grew reflective after they reached Golgotha.

From there, they hastened to, “the tomb that could not contain our Messiah.” Cheryl’s hoarse voice managed a weak, “Alleluia.” An impromptu singing of hymns about the resurrection brought tears to Tim’s eyes as their words pierced his soul.

The tour ended on the Mount of Olives, which Cheryl said would be “where Jesus will soon touch down on Earth again!”

Outside a gate on their way back into Jerusalem, the tourists paused at a memorial. Some laid flowers at its base. The tarnished brass letters on the plaque read: “Dedicated to the American troops who died defending Israel during the 2062 War on Israel. May they rest in peace.” An electronic screen contained the names of the dead, listed alphabetically.

Many from the tour group opted for the joint worship service that evening sponsored by the Jerusalem Mission and eight other ministries. By then, Tim had hooked his seatmate up with Bud. Tim’s headache instead sent him to his lodging.

His ears ached more than his feet and head when he lay down on the most welcomed mattress he could recall. He uttered, “Thank you, Jesus, for Your infinite mercy,” because his other two roommates said they would join Bud at the worship service. Tim excused himself by saying, “I have to put together an outline before I forget what I saw and heard today. It was too much to take in all at once.”

His eyes had shut and head drooped when his smart watch beeped to rouse him. The message told him of a recent deposit to his bank account. He then booked two seats for a flight from Tel Aviv to Rome that departed the next morning.

27

Bud’s new twist of Dr. Graves being an antichrist, instead of mere demented evil genius plotting to take over the world, did not upset Tim while they flew to Europe to find Patrice Oldefarmer. If Bud decided to abandon his book, Tim had built up an impressive series of travel stories, enough to craft his own book.

To tune out Bud’s rhetoric, Tim silently conjured up titles for his book idea. How about Around the World in Less than a Month? No, that’s obvious borrowing from Jules Verne’s book. Maybe Traveling the World by Freighter, Plane, Train, Bus, Boat, Jungle Cruiser, and Range Rover is better. A flight attendant derailed his train of thought.

“Sir, please place your tray in the upright position and fasten your safety harness. We are descending into Rome.” The words carried no emotion.

Obeying an android flight attendant reminded him of his apartment’s nagging computer. Tim flipped the tray into place and pulled three belts over his shoulder, torso, and waist. Blessed with a gentle touch, the co-pilot connected rubber to tarmac and the plane barely shuddered as it landed.

When they deplaned, Bud wanted them to catch a train to Switzerland, but Tim objected. “I’m almost three times older than you are. Your family has wealth; mine doesn’t. This might be the only time I get to see Rome. I checked and it’s cheaper for us to fly home to SLD from Rome than from Switzerland. You head up there to talk to Patrice by yourself. That way, I’ll have enough for two or three stories.”

* * *

Tim noticed most of the traffic headed in one direction as his bus from the airport pulled to a stop near Rome’s center. “Excuse me, driver. Where is everyone going?”

“To the New Coliseum for the big match today.”

By the time Tim walked into the stadium modeled after the remnants of the Coliseum built during the days of the Caesars, it had reached its capacity of 180,000 fans. The event pitted Team Italy against Team Scotland. He sat in the top row of the top tier. After Tim donned his binocuglasses, the players on the field grew from ant sized proportions.

He patted the present Karen had snuck into his luggage. By looking through them, some of the larger players on the field appeared fiercer than the bull elephant that had charged at them in Kenya, especially the bearded Scots who wore kilts.

At first, the match seemed routine. But after a scoreless first half, the crowd flooded the concessions until they sold out of beer, wine, and other forms of alcohol. The winner would advance to the world quarter finals, national honor was at stake.

Started internationally in 2029, The World Buzzball Federation drew players from soccer, football, and rugby, because the game incorporated elements from each sport. The competitors wore fiberglass helmets to protect skulls and brains, but no other protective pads. Some players wore soft fabric lace up shoes; others ran the 150-meter long field barefoot.

The ball combined features from those used in soccer, rugby, and football. The oval shaped result could be passed, carried, bumped, kicked, or thrown at the goal, a netted area measuring two meters wide by one meter high by four meters deep.

A team’s possession of the ball lasted for six downs. If no one scored during a series of downs, possession of the ball traded teams. Any part of a player’s body could touch the ball or opposing player above the waist. After the center snapped the ball, the offense ran it forward until a defensive player touched the ball with both hands. The next play would begin from that point of contact.

Because the ten referees called fouls when a player grabbed, hit, kicked, or otherwise touched an opponent below the waist, the upper halves of players’ bodies suffered most of the injuries. Penalties were not assessed for taunting those in the stands, so players on the sidelines often spent more time facing the fans than the field.

Rules dictated that scoreless first halves resulted in four more players per team being placed on the field, so thirty players faced off as the last thirty minutes of regulation play began.

Team Scotland’s first possession pushed to within six meters of the goal after five downs. On the sixth down, a halfback drop kicked the ball toward the net. The goalie leapt sideways, but his outstretched hands missed the ball, which caught him full force in his face. Because helmets only covered the crown, back, and sides of players’ heads, the ball shattered the goalie’s nose and loosened three teeth. A medical android diagnosed his injuries and declared the goalie unfit to play.

This caused the hometown fans to erupt in jeers, boos, curses, and obscene gestures. The 40,000 fan contingent from Scotland reacted by dancing and singing their national anthem.

Their song was soon drowned out by the 110,000 Italians who retaliated with their country’s national anthem. Most of the remaining 30,000 fans remained neutral.

The Italians failed to score during their next possession. On the sixth down of the succeeding possession, the Scots scored because Italy’s substitute goalie lacked the injured goalie’s speed and agility.

On and on the Scots rolled until they led 2-0. At first Tim did not discern the changing mood of the crowd as it descended from festive to sullen to angry to vengeful. When an official disallowed an Italian goal because he said a teammate of the scorer had stepped on the foot of a Scottish defender, the angriest and drunkest Italian fans stormed the field.

The ten referees and fifty-player, eight-coach, and three-assistant Scottish team ran for the tunnels and their locker room.

But a Scot lineswoman was tackled during her long dash to safety. The coach who returned for her was beaten senseless. The player whom he tried to rescue was stripped of her clothes and groped and leered at by those who passed her from hand to hand above their heads.

Enraged by the assault on one of their heroines, thousands of Scottish fans leapt over the steel rail separating them from the field. Those who landed in the ten-foot wide moat that surrounded the field swam to its other side. They wore crazed expressions when they emerged from the water.

Soon, most of those on the field started slapping, punching, and kicking opposing fans above and below the belt.

After security guards armed with water cannons and stun guns failed to disperse the rioters, a fleet of mini drones took off from Rome police headquarters. The sound of the incoming drones sent most of those destroying the playing field back into the stands.

The foolhardy stayed to battle the drones with pieces of broken seats used as clubs.

* * *

To take Patrice Oldefarmer’s DNA sample almost a year earlier as the final hurdle for her admittance to The Club, Bud had traveled to Frankfurt, Germany and visited her at a stylish flat. But when he had tried to contact her by email from India, an automated reply told him “she is on holiday in Switzerland.” He then called the phone number given at the end of the email. Patrice’s mother had answered.

She seemed happy because Bud had met her daughter on holiday in South Dakota, America and invited him to visit them at a cabin in the mountains near Bern.

After disembarking the train in a city with buildings 600 or more years old, Bud continued on by solar-powered bus to a rustic village. He hiked the last four kilometers past patches of an early snowfall. The trail wound so deep into mountainous forest he wondered if he had slipped through a portal back in time who knew how many years, a hundred, thousand, or more?

He encountered no human during the last half of his trek.

The cabin sat at the base of a steep, snow covered mountain whose peak appeared to touch the blue sky above it. Out of breath as he knocked on the cabin’s thick pine door, Bud prayed that Patrice would remember The Club.

Patrice’s mother was as gracious as Bud recalled her daughter being.

And as straightforward.

“Patrice is taking a nap.”

Mrs. Oldefarmer seated their guest at a roughhewn table laden with cold cuts of pork and beef, dark breads, and slices of cheese that melted in Bud’s mouth. He washed his meal down with the purest water he had ever tasted.

She waited until he finished eating the main course before placing a small telerecorder on the table and dessert in front of Bud.

“Interview with Bud Lee, who says he spent time with Patrice during her trip to America in June of this year. What exactly went on during her visit there, Mr. Lee?”

Bud gagged on his first morsel of Black Forest cake. He motioned for her to turn off the telerecorder before he spoke.

“Why do you need to record our conversation?”

“I cannot let any detail of what you say escape my memory. Patrice’s doctor said he needs all information you can provide.”

“Doctor? What’s wrong with Patrice?”

She led Bud to an upstairs loft and sat down on the bed where her daughter slept. Patrice’s angelic features and long blonde hair reminded Bud of a princess from the fairy tales he had read as a child.

Her mother caressed her until Patrice’s eyes opened. With pillows propped between her back and bed’s headboard, she sat staring out through the large window at the valley. Drinking two cups of coffee sweetened with large chunks of dark chocolate seemed to rouse her only a little.

Patrice said nothing when her mother told her, “Bud Lee has come from America for a visit, darling.” Her daughter continued to stare at the scene carved by glaciers.

“I really enjoyed meeting you at Dr. and Elani Graves’ house in June at the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation. Now I understand where you learned to make such delicious desserts like the one you served me when I first met you in Frankfurt. Your mother’s cake is wunderbar. Ich liebe dich, Schatz.”

Mrs. Oldefarmer covered Patrice with a large quilt and gestured for Bud to follow her down the stairs. “Just how well do you know my daughter, Mr. Lee? Why did you say, ‘I love you, dear treasure’ in German to Patrice?”

“Forgive me. But because she didn’t remember anything I said to her, I got desperate. I hoped saying something in her native language would make her smile or get mad or something. She was the most outgoing person I met while I worked in South Dakota. Now she’s like a zombie.”

She poured pungent coffee into two mugs and sat next to Bud at the small kitchen table. “Patrice arrived home from her trip to America in a highly agitated condition. Within days she slipped into what the psychiatrist calls a catatonic state. The doctor has tried twenty-eight combinations of medicines and all available therapies. Nothing has helped.” Her voice cracked and head trembled. “Please help us. I want my daughter back.”

Bud remembered a game of checkers with his younger sister, who had maneuvered Bud’s last red checker piece into a corner of the board for a stalemate. Having hoped to capture some information to at last convince Tim about The Club, Bud instead once again felt trapped. He agreed to detail what he knew, if the telerecorder remained off.

Mrs. Oldefarmer did not interrupt his story. When it ended, she touched Bud’s hand. “Will you please scan Patrice for the implant you mentioned? Perhaps it is what is harming her.”

* * *

Tim and Bud flew fourth class on the final leg of their expedition around the world. Their nonstop flight held 931 passengers and forty-two crew members, three-fourths of them androids. At a cruising altitude of 82,000 feet, the jet would take a little over four hours to complete the nonstop flight from Rome to SLD.

Tim relaxed somewhat because flights this size required two human pilots to join the computer in the cockpit. Exhausted after weeks of time zone changes, strange food, and living out of a single carry on piece of luggage, Tim gave what he hoped might be his final analysis of Bud’s growing conspiracy theory.

“Look, kid, every conspiracy I ever heard of or read about turned out to be flaky. So far, you have a whole lot of nothing. Two of your alleged Club members are too whacked out to tell us anything helpful. You’re going to end up like them, if you keep on going like you have been. And the other four who we visited all claim they don’t know any of the other ones. And not one of them had that implant you claim Dr. Graves put into all of them.”

“But four of them did say they were at the Cheyenne River Standing Rock Casino at the same time.” Bud pointed his index finger at Tim.

“Yeah. And LBJ, the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, KGB, mafia, George HW Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and who knows who else were all in Dallas on the day when JFK was shot and killed. Oh, and Richard Nixon was in town the day before. Guilty by association by being in the same location isn’t enough. You know the real reason Kennedy was killed?”

“No.”

“Because he invaded Cuba. That made Castro paranoid enough to have one of his agents meet with Lee Harvey Oswald. Next, JFK had the CIA help get the president of South Vietnam assassinated during a coup. Your crush Minh Pham told me all about it. What goes around comes around. Or like my wife always says, ‘You reap what you sow.’”

“Okay, okay. But why did Dr. Graves have me sign a confidentiality contract before he hired me?”

“Probably so he could win if he ever sues you to kingdom come and back again. He’s no dummy.”

28

Surviving in SLD had been hard, but trying to survive in the wilds of Tennessee was proving even more difficult for Brent Fulsome.

Hungry poachers had been more dangerous than game wardens, avoiding both obsessed him. Brent gutted the deer he had shot with his crossbow because his supply of ammunition was depleted. Then he removed its antlered head. Even without those parts, the carcass weighed more than Brent’s skinny frame could carry home.

Brent dropped the bloody body and cut it in half.

“Looks like all you foxes, panthers, and bears get to have a feast on me.” He stared at the large portion of meat on the ground next to the still warm internal organs. “Be sure to leave some for the vultures, crows, and rats. No sense in being greedy.”

It took six hours to haul his half of the kill back to the cave that served as his shelter. During his long hike, Brent wondered about Tim Beheard and Bud Lee and their quest to expose Dr. Graves.

I bet their wild goose chase is even worse than my living out here. Maybe I shouldn’t have made such an issue about Dr. Graves. Bud Lee made him sound like his only fault is that he loves his privacy, almost as much as I do.

29

Lonely and bored by his hollow relationship with his solidgram of Elani, Dr. Graves stepped outside his cottage. His foul mood rendered the warm sunshine and quiet English countryside into a prison of his own making.

Dr. Graves had talked to the real Elani once since leaving his home and beloved redwood trees in the hands of Chief Red Bear. Her words felt as if a guillotine’s blade had sliced the thin bond between the spouses.

“I might have returned if you didn’t sell our home,” she had said. “At least there I could visit the casino. There is no way I will ever join you there in England. Good-bye.”

Her emphatic “good-bye” had prevented him from calling again. He wandered the estate until his stomach, empty since yesterday, ached. Famished for human contact as well, he walked toward the estate’s manor.

It was smaller than other nearby manors. A contingent of butler, cook, maid, and groundskeeper kept its five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and 100 acres in order. Seven chimneys jutted through a roof pitched so steeply that the attic was larger than most of the modern homes in England.

The butler took Dr. Graves’ hat at the front entrance and announced him to Professor Henry Ulysses Adams, retired dean of literature at Oxford. Old school to the core, he never read an electronic version of any book. Professor Adams set down a black leather-bound book of Shakespeare’s works and motioned for Dr. Graves to sit next to him. “I was hoping you would drop by. Can you stay for supper?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Gerald, please inform Abigail of our guest for the evening meal.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The butler bowed and hurried off to the kitchen to deliver the order. There he could enjoy a cup of tea and biscuits and share the latest gossip with the cook. The pair’s tales helped them to endure the rigors of providing nineteenth century service in a twenty-first century setting. Professor Adams was one of a handful of manor owners who still insisted on being called, “my lord.”

After adding six fat logs to the fire, Professor Adams sat back down in his overstuffed chair. Its oversized dimensions gave it the appearances of a throne. His white collar-length hair and embroidered robe transformed the professor into a king from centuries gone by, Dr. Graves thought.

The stone fireplace absorbed the fire’s warmth and radiated it into every corner of the library, which contained almost four thousand volumes sitting on shelves that ran from floor to twelve foot high ceiling. After filling his favorite meerschaum pipe with his finest tobacco and lighting it, Professor Adams brought up what had nagged him for a fortnight.

“I hate to pry, but certain parties are making inquiries about you.”

Images of Bud Lee and Tim Beheard surfaced in Dr. Graves’ mind. “Who is it making such inquiries?” His fingernails dug into his chair’s soft velvet colored fabric until the sharpest nail cut it.

“Oh, two colleagues of mine. One of them works with MI-18 so I really cannot afford to ignore him. He claims you exited America and entered England in a most circuitous and therefore, unusual fashion. I’m afraid if your visa is to be extended, you must provide me some details. I really do want you to remain here on the estate, but I must know what went on to bring you here in the first place. Of course, I will pass along just enough information to satisfy those inquiring about you.”

Despondent after months of not having the real Elani to confide in, and anxious to relieve any fears of the only one he trusted, Dr. Graves let the library become a sort of confessional.

“You know how Elani and I failed to produce any offspring?”

“Yes. I never really understood why she refused to have one or more by growing them at a breeding center. All you had to do was let the technicians take your sperm and her eggs and nine months later you could be proud mother and father.”

“I finally decided to take matters into my own hands.”

“How so?”

“First I canvassed worldwide to find the best specimens. After DNA tests eliminated the candidates with inferior genes, my computer chose the final six. I used a ruse that they had been chosen to join The Club, a sort of think tank to solve their continents’ problems. At our first meeting I told them I needed to install implants through which we could communicate to arrange future meetings, because any contact via phone, computer, or even mail was not secure enough.”

“So true. There are far too many snoops running about nowadays.”

“Only one of them volunteered for an implant, so I drugged the rest to sleep.”

“My, my.” The professor wagged his finger. “You have been a naughty boy. Elani went along with all of that?”

“No. I drugged her also to keep her from interfering. Then I extracted 10,000 eggs from each of the three women Club members and Elani and millions of sperm from the three men. Because I had no further need of the six of them, I placed implants in them that were programmed to suppress their memories of me, Elani, and each other.”

“But what if the implants are ever detected?”

“I used organic chips designed to biodegrade and exit the body as waste material after one week. The computer said one week’s worth of memory suppression impulses from the chips would produce permanent memory loss of what I needed to have erased from their minds. But when I doubled the impulse rate for the two Club members who were attracted to each other, they experienced unexpected side effects.”

Professor Adams stopped puffing his pipe. “They killed themselves?”

“No. But they are now mentally defective, fit only for the looney bin.”

“Collateral damage, but minimal. Very wicked on your part, but ingenious. Your father would have been proud of you. What did you end up doing with all those eggs and sperm?”

“I let the computer pick the choicest eggs and impregnated them with my sperm and I impregnated some of Elani’s eggs with the choicest sperm from the three male Club members. I was certain Elani would be pleased by my initiative, but when I told what I had done, she became irrational and left me.”

“But why did you sell your home there in America and come here?”

“I had no choice. My former manservant Bud Lee came back accompanied by some second rate hack writer trying to confirm the existence of The Club. I suspect they are writing a book about it. The fools came to the wrong conclusions based on their limited knowledge and even more limited intelligence. So I took the frozen embryos into Mexico and used some of the proceeds from the sale of my estate to pay a lab to grow them to maturity. It’s only a matter of months before our children are born and placed in homes that adopt them. We can even track their progress while they grow up. The technicians have agreed to implant chips in each one of them, so I can always know their whereabouts.”

“How many children?”

“Oh, only about 1,000 of them or so. My computer program eliminated all of the inferior embryos from the process and destroyed them. What remains are the cream of the crop. My computer monitors the embryos’ progress daily in case any more of them prove to be defective. Mustn’t allow any such to be born. Earth is already polluted with billions of defectives.”

“All of that is none of my colleagues’ concern. What they wonder is why did you travel from Mexico to the Caribbean to Africa and then France before coming here? That gives you the appearance of a terrorist.”

“I withdrew most of my money from my bank in the Bahamas. I left a small amount there, so the IRS can impound it to collect what they think I owe them from the sale of my house. The bulk of my money is safely hidden away in a Swiss bank. It took some doing, but I obtained a false identity and passport to enter Switzerland from Africa. Then I used my real passport to enter England from France.”

“Very clever of you. Well done. Even my friend at MI-18 has no record of your travel to Switzerland. I always said you would make an excellent spy.” Professor Adams pulled a Bible from the bookstand next to his chair.

Dr. Graves recoiled when he recognized it by its cover. “A Bible? You haven’t been reading it?” The professor’s wry smile further unnerved him. “Have you?”

“If you are going to conquer your enemies, you must first study what they believe.”

“But… reading the Bible?” Dr. Graves shuddered as he stuck his finger down his throat and pretended to vomit.

“Ah, here we have what the serpent said to Eve in the Garden of Eden: ‘For God knows when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ Isn’t what Satan said simply marvelous? I so love him in his role as the serpent and his craftiness. What an inspiration to us all.”

He closed the Bible and stared at the ceiling. “You’ve done well. Someone has to ensure that superior offspring are brought into this world to save it. Our destiny is to become like God by deciding for ourselves what is good and evil. Only then can we at last create a world in our own image, a perfect one, free of defective humans. Your father would be proud of you. I know I am.”

30

Having enjoyed his freedom of journeying around the world, Tim renamed his subterranean apartment “a dungeon.” There he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day trying to organize his notes into an outline for the book he had been commissioned to ghostwrite. After four days, he gave up and borrowed a copy of Bookwriter 2088 from a friend.

“It’s the best there is,” the friend had said as he handed Tim the one inch square disc with the software program. “I’ve written over thirty books using it so far.”

But how many copies of them have you sold? Tim thought as he thanked him.

Tim set up shop at the corner of his one-room apartment devoted to his computer. Moose joined him by leaping onto the small card table, her paws grazing his cup of coffee, genetically modified to deliver four times the caffeine of ordinary coffee. She stretched out in front of the monitor for a nap.

Tim completed the Writing a Nonfiction Book tutorial in an hour. Then he spent the next eight hours typing the names of Dr. Graves, Elani, the six Club members, and Bud Lee and a description of everything he knew about each of them into the program’s template. As the ghostwriter, Tim’s name would be missing from the finished product. That did not bother him, but the two choices offered after his daylong efforts did.

He read them aloud to Moose: “Produce (fill in desired number) word book. Produce outline for (fill in desired number) word book.” Enough of a work ethic remained in him, so he chose the latter option. He typed in 100,000 for the word count. Two minutes later he printed out a fifty-two page outline.

“I love the smell of graphite in the morning.” He sniffed the stack of papers and tossed it on his bed stand and ordered his computer to turn off the overhead light. “Now all I have to do is fill in the blanks. Smooth sailing from here on in, Moose. Computer, wake me up at six a.m.”

“But doing so will give you five hours of rest. At your age you require at least –”

“Shut down. You’re burning up my energy credits.”

31

Bud straightened his tie after he parked the hovercycle he had rented at the Rapid City International Airport. This time, Dr. Graves has to answer my questions, Bud thought. I’m not letting him snow me again.

If he didn’t cooperate, Bud planned to order Tim to include a dramatic scene of how the gallant Mr. Lee gave the evil genius a final chance to confess. Either way, it was a win-win situation for Bud and his readers. The sound of laser saws and nail guns as he walked to the front door ended his daydream of signing his books at SLD’s largest bookstore.

Bud found the door ajar, so he pushed it open and entered the home where he had toiled for the Graves. Gone was everything familiar, replaced by workers intent on transforming half of the den into a bedroom. One of them stopped Bud.

“Sorry, sir, but the lodge isn’t ready yet.”

“I’m looking for Dr. Graves. Is he home?”

“He was the former owner, right?”

“Former owner? But...”

“He sold out to the tribe. They’re making this into a lodge for guests who drop lots of credits at the casino, you know, high rollers.” The carpenter pretended to shake and then roll a pair of dice. “Listen, I got to get back to work. We’re under a tight deadline to get this ready by the weekend. Maybe the office up there at the casino can help you out.”

* * *

Bud waited an hour before Chief Red Bear let him enter his office.

“Ah, Mr. Lee, what brings you back to the casino? Are you looking for a job, or are you here for a little fun and relaxation? We have a buffalo hunt scheduled for tomorrow. Dr. Graves told me how much you like buffalo meat. Our hunting expeditions come complete with the necessary reservation hunting licenses, guides, and weapons of your choice. Perhaps you would prefer a buffalo gun like those used by buffalo hunters in the 1800s?” A hologram of a weapon floated in front of Bud’s face. “We can also butcher and freeze what you shoot within five hours and ship it home on the airplane with you.”

He rubbed his hands together. Reeling in a customer to buy one of his services was more fun than angling for the trout in his reservation’s waterways. Noticing Bud’s hesitation, Chief Red Bear sweetened his offer. “Because you are a former employee of Dr. Graves and Elani, I can even give you a thirty percent discount.”

Bud sat in a chair covered by buffalo hide. Its soft hair tickled his sweaty arms and hands. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not here for buffalo, Chief Red Bear. I’m looking for Dr. Graves. I need to talk to him.”

“Is it about a reference?” He pulled an envelope from his middle desk drawer and tossed it onto Bud’s lap. “Dr. Graves left one for you in case you returned. He’s quite perceptive. He always seemed very discerning of what those around him really wanted in advance of their asking for it.”

Bud looked at his name on the front of the envelope.

Chief Red Bear spun his swivel chair around until he faced the redwood grove to the south. Turning his back on those he lied to always eased the process. He called Bud to his side and then pointed at the towering trees.

“Dr. Graves sold out lock, stock, and barrel, like the old timers used to say. I tried my best to talk him into staying here, but he would not listen. Now all I have is this view of those redwood trees to remind me of him. He was my best friend, you know.”

I’m surprised he isn’t part of your rogue gallery. Bud glanced at the photos along the wall of those who had lost vast sums at the casino and the fake scalps nailed next to their likenesses. If Dr. Graves had his way, my scalp would be hanging on the wall of wherever he’s hiding, Bud thought.

“He left no forwarding address, so I’m afraid I can’t help you out.” Chief Red Bear spun his chair back around and slapped his desk with both palms. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get ready for a tribal council meeting tomorrow.” He waited until Bud entered the hallway and the redwood door to his office latched before ordering his computer to send an email.

“Address encrypted email to Dr. Graves. Text is as follows: Hi, Doc. I just had a visit from your former employee Bud Lee. He seemed very anxious to find you. Even your glowing reference wasn’t good enough to send him on his way happy. I think he’s out for blood. Your blood, if I sensed his real motives. I told him you left me no forwarding address. I really hope things are patched up between you and Elani. I’ve never seen a man love a woman like you love her. If you get tired of England, pay us a visit. You can stay in the penthouse here free of charge. I miss you. I’m sending this via my email account in Switzerland to confound any snoops who might read it. To be safe, please use cypher number seventeen to decode this email.”

* * *

By using the detailed printed outline as a blueprint, Tim was halfway through writing The Club within a week. He had decided to cut the book’s length to 325 pages. According to Publishers’ Daily, books of that length were currently selling the most copies worldwide.

With his recent sales of his travel articles and the ease of using the outline, Tim became convinced Bud’s book would be a success. Maybe not the best seller Bud envisioned, but successful enough to generate ample royalties for the ghostwriter. The first interruption since he had begun dictating the book to his computer came at lunchtime.

“This is Tim.” He blinked at the strange face on his visionphone’s screen.

“I’m Jennifer Clydesdale, Mr. Beheard. I read your fabulous article about your trip down the Nile and was wondering if I could talk to you about it over lunch today?”

His stomach growled as he imagined a complete meal away from his dingy confines. “Sure, if you’re willing to buy.”

“Of course. That was my intention all along.”

* * *

She chose a bistro within walking distance of his living complex and wrinkled her nose while Tim devoured the day’s special, a hamburger made of texturized vegetable protein and a side of chili fries, to which he added hot sauce before each bite. She pecked at her chef’s salad with manners matching her lilting British accent, Tim thought. Her short brown hair framed an oval face that belonged to a pixie from a fairy tale, instead of a fan, but his free meal dulled his suspicions.

“So you would not recommend that I retrace the exact route that you took down the Nile?” Jennifer pushed her half-finished salad to the center of the glass topped table.

“Not until they clear all those blood thirsty pirates out of the Sudd. But you could always start off at Lake No instead.”

“I see. May I leave you my card? I must be going.” She pulled a blue colored card from her purse. “Good writers very rarely make good editors or proofreaders. And those to whom you submit your work to are likely to reject anything having too many errors.”

Visions of Bud rejecting the first draft of the manuscript haunted Tim as he read the business card’s white letters: Jennifer Clydesdale, Copyediting, Critiques, and Proofreading. Reasonable rates. Contact: JenniferC 12,387@servicenet.biz.

“How much do you charge to critique books?” He dropped the card into his shirt pocket.

“I normally charge 1,000 credits per each 80,000 words.”

Tim glanced at his smart watch and asked for his bank account balance. He frowned as the amount flashed on its screen. “How many words can you do for 250 credits? It’s all I can spare until I finish the book and start collecting royalties from it.”

She took an herb cigarette from a gold-plated holder and lit it. “Because you were so gracious to tell me about the Nile in person, I’ll give you a cut rate deal. But you must not tell anyone else or they shall all be clamoring for the same treatment. How about if I were to critique 30,000 words for your 250 credits?”

“Sounds fair enough. I need some feedback so I can polish it up before I deliver it to my client. He is the real picky type. You don’t how much I hate doing rewrites. That’s a real pain in the...” He paused as her nose twitched. “Before I forget, all of this has to be kept strictly confidential when you read it. I’m just the ghostwriter. No one can know that or what’s in the book until after it’s been published.”

She blew a smoke ring and smiled. “No problem. I always act the part of the professional. How else can I expect repeat business?”

32

“Really, Elani. You’ll be quite happy once our children are born.” At times, the solidgram of Dr. Graves’ wife seemed real to his weary mind. The shrill ring of an antique black phone brought him back to reality.

“Who can that be?”

No longer needed, the solidgram of Elani faded as he picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Professor Adams here. Can you come around to the manor? I have the first part of the manuscript in which those two hooligans are writing fabrications about you.”

“I’ll be right up.”

In his haste, Dr. Graves left the front door of the cottage open and neglected to pull on his raingear or grab an umbrella. With his mind focused on how Professor Adams could have obtained the manuscript, he did not notice the steady drizzle.

He must have bribed that flaky writer whom Bud hired, Tim what’s his name, to get a copy of it. Oh, I hope the bribe was not too great, because I must repay Professor Adams for his kindness.

His feet splashed in the puddles on the dirt path connecting the guest house to the manor.

No, Professor Adams is much too clever to resort to something so uncertain as a bribe. Perhaps he hired a hacker to steal it from his computer. Oh, no. That may have cost even more than the bribe would have.

A row of oak trees sheltered him from the wind during the last stretch of the muddy path.

I give up. What does it matter how he obtained it? The main point is the old sly fox did. I can’t wait to read it.

Dr. Graves shivered while he pounded on the manor’s front door. His impatience and chill set his feet to moving in a dance taught to him by Chief Red Bear when they were children.

Gerald opened it and stared at what he thought resembled a drowned rat. “Please, sir, step inside. I will fetch you some dry clothes. Please remove your muddy shoes and I will also bring you a pair of slippers to wear while I clean your shoes.”

Dr. Graves pushed past him. “No time for all of that. Where is Professor Adams, in the library?”

“Yes, sir.” Gerald dodged the muddy tracks Dr. Graves left as he trampled through the dining room, down a hallway and into the library. Most unseemly of him, I best announce him after the fact.

When the butler caught up to him, Dr. Graves sat on the hearth, his backside so close to the fire that its heat produced steam from his soaked pants, long-sleeved shirt, and tangled hair, hanging the same as a dirty mop needing to be rinsed.

“Forgive my tardiness in announcing Dr. Graves’ arrival, my lord.” Gerald bowed in front of Professor Adams. “I fear he was in such a great hurry that I could not keep pace with him.”

“It’s my fault, Gerald. I am the one to blame for his haste. Please bring us some hot tea and biscuits.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Gerald paused outside of the library and stared at the messy trail Dr. Graves had left on tile and carpet. Glad this was one of the maid’s workdays, he took a detour to the laundry room to inform her of an unexpected cleanup.

Back in the library, Dr. Graves skimmed the first pages of Tim Beheard’s and Bud Lee’s “expose of a sinister plan to control world events.” As he finished reading each page, he tossed it into the fire.

“Don’t you want to retain it for when you go to court?”

“Court? What on earth for?” Dr. Graves continued to read while he spoke.

“To sue both of them for libel. They are accusing you of ridiculous things you never even intended on doing.”

“Bah! I’ve read enough of their tripe.” He tossed the unread pages into the fire and paced in front of the fireplace. “I need to keep them from publishing it somehow.”

Professor Adams tapped the ashes from his pipe into his palm and then blew them into the dust bin by his chair. “I’m afraid life is full of compromises. What if we could convince them to write it as a novel instead?”

Dr. Graves stopped in mid step and stared at his mentor. “Fiction? Then my name and Elani’s and the six Club members’ names would not appear in their book of lies?”

“Precisely.”

Dr. Graves settled into the chair that had formed to his contour because of his long hours of sitting in it. Gerald arrived and served the tea. Its warmth dispelled the last of Dr. Graves’ fears.

* * *

Professor Adams let Dr. Graves eavesdrop on his conversation with his grandniece, Jennifer Clydesdale. “Excellent job of obtaining the first part of the manuscript, my dear.”

Jennifer’s impish smile filled the screen of the visionphone in the professor’s lap. “Should I try and get the ghostwriter to have me critique some more of what he is writing? He is rather tight about his money, but maybe he can have the other chap pay for it?”

“No, that shall not be necessary. However, we need you to convince them to write it up as fiction instead. Tell them it is libelous and if any of the characters can be identified by any readers, they will sue them. There are a total of at least eight potential lawsuits they could endure.”

“That may take some real doing.”

“Give them the name of my solicitor. Say you consulted him and it is his opinion it is libelous as currently written.”

“Will do. Goodbye, Uncle Henry.”

“Indeed.”

Professor Adams let Dr. Graves doze for a quarter hour before rousing him from his nap.

“Have you given any further thought to my offer?”

“Yes. I think I’m finally ready. Are you certain what you do will change me enough so Elani will come back to me?”

“My computer is certain the procedure will be successful.”

“Then let’s get it over with.”

* * *

Professor Adams’ lab filled the entire attic.

After Dr. Graves settled onto its lone bed, the Professor injected anesthetic into his arm to reduce his respiration to five breaths a minute. The bronze colored helmet he slid onto his sleeping patient made him look more machine than human because of the wires that ran from it to a computer.

He instructed the computer to remove all memories of Elani’s threat of permanent separation from Dr. Graves’ mind and then climbed down the narrow stairs from the attic to the second floor hall.

He unlocked the smallest bedroom’s metal door and poked his head inside. “Hurry up. It’s time for you to get dressed. Meet me in the library.”

Two hours later, the computer sending pulses into Dr. Graves’ mind detected no memory Professor Adams had defined as unacceptable.

His eyelids fluttered open. After removing the helmet, he dropped his feet from the bed to the hardwood floor, yawned, and stretched. The bed seemed to pull Dr. Graves back onto it, but aromas of baking lamb, carrots, and potatoes motivated him to descend two floors.

Thirsty, he stopped at the library to ask his host if he might have a drink before dinner.

“I was wondering if…” Dr. Graves stopped inside of the doorway to the book filled room. “Elani? Is that you or just the solidgram of your likeness?”

She walked over to him and placed her slender arms around his neck. The familiar scent of her soft hair and touch of her lips on his cheek made Dr. Graves feel lightheaded.

“You won’t need your solidgram any longer. Professor Adams called and told me how much you would change, thanks to his procedure. So I traveled here ahead of time to surprise you. I’ve decided never to leave you alone again, darling.” She took his arm and steered him toward the dining room.

Professor Adams rose from his chair and smiled.

Best android I’ve ever programmed. And thanks to Dr. Graves’ session with my computer, he shall never know the difference between Elani the android and the real Elani. It’s so fulfilling to fill his remaining years with joy. I love being a creator.

33

Brent Fulsome pushed the button of the Master Disguiser unit in his shirt pocket. This thing better work or I’m in trouble, he thought. At the first plate glass window he had seen in months, Brent paused to see his reflection.

Even Mom wouldn’t recognize me, if she were still alive.

He walked past businesses where he had worked and hung out with friends as a teenager. After making one left turn and two right turns, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder. Satisfied that no one had followed him, he retraced his steps half a block and knocked on the front door of the smallest house he had passed since entering the city.

“Who is it?” A voice rose through the mail slot in the front door.

“Brent. Let me in, Roger.” Brent turned off the switch of the Master Disguiser unit, which returned his appearance to normal.

The door slowly swung open and a hand grabbed Brent’s plaid coat and pulled him inside.

“You’re supposed to be dead. What’s going on?” Roger peeked through the curtains of the sole window that faced the street.

“Never mind. I need your help.”

“I figured as much. You always do.”

Roger led Brent to his basement, the only room he considered private in his home. Its walls and ceiling were covered by lead he had melted and applied with paint brushes, a thin coat Roger believed adequate to shield conversations from snoopy government officials or worse yet, snoopy neighbors whose gossip could prove just as damaging.

“So where you hiding out at? I heard you took your daughter out of town to put her out of her misery because of that disease she had. You know, the one that killed her mom. Uh, she is dead, right?” Brent’s icy stare silenced Roger.

“Have to plead the Fifth Amendment on that one. What you trying to do, incriminate me so I’ll get busted? Are you working for the feds now?” Brent sat in an easy chair and propped his feet up on the small table in front of it.

Roger shrugged. “Whatever you say, boss. What is it you need this time?”

“Some ammunition. I know you have the right kind because it’s for that rifle you sold me.”

Roger turned and leaned against his gun safe. “Why would I still have that kind of ammunition? I don’t need it anymore because you bought that gun.”

Brent picked up one of the empty beer cans from the table and threw it. Instead of hitting his friend in the head, it bounced off of the six-foot tall iron safe.

“All right, no reason to get huffy. If the government would just let ordinary citizens have laser weapons you wouldn’t even be here bugging me. It’s not fair that only the military and law enforcement get to have them.”

“Quit changing the subject. I saw that you had another rifle of the exact same kind you sold me when you opened that safe to sell the other one to me six months ago.”

Roger gently banged his head against the safe’s three-inch thick door.

“Before I open the safe, what can you give me for two boxes of ammo? That’s all I can spare. You know I can only buy one box every three months because of those damn federal laws. Any more than that and I could go to prison for ten, maybe twenty years.”

Brent reached up to his shirt pocket and turned the Master Disguiser unit back on. As Roger watched, the face of his surprise visitor seemed to contort and then blur. When it came back into focus, he thought a stranger sat in his favorite chair.

“What the…how’d you do that?”

Brent switched the unit off as he pulled it from his pocket and handed it to Roger.

“This thing cost me plenty when I was living in SLD. I got it on the black market.”

“Yeah, I reckon so, something that good has to be illegal. Can it fool all those facial recognition programs the government uses?”

“Yeah, which means it’s worth at least ten boxes of ammo. You got that many?”

“Let me try it out first. How’s it work?”

“It sends out some kind of hologram onto your face and has to be no more than a foot from your face for it to work right. Here’s the switch.” Brent pointed.

Roger walked to a mirror that hung on the wall next to the safe and turned the unit on. He grinned when his face was replaced by one he had never seen.

“I’ll give you six boxes of ammo for it.”

“Nine boxes.”

“Eight.”

“Okay. You win.”

Brent stood and snatched the unit from Roger. “One other thing, I have to use it one last time while you walk with me out of town so no one can recognize me. You’ll get it back once we reach the woods.”

34

Mystified by Dr. Graves’ disappearance from his South Dakota home, Bud decided to revisit The Club member who lived closest to SLD.

Though it was autumn, Baja California baked under the afternoon sun. With the outside temperature in the mid-nineties and the inside of the non-air-conditioned cab even hotter, Bud began to wonder if this climate had contributed to Ramon Zappista’s mania. After arriving at Ramon’s villa, Bud paid the driver and added a small tip that made him curse in Spanish as he smiled and lifted the brim of his sweat-stained cap.

The temperature dropped twenty degrees after Bud stepped inside of the villa’s six-foot thick adobe walls. When the man who met him at the front door offered to take Bud’s leather briefcase, he wrapped both arms around it.

“No, thank you. I can carry it myself.”

“My name is Carlos. I am Senor Zappista’s live-in caretaker.”

“I’m Bud Lee. Ramon should be expecting me. I arranged this visit through his doctor. How has he been doing?”

“The doctor says his progress is slow, but improving. Ramon’s biggest improvement came after they used laser surgery on his brain to fix it.”

Bud’s doubts ebbed when Ramon greeted him on the hacienda’s patio.

“Buenos Dias, Senor Lee.” He grabbed Bud’s hand and pumped his arm. “So good to see you again. I’ve been meaning to write and thank you for bringing my music to me while I was in the hospital. I don’t think I would have survived my stay there without it.”

Bud noticed the stacks of albums next to the computer on the round metal table where Ramon worked. “So you’re back working as a music producer again?” He picked up one of the album’s one-inch square plastic covers. A hologram of the band’s members materialized and then faded.

“Yes. My doctor wants me to return to work very slowly. So far I’m up to three hours a day, four days a week. He said I must ultimately limit myself to seven hours a day, six days a week or I might have another manic episode, like the one that sent me to the detention center. He says I must maintain a six day workweek with one day off for life.”

Bud stared at the five pill containers next to the albums.

“Those are my prescriptions. The medicine saps my energy. Where are my manners? Something to drink for you? Sorry, but the doctor made me get rid of all the alcohol.”

Bud accepted an iced tea from the small refrigerator on top of a mahogany bar next to the pool. Its exotic flavor and genetically modified caffeine revived him. “I really don’t have much time, Ramon. Do you remember anything yet about Dr. Graves or The Club?”

Ramon bobbled his head. “Sorry. The doctor said mania like mine was can erase memories. Maybe that’s why I still don’t remember?”

“Maybe.”

The computer that ran the house per Ramon’s doctor’s orders sounded a ringing bell for thirty seconds.

“That means work time is over. Time for some fun in the water. Let’s go.”

Carlos drove the woodie station wagon to the nearby beach. He parked it under a patch of three palm trees and then lay in their shade on the sand for a short siesta, a welcome break from one who seldom relaxed. Ramon and Bud waded barefoot into the warm salt water. When Ramon pointed at shells or starfish he said would be worthy souvenirs, Bud crammed the smallest specimens into his jeans pockets.

“I can’t go surfing for another eleven months.” Ramon skipped a flat rock into the surf. “The judge took away my surfing license for a year just because I didn’t obey the drone that told me to stop surfing.”

“I hate to keep bugging you, but if any memories of Dr. Graves or The Club come back to you, could you call me right away? It’s very important. I know someone else who needs help.”

“Sure. Punch your number into my computer.” Ramon removed a chain from his neck. A blue Saint Christopher’s medal and waterproof two-inch square computer dangled from it.

Bud took the chain and admired the slender computer, which weighed less than the medal. As he entered his phone number, the flashing time on the screen jarred him. “It’s already 3:20.

My train leaves at 4:10.”

* * *

The woody pulled into the station’s parking lot at five minutes past four. As Bud jumped from it, Ramon grabbed his arm.

“Wait, I forgot to show you a picture of my fiancée.”

Bud heard a conductor yelling for passengers to board. “Some other time, I can’t miss my train.”

* * *

A few miles before the train reached Tijuana, Bud’s visionphone signaled an incoming call from Switzerland.

“Hi, Bud. How are you?” Patrice Oldefarmer’s mother asked. Hope filled her face and voice.

“Hello, Mrs. Oldefarmer. Is Patrice feeling any better?”

“That’s why I called. She wants to see you.”

35

Mrs. Oldefarmer insisted she would only allow Bud to have face to face contact with Patrice. When Bud balked at her restriction, she offered to buy him a roundtrip ticket from SLD to Bern. He caught the next flight with an available seat.

Enough snow had fallen since his last visit that Bud needed a snowmobile to traverse the windy trail from the village to the Oldefarmers’ cabin. The closer he came to it the faster his heart beat.

As the cabin came into view, Bud pushed the snowmobile’s fifty-two horsepower engine to its top speed. Its treads dug so deeply they clanged against the rocks buried under the two feet of snow. Realizing too late that braking on snow was a skill he did not have, he turned the wheel and slid sideways for the last thirty feet. The snowmobile’s engine sputtered and died next to the cabin’s log walls.

Bud removed his gloves and helmet. A tapping sound tilted his head upward. When he saw a smiling Patrice waving through the picture window in the loft, Bud dropped the helmet and gloves and barreled through the front door without knocking. Patrice’s mother dropped the tray of cookies she had pulled from the propane fed oven and scolded him.

“Where are your manners, Mr. Lee? I…” Bud’s pleading look stopped her. “Go ahead upstairs. She’s waiting for you.”

Bud climbed the pine stairs two at a time. His momentum into the loft left him tottering over Patrice as he waved his arms to regain his balance. She applauded his entrance.

“Welcome back to Switzerland, Bud. Mother tells me this is your second time to visit our chalet, yes?”

Bud nodded, uncertain about which of his dozens of questions to ask first. He sat in the rocking chair after Patrice pointed at it. “Do you remember –” Patrice’s uplifted palms cut off his query.

“Mother has already told me the story you told her when you last visited us. I’m sorry, but I remember none of it. Maybe I have a doppelgänger? They say everyone has one. Anyway, the doctor says I should be able to return to my job in another few weeks. Isn’t that grand?”

“But…”

“However, you might find this to be of interest to you. Sorry I made you come all the way here to see it, but I had to be sure you are serious about your story and not some crazy man.”

She turned her laptop computer so Bud could see its screen. He gasped at the photo of the six Club members.

“I can’t remember taking it but judging from the angle of whatever was used to take it, I must have held the device at arm’s length. Notice how my arm is lifted up in the photo?”

“But why didn’t your mother show me this when I came here before?”

“She did not find it until after you left. She’s not very familiar with my computer. But after she found it, she showed it to me and said I smiled because I saw him.”

“Him? Which one?”

“Ramon Zappista, of course. Who else? Mother told my doctor how I smiled. He used the photo to track Ramon down in Mexico. After explaining my condition to Ramon, the doctor arranged for him to talk to me by visionphone. Mother says at first I just smiled, but by his tenth call to me, I said a few words. We’re getting married.”

“What?” Bud jumped to his feet as he remembered Ramon’s offer to show him a photo of his fiancée. “I don’t believe it.”

Patrice held out her hand. A slender gold band that supported a diamond rested on her shortest finger. “Silly Ramon. He sent me an engagement ring too small for my ring finger that barely stays on my little finger.”

36

Bud waited until he arrived at Atlanta International Airport before he called Tim. At first, Tim thought his ringing smart watch was part of a dream in which Bethany was calling him. But after Moose meowed in his face and rubbed her cold wet nose on his cheek, he wanted to shut it off because he saw Bud’s face.

“About time you answered. You aren’t going to believe this.”

Tim read the fluorescent dial of the clock on the wall nearest his bed. “It’s 3:08 a.m. You’re right. I can’t believe you’re calling me at this hour.” Tim shut his eyes when Bud launched into a synopsis of his trips to visit Ramon and Patrice. Tim’s half-awake mind understood enough of the tale to make him groan.

“Forget all the, ‘they’re getting married,’ stuff. Who cares about that? Let me see the picture of all six Club members.”

“I don’t have a copy of it.”

“What? We go all the way around the world so you can prove that The Club exists and then you don’t even get a copy of the only known photo of them all together?”

“Uh, there’s been a change of plans. Now we have to write the book as fiction.”

“Huh? I’m almost finished writing what you wanted, an expose. I’m on the last chapter.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking about this ever since Patrice told me about her engagement and decided to wait to call you until I got back to the States so I could be sure about making the book fiction. I’m sorry. But we can’t write anything that might ruin things for Patrice and Ramon. If we did, Ramon could get manic again and Patrice might go catatonic.”

* * *

Upset by his weeks of wasted effort, Tim did not return to his ghostwriting chore after he rolled out of bed an hour later. Instead, he checked his email for the first time in a week. After sending 394 emails to the spam folder, he found one from Jennifer Clydesdale entitled “Critique.” It read:

Your book, though interesting, contained problems with diction, grammar, punctuation, syntax, and word usage. In addition, the style used was rather inconsistent, even within individual chapters. But most importantly, what has been written is libelous. To be certain, I consulted our family solicitor in England and described the book’s contents in general, not specific terms. He assured me of his complete confidentiality and recommended that the book be rewritten as fiction. The names, places, and dates all must be altered adequately enough to ensure no readers will identify them as any real life persons or incidents.

The good news is that you can retain your style if you write the book as fiction. Your meandering way with words makes for an excellent yarn, but will not work for an expose.

After you have rewritten the book, I will be glad to provide you another critique. I presume money may still be an issue for you. Perhaps your client would be willing to pay for my services?

Your devoted servant,

Jennifer

Tim deleted the email and rubbed Moose’s chin. “No sense in letting Bud see this, huh, cat?” He reached onto the bookcase and pulled a box labeled Novel Writer 2081 from it. The software program’s cover promised “a maximum work of literature with minimal effort for the writer.”

Tim slid the disc into his computer and read the program’s options. He chose one labeled, “Turn Your Nonfiction into Fiction,” and transferred his manuscript to the program.

It took a half hour for the program to translate the unfinished book from one genre to another and another four hours for Tim to read the new fiction version. After reading the “spelling/punctuation/grammar/syntax/diction” check on the book, he fell into bed, satisfied that the new ending was better than his. While he drifted to sleep, he thought going through the manuscript line by line four more times as he decided on a new title for the book would be adequate.

Two weeks later, he emailed a copy of The Gathering to Bud.

37

Unsure of what Tim had sent, Bud asked the only one he trusted to read it. Fifteen and certain her brother would be “in big trouble with Dad,” unless the book sold well, Tami Lee read it straight through in one afternoon.

“It sounds fake, like a computer wrote it,” she said as she tossed Bud’s book reader onto his desk. “You sure a human being even worked on it? I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?” Bud asked.

“Why did you even bother to ask me to read it if you don’t trust me, big brother? All I’m saying is what Dad will probably say if he ever reads this masterpiece of yours. I can’t believe how phony it sounds. If anyone ever bothers to review it, they’ll give it zero stars or one star at the most. I know I would.”

* * *

When Bud went to Tim’s apartment unannounced, Tim met him at the door in a bathrobe and two weeks’ worth of unshaven whiskers. He seemed more bored than surprised by Bud’s visit.

“How did you like the book?” He asked in between yawns.

“Don’t give me that. You used a computer to write it, didn’t you?”

Tim raised his hands. “Don’t blame me. I signed on to write nonfiction, not a novel, remember? That’s exactly what you said you wanted at first.”

“Then rewrite it so it reads like nonfiction even though it’s fiction. My sister Tami is going to help you out to make sure you do it right this time. And we’re going to pay her out of your royalties, not mine.”

38

One Year Later

Dr. Graves flicked through a hologram show of his and Elani’s children. He stopped to comment on each one.

“Little Jules has certainly grown, hasn’t he, my dear?”

Elani the android smiled. “A chubby little oinker, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he reminds me of Ahomana. They all have such great potential.”

Dr. Graves daily monitored the 713 children who had grown to term in the Mexican laboratory. He had enjoyed choosing parents whom he considered worthy of adopting them. The other 326 offspring had been terminated after birth when the technicians reported their imperfections to Dr. Graves. He had concluded that the defects had come from The Club members’ eggs and sperm, not his or Elani’s.

His obsession proved useful, allowing Elani the android to slip away “on walks” that were sessions in Professor Adams’ lab to fine tune any quirks within or outside her human-like frame.

Thus far, she had required one update in the software that animated her.

“Excuse me. I’ll be right back.” Elani the android went to the cottage’s sole bathroom and locked the door.

Then she lifted the wooden toilet seat lid and banged it against the porcelain water tank in case Dr. Graves eavesdropped by the door. After pouring a cup of water from the sink as a slow trickle into the toilet bowl, she closed the lid and flushed the toilet. Finally, she stood by the sink and turned on the faucet to simulate the sounds of hand washing.

But instead of placing her synthetic skin under the tap, she lifted her blouse and pressed one of her porcelain ribs and then her plastic sternum in a series of varying pressures to allow the computer at Professor Adams’ manor to communicate with the receiver in her head.

“Contact initiated.” The computer’s artificial voice reassured her more than any human’s. “My readings indicate a slight malfunction of your body temperature regulator. If left unattended, your skin may begin to melt from the inside out. Report to Professor Adams as soon as possible to have problem corrected. I will advise him.”

The android combed her hair. Satisfied she had spent an adequate length of time to simulate urination, hand sanitizing, and hair brushing, she returned to the den.

“I think I shall take a walk.” She reached for the blue shawl on a peg by the front door.

Dr. Graves turned off his hologram player. “I’ll go along, my dear.” He patted his stomach. “I’ve been feeling sluggish. Maybe some exercise will return my bowel movements back to normal.”

“Okay.” Her software allowed her to disagree with humans only to protect her artificial origins and existence. She decided to let her creator handle the unexpected visitor, her dimwitted husband who had proven more boring than stimulating.

After completing a mile long circuit along the estate’s eastern boundary, Elani the android feigned thirst. “Oh, suddenly I’m so very thirsty. Can we stop by the manor for a drink of water perhaps?”

“Certainly, darling.” Dr. Graves squeezed her hand. “You’re feeling a bit warm. Hope you’re not coming down with something.”

Professor Adams was pruning some of his prize roses in front of his home when they arrived. “Oh, I was not expecting the both of you.” Realizing his gaffe, he pretended to cough. “I thought you might come by alone to discuss the book I’ve been reading.” He pointed his shears at Dr. Graves.

“Book?”

“Quite. It’s called The Gathering. My great niece Jennifer sent me a copy of it that she found in a used book shop. The book’s plot is quite startling, science fiction with the emphasis on fiction. It’s author definitely does not understand science.”

“Very well. But first, Elani requires a glass of water before she returns to the cottage. Then I can have a look at the book.”

“Come on inside.” Professor Adams opened the front door. “I’ll ring Gerald to fetch us all some refreshments.”

* * *

The drops Professor Adams placed in Dr. Graves’ cup of tea put him to sleep in his favorite chair two minutes after he finished drinking it. Elani and the professor left him to snore in front of the fire and climbed the stairs to the attic’s lab.

The android lay on a metal table and closed her eyes as her maker powered down her energy source. Within minutes her defective part would be replaced, her body temperature drop to normal, and she could return home with the husband whom she would outlive.

She wondered if Professor Adams would then sell her or use her parts as replacements in other androids.

39

Second mate Bud Lee monitored the freighter’s heading and speed. He ordered the ship’s computer to maintain its course.

“How long until we dock?” Bud asked it.

“If we can outrun the tropical storm heading this way from the southeast, we will reach Cam Ranh Bay in three days, nine hours, and forty-one minutes.”

“Thank you, computer.”

Bud nodded at his captain and stepped from the bridge onto the deck. He was relieved that his father did not insist he toil at the company’s headquarters in Long Beach. Being a second mate stretched his comfort level enough; the nine months spent at a maritime academy to become one had seemed an eternity.

The warm Pacific breeze whipped by his face as he clicked on his ring computer and asked it for any updates on The Gathering.

“To date, 1,893 e-book copies have sold and 201 paperback copies have sold. Would you like to know the book’s ranking on Publishers Daily Worldwide’s lists for your book’s genre and subgenres?”

“No.” Any book that ranks in the millions isn’t worth tracking, Bud thought.

He wondered if he should have listened to Tim and held out until an agent agreed to pitch their book to one of the world’s “big nineteen” publishers. But with agents only taking on about one out of every 17,000 unknown authors who contacted them, Bud had been unwilling to endure any more delays.

“Getting an agent will take us too long,” Bud had told Tim. “By the time we finally find one, one of The Club members might regain their memories of it and write their own book about it before we do it as fiction.”

Bud daydreamed about his next book.

His inspiration and source for it was Minh Pham. Her face smiled in his mind when he fondled the ring in his pocket. A gift from his grandmother, it was the engagement ring given to her by her beloved decades earlier. Now, Bud would offer it to the one waiting for him in Vietnam. He hoped their wedding would be as joyful as Patrice Oldefarmer’s and Ramon Zappista’s had been.

His next book would be another joint effort, a biography of Minh’s ancestor, whose father had been an American soldier and mother a beautiful Vietnamese peasant. Bud’s sister Tami would be its ghostwriter because he was unwilling to share royalties with Tim again.

This time, Tami and Minh would receive them.

40

An owl returning to its daytime roost awoke the cat sleeping on the chair next to the front window. Moose poked her head through the curtains and watched the bird of prey burrow under the palm fronds of the lone tree in the front yard. Then she jumped to the floor, her claws echoing off of the tiles. At the bedroom door she stood on her hind legs and pushed it open with her front paws.

Tim’s snores and Bethany’s rhythmic breathing greeted the hungry cat.

Moose leapt onto the bed, meowed, purred, and walked on Tim until he stirred. Revived after a shower, Tim joined the cat for breakfast. His was a sixty-four ounce protein, fruit, wheat germ, yogurt, ice cube concoction blended by the Mega Blaster Blender Charles and Bethany had given Tim for his birthday and a bowl of Cat Chunkiness for Moose.

After breakfast, Tim pulled his electro cycle from the garage. A gift from Bud “for going the extra miles on my book,” the two-wheeled vehicle got Tim to work on time unless an accident blocked his route. Its pedals provided a backup Tim could pump with his legs in case the cycle’s batteries ran low on power.

Returning to work at the SLD Times after such a long absence had proven difficult at first. But as his beat worked into a schedule of being in the office eight to twelve hours a week, he adjusted. Traveling consumed the rest of his workdays. As the Times solitary travel writer, Tim could set his own schedule if he submitted stories by deadline.

Returning to Bethany was more of an adjustment. A counselor had managed to have them sign a “We Agree to Disagree” contract.

Gone was the ten-round knockdown, drag out fights, during which they used words to inflict wounds on each other’s souls. They had been replaced by shorter three-round matches during which husband and wife listened to each other. During one discussion, the two decided to save all of Tim’s royalty checks from The Gathering to help fund a trip to Africa to visit Karen.

It would be the first vacation for the four Beheards together. Tim claimed there was an elephant in Kenya whose recent dental work had mellowed him and would like to meet them.

41

Checking the trap line had not yielded much on this run. At the tenth trap, Brent Fulsome found a dead rabbit to show for his four-mile hike. Brent gutted it and put the carcass into his backpack. After resetting the trap, he walked and slid down a series of hills to a stream.

Hope the trout lines did better than the traps.

But the first three lines had nothing but hooks attached to them. The fourth held part of a trout’s head attached to a hook. Its skeleton lay on the bank.

“Damn bears.”

Brent baited the line’s five hooks. “Go ahead and fatten yourself up on our fish. You’ll make mighty fine eating when I shoot you during bear season.” He shifted the strap of his 60-year old 30.06.

It had taken six months for Brent to establish a routine and another seven months to accept its dullness. Living off the land proved not to be the adventure he had often craved for years. His cave provided a temperature of about 55 degrees if he travelled deep enough into it and protection from others.

Not that Brent objected to his fellow human’s presence. No, it was their crazy ideas of how to run everything, micromanaging every area of life until any similar to Brent retreated from society, most in small ways, a few as Brent had.

“You got to learn to accept the hand of cards the good Lord dealt you, son,” Brent’s mother had often said.

Brent looked heavenward after he entered a meadow allowing a view of sun and sky; a welcome relief from the shade of the forest. “Guess you were right, Mom. But could you at least put in a word to the Lord for me? I’m getting weary from this hand I was dealt.”

An hour later, he neared the cave. As always, he paused seventy yards from its entrance and scanned the bushes and trees near the opening. An out of place color stopped his search.

“All right, whoever it is behind those blackberry bushes by the cave, show yourself.”

A man dressed in jeans and down-filled jacket eased from behind the bushes into a clearing. He tipped the red colored cap that had given him away.

“It’s me, Dr. Farrington.”

“Doc?” Brent walked to the intruder. “What are you doing out here?”

“It’s Karla. I’ve heard rumors she’s still alive.”

“So what if she is? It’s none of your business. You best be leaving now.”

“You don’t understand. There’s still no cure for what killed her mother and what Karla has. If I could study how you kept her alive, maybe we can help out other people who have what she has. None of them has lived longer than Karla has after coming down with it.”

Brent nodded at the cave. “I keep her in the cave during daylight even if there’s no sun whenever it’s cloudy. And there’s no artificial light in there, only what we get from the fire.”

“Maybe we can build Karla a room to replicate the exact conditions of your cave.”

“Leave us alone. I told you enough. If you come back again, I might not be so nice.” Brent stepped into the cave.

Gentle sobbing turned both men’s heads toward a slender figure hovering beyond the daylight that illumined the first twelve feet of the cave’s mouth. A soft plea replaced the crying.

“Please, Daddy. I just want to go back home.”

THE END

Steve Stroble has worked as a reporter, editor, and audit report writer. You Will Be Like God is his seventh self-published book. He is currently working on a collection of short stories inhabited by characters similar to those in You Will Be Like God.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my alpha reader for the past thirty-nine years, Jean; and the beta readers for their feedback on the manuscript. Thank you to Donna Casey for the cover, Martha Hayes for her editing, and Carol Stroble for proofreading. Any errors that remain in these pages are mine.

For updates on other books and free book giveaways, sign up at http://eepurl.com/btAd5z.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright c 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

INK: RED

Al K. Line

RUN

Edsel crunched into neutral, slammed on the brakes and was out of the car before it stopped moving. The smell of burning rubber was lost behind him in seconds as his legs pumped for all they were worth, arms moving like pistons as he vaulted over the ripped refuse sacks spilling into the road just as a fox ran for the safety of an alley, disturbed from its scavenging.

Already the lactic acid was building in his thighs and his calves were beginning to cramp. Edsel ignored it, just carried on running. He had worse things to worry about than just a little bit of soreness from all the sprinting he’d been doing — The Eventuals that were pursuing him for one, and the scabs he could feel ripping all over his body where The Ink, that damned disgusting blood red Ink, had began to heal, leaving the curse permanently staining his once pale skin, singling him out whether he liked it or not as a member of the fastest growing religion society, or the pathetic tatters of what was left of it, had ever seen.

Thank god I got away before they did my face.

Edsel winced as he felt taut, dry skin rip across his back, the crook of his elbows and under his arms. The back of his knees began to ooze a wet goop of pus, blood and who knew what else, as the scabs cracked and popped while he tried to run for all he was worth, not just fall over screaming and let the group of acolytes finish the job and inject The Ink all over his head. They’d nearly got there too — the back of his neck at the nape was permanently red now. As was the rest of him from his toes to his groin, up his legs, across his torso, arms and most of the way up his pectorals — he looked like a damn lobster and felt sick at the thought of having to one day look at himself in the mirror. If he survived the next few minutes.

It was seven years since The Lethargy first got a name, and Edsel was alone in the world now; apart from Kathy.

Kathy, Kathy, Kathy. The one thing that had kept him going since he thought he would never talk to another living soul again. He had to get to her, had to make sure she was all right; that she was at home.

Edsel was lucky enough to have remained what the media had named Whole, before it shut down as nobody could be bothered to run it, or do much of anything any longer. By the time mankind had actually realized something was destroying the minds of people all over the world, and they slowly fell into a coma-like existence, it was too late. Not that anybody knew what to do about it anyway.

But Whole, he was Whole. He had escaped The Lethargy so far and so had Kathy. So far.

Turning as he heard tins, bottles and the accumulated trash of years scatter, Edsel saw three red-faced men ranging from early twenties to late forties kicking it all out of their way as they panted after him.

Where to now? Where’s safe? I’ve got to get home.

Looking around frantically, Edsel couldn’t see an easy way out. The damn car had been a stupid idea — he’d got less than a quarter mile through the city before the road was impassible, blocked by all manner of vehicles from motorbikes to public buses, some still containing drivers slumped in their seats, passengers that became lost to The Lethargy and never came back to themselves, dying where they sat, uncaring, unknowing.

“Argh,” grunted Edsel, as the pain flared like a dart to a frayed nerve.

Must not scratch my arms. Must not touch my skin.

With dry and gritty eyes, Edsel scanned in all directions as he ran, trying to find something, anything, that would help him get free of his pursuers. He wasn’t a big guy, not strong particularly, didn’t have a gun with him, or one stored anywhere as they were next to impossible to find. The few gun clubs he’d finally decided to hunt down out of misplaced hope had been ransacked years ago, the strict British control over firearms making guns the most expensive bartering tool less than a few months after The Lethargy really got going. Everything fell apart slowly at first, nobody even really noticing, but the minute the media gave it a name and people actually understood the reason why nothing worked properly any more and the streets were always half empty, well, all hell broke loose.

No fear of reprisal for actions meant that society unraveled in a heartbeat. But it was more than that, it was the knowledge that sooner or later, maybe that very day, The Lethargy would wrap you in its warm blanket of forgetfulness and you would fade in and out of self-awareness until you were nothing but an empty vessel. Then you died.

He had seen it happen to his very own family. His mum and sister were both gone within a few years and he had to watch it happen, help feed and clean them, until he couldn’t cope and thought he would go mad as sadness enveloped him and refused to let him surface to breathe the air of if not the happy, then at least the not morbidly depressed.

And that’s when it happened: he almost got turned, but not quite. A chance encounter with one of the crazy Inked Eventuals had led to him pouring his heart out to a stranger, telling of the loss of his family, the way he had finally had to kill them just to end the misery — they were never coming back anyway. He told of the despair, the sorrow and the utter pointlessness of it all, and the shame he felt for the way society had reacted to such a catastrophic event.

Rather than coming together and helping each other, it was every man and woman for themselves — looting, murders, rapes, slavery and worse were all the norm as the prisons overflowed, until there was nobody left to arrest, try, or imprison the diseased remnants of a once modern society.

The man had sympathized, had told him of the religion he followed, talked of The Ink and why it was taken, and that their belief was that what had happened was a punishment from Him for ruining the planet — they wanted it finished, wiped clean of the disease that was humanity.

He nearly joined. Then he met Kathy.

There was peace for a while, happiness, then they began to hunt him, to chase him and never leave him be. Crazed religious extremists following a faith that felt that once you showed an interest in their fatalistic dogma then you would be turned to becoming a believer whether you wanted to or not.

But they didn’t know about Kathy.

They pursued him, unaware of her presence, Edsel keeping her hidden. Safe. There hadn’t been a day of peace since.

This time was different though, this time they had caught him, and he’d been gone for a few days at least. It could have been longer, he didn’t know, he just knew he had to get back to Kathy and nothing, nothing, was going to get in his way.

Not even the pain that constantly ripped through his body.

RAIN

Perfect. Rain, just what I needed.

Edsel wiped the water from his eyes, cursing his tattooists as pain screamed up his arm from his palm that was blistering and peeling. At least the water was soothing his skin a little, but it would help if he could see more, even if it meant hurting more.

Thick cloud descended, hiding the city, which was something. It was so damn depressing looking at it now, half the buildings burned out or collapsed, the rest smashed, scavenged for anything of use, and the streets covered in the garbage that a first-world society took for granted would always be cleared away.

The rain beat down harder as Edsel splashed though the stinking puddles.

Great. Soaked feet now too.

Although it did cool them a little, easing the fire that he felt with every step. It had been excruciating the second they had begun — he had no idea that being Inked on the soles and on the whole foot would hurt quite as much.

All part of the ritual, his captors had said, smiling through red lips, the insides of their mouths as red as the rest of their bodies. They ignored his pleas, ignored the fact he didn’t want to be a part of them, answered with grunts and more Ink, promises that he would come around eventually, and the alternative was death. Was that what he wanted?

No, it wasn’t. So he kept quiet and took The Ink against his will, listening to his own screams as they slowly stained more and more of his naked torso, all the while half aware of the inane chatter of the two tattooists.

They had shaved his head, right down to the bone, beard too, pubic hair, arms, legs, all of it — part of The Cleansing as much as The Ink. Naked and helpless before Him, all because of a weird warping of their religion, basing the ritual of The Ink on their leader’s red burns and disfigurement.

The Converse on his left foot began to flap. The sole was coming loose and it was slowing him down.

No matter, just keep going. Don’t stop, don’t pause for a second. Keep on running; keep on going. Shake your head to get rid of the rain in your eyes, don’t use your hands, it will just hurt too much.

Driving just the short distance he managed had been hell. The steering wheel felt like it was on fire, changing gears was a lesson in the spiteful design of human anatomy and just how many nerves a hand contained, and when it came to using the clutch whilst changing gear, well, the force needed to press the pedal had sent Edsel screaming out the open window like a woman giving birth.

But he thought he would make it, get away, get back to Kathy, his savior, his love, his hope and his only friend in the whole world.

Then the road was blocked and now here he was, damn sneaker flapping like a tired dog’s tongue, as he tried to avoid falling and tripping over... ugh, it was a person, still alive too by the looks of it — just.

He jumped over the skeletal figure, landing awkwardly, the sole causing his ankle to twist as his foot hit a plastic bag and he slid. His leg bent and he put his hands down for balance, even though every instinct in his body told him not to.

He screamed out in pain.

Damn, now they know where I am again. If I’d managed to lose them in the rain anyway.

At least the ankle wasn’t twisted, or worse — broken. Edsel was exhausted, and stopping was the worst thing he could possibly have done as a wave of tiredness swamped him.

Go, go, go.

He ran on, down the wide street, the signs of expensive department stores hanging like bodies from the hangman’s noose, swaying in the wind like the countless missed harvests all over the country, the world.

The rain beat down faster, flooding the street in seconds; turning it into a river that rushed down the slight decline, bringing yet more trash with it, threatening to make it impossible to run.

At least these red idiots have the same problem.

He splashed through the water, the polystyrene food containers and coffee cups, ignoring the cramps, the blisters, the pain and the cold as the rain soaked through what little clothing he wore.

Got to get away, got to get home, got to get Kathy. It’s only a few miles, nothing to worry about, this should be easy.

Edsel kidded himself, he knew it, but where there was life there was hope, and he was still alive — barely.

They were gaining on him. He could hear their feet hitting the sodden street, splashing like fish in shallow water flapping to get deep again. He picked up speed, pumping faster and faster, sure his heart would explode at any second.

Must practice running if I get away; I thought I was fitter than this. Twenty five and I’m like an old man already.

It wasn’t surprising though. Food wasn’t easy to come by so only a fool would put themselves through the misery of doing regular exercise on top of the long hunts for food — energy expenditure was already high enough. His slim body wasn’t built for such mad sprints — if anything he would have been a middle distance runner. He needed a steady pace, not sprinting for his life while well-fed Eventuals chased him through the dead streets of Manchester.

Gripping a lamppost before he remembered it was a really, really bad idea as the scabs on his palm ripped off and blood oozed out, he took the corner well with the extra leverage and ran through the narrower street looking back to see that his pursuers must have slowed — they were only now making it around the corner.

But there were only two of them, where was the third? Too tired? Given up? Or—

Oompf.

He nearly, but not quite, went down.

It was the third man. He’d obviously taken a shortcut through an alley and the smack into Edsel’s side meant it was nearly over. Nearly. Trying his best to combat the flare of pain, he stomped down sharply with his right leg, smiling as he heard a satisfying howl — even though it probably hurt him as much as it did the man.

No time to fight, gotta run.

With the wind knocked out of him from the punch to the belly, and his skin actually spasming, he carried on regardless, maybe at least cutting down on his pursuers to two for a few minutes while the other recovered. Hopefully a bone in the man’s foot would be broken and he would have improved his odds dramatically.

He kept running.

It kept raining.

The rain hurt like it was made of fire. Each nerve ending was opening up to greet the temporary cleansing of the fetid streets with a pain he never knew existed.

No good, the sole was hanging on by nothing but dogged determination now, so he reluctantly stopped for a second and ripped it off. He had to find safety soon — there was no way he could run with half a sneaker on his foot.

Go in.

He had to go inside a building, any building, just to try to lose them for a few minutes so he could take stock and sort out his feet. Barefoot would be better than this, anything would be better than this.

At least it can’t get any worse.

Edsel sprinted across the street, jumping puddles, body so hot he was amazed the rain didn’t fizzle before it made contact with his skin. The sign above the sports store was still in place, so he knew he was in with a chance, albeit a remote one. He didn’t really expect there to be any footwear left, but at least he could get out of the rain, try to lose the others, and somehow find a few seconds to deal with his feet.

I can always hope. Gotta stay positive or they’ve already won.

Edsel crashed to the ground; he hadn’t been watching where he was going. The smell of the putrid flesh of a half eaten dog greeted him as his face hit the creature’s midsection with a sickening thump. Hands slipped in rotten flesh and came away with clumps of fur stuck to skin that was almost liquid. He had the foul stench all over his scavenged jeans and t-shirt as he got carefully to his feet, the fear of slipping again a reality.

They were almost upon him, so Edsel took his chance and ran into the store through the large shattered full height window, praying he wouldn’t get glass stuck in his foot. If he did then it would all be over, he knew that now. They didn’t want to capture him and finish the job, desertion only had one punishment.

Death.

SOCKS

He had to walk; there was little choice inside the store. There was no room to run, but at least those behind him would be facing the same issues and hopefully would have an encounter with the dog too — Edsel wrinkled his nose at the smell that threatened to make him puke.

Like I haven’t had enough crap on me in the last few days. Ugh.

Edsel shook his head at things he really didn’t want to remember, but knew he would for the rest of his life — however long that might be — then moved as fast as he could between the rails, most on their sides, little in the way of clothing left. The racked walls dedicated to footwear were empty, nothing there. He guessed the stock rooms would be the same, if not worse, as that way people could find their sizes. Walking quickly through the store to the back he grabbed a sweatshirt from the floor and pulled off his stinking t-shirt, wiping his hands as best he could, the smell still almost overpowering, his empty stomach threatening to purge foul acid.

What I wouldn’t give for something to eat though, I can’t go on like this.

The sweatshirt was a simple green thing, but the hood would be good against the rain and cold once he was back outside. Miraculously it fit — a little snug but it was better than nothing. His dark denim jeans would just have to stay on; it would take too long to even try to get them off.

A few mis-matched sneakers and more sturdy footwear littered the floor, and there were still quite a few kids shoes littered about the place. He scanned it quickly as he moved through the store, finding a left Adidas in his size.

He quickly unlaced his ruined Converse and put the new sneaker on. No time to search for the other one, it could be here or not, but at least he had something on his feet. The looser fit of the skater-style trainer was a welcome relief after the Converse he had luckily found only hours after he made his escape. They were the worst choice in footwear possible for someone that had just had their feet tattooed, but they didn’t hurt as much when he first put them on as they did now — two days later.

Scabs had started to form, then got ripped off repeatedly — it was a never-ending nightmare of pain, running, thirst, hunger, downright dread, and worst of all not knowing if Kathy was safe. Alive.

His foot stank. The soaking sock was thick with lumps of dead skin. Uncovered, the sight of his foot and The Ink going up his leg almost made him cry. Almost. He didn’t think he had any tears left now — he’d cried them all on the gurney as they ruined his body, branding him as belonging to everything he hated in the world.

What was wrong with these people?

With no better solution, he turned the sock inside out and was about to put it back on when he spotted a few pairs weirdly still on an upright rack. A bizarre slice of normality where all was chaos. He grabbed a pair, stuffing one in his pocket and putting the other on then quickly tying up the sneaker.

Aah. Bliss.

Rails clattered behind him and he heard the voices of The Eventuals talking to each other; they were spreading out to cover the room as best they could. All three of them.

Damn. Time to go.

Edsel got to his feet and crouched low, moving fast to the back. These places always had a rear exit, they had to by law. He just prayed it was unlocked. He got behind the counter without being seen and crawled back into the rear of the building, hands and knees screaming at the pressure. There were people in the canteen, obviously still able to show up for work at one point — The Lethargy gripping them and letting them gradually die from starvation where they sat around a dirty off-white Formica table.

There was a microwave, fridge and coffee machine in the corner, mocking Edsel with their familiarity — a reminder of a once normal life. Well, it wasn’t normal anymore; or it was, but it wasn’t good. He supposed whatever happened made it the norm, it was simply a reality that was more like a nightmare was all. It said a lot about the people: they obviously had nowhere else to go.

Slowly he got up off all fours, the industrial grade carpet feeling like someone was rubbing sandpaper into his palms. His knees were already bleeding again. He went through a door and found himself in a stockroom, boxes strewn everywhere, the place a total wreck. Nothing much was left in terms of clothing, but there were all manner of other things: loads of exercise equipment, balls for various sports, gym equipment and any number of weights plates, kettlebells, rackets and...

Is that a baseball bat?

The weight felt good, the old fashioned wooden bat surprisingly warm and comfortable in his hand, the pain not as bad as he thought it would be. He took a practice swing. His torso burst into flame at the movement, skin chafing badly in the tight sweatshirt. Best to save the batting for when he had heads to aim at.

A door banged behind him and he knew they would be through into the stockroom after him soon. He had to go. Even with the bat he knew it was a risk to take on three of them — they had knives and maybe even a gun. Plus they weren’t screaming inside with pain like he was.

He hunted around for the exit, not seeing a sign. There were doors at the far end on the right so he opened one and jumped back in shock at the sight of a demented looking shaved-headed man with eyes black-rimmed, two day stubble making his face look even more gaunt than it was.

Jeez, it’s me! I look like death.

He pointedly ignored the mirror and headed down the short corridor until he finally came to the fire exit. The safety bar was across, but it would give him his freedom if he pushed down and it wasn’t locked.

Beep beep beep. The damn door had an alarm! What the hell? Power was out and had been for years, so it must have had some kind of weird backup. At least it was open, but his pursuers knew exactly where he was now.

The door led outside to a concrete ramp with a handrail on the left, then into a small car-park for staff for a few of the stores. There were two cars in spots outside the store he’d just left, no others.

The people inside. Poor buggers.

Shaking his legs into life, Edsel began running once more. It was all he did — run and run and run. The moving without running had actually energized him a little though. His heart rate returned to almost normal, well, as normal as you can expect when you are being chased by crazed religious freaks that want to make sure you die slowly at their hands for blasphemy.

Back in the street once more. A different one, a narrow one-way system with a tiny sidewalk almost too narrow to walk on and not spill into the road. Once the little businesses here made a roaring trade selling all manner of bespoke items from expensive jewelery to antiques — now the doors hung from fractured hinges and the jewels were taken before people realized they were less valuable than a hot meal; the antiques mostly stayed put. What use were they when survival was what mattered most of all?

Water bubbled up from the drains, unable to cope without regular maintenance for so long, and once again his feet, now in mismatched sneakers, were soaked. He heard his pursuers behind him and took a quick look. One was well ahead of the others, a stocky guy that seemed built for the chase.

Around the corner, another street, a chance maybe?

Turning quickly, and before the thick-set man had a chance to react, Edsel swung the bat with all the strength he had left, hearing a satisfying crack as it connected with the red bald head of the man. He staggered, clutched his head, then went down into a pile of tattered garbage sacks as his ear oozed thick blood.

Yes! Go.

Edsel ran on, winding his way slowly but surely back to all that kept him going in the world. Home to Kathy.

HOME

The door slammed behind him and he bolted it, in no mood to chastise Kathy for the mess in the hallway — she never was very tidy. Not that it made any difference — The Eventuals knew where he had been living and would have been here soon enough anyway, just to check if he’d risked coming home or not.

“Kathy, Kathy honey? We have to go. Now.”

He ran into the living room and went cold. They’d already been, closing the door politely behind them on their way out, after they caved in her head with a poker from the unused fireplace. As if to mock him they’d then had the good grace to put the poker back in the coal scuttle where it was kept.

They’re here.

Edsel didn’t have any fight left in him — what was the point now anyway? Everything was gone.

Everything.

Kathy.

DESPAIR

Edsel’s world crashed down around him in wave after wave of sick clarity. The bat fell to the floor with a soft thud, thick carpet soaking up the sound just as it had the blood of the most beautiful creature he had ever known.

The image of Kathy would forever be burned into his brain like a brand.

How could they? How could they do this to her? To me?

If only he’d got home sooner, made it across the ruined city a few hours or minutes quicker. But he’d done his best, hadn’t slept in days, and assumed that they would make catching him the priority, not searching his home and finding Kathy.

How wrong he’d been.

She was all he lived for; his salvation; his hope and his joy. Without her there was nothing, nothing left at all. No family, no friends, no people he could turn to, nobody to trust or offer a shoulder to cry on.

All was emptiness.

He felt the weight of the crushing loneliness return and envelop him in its cold reality as it had once before; before he met Kathy. Now that twinkle in her eye when she listened to him, made fun of him when his thoughts got dark — all gone.

This was it, he may as well give up, there was nothing left now, nothing to do but to accept The Void and at least have oblivion to take away the pain.

Everything became too surreal. The rest of the room was neat and tidy, still smelling of furniture polish, the cushions still piled up on the sofa where they curled up together for warmth and company. The place where they had tried to make life normal, carry on as if it all mattered, would make things better.

He was cradling her, sat on the floor sobbing like a child, rocking her naked battered body, trying to soothe the corpse as if it would bring her back.

Kathy, sweet Kathy, always full of life and hope, never giving up, always looking on the bright side. They were going to have a new start, go somewhere quiet, into the country, away from the madness, away from the ruins and the scavengers and the constant reminder of all that was lost since The Lethargy took away everything. He’d wanted to, anything for her. Anything.

Now the dreams were crushed, just like her head. Blond hair thick with still warm blood.

Her beautiful head, caved in and ruined. Just like their future, like everybody’s future.

“Kathy, what have they done to you? My beautiful Kathy.”

There’s nothing left now. Nothing.

Edsel stroked her beautiful blond hair. He’d always loved it, and he knew she found it soothing, taking her away from bad memories of the past.

She wouldn’t want this Edsel, Kathy wouldn’t let you give up, even now. She’d want you to carry on, to make her death mean something. Get up, get up before it’s too late and—

“Hello Ed, or should I say jty.”

Edsel jumped, forgetting the fact that they were probably still in the house, forgetting for a moment the searing pain that ravaged his entire body.

It’s now or never Edsel, make up your mind.

Thoughts whirled a mile a minute, then the decision was made.

“Don’t call me Ed, and don’t you dare call me jty, you freak.”

The man just smiled at him, calm and confident. Bishop, the one he had trusted and told of his despair so long ago. A different life. Now his original name was stripped from him, replaced with the title Bishop, nothing more. There were countless Bishops, just as there were Cardinals, initiates and acolytes — all had their names taken, replaced with a random three letter moniker, taking away their identity, all part of the religion’s way of ensuring those in the church accepted that they were meaningless, not worthy of even a name — there just to help bring about The End, to finish off what The Lethargy had started.

There was loud banging at the door.

It was the others, those that had pursued him, they were here now too. Bishop turned at the noise and Edsel made his move. He grabbed the poker as he let go of Kathy for the last time, bouncing to his feet as his body screamed at him. Scabs tore and nerves lit up like fireworks but he swung anyway, the poker making contact with a satisfying crunch; Bishop reeled back against the door jamb. Edsel shouldered into him as the front door crashed open — wood splintered, and glass sprinkled onto the carpet.

No time to retrieve the bat, the poker would have to do.

His two remaining pursuers were inside, crunching over the fractal shards as they took in the scene before them. Edsel ran down the hall toward the kitchen at the back of the small house.

Damn, damn, damn. Where’s the key?

The back door in the kitchen was sure to still be locked — they never left it so somebody could just walk in — but he’d told her time and time again to always leave the key in the lock just in case they needed to get out in a hurry. She had a habit of moving it for some reason he never did get an answer to. At least the net curtain over the glass was still in place — it made the room gloomy but ensured privacy during the day. It didn’t matter now, nothing did.

There, on the counter-top, next to the microwave they should have thrown out ages ago — no point having it when there wasn’t any power. He grabbed the key and pushed for the keyhole.

Ugh, missed. C’mon! Try again. Quick.

This time it slotted in perfectly; he turned it and the lock clicked.

He grabbed the handle, turning it as a hand reached out from behind him, slamming the door shut again.

“Don’t think so. You aren’t going anywhere you traitor.”

One of his attackers, one of the two that gave him The Ink, branding him forever as one of their foul believers in their sick and twisted religion.

Edsel shot an elbow back, the nerves raw as the red skin covered bone made contact and a satisfying oof swept warm bad breath over his neck. Edsel grabbed the door handle again and was out the door as he felt a hand clutch his sweatshirt.

The poker, you idiot, use the poker.

He swung backward blindly, but there was no aim and not much strength. He felt contact but it was soft and didn’t help. He turned and aimed better, but he just didn’t have the energy — he wanted to give up but he couldn’t.

Kathy would kill me if I gave up. Haha. Get it together Edsel, move. Now.

Summoning up energy from he didn’t know where, Edsel swung again, the poker smacking into the shoulder of the tattooist. What was he called? gbt, or something equally ridiculous. The strike reverberated up his arm and he could feel more skin weep across his chest where the swing had caused his arm to chafe. His armpit felt like a million biting ants were slowly eating his flesh; he could feel the sticky excretions begin to stain through his sweatshirt.

But he was free for a second.

He ran again.

All he did was run. He needed to stop, he needed to cry.

Edsel was crying. He ran down the garden, letting the salty tears fall freely until he had to wipe them away and let the salt bring pain flashing once more to his swollen, tattered hand.

He crashed through the overgrowth — the garden a mess of weeds and plants gone wild without any maintenance. The city was too dangerous to spend time outdoors at your home — the last thing you wanted was for anyone to know a property was occupied, especially by women. Edsel had been careful to hide Kathy as much as he possibly could — it was incredible how quickly men had turned back into cavemen and would drag off any female they thought was still Whole. Survival of the line became an obsession even as most of humanity curled up into a ball and slowly died.

Shit. Wall. This is going to hurt.

“Get him! Don’t you dare let him get away again. What’s wrong with you?”

Bishop was shouting at the two men. He could hear them crashing through the waist-high grass — they would be just as soaked as he was, but at least the rain had stopped. He didn’t think he could have got any wetter but now his jeans were sodden and sticky seed heads were jabbing through the thick denim. It felt like he was getting The Ink all over again.

No time to think, just do it.

His heart hammered in his chest like it was going to explode; his legs were chafing horribly from the soaked denim, and now he had to get over a seven foot red-brick wall.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to brick up the door Edsel.

The new sneaker gave a little extra bounce as he leapt up, arms above his head.

The poker! Damn.

He was up though. He dropped the poker over the wall as a new pain joined with the old.

The glass!

Already brutalized forearms ripped, blood soaking through the sweatshirt, staining it dark. He’d bedded glass into the top just as an extra deterrent, but he’d forgotten. Feet scrabbled for purchase, and he scrambled higher onto the wall, but one of The Eventuals had his leg. He kicked out.

There goes the new sneaker.

He was up, belly scratching over the dislodged glass, sweatshirt riding high, deep gouges covering his stomach like the doodles of a child.

Over.

Yes!

The cold poker gave a welcome numbness to his hand as he picked it up and ran down the lane that divided the gardens of the rows of houses that backed onto each other.

Where to now? Why even bother?

REST

There was time, a little at least. But what was the point? What was he going to do now anyway? Edsel wasn’t wallowing in pity, he genuinely had no idea. Without Kathy he just didn’t know what he was supposed to do. If he was going to survive then he knew he had to get away from the city, but where to, and what for? What would Kathy want him to do? She would want him to keep his promise, that’s what. Get away, to open fields and live a life they should have been living already.

It was increasingly difficult to think straight: he was too tired, too upset, and he hurt so much. It was impossible to think clearly; his head felt like it was wrapped in cotton wool, like nothing was making any sense.

Haha. Well, it hasn’t for years now has it? Nothing makes sense, not one damn thing.

Edsel looked at himself in the mirror. He was going to have to do something about his skin — he wouldn’t be able to keep moving like he had been. Already it had been what, almost two days since he’d escaped? It was only going to get worse as The Ink soaked deeper into the epidermis and The Fire — what they had called whatever it was they added to make the pain build and build for days — began to hurt more and more. More scabs would form from the tattoos and they needed time to heal, but he wasn’t going to have the luxury of rest — they would find him again, soon. They always did.

Maybe I’ve got a few hours if I’m lucky.

Those that took The Ink voluntarily were kept from moving for days after the ordeal was over. He’d heard all about it, most people had, and they had gone in their droves to get the permanent marks, just so they could ‘belong’ before everything came to an end. Everyone was so lost that The Eventuals were all that were left for a lot of people; a sense of belonging to see out the final days of the human race as those that thought they had escaped The Lethargy began to succumb. It never relented, nobody was safe — populations were decimated, survivors worldwide became fewer by the day.

There was no way to know how many people were left, but while media, radio and the Web still worked, it seemed like it was only a few million across the globe. That had been years ago, now it would be much lower. The United Kingdom was like a ghost town. Streets were empty of everything apart from bodies, trash and rubble. Looting in the early days had emptied the stores and no services worked any longer.

Ugh. Look at me.

He’d run as fast and as far as he could, but he had to stop. He just had to. His body was screaming, his energy levels were exhausted, he was starving hungry, thirsty like he’d never been in his life. He felt like he was going to erupt — made of molten lava. He looked like it too. Worst of all, and what threatened to break him entirely, was that he was finding it hard to care.

He ran on, pushing himself past any boundaries, his heart empty, gone; broken. Alone again, just like before. Forever now — nobody would replace Kathy, nothing could.

Edsel ran, a hypnotic pace that numbed him to everything apart from just breathing. One foot in front of the other, just to get away, to escape from the nightmare his life had become. From his kidnappers, from the pain, from the emptiness. From himself.

When Edsel came back to reality he found himself in a warehouse district, a few miles from his home — a home he would never return to. He was free of them for a while, but they’d be back, they would find him. He wasn’t in any doubt about it.

The bathroom was cramped, but at least it had a mirror and a few things that might be useful. And clothes, there were clothes! Dry ones.

Bodies too, just a few. He stepped over the decaying corpses and down a short corridor away from the foyer where a secretary had obviously shown up for work as she didn’t know what else to do — she had succumbed right by the photocopier and eventually died sat leaning against the machine. Further on there was a man dressed smartly in shirt and tie who had probably just faded away where he stood, then finally crumpled unknowingly to the floor. Maybe they had both carried on showing up simply to act normal?

He’d seen it a lot, would have done the same thing himself if he’d ever had a job to go to. By the time he was old enough to work there was no such thing as a job any longer. He’d still been going to school until the teachers stopped showing up, the students too. Finally it was just him — sat alone at a desk, not knowing what else to do.

Back through the foyer there was a small canteen and a few other rooms for offices and a boardroom, then the warehouse itself. Nothing much of use was stacked on the rows of racking, just a load of electrical components that were now worthless. But in the lockers and in offices he’d managed to scrounge together some better clothes and footwear. Work clothes and a warm sweater.

All he’d had to do then was get his soaked and bloodied clothes off and try to think what to do, and how to cope with the life of being Inked and a wanted man by this Ward of The Eventuals.

What’s wrong with them?

Shaking his head, he’d carefully tried to remove his clothes without causing too much more damage to his burning body.

It made him feel sick just thinking about what he was going to see — again.

When they’d secured him to the ceremonial table — in reality a gurney, probably from some kind of mental institute judging by all the leather straps — for The Ink to begin, then wheeled over the tables full of equipment, he’d squirmed and screamed and sworn vengeance on them for what they were about to do. They’d just grimly begun, telling him that they knew deep down it was what he wanted, that he’d thank them for giving him such an honor.

He didn’t.

It hurt like he couldn’t believe, and then it just kept on getting worse. They’d told him it would continue for days, each hour The Ink seeping deeper, slow-releasing the poison in the special additive, part of the ritual, part of the sacrifice, part of the proof that to still be alive was a blasphemy — a just punishment for those still remaining. It was holy, they’d said, blessed by Varik himself, to be mixed with the red Ink so that it opened up nerves to accept the pain that must be endured — an offering for their pointless lives. After a few days it would subside, then it would be just a matter of healing from the assaulted skin.

Scabs had begun to form even before they’d finished with his lower body, and he’d endured it, hour after seemingly infinite hour.

It went on for lifetimes.

The worst thing was that he’d watched it all, he had no choice.

Large mirrors above him showed his pale scrawny body in all its nakedness. But gradually it was stained crimson, injected with a permanent dark red on every single millimeter of his skin, rising from his toes up his legs, his groin — which was painful beyond belief — and ever upward until eventually he would be red from his toes to the top of his head.

But he’d got away, hadn’t he? Only to be confronted with a pain more unbearable than anything he’d encountered so far — Kathy had been abused and taken from the world, sent to The Void.

In the bathroom, after gathering up the clothes, he pulled the sweatshirt off as carefully as he could, the rips to his stomach from the glass thankfully clean of shards. His forearms were a mess of criss-crossing cuts but the pain faded into the background. He pulled the ripped sock off his foot, undid the Converse on the other, then that sock came off as well.

Next was the jeans — he wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it. Just do it. That’s it, button first, then the zip.

There was a thick scab-line all the way around his body where the top of the jeans had rubbed his abused flesh raw. Just looking as he unzipped the jeans made him sick. His groin was disgusting: penis like a mangled hot dog, scabbed, swollen, so abraded it was like having cat litter in your pants. He peeled the jeans down slowly, revealing more of his hairless body, more damaged skin, but finally at least they were off.

What do I do now? What’s going to help this all heal?

Searching through the small bathroom he came up with nothing, so went out to the lockers, padding about naked, the cold welcome — better than the fabric chafing his ruined body. There was nothing, no magic lotion that would soothe his skin, not that he really expected to find much of any use.

Back in the bathroom he patted carefully at his skin to dry it, rubbed a towel over his face and head — the only part of him that didn’t hurt — then stared in the mirror.

What greeted him was hard to accept as real. The creature that stared back at him was ruined. His blue eyes were sunken, dark bags underneath like he’d cried tears of coal, and he could tell he was so exhausted he would collapse soon. He hadn’t slept in days — they’d kept him awake while they marked him, and he hadn’t rested since his escape. They were always just behind him, like a pack of hungry dogs.

His body was stripped of excess flesh as there was never enough food these days, but he was fairly athletic looking, if scrawny. His red body mocked him, a permanent reminder that life had become so far removed from what it once was.

It was all too strange. The world he lived in didn’t seem real, didn’t feel like it could be possible. Reality was such an insult to normality that he wondered if his life growing up had actually been anything but a dream. Did he really just go to school and play with his mates? Go to stores, watch TV in his room and surf the Web or play on his Xbox? Gone, all gone. No point thinking about it now, it wouldn’t bring back the happy times. Now there was nothing, just death, Eventuals, and the struggle to survive.

Shit, stop it. Stop thinking about it. Focus.

The man in the mirror frightened him, so Edsel turned away and carefully patted under his arms. He looked.

Shouldn’t have done that.

There were crusty bits, oozing bits, and things he didn’t want to even think about. It would take ages to heal, and then what? Just red, like the Devil himself, mocking the things he took for granted, the simple comfort of having your own skin color. Now everything was stripped from him.

Edsel got dressed.

All that was missing was underwear, so he tore strips off clean cloths from the canteen and made some makeshift protection for his groin. Then he dragged on thankfully loose black cargo pants and thick socks, two pairs, before putting on some sturdy work boots, then a simple dark blue sweater. The less clothes the better, but he didn’t want to freeze either. It was summer but the days were often still cold, and the rain was coming down sporadically.

***

The carpet smelled funny, synthetic, full of chemicals.

Carpet? Uh-oh.

Edsel got up carefully. How long had he been asleep? He looked around nervously but there was nobody else in the room; the clock on the wall was no help — batteries had probably given up the ghost years ago. Through dusty blinds he could see the sun was still fairly high.

Probably about six then.

He’d only been out for a couple of hours, but that was a couple of hours too long. They could be coming to get him any second now.

What’s the plan? Where’s the poker? Ah, there, where I was sleeping.

With the cold metal in his hand he at least felt ready — well, as ready as he’d ever be anyway. He went to the window again, looking out into the parking area. It was clear, so maybe he had time to come up with something.

Think. Come on, they will be here for you soon.

Nothing. He was empty. It was all too much. Kathy was gone, what should he do? Vengeance? Yes. No. How? Run? Yes, run. Get away, before there were more of them — a lot more. He needed to think, he needed time to gather himself, to come up with a plan. He couldn’t go back, not for the punishment they would dole out, not for anything. He had to come up with something, anything.

The tears fell.

Kathy had been his everything, bringing him back to life even after he thought he had been dead to the world, ready to just give it all up and take away the emptiness he felt by just finishing it all. Not that he ever would really, he always knew that; he just felt like it would be a release. But life was too precious, any life was better than none. He had a duty, he had to stay alive.

He’d met Kathy on one of his darker days, when such thoughts came and went in a loop of misery and depression. Then he saw her, and he was never the same again.

She’d brought him back to reality, back to life, giving of herself, offering him hope and a chance to look to the future for the first time in years. He thought she was probably one of The Awoken, those that had been effected by The Lethargy but in the opposite way: slowly opening up, becoming something more than Whole, a form of enlightenment but different. There were rumors, more than that, there were reports on the news for a short while, stories of people suddenly having the ability to see things, see data streams running around the world, understand the way things worked, look into your mind, talk to the trees and enter the minds of animals, even human beings.

And The Commorancy, just about the only bit of hope there was left.

Marcus. Marcus Wolfe — the name had become legend in an instant, then the hype faded along with the reports. All that remained was static.

Edsel had tried for a while to gain entry to The Commorancy, to get an invitation, but had given up when his life suddenly took on real meaning at last. But it was as legendary as The Eventuals, just harder to become a part of. Now it was too late. Or was it?

Maybe he could gain entry, get an invitation, finish what Kathy had begun when he’d been brought back to life by her and started to understand the beauty of the world they found themselves so alone in. He could get one of the seven Rooms, where it was said people would become Awoken, have the ability to see things ordinary people couldn’t. Awaken, be useful. Do something with his life, for her. So she would be proud of him, smile if she saw him, her eyes twinkling like they always did when she was happy, or even just staring off into the distance, lost in dreams and entering The Noise, slowly learning about what was awakening inside of her.

Yes, he’d do that. He had a plan.

FOOD

He had to eat, he had to drink, and he really, really, needed a pee.

Oh boy, this is not going to be pretty.

At the mere thought of it his testicles shriveled up so much he wondered if they’d ever drop back down again or would forever be lost, just like his heart.

Man up, how bad can it be?

It was bad.

Edsel was on the floor, curled up, almost, but not quite cupping his groin, knowing it would only make things worse. Sweat covered his body. He was hot. Cold. Hot again. Shivering and sick. And the sweat? The musty sick smell of sweat that hurt so much. What kind of body design was this? As each bead popped to the surface through his ravaged pores a tiny geyser of agony erupted, like pins were being forced out from inside, rather than the other way around.

And he was thirsty too!

But if he drank then he’d need a pee again at some point, and there was no way he was ever doing that again. Never.

Ugh.

He waited it out, unable to move, his penis screaming in agony, his whole middle on fire, making everything else pale into insignificance in comparison.

Some things are just too damn private and personal.

He lay there for what felt like hours but knew was only minutes.

Time to go. Where?

It was impossible to think straight — there was too much hurt, too much exhaustion. Too much loss.

Try to find a way into The Commorancy, right? Get safe, secure, away from the nightmare?

That was a plan, that was something to aim for.

To hell with that. I’m going to kill the bastards.

He felt better already.

Time to turn the tables and make them pay.

Sorry Kathy, I know you won’t approve. I know you’d say I should look after myself, try to become a better man. Awaken, stay safe. But I can’t, not after what they did to you, what they did to me. They have to pay for what they have done.

A terrible noise startled him; it was his stomach. He needed food, and he needed water. The canteen didn’t have anything, the water cooler was empty — nobody had bothered to get it refilled.

But maybe in the other warehouses he would have more luck. Surely some of them would have a vending machine or a simple cup of water for him?

Time to find out.

***

The Pepsi was sheer bliss. It was warm, probably out of date, although he didn’t bother to check, and it roiled in his guts as the fizzy liquid met nothing but stomach acid — it was glorious. His first drink in more than a day and the caffeine and sugar buzz felt like nothing on this earth.

“Aah.”

Leaning against the broken glass of the vending machine, Edsel tried to formulate some kind of a plan. His head began to buzz a little and it gave him some kind of clarity, for a few seconds anyway.

Oh no, here it comes, here it comes.

His head began to spin, his eyes lost focus, and there was something rising from within — his body moving away from him, like it no longer belonged to him at all. Edsel hit the floor but was already unconscious. The sugar load after so long without food had crashed his system. The final adrenaline come-down had caught up with him — he’d been running on a high for days now, the adrenaline from getting The Ink, his escape, and Kathy’s death all kept him going at a ramped up speed, the rest and the drink had been the final straw.

As he lay there the strange milky fluid called lymph, that was a result of the tattoos, slowly turned his skin a milky pink. Scabs continued to form, his skin bubbled in places where excess moisture was trapped and searched for release, and his body just kept on burning and burning.

For just a few minutes he was free of it all.

He came back to himself soon enough and finished off the rest of the drink, not caring what would happen, only that he had to get hydrated. Wandering around the huge warehouse he now found himself in, his joy could hardly be contained when he found a water cooler.

Half full.

He drank until he felt like he would pop, then searched around until he found what he was looking for — there was a half full milk carton in the canteen, the only vessel he could find. He emptied it best he could, then poured a can of Fanta — he hated Fanta — into it and put the cap back on. It fizzed satisfactorily, then he emptied it back out and rinsed it with water from the water cooler. A few sniffs and a few rinses later he at least had some portable water.

He took a backpack from a peg at the entrance and after emptying it of a container of very moldy sandwiches and a yogurt he definitely knew no longer contained any good bacteria, Edsel filled it with cans of drink and his water bottle.

With no better solution coming to mind he tied a towel around the backpack so it wouldn’t chafe so much on his back. It hurt like hell to get it on, but at least it was a pain with a purpose this time.

Right, time for food.

As he headed for the door Edsel stopped; he was sure he heard something. He listened, trying to hear over the hammering of his heart.

They’re here. Damn.

Then he felt it, and knew it was definitely time to go. It was that Bishop, he somehow just knew it, and here he was trying to get into his head. He would too, if Edsel didn’t get away from him, and fast. He felt, rather than heard, Bishop talk to the acolytes, and knew they would be right beside him in seconds now. His only hope was to run once more.

Out through the broken entrance and into the evening. It was still light, which was something: running through the littered streets in the dark wouldn’t be fun at all.

Yeah, like this is fun.

Edsel winced as the backpack began to bounce around on his back. He needed to tighten the straps but it was too late now. He felt the intrusion into his mind weaken as he got some distance, but they knew where he was now and once they picked him up they wouldn’t lose him so easily. His chase through the city had taught him that if he didn’t get maybe half a mile, even a mile, away from them then they could pick up his presence. It was The Noise. Those that were Awoken, or Whole and on the cusp of becoming something more, had a serious set of skills. They included entering the minds of creatures and even people if they were close enough. Mostly it had seemed, during the early days when reports still came on TV and the Web, that it was easiest done on those with The Lethargy — less resistance, basically an empty space to occupy.

But if you were powerful enough in The Noise then you could occupy human minds, even Whole ones, and for some Awoken it was a very strong skill. The acolytes that had tattooed and chased him were obviously not all capable of such things, but one of them was, and Bishop certainly was. They could search for him in The Noise now they knew what he would look like, although he had no clue how it actually worked, and if they were close enough they would find him. If they were very close then they could enter his mind, maybe even take it over and he would be helpless.

So he ran.

***

Edsel was lost. He didn’t know this part of the city so well — away from the commercial center and heading out into the suburbs. Row after row of houses, mostly now unoccupied or home to those slowly fading to nothing or hiding from the madness, waiting for everything to be all right again, trying not to admit to themselves what they knew to be true: it never would be.

He was free of his pursuers though, yet again. Spurred on by the water and the loaded drink he’d found himself running hard, setting a good pace. Maybe it was the new clothes — the looser fit meant he wasn’t getting such bad chafing, although it still felt like every nerve was stripped bare. Or the boots, they were a good fit, sturdy yet comfortable. He wondered about the person that had worn the old Converse he’d taken not long after his escape.

Stupid. To be thinking about such things when his world just came crashing down around him, but what was the alternative?

To think of Kathy?

I will have my revenge, and I’m sorry Kathy, sorry I couldn’t be there for you, sorry that I can’t, won’t, do what you would have wanted me to.

Landmarks began to become familiar; he must have skirted around a different way, but he had been heading in a certain direction there was no doubt about it. It may not have been a conscious decision but he was heading right back to where it had all started, back to where he had been held captive and given The Ink.

He was running right back into the arms of The Church Of The Eventuals.

This time it would be different though, this time it would be him that was the hunter.

A crunch underfoot caused Edsel to look down and stop. A large apple tree, left unpruned for years, had spilled over the top of a fence and its unripe fruit was hanging low. A few apples had dropped to the ground. He jumped up and grabbed one, pain searing up his legs as he landed.

Biting into the sour flesh was like being in the dentist’s chair, the assistant using one of those suction tubes to remove the moisture from your mouth.

He spat out the tough, bitter fruit.

Useless. Move.

Where was he going though? He couldn’t just run full steam right back into their lair; they’d be on him and it would be over in a second. He needed to formulate a real plan, come up with something that had some kind of a chance of success, not just run blindly at them and hope he would come out a winner — he wouldn’t.

Night was drawing in, the late summer evening finally admitting defeat and moving over to make way for the nocturnal creatures that now made the city their home in ever-increasing numbers.

The dogs.

It wasn’t safe to be out at night, not any more. The day held risk enough, and the dogs were a real danger during daylight hours, but at night? That was when they really came out to hunt.

With little in the way of food readily available, the now wild animals came out mostly after dark to hunt and feast on other creatures of the night. The howls and screams of cats, dogs, foxes, even the occasional boar and deer, all rose to a crescendo during the dark hours, never giving you a minutes peace, a chance to enjoy the silence of an almost human-free city.

There were no more sirens blaring, no cars speeding through the streets, no fumes, no fire engines, police cars or ambulances any longer, all that was left were the animals, and him.

Time to rest. Sleep, recover. But where?

His feet pounded the street, a never ending nightmare of pain with each footfall. On and on and on, a punishment for crimes not even committed, yet paying a horrendous price. Again, again and again and again, body aching, mind dulled, nerves on fire, chest tight and lungs ready to explode — Edsel knew he was going to simply collapse in the street at any second.

There was nothing for it — Edsel picked a house at random and hoped he would strike gold.

COMPANY

Edsel jogged quickly but quietly to the side of the semi-detached house, a Victorian two-story, all red brick and bay windows. There was a gate at the side, which was good, but it was just on a latch, no lock — not so good. He reached over and lifted the latch before creeping around the back, keeping low just in case. He moved as silently and as cautiously as he possibly could, even though it was using up time he knew was very precious.

Still, it had to be done.

He’d had a few close encounters with people over the years — mostly not friendly ones. The worse things got, the more it brought out the worst in a lot of people. In the end he’d given up trying to seek out like-minded people — those that would group together and help you out, watch your back if you watched theirs. For a while he’d stayed with a group of strangers, but it was already falling apart before he joined them.

There were two women and seven men, and the minute he stepped into the room after getting an invitation by one of the men he knew it was a bad idea. He could literally feel the tension in the air, and although they all had the best of intentions it simply wasn’t a good mix of people — there would be major problems, he had no doubt about it. Within a few weeks he left. Fights broke out on a regular basis as one of the women constantly flirted to get her own way; the other obviously resented it. Some of the men were all for it, others less than happy with the situation, and the inevitable quarrel broke out that led to a full scale fight. Once the noses started breaking Edsel knew it was time to leave.

Other encounters over the years had been downright hostile, and it wasn’t until he met Kathy that he finally felt like there was still good in the world. Ever since the first day that they met they were inseparable. Something just clicked, and he knew she was as happy as he was. Company, the warmth of each other through the long dark nights, and a reminder that not everything in the world was bad.

All gone now.

Edsel’s body was screaming again as he crept around to the back of the house. He wondered when the scabbing over of the tattoos would reach its peak. Although pain was still blinding in its intensity, it was beginning to itch more and more now as the skin tightened and scabs really began to form in earnest.

As they had been giving him The Ink the two tattooists, each beginning on one foot each, had gone through in morbid detail exactly what he could expect from his new markings.

It had sounded worse than the actual pain of having every part of your body covered in Ink — until it started. There was simply no describing the pain involved with having the areas between your toes injected with Ink by a needle. Then they did the soles of his feet and he blacked out. When he came-to they were still working on his feet. He was made to watch, his head strapped to the table, eyes held open with some kind of clamps. Every so often they would put drops in just so they didn’t dry out — most considerate.

Then they started on the ankles; he blacked out again. The skin covered bone was by far the worst, until they got up to his groin and peeled back his foreskin and even tattooed the inside. It was explained that every single piece of flesh that could be seen in any way would be red — this was how they gave themselves to the religion completely. He would thank them for it, they had told him, they were doing him a favor.

Some bloody favor.

His ordeal tormented him, and he knew it would for as long as he lived. Some things were best forgotten but they were always the things that stayed with you forever. Not that he could ever get rid of the memory of what had been done to him however hard he tried — it was there, every time he looked at his body. The only question was how long he’d actually have left to live.

At some point, after countless hours so filled with pain he didn’t know if it had been half a day or half a lifetime, they flipped him over and he had to watch them start at his lower legs again before moving on up to his backside. A thousand needles penetrating the skin around your anus is not something you ever want to contemplate happening, but it did, and they just kept on going — like two sadistic butchers teasing their meat before they finally put it out of its misery.

Through it all was a constant monologue of what would happen to him. Either the tattooists would regale him with morbid tales, or on occasion Bishop would come in to check on progress and give even more detail about what he could expect over the next few days and weeks.

They would keep him tied down — for his own safety, he was assured. The last thing you wanted to do was to disturb the scabs that would form. First there would be a milky substance extruded by his body, a sort of coating called lymph that was the body’s first defense. They would apply a special ointment to keep his skin hydrated as this would lessen the scabbing. It was important that The Ink was respected, never allowed to dry out, and under no circumstance was he to be allowed clothes. The material would rub on the scabs that formed by the second day, and if the scabs were ripped off then The Ink would not take as well, meaning the color would be less than perfect. It would be patchy, and that was a mockery of the gift bestowed on him.

He was to remain still, no movement; the skin must heal sufficiently first. The skin was to be hydrated but not too wet, as that way The Ink wouldn’t penetrate deep beneath. Sweat would ruin The Ink. Sweat would stop it from sinking through to the lower layers that made sure it was permanent, and even moving around much could cause the scabs to split and his Ink to be ruined.

So he would remain isolated, strapped down, maybe allowed up only if he showed that he understood the great gift bestowed on him, and proved that he respected The Ink and how it must be cared for if it was to be absolutely perfect. It made no sense — who cared if all you wanted was an end to humanity’s existence anyway?

Oh, and by the way, don’t forget about The Fire.

With the pain and fear mounting, he didn’t even bother to ask — he was already so far gone in pain that he didn’t think it could get any worse. After a long silence Bishop told him that within The Ink was a special additive, one that would open up his nerves in a way otherwise impossible. As his beautiful gift — their words, definitely not his — worked its way deeper and deeper in, and the accumulative effects of so much tattooing began to build, then so too would the pain. It would build and build to a crescendo over a number of days, finally reaching a peak right around the time that the majority of the scabs formed. Then it would recede as the scabs gradually healed over and dropped off of their own accord.

That would be right about now then.

Edsel wanted to scream, scream louder than he had ever screamed before. His whole body itched like he couldn’t believe. He wanted to just take off his clothes and rip off his skin. Better to be flayed alive than this.

He had to get his clothes off soon — the material felt like the fibers were made of barbed wire, the slightest movement sent shockwave after shockwave of pain shooting through nerve endings, hitting his brain while lights flashed before his eyes as his senses threatened to shut down and give him peace.

Not yet, not yet, I need to get inside. Get safe, figure out what to do, how to get them back.

But what could be a suitable punishment for the things they had done to him? He wasn’t that kind of a man. He didn’t spend his time plotting tortures for other human beings. Death, just death. That would have to do. Give them what they want though? Was that right? Their whole faith was based on bringing about the true end to humanity, searching out Whole people and either turning them or eliminating them.

Edsel shook his head to get some clarity. The pain was building and he knew he would lose it soon. He had to at least get inside and sit down before it happened. He slapped hard at his shaved head, just to touch something that hadn’t been violated by their damn Ink.

The back door was unlocked so he walked in, moving carefully past a broom and a mop leaning to the side of the door. He went quietly through the kitchen that actually looked like it might have a few things worth taking, maybe even food. Could he dare hope for that much? He held on to the back of one of two chairs next to a small table, getting his balance, then walked down a hallway and into a living room. The house smelled nice; clean, and had obviously been well looked after. Such things made the stark reality of life outside so much harder to bear. Better that there was nothing nice left any longer, maybe that would make his ordeal easier to cope with?

Taking his backpack off carefully, then slumping gratefully into a soft chair with patterned scatter cushions, Edsel sighed in relief at what must be the most comfortable piece of furniture in existence. He leaned his head back and just as he blacked out a head rose from behind the large sofa and a pair of wide eyes stared at him, full of fear — it was probably the saddest thing he had ever seen.

It was too late, he was past caring. Edsel lost consciousness and fell into a black pit of emptiness where the pain was taken away — just for a while.

EGG

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and the best was yet to come — it tasted out of this world.

Oh my god. I’m in heaven.

A fried egg! He savored every mouthful, the runny yolk like liquid gold. Once it was finished he ran a red finger around the plate, sure to get every last little morsel of the golden goodness, sucking his finger even though it hurt. He didn’t care.

“Thank you, thank you so much. That was divine.”

“That’s all right, sorry it was only one. Daddy said that I should only ever eat one at a time, just in case Martha gets into trouble.”

“Martha?” asked Edsel. “Ugh, argh.”

“Are you okay? Do you want me to do something?” The boy began to stand, although obviously unsure exactly why or what he was actually going to do.

“No, it’s fine, I just hurt is all. Everywhere.” Edsel shifted in the chair at the table, pain reaching new heights even though he tried, unsuccessfully, not to show it. He didn’t want to scare the child. A young boy, he couldn’t be more than twelve if that. “Now, who’s Martha?”

“The chicken of course. My dad said that she might not lay every day so I should only ever eat one egg at a time, and no more than four a week; just in case. That way I would at least have something to eat for a few days if she didn’t lay or she died or something.” The boy shrugged his shoulders, like it had been going on so long it was just the way things were. Normal.

“And Daddy? I thought you said you lived alone here.”

There was a silence, the boy’s head bowed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to say anything wrong.” It was obvious that the boy’s father wasn’t around, what was wrong with him? He needed to think straight, this was a definite complication to things.

“It’s okay, I just try not to think about it any more. It’s just me and Martha now, and she isn’t much company.”

“Is she out in the garden? I didn’t see a coop?”

“Oh no, Daddy always said she was too valuable for that. As soon as he found her we kept her inside. She’s upstairs.”

“Oh, right.” It didn’t really come as a surprise. He’d heard of people keeping all sorts of animals, including pigs, in their homes. It was different in the cities to out in the country — everything was up for grabs as food was so scarce. He always wondered why he didn’t leave and go to the countryside as soon as things turned sour, god knew the stench of the city should have been enough. Get away from so many reminders of what life once was, but the pull of home was always so strong. It was all he knew, all he had ever known. It would have to change though, he knew that. If he survived.

Kathy would have loved the countryside. She’d never seen it, but even in the city they’d taken walks now and then in the night when the moon gave enough light to see and they felt the risk was worth the reward. She’d loved the open spaces so much.

“Mister? Mister, are you okay?”

“Eh? Oh, sorry, just thinking.”

“You looked sad. Did somebody die?”

“Yeah, you could say that. But anyway, thanks for the egg, for looking after me last night. I’m sorry to just barge in, it must have been very scary.” Edsel couldn’t imagine the sight he must be for a young boy all alone with just a chicken for company. A chicken!

The young boy shifted about uncomfortably, clearing away Edsel’s plate and his own — both so clean they didn’t even look like they needed washing. “It was scary. I haven’t seen anyone in so long, not since my dad. But you just sat down and fell asleep in the chair. And, um...”

“What? It’s okay, you can tell me. And I’m Edsel by the way, what’s your name?”

“I’m Aiden.”

“Haha, that’s kind of apt at the moment, it means fiery.” Aiden looked at him in confusion. “Never mind, ah, shit. Oops, sorry, excuse the language.”

“Is it your hands? What’s wrong with them? Did you burn them? Were you in a fire?”

Edsel looked at his hands, the only bit of his body that Aiden could see that was tattooed. “It was The Eventuals. You know about them? Know about what they call The Ink?”

“Those are the bad red men, right?” Aiden brightened at having such knowledge.

“Yeah, that’s them. Well, they captured me and I managed to escape, but they are after me—“

What is wrong with you? Eating an egg, sat here like you don’t have a care in the world? Idiot!

“Damn, how long have I been here? How long did I sleep?” He couldn’t believe he’d not left the minute he’d woken up. Everything had been such a shock, seeing the young boy there, the eggs cooking, the boy obviously scared but trusting in a man that had walked into his house and fallen asleep.

Aiden looked at his watch. “It’s six thirty in the morning, why?”

“I have to go, I can’t stay here. They’ll be after me. I’m amazed they haven’t found me already. It’s not safe with me here.”

“Can I come?” asked Aiden, face lighting up, like Edsel had the answers to his current lonely life.

“Look Aiden, men are after me, horrible men, bad men. If they catch me, or you, then it’s curtains, you understand? I’m sorry, it’s too dangerous.”

“Oh. It’s so lonely though, I’m all alone. And I’m hungry and scared and it’s just me and Martha.”

“I’m sorry, I really am. Look, if I get through this then I’ll come back for you, I promise. But right now it’s just too risky. I have to go. Now.”

He hated himself for doing it but what alternative was there? He couldn’t just stay with the boy, they would find him and kill them both. But if he managed to succeed, he really would come back for him. He promised himself that as he moved into the living room and shouldered his backpack. He would, he really would — there was no way he’d leave Aiden all alone as long as he himself survived.

Poor kid.

He walked back into the kitchen, Aiden still standing there, the most pitiful sight he had ever seen. It nearly broke his heart. He had to leave.

“I’m sorry, I took one.”

“One? One what?”

“A drink. One of your cans. I took a Pepsi,” said Aiden guiltily.

“Haha, don’t worry about it, you deserve it. You deserve a lot more for helping me out. I’m sorry, but bye.”

He was out the back door before he had to look at the poor boy again, but there was no choice. Through the gate and down the road, furtively looking around, checking for his pursuers.

Where are they?

They could be anywhere, they could be coming around the corner right now. He should run, it’s what he did wasn’t it? Run. That was his life now, but there was more, not everything had turned sour. There were smart young kids that would trust you, share their food, and look at you with such sad eyes...

Just run.

WAIT

Here they come.

Footsteps were not far behind him. He should have just kept running the night before, gone as far as he possibly could until he collapsed. But how far would he have got? He should have done it anyway, rather than walking into somebody else’s home and saving his body from the torture for a while. Still, he’d had food, met Aiden. But one egg, nice as it was, simply wasn’t fuel enough for him to be able to keep on going at full speed indefinitely.

He ran faster, ripping open at the seams as the scabs that had formed through the night split and oozed. His body was a chrysalis, tearing open; maybe inside there was something beautiful? A butterfly waiting to dream of being a man for a day before it died?

You’re losing it Edsel, get a grip.

Footsteps grew louder.

I’m going to get caught, they’re going to get me this time. No way can I just keep on running.

“Wait, wait for me.”

Edsel turned. It was Aiden.

Has he got a chicken with him? He has. He’s got Martha with him.

He couldn’t help himself, he smiled. It was so comical, yet so damn sad at the same time, that he wanted to scoop the boy up in his arms, hug him tight and tell him everything would be all right. But a chicken. C’mon.

“What do you think you’re doing? I told you to stay home. You can’t be out here, and not with a chicken.”

A chicken!

“Where I go, Martha goes,” said Aiden defiantly, the poor bird tucked tightly under the boys arm, wrapped in a towel by the looks of it, so it wouldn’t flap away.

“You can’t go on the run with a chicken.”

“Why not?”

“Because... Because it’s a chicken, that’s why.”

That made sense, right?

“Well, I’m coming. Please, I don’t want to be alone any more. Dad left almost a year ago, I haven’t got anyone. I want to come.”

It was exasperating, he couldn’t take the boy. He’d have to make him go home. It was too dangerous, he’d be a liability — get them all killed. Well, maybe not the chicken. “You can’t come. Go home. I don’t want you, you’ll get me killed. Yourself too.” He had to be harsh, it was for the boy’s own good. “Aw, c’mon, don’t cry, it’s for your own safety. I’ll be back.”

“You won’t,” sniffed Aiden. “You’ll go and never come back and leave me alone forever, until I get The Lethargy and just die and Martha’s eggs will pile up and then she’ll die too as there is nobody to look after her.”

I can’t believe this, I’m on the run from maniacs and I’m arguing over chickens and he simply can’t come.

There was a car coming down the street, fast. It was them. No more time, the decision was made.

Edsel grabbed Aiden by the arm and started to run. “Come on, fast. Faster, they’ll kill us.”

“Martha!” The towel fell from Aiden’s arms as they started to run. Martha flapped about noisily until she was free of her fluffy prison and ran around wildly, right into the road.

Squawk.

“Martha!”

“We have to go. Move. Now.”

They ran, both turning to see the car closing on them fast. The chicken was still alive. It must have gone right under the car.

Lucky bugger.

“Faster. There, over there.” Edsel pointed to a playground, tall grass partially hiding swings and climbing frames probably not used in years.

That’s got to be the saddest thing I’ve seen in my whole damn life.

Sun glinted off the slide, mocking the degradation and the abandoned hope for a future that would never be alive with the laughter of children.

No more kids. Well, there’s one at least. He’s your responsibility now Edsel, you have to look after him, no choice now dude. None at all.

They ran for the playground, the green metal fencing meaning the car couldn’t follow. The fields beyond, once used daily by regular folk walking their dogs, now as deserted as the rest of the country — the rest of the world.

“Faster.”

Pain blinded Edsel to everything but running. The scabs had formed a tight seal over most of his body through the night, wrapping him as tight as a mummy, the skin ripping and cracking as the sudden movements opened up wound after wound, his clothes rubbing the dry itching skin, tearing off long peels of thick poisoned flesh like pork crackling as they ran for all their worth toward the silent playground, the swings still, nothing but ghosts left.

All that remained were dead children, forgotten by parents lost to The Lethargy, searching for adults in the only place they could think of to look once they were all alone.

“Don’t look,” said Edsel, trying to avoid the partially eaten or skeletal remains of a number of children and a few adults too by the look if it.

“It’s okay. I live here, I’ve seen it all before.”

God, what a world to be a kid in. When I was his age I hadn’t even known anyone that had died, let alone seen the corpses of children eaten by dogs. I don’t think I’d even lost a goldfish.

They ran fast through the playground, dodging bodies, knocking aside empty bottles and cans, pausing only to open the child-proof gate at the far end. They were out into fields now, gaining some distance on whoever had been in the car. Edsel risked a glance backward.

Damn, four of them now, they’ve got reinforcements.

He picked up the pace but Aiden could only go so fast, his young legs not up to the same speed as Edsel.

This is going to be a problem. Poor kid, what have I got him into?

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

“Eh? What?”

Did he just read my mind.

“A little, sorry about that. Daddy always said it was rude to do it, but when I’m excited it just kind of happens. Sorry.”

“You’re Awoken then? Naturally? Never mind, come on, let’s get out of here.”

They kept on running.

The field was knee-high for Edsel and higher for Aiden so they had to slow, but at least they were getting away. Their trousers were getting wet, the rains through the night ensuring everything was damp as usual. His legs began to hurt at a new level as the grass brushed against the material, seed heads pricking him like a replay of the chase of the day before.

What now? Where can we go? This is getting real old. Will there never be any goddamn motherf—

“That way, over there,” said Aiden, pointing toward a series of high-rise monstrosities — a failed housing project from the eighties, one of the few not demolished before The Lethargy put a halt to the hope of re-homing people into a better way of life.

“Okay, it’s as good as any other direction.”

Like things aren’t depressing enough already.

Running. Always running. Edsel felt like he’s spent his life running, splitting apart just like the Converse had.

Empty inside.

***

It was a maze of concrete walkways connecting giant crumbling concrete coffins to each other. There were bridges, sloped curving walkways that connected to a small shopping precinct that held a convenience store, a post office, the ubiquitous liquor store and betting shops. All smashed now, the booze gone before the food from the Spar next door.

Aiden seemed to know his way around pretty well, leading them up a walkway that rose up to the entrance to one of the fifteen story high-rises. Inside the broken doors were piles of refuse — as far as most people had bothered to take their trash once it was no longer collected. It stank. There were obviously dead animals of all description and all states of decomposition within the mountain of discarded remains of humanity trying its best to hang on to life. Inevitably unsuccessfully in most cases.

“I used to come here, looking for people, before it got too dangerous. Before somebody tried to take me. A man, a horrible man that tried to—“

“It’s okay, it’s safe now.”

Who are you trying to kid Edsel. Safe, my arse.

“I know. I, um, I killed him.”

Edsel stopped and stared at the boy. “You what?”

“I used my powers, what Daddy said was because I was Awoken. I went into his mind and saw the things he wanted to do to me; I made him smash his head against the wall, that one there.” Aiden pointed at a dark smear staining the depressing, graffiti covered brickwork. “I didn’t mean to kill him, but he banged his head and then he was dead.”

“Well, I’m sure he deserved it,” grunted Edsel. “Where to now Batman.”

“Batman? Who’s Batman?”

Poor kid, I guess he’s too young for a lot of things. He would have been what, five when The Lethargy happened?

“Nevermind. Where to?”

“That way.” Edsel followed the boy’s finger. It pointed at a door that had mesh enforced glass which led to a narrow balcony running along the outside of the first floor of the high-rise, where people had to walk to get to their front doors.

What a place to live. Why would anyone think this was a good idea? They started falling down as soon as they built them.

They went through the door and along the balcony. At the end was a connecting walkway that took them over a road and up to another level of what appeared to be a large car park.

“We can get into the bigger shopping center that way, it’s the car park for it.”

“Okay, great. Let’s go.”

What am I gonna do with him? I can’t just let him be chased with me. Damn, can he hear this? Can you hear this?

Edsel turned and looked at Aiden, who seemed to be pointedly not looking at him.

Yeah, you can.

“Sorry.”

SHOPPING

They had to be careful. Edsel knew from experience that shopping centers were some of the most dangerous areas in the city. The desperate, the hungry and the plain bored seemed to congregate in such places. Hoping to find clothes not already stolen, gadgets of all description, the most precious commodity of all: batteries. He’d seen two men fight until one killed the other just over a Duracell, they were that important to people now.

I hate these places, they were always weird even before The Lethargy.

Edsel had an intense dislike for the soulless shopping centers that sprang up what seemed like every week all over the city, a never-ending supply of people popping into existence to take advantage of free parking and the escape from the weather. He always felt out of place, like he didn’t belong. Now it was just depressing.

The place was eerie. The small amount of natural light from filthy opaque skylights turned it into dusk as soon as they entered. He winced at the reminder of the once overtly consumerist society he would give anything to go back too — heck, he’d even happily wander the crowded walkways, smiling sweetly as people bumped into him and then stared at him like it was his fault. The wide cream tiled floor was littered with all manner of useless consumer goods, old food wrappers, cups and general trash, just thrown to the ground after the bins spilled over, people muttering under their breath about the lack of cleanliness yet still making it worse rather than taking their empty wrappers home with them.

Edsel remembered coming to places like this as The Lethargy did its work. Every week it got worse and worse. Fewer stores open, the trash piling up, smoking bans forgotten by those lucky enough to have grabbed a stash of any brand of cigarette they were able to steal without getting killed. Risking an all-out attack by those watching green with envy as they sucked down their nicotine, eyes darting about warily yet unable to stop a vice that let them forget about life for a split-second when the nicotine hit the spot.

Fights and arguments escalated in intensity as confusion mounted. Those open for business didn’t want money any longer — what use was it when the banks weren’t open and there was nothing to do with the money anyway? Bartering became extreme; traffic in people increased. Many would sell their family or friends for little more than a meal or a pair of new shoes. He’d actually seen two men arguing over a young girl while the mother stood by gulping down a bottle of precious wine they’d given her in exchange for what was obviously acts the girl wanted no part in.

It all got really bad; then society totally collapsed. Store owners couldn’t stop the looting any longer, how could they? People took what they wanted, windows were smashed and the stores were ransacked until nothing of use was left. A free-for-all with no meaning, goods stolen that were never taken out of the box once they were taken home, or dropped in the streets as the thieves lost themselves in the haze of Lethargy before they even made it home to their houses — where the fridge was empty, the cupboards were bare and their children starved.

Did we deserve this? Maybe we did.

As they crunched down the open spaces, marching past broken, once state-of-the-art TVs and all kinds of digital equipment now useless, the bodies began to pile up in earnest. People lost to The Lethargy, their final days spent in a fugue until they died, often stripped of their clothes and belongings by those still with their wits about them. They weren’t all dead though, they walked right past a few people that had obviously only recently succumbed, just sat on the floor, eyes staring vacantly at nothing as the life slowly seeped out of them. There was nothing they could do about it, there was no hope for them.

Just like there hadn’t been any hope for his own family. His mother was lost mercifully quickly, but it took his sister over a year before she finally faded into nothingness — then Edsel was young, alone and scared, but he survived, made it through. It was like going back in time, staring at the young boy by his side. At least he’d been older when things turned bad, he couldn’t imagine having coped with any of it at the age of twelve.

Brave boy, and Awoken too.

***

“No. Way.”

Aiden beamed at Edsel, chewing away on his own sandwich. “You like?” he said, crumbs spitting out of his mouth.

“Oh boy, best sandwich ever. Where’d they come from?” Edsel couldn’t believe his eyes when the boy pulled out a container of sandwiches from the backpack he’d brought with him. It was a peanut butter sandwich and the best thing he had tasted in his entire life. Well, maybe the egg was, but this sure as hell came in a close second.

“I made them. We had a huge stockpile of all kinds of stuff, but this was nearly the last of it all, the last of the peanut butter, the last of everything.”

Another mouthful, fuel finally recharging his energy reserves. “But the bread, how’d you get bread?”

Staring at him in confusion, Aiden said, “I made it.”

“You? You made bread?”

“Sure, it’s easy. We had sacks of flour; I make it all the time.”

“Well, I’ll be... Good job dude, best bread ever.”

Aiden smiled like he’d won a prize and sat happily munching away on the rest of his food. Not to seem ungracious Edsel pulled two cans from his backpack and offered both hands to the boy. “Which one, Pepsi or Pepsi?”

The kids a good sport. He’s playing along. Very trusting too. I wouldn’t trust me, look at me.

Edsel looked at his outstretched arms, sleeves rolled back over tortured forearms.

God, what a nightmare.

With the look of a boy with a real hard decision to make, Aiden frowned deep in concentration. “Hmm, now let me see, Pepsi or Pepsi, such a difficult decision.” He brightened. “I think... yes, definitely, I’ll take the Pepsi.”

“Good choice my man.” Edsel passed the drink and the sound of two ring-pulls giving up their fizzy delights echoed through the empty space, a tiny hint of temporary happiness amid the madness.

They both took a deep drink.

“Good?”

“Good,” confirmed Aiden.

“Look, we can rest for five, but then we have to go again. They’ll take a while to find us, but they will. What happened? To you I mean. To your dad? It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. What about your mom?”

“That’s okay, I don’t mind. I wish we still had Martha though.”

He really thought a lot of that chicken. Totally understandable, poor kid’s been alone all this time. Just like I was.

“Sorry about that, she’ll be okay though. Bet she’s off digging up some garden right now, eating juicy worms and slugs.”

“Ugh, gross.”

“Right?”

“And I can warn you, you know?”

“Warn me?”

“About those men, the ones chasing you. I can help, told you I could. I can sense them: people. I know if someone is coming if I really concentrate and open up, go into The Noise a little bit. That’s what my dad called it anyway: The Noise.”

“That’s right, but you sure? Sure it’s safe for you?”

“Oh yes, totally. I could even make them do things if they got close enough, well, one anyway. I can’t do more than one at a time.”

“Okay, but be careful. Now look, some of those men are Awoken too, so don’t try to do anything, they could do the same to you... maybe.” Edsel wasn’t sure what happened if Awoken tried to control each other, but he guessed that if it was possible a grown man would be stronger than a young boy. Maybe.

“Sure. And all clear, nobody around apart from a few people with The Lethargy. Just like my dad had. It was just me and him, I never knew my mum. He told me stories when I was little about how things used to be, but I was too young to remember anything much before The Lethargy. He was fine for years, we thought he would be okay. Maybe like me. As I got older I started being able to do things, my ‘powers’ I called them. He told me stuff, things he’d read, things he’d heard on the news, although I don’t remember ever really watching the TV much — it didn’t hardly work when I was old enough to remember it or anything. But a few years ago, I think just after I was ten, he started acting funny.”

“Slowing down? Not doing much? Just standing there?”

“Yeah, things just got messy then. I didn’t really know what to do. He’d shown me how to look after myself, that wasn’t a problem, but I didn’t know what to do with him. How to help.”

“I know, sorry. Horrible, right?”

“Really horrible. Well, anyway, he got worse and worse, then he just stopped moving, wouldn’t budge. Then a couple of days later he died. It was quite quick; he’d told me some people took years and years. Creeping Lethargy?”

Edsel nodded. “That’s the worst one, you were lucky.”

Idiot!

“Sorry, not lucky. Um, I mean at least he didn’t linger for too long. Sorry.”

Poor kid.

“That’s okay. That’s it really, I don’t want to talk about it. He died. I buried him in the garden.”

“Sorry.”

“What about you? How’d you end up, you know...?” Aiden pointed to Edsel’s hands. “And someone died too, right?”

“It’s a long story, and I’m worried we’ll get caught if we stay here. We need somewhere where there are more exits. But I’ll tell you, promise. Come on, let’s see if we can find anything useful then get out of here.”

At least there won’t be any queues at the checkout. Small blessings.

They went shopping.

ED

“Ed?”

“Please, don’t call me that.” Edsel shuddered, the name brought back memories from years ago he never let surface if at all possible. “Call me Edsel. Always.” He tried not to look cross, but knew he’d failed.

He’s just a kid, be kind.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—“

“That’s okay, what’s up buddy?”

“What’s the plan? Those men are after you, right? What are you going to do?”

Edsel thought about it. Could he really still seek vengeance now he had a young boy in his care? He knew the answer, didn’t really need to ask. “I’m going to kill them. The ones that did this to me, the others at their little church. That Bishop, all of them. They’ll pay for what they did to me, and Kathy.”

“Okay, right.” There was an uncomfortable silence, Aiden was obviously itching to ask a question.

“Go ahead buddy, but this store is useless. Let’s walk while we talk, then get going.”

“Okay Edsel. Um, who was Kathy?”

“She was my friend, more than that, and they killed her. They went to my home looking for me and they killed her. I found her, and a Bishop in The Eventuals, when I made it there after I escaped.”

“Was she your wife?”

“No, we weren’t married, but we had been together for quite a while; we were inseparable. We were going to move to the country, start over, get away from this craziness.”

We should have gone sooner, none of this would have happened. Right now we could be curled up in front of a roaring fire, tired from a day working in the fields, maybe even getting eggs from our very own Martha.

“My dad talked about that too, saying it would be better than staying where everything was ruined anyway. We were going to go as well, then...”

“I understand buddy, but he did a good job, right? I mean, look at you, very handsome.” Edsel ruffled the boys hair, hoping he was doing all right. He didn’t have much experience with kids, in fact his experience with youngsters was almost zero.

Needs to wash his hair.

Aiden blushed a little and mumbled, “Thanks. And, um, sorry it’s greasy. I ran out of shampoo.”

Damn, forgot.

“Hey, you’ll have to stop reading my thoughts. It’ll get me into trouble.”

“Sorry, I’ll try to switch you off. I think I can sort of tell myself to blank you out. I think.”

“Cool. How does it work? You can really hear my thoughts?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s not hearing them as much as it’s kind of seeing a picture, just knowing.” Aiden shrugged. “Dunno really, I kind of just see them somehow.”

“Well, however you do it it’s pretty amazing.”

He was a handsome young man, if a little on the scrawny side, but wasn’t everybody these days? He was quite tall for twelve and had a mop of brown curly hair and pale blue eyes that were quite intense. But the main thing that impressed Edsel was that the kid managed to smile a lot. Now that was something. He hoped he never lost that smile — there wasn’t much to be happy about.

There was nothing of use in any of the stores, so they kept on going. The shopping center had a simple cross layout with various outlets on each side of the large walkways. They’d already checked over half of them and Edsel was getting itchy. They’d find them soon enough.

They stopped outside an electrical outlet, ripped signs and posters still visible, advertising the latest laptops and mobile devices.

“Guess you never did any of that?” said Edsel, pointing at the advertisements.

“Use computers?”

“Yeah, and you know, talk to your mates on a phone. Text, go on Facebook, all that stuff?”

“No, not really. I kind of remember learning to use a computer a little bit, but not really. Then it all broke, but my dad told me about it. He said that it may have been the one good thing that came from The Lethargy — at least people wouldn’t spend their lives in front of a screen any more.”

“Yeah, well, he may have been right on that score, but it was fun though. Come on, let’s check it out, but quickly.”

I miss the Web.

There were countless smashed gadgets and even a few TVs left. What were prized items for the first looters soon became worthless once people realized the power was sporadic, then no longer worked at all. Edsel wasn’t sure what he was looking for but felt that something would be of use. They wandered into the back, to the storage areas, and it was pretty much the same: in total disarray and mostly empty of goods, or else what was left was smashed. He found a spool of three core cable though and stuffed it into his backpack, before calling Aiden that it was time to go.

Maybe I’ll just hang myself and have done with it all. Joke, Aiden, in case you are hearing this.

Edsel was feeling another wave of more intense pain creeping up from his toes right to his upper chest where The Ink stopped. His arms were on fire and when he rolled up his sleeves to look at them he could swear that they were turning a brighter shade of red. The scabs were getting really dry too, which meant that they were splitting more and more, the itching so intense he had to use all his willpower to not scratch away like a bear at a tree. In between the scabs, where the raw-to-the-touch skin wasn’t all bumpy and rough, large bubbles were popping up, like the top layer of skin was trying to get away from the poison infecting his body. He couldn’t blame it really. It had been happening all over, and he’d lost count of the number of ‘pops’ he’d felt as they released a foul liquid that soaked his clothes and somehow left a strange metallic taste in his mouth.

Boots. Yes. Where’s Boots.

Boots the pharmacy, on every single high street in the UK, sold all manner of perfumes, potions, lotions and over the counter as well as prescription medications. Maybe he’d strike it lucky and get something to ease the incessant itching at least, moisten his skin so the scabs healed quicker.

“You know where Boots is?”

“Boots? Sure, I’ll show you.”

***

“Goddamn!” Edsel kicked at the boxes of tissues, smashed bottles of cough mixture and mounds of toothpaste that littered the floor.

Shopping sucks. It sucked before and it still sucks now.

“Hey, all of this is good stuff. You have to brush your teeth you know?”

The kid’s right, I’m just getting moody with the pain.

“Sorry, you’re right. Gather up some soap and tissues and see if there are any flannels, all that stuff.” Edsel wasn’t thinking straight. Simple things like soap and being able to brush your teeth were part of what made things feel even just a little bit normal; the kid was smart. It could take days, weeks, before he got his revenge, although he hadn’t actually thought past the next few minutes for so long that he hadn’t considered basic necessities. Apart from food.

His stomach rumbled in reply.

I could eat that damn toothpaste I’m so hungry. I thought the sandwich would have helped more.

He left Aiden to it and went hunting, constantly aware of the time it was all taking. When had they left his house? It was half six or so, so it couldn’t be more than a few hours later. He’d ask the kid in a minute.

Gold! I’ve struck gold. Yes!

Tubes of aloe vera fell off the shelf as he tried to turn a box around to see if it had any left. He popped the cap on the flexible tube, rolled up his sleeve and carefully rubbed the gel over his hard, scabbed-over skin. Flakes fell to the floor but the effect was instant. The itching receded in seconds, not gone, but not eye-gougingly irritating either. He pulled both sleeves up as far as he could until the bunched up material hurt his arms too much, and smeared the gel over his skin. It shone like glazed meat, and looked like a suckling pig he’d once roasted over an open fire.

Aah, bliss.

It cooled him down, he could feel the difference for sure, and it should begin to kick in properly soon. Stuffing as many tubes as he could find into his backpack he went to get Aiden. He was starting to get claustrophobic and the air seemed to be getting stuffier as the day wore on. It must be warming up outside, although it was still a bit early, even if it was going to be a nice day.

Nice day? Don’t think so dude. Warm means sweat, which means hurt. And they are after you. Aiden too now.

“Hey buddy, got what we need?”

“I think so. What about you?”

“Yep. What’s the time?”

Aiden checked his watch. “Half past three.”

“What? No, seriously, what time is it?”

Aiden looked at him, confused. “Half three.”

“It can’t be. We’ve only been here an hour or so, if that. Let me see.”

He turned Aiden’s wrist and looked at the digital readout.

Damn. What the hell is going on?

“You sure that’s right? It can’t be that late.”

Aiden looked at him worriedly.

“What?” Edsel knew he wasn’t going to like whatever it was Aiden was going to tell him.

“You kept blacking out, falling over. We had to keep resting.”

“When? Where?” He didn’t remember that at all.

“Here, in the shopping center. You had the sandwich, remember? Then you passed out. You were out for ages, I didn’t know what to do. Then you came-to like nothing had happened. You did it a few times. I thought at first you had The Lethargy, so I, um, peeked, and you didn’t.”

“You sure? About the blacking out I mean? I don’t have the Lethargy, do I?”

“Yep.”

Edsel went cold.

“I mean, yep about the blacking out, not about The Lethargy. Sorry.”

“Phew. Okay, good, I don’t remember. It’s The Ink probably, my body reacting to it, and the damn poison they put in it. Goddamn freaks.”

“Just from tattooing your arms?”

Best the kid knows, so he understands how dangerous they are.

He lifted up his sweater, pulled up a trouser leg, turned slowly in a circle.

“Oh! Does it really hurt?”

“Like a mother— Yes, a lot. I got some gel though, we need to go. If I’m blacking out then we need to find somewhere safe, especially if that’s the time.”

“I know where to go.” Aiden brightened, grabbed Edsel by the arm excitedly and said, “Follow me,” before pulling him along, getting ready to speed up.

Edsel’s world turned into white-hot pain, flesh being stripped from the bone by an expert butcher.

“Ow ow ow. Aargh, leggo, leggo. Shit.” Edsel stared in horror at his arm, the moist flesh peeling away in places as easily as slow cooked meat sliding off the bone because of the grip of the boy’s hand. Tiny beads of blood pricked to the surface until soon it was nothing but red on red.

Aiden went whiter than his already pale skin. “Oh no! Sorry, sorry. I forgot. Sorry.”

“It’s... okay. I think. Come on, lead the way. No grabbing though.” Edsel was amazed he didn’t black out, but for all he knew he had — there was no memory of him collapsing since they left the boy’s house, he obviously wasn’t anywhere near to being himself.

Keep it together, just stay focused. Don’t think about the pain, don’t look at your arms, and for god’s sake don’t scratch.

Edsel’s arm where Aiden had grabbed it was screaming at him, the raw flesh was already chafing horribly against the sweater, but it was better covered than for him to have to stare at it.

It would be better to just chop it off; it wouldn’t, couldn’t hurt as much as this.

They moved as fast as they could, heading toward one of the exits. Edsel didn’t know why, but he trusted Aiden knew somewhere good to lay low — he seemed to be very confident for such a young boy.

It’s being Awoken, he sees things I don’t, knows things about it I don’t.

“Wait, just a minute.” Edsel ran into a WH Smiths and came back out a minute later, stuffing a spiral-bound map into his now bulging backpack. “Okay, lead the way Superman. You’ve heard of him, right?”

“Duh. Everyone knows about Superman.”

“Right, sorry.”

Cheeky bugger.

“Who, me?” said Aiden, obviously still listening in now and then.

Edsel couldn’t help but smile.

DEEP

“What is this place?”

“It’s part of the railway. I never went on a train though, not a moving one anyway. But it’s safe, it’s hard to find people in The Noise through all the concrete. It needs to be all around you to hide you, so I thought this would be a good idea.”

Smart kid.

“Nice thinking dude, good job.”

It was a vast tunnel, absolutely huge. Part of the massive rejuvenation project where networks of underground trains were to revolutionize travel around not only the city itself but would link up with high speed above ground railways from both the north and south of the country — bringing life and commerce back to the north. Much of the preliminary work for the network had been completed, but as The Lethargy took hold it all came to a total standstill — it would never be finished now.

This place is incredible, amazing what people could do. How come we all reverted to animals so quickly when we had it in us to be so much more?

They’d moved fast across just a few streets, praying that they wouldn’t be seen or sensed if there were any Awoken in the area, then it was down shiny steps that never saw the footsteps of the millions of passengers that were expected. Once past the unfinished ticket booths and spaces for the obligatory concession stands and ever-present brand coffee shops, they came to a huge escalator with the wrapping still on, eerie with its lack of movement. They moved deeper and deeper into the unfinished, still raw tunnels until they were in the huge empty space that was to be Manchester’s pride and glory, only it wasn’t. Rails weren’t laid, trains never ran, and for a short while it had become a refuge for those who found life above ground too dangerous. There was a sense of peace and safety, and the clever natural lighting system by a series of reflective devices meant the main areas and platforms were perfect for those trying to escape the madness above.

Most died eventually, hiding away, hoping life would somehow get better.

“Time?”

“Half four now.”

“Okay, listen, we need to talk and I need you to listen. I have to take my clothes off and smear this gel on. It ain’t going to be pretty but I could really do with a little help. Just on my back, if you don’t mind. This Ink is killing me, I feel like a crispy duck I’m so frazzled. And we have to get food. I don’t know about you but I’m totally famished. I had a load back at my house, but there wasn’t any time. We’ll have to move again soon, get food from somewhere, if you’re up for it?”

“I’m up for it,” smiled Aiden. “How bad are the tattoos? My dad told me about what The Eventuals do, they want all people to die, right?”

“Yeah, their leader — Varik, he set it up, it got out of hand really quickly. Anyway, he, they, all of them, believe that The Lethargy was like a message from God or something, that people need to become extinct. So they try to convert you, and if they can’t then they kill you. They think nature should rule, and anything man-made is blasphemous and wrong. It’s mostly full of suicidal people that have lost everything, or those that are so scared of getting The Lethargy that it all just kind of makes sense to them.”

“But why are they all red? Why did they do it to you?”

“Because their leader got burned in a horrible fire, so the story goes, so they do it to show their commitment, and they see it as a way to strip their identity, the same as they aren’t allowed to keep their names, just have a random set of letters assigned to them. They’re bonkers in other words.”

Aiden looked worried. “So you were joining them? You went to get The Ink?”

“No, they caught me and forced me; I had no choice. I’d had a bad time a few years back, met what turned out to be one of the Bishops. He spotted me, or maybe had been keeping tabs on me, I don’t know. All I do know is that when I was actually happy they took it all away from me and killed Kathy. For that they have to pay.”

And they will, they’ll pay all right. I would have just run, left with Kathy, but not now.

It was warm in the tunnel, the huge vaulted ceiling, still just rough concrete shuttering, ensured it stayed a pretty constant temperature. Even the slight breeze was warm. Edsel would be glad to get his clothes off and let the gel work its magic.

“Okay, turn the other way if you like. I have to strip off. I’ll tell you when to look, so you can do my back. Sorry, be warned, it’s gonna be gross.”

This is gonna freak him out big time... me too. Ugh, here goes nothing.

Aiden turned away and began rearranging the items from his backpack he’d got from the pharmacy. He hummed to himself while he did it, probably to drown out the moans and gasps of Edsel as he stripped off.

Edsel took his boots off first, then began to peel a sock away. The first pair came off fine, then it was time for the ones that actually made contact with his damaged flesh. He felt like all he did was put clothes on then take them off lately — each time more painful than the last. The sock was sticky with blood and some kind of secretion, and as he peeled it down he could see scabs and raw flesh. Then the sock stuck. He pulled, wincing and gritting his teeth, trying not to cry out as it finally came free.

This is never going to heal, not running about like this. God, look at it. Those bastards.

He steeled himself and went to work on the other foot. This one was worse. As the sock came off over his toes he felt a serious rip, the skin between his large toe and the next dangled from the end of the inside-out sock, the newly exposed flesh pink and raw. If it carried on like this he was going to be a mess of blotches of dark red Ink and lighter pink where The Ink hadn’t had time to penetrate deep enough.

Doesn’t matter, my body’s ruined anyway. Right, c’mon let’s get this over with.

Trying not to look but knowing he had to, Edsel pulled the trousers off as carefully as he could. At least they were loose and didn’t catch. Then the makeshift underwear.

Well, don’t think I’ll be impressing the ladies with that! Ugh, this is me now, what I’m going to look like forever. What is wrong with those people?

Finally, he just had to pull the sweater off. Even lifting his arms sent spikes of pain shooting up his body, making the veins in his neck pound like his head was going to explode. He grabbed the sweater and pulled it over his head as fast as he could, just to get it over with as quickly as possible. Edsel felt himself almost white-out, he became dizzy and began to wobble, but focused and just let the wooziness pass. All it was replaced with was pain — the one constant now.

After what felt like a lifetime of undressing, it was time to soothe his skin as much as he could. Edsel began to slather himself with the aloe vera.

Oh boy, that is so good. Aah.

It was delicate work, but the coolness was heaven-sent. He knew it wasn’t good to allow the skin to become saturated, but he didn’t care. The thicker the gel the fresher his skin felt. All over his legs and the rest of him that he could see, he looked like a burn victim, which is what he was he supposed. Flesh had bubbled and cracked, tried to heal then split again from exertion, sweat and chafing. Drier areas of his body such as his belly and lower thighs were the worst — however much he put on it soaked right in and the skin was itching like mad again in seconds. Rubbing the gel in was like running his hands over rough bark — he didn’t even want to think what it would be like once the stubble began to grow back all over his shaved body.

Will the hairs push through the scabs or will the scabs be gone by then?

The raw line around his midsection where the trousers chafed was thick with crusty dead skin. As he applied the soothing ointment large pieces came off in his hand, and he cursed the men that did this to him over and over again.

Having finished what he could he redid the makeshift underwear, realized he needed to pee, felt his heart-rate double at the thought, but told Aiden to wait and went down the tunnel a little and relieved himself. He tried not to howl and scream but when he returned it was obvious the boy had turned and looked at his broken body.

I doubt I look better from behind than I do from the front. Poor kid, what a day he’s had.

“Sorry. For the screaming.” He quickly redid the underwear and began to pull on the trousers. Aiden turned and Edsel knew for sure the boy had looked. He looked petrified.

“That must hurt.”

“Yeah, you could say that. Look, don’t worry, they won’t do it to you.”

“No, they’ll just kill me, right?”

“Right. Sorry.” Edsel sat and pulled the socks on, keeping them inside out as they would be cleaner that way, and swapping them around so the outer pair were now the ones on first. He probably already had infections from the open wounds, he didn’t want to increase the risk more than he had to. He got the boots on and tied up the laces, then handed Aiden a tube of gel. He’d used three already, it would be all gone by the time his back was finished, maybe a half tube left if he was lucky.

The tube was taken rather worriedly, then the sound of the cap flipping open echoed down the empty tunnel into the dark. Aiden shifted from one foot to the other, then obviously steeled himself as he squeezed a dollop out into his palm.

“You up for this buddy? I don’t want to freak you out or anything.”

“Haha, I’m already freaked out, you look like you were in a fire. You look like chicken we cooked outside once.”

“Hey,” joked Edsel, “no talk of chicken or I might just pull an arm off and eat it. I’m that hungry.” Edsel turned around so Aiden could get to work. “Just be careful okay? Slow and gentle.”

I hope he doesn’t rip anything.

“Okay. Ready? Here goes. Mmf.”

“Aiden? You okay buddy?” Edsel turned and Aiden was off his feet, caught in the grip of the larger of the two tattooists, hand over his mouth.

“Shit.” Edsel acted without thinking and grabbed the fallen tube and squirted it right into the attacker’s face. He screamed and loosened his grip. Aiden wriggled like a cat in a bag and bit down hard on the arm around his chest. The man howled and Aiden landed in a heap.

Edsel grabbed him and pulled him up. “Bag. Let’s go.” They grabbed their bags and ran off down into the darkness of the tunnel.

Behind him Edsel could hear the shouting of the man, telling others where they’d gone.

Damn, how many of them are there now?

Edsel felt the wind pick up, then it was as if there was an absence of sound. Like it was sucked out of the air. He turned and saw the largest eagle he had ever seen in his life glide gracefully through the tunnel, legs hanging low with talons so huge one foot could easily cover a man’s head.

“Um, we better run faster Aiden, things are about to get serious.”

What the hell is that doing here?

Aiden looked at Edsel, then turned and saw the bird. He ran faster.

It was obvious in seconds that they couldn’t outrun such a creature, but it didn’t attack. It swooped low, almost brushing Edsel’s bald and very dirty head with the tip of a wing before it flew off into the tunnel, reappearing moments later, staring at them, clearly bored, before disappearing back where they had come from.

“It’s Awoken. The bird,” offered Aiden.

“You can tell?”

“Yes, it’s actually quite nice.”

“Well, let’s arrange a meeting, I’ll put it in my schedule. Sorry, didn’t mean that, but you can bet it’s a scout, they probably have help now.”

“It’s okay, it must hurt.” Aiden nodded at him as they ran, and it was only then that Edsel realized that he didn’t have his sweatshirt on.

Damn. That’s not good. Can this get any worse?

It got worse.

“Can you see anything?” whispered Edsel. “I’m as blind as a bat here, I can’t see a thing.”

“A little, I’ve been working on my eyes. Not much though.”

“Working on your eyes? Oh, right, because you’re Awoken, right?”

“Yes. Well, partially Awoken, but I’m not that good with things yet.”

“Okay, well you’re in charge buddy, lead the way, but we gotta be quick. They can probably see just fine, or have torches. Let’s go.”

They headed deeper into the tunnel, all light extinguished.

Aiden dragged him along by the hand, while Edsel tried not to scream at the pain. Edsel was blind and just put his trust in the young boy.

He’s a good kid, can’t believe I got him mixed up in this mess.

They stopped. “In here, follow me. There’s a step but I think it’s the way out.”

The rise of the step could be felt with the toe of his boots so Edsel lifted a leg and followed Aiden, an arm resting on the boy’s shoulder. It began to lighten. They made it to the bottom of a service ladder, twenty feet or so up was light.

“First or second?”

“First.”

“Okay, up you go.”

Watching for a fall, Edsel kept a close eye on Aiden as the boy climbed smartly up the ladder then peered down once he was out.

“All clear.”

This is gonna hurt. Haha, so what’s new?

The steel was cold at least, so it numbed the pain, but it wasn’t easy going. The gel was making gripping hard and Edsel had to stop halfway up and wipe it away.

Now that hurt.

He made it, but the backpack he’d had to put on his bare skin felt like it was full of knives. He could feel more of the scabs torn away, his armpits felt like there were fires burning hot enough to melt metal. His shoulders? Well, they were probably worn away down to the bone by now, they must be, judging by the pain.

“You okay?” asked Edsel.

“Yeah, you?”

“Sure, let’s go.”

They ran down a narrow corridor, all kinds of maintenance equipment and doors leading who knew where at regular intervals.

Five minutes later they were in another large open space with yet another static elevator. They ran up and out into the cool fresh air of evening and kept on running.

Running. Always running.

TIME

Edsel caught sight of himself as they ran past dark tinted windows in a street full of once swanky businesses — he looked crazed. A dirty-faced bald head with thickening stubble, torso red and as lumpy as a limpet covered rock.

New rule. No more mirrors. Ugh, gross.

This couldn’t go on, he needed to find a safe place for him and the boy, but it was impossible to get away. They’d find them.

“Okay, stop.”

“What? We can’t, they’re coming. I can feel them. Two of them, in a car I guess. They’re moving fast.”

“Well, we’ll have to fight then, we can’t just run forever. Time to even the score a little.” Edsel scanned the mess of the street wildly, looking for something, anything, that would help. He was burning up again, the poison reaching its peak. “There, grab one.” Edsel hefted a scaffold pole that had been part erected outside a building that had burned to the ground back when there had thankfully been a fire service to deal with it. The street was scattered with them; they’d do the job.

Aiden picked up a short length.

This is no job for a kid, look at him — he’s petrified.

“I’m all right, honest.”

“Okay, look, I’m sorry. But we have to do something. So, now we run back the way they are coming. If they get this far they will have stopped as the road’s impassable. Let’s go.”

They ran back the way they had come. Edsel could hear a motor in the distance; they were obviously searching for them. He heard shouts from the other end of the street — who knew how many of them were now after him. After both of them.

Poor kid, this is going to ruin him for life.

Edsel grabbed Aiden’s arm and pulled him to a halt. “Okay, back against the wall. Right, now, when they get close I want you to use the pole like a spear and aim right at the windshield, got it?”

It wasn’t exactly an optimistic look, but Aiden hefted the short scaffold pole and got ready. “Okay.”

“Right, here they come.”

Some plan Edsel, you’re taking a huge risk here dude.

The car screeched around the corner, then slowed to navigate the littered street. They couldn’t have been going more than ten miles an hour.

“Now.”

Aiden threw his pole but it turned slightly and hit the windshield at an angle, cracking the glass but not going through. Edsel took aim and as the car slammed to a halt he thought back to his days in school and how they would throw javelin on gym days. He threw it as hard and as accurately as he could. He’d never been very good, but he used to enjoy it.

The passenger side window was down and the pole flew steady and crushed the skull of the man. He was obviously dead, the side of his head completely caved in from the thick hollow tube.

“Wait here.” Edsel ran out into the road and grabbed the shorter length that had clattered to the ground after rolling off the car. The driver side door was already open and a man was stepping out fast. He didn’t know these men, but their Ink told him exactly what he needed to know. Edsel swung hard and almost hit the driver but he backed away just in time — Edsel caught nothing but air.

The man crouched low, knife pulled from a sheath at his side.

Damn. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.

Edsel wasn’t a fighter, he’d never had a proper fight in his life before his nightmare began. It was the kind of thing you avoided if at all possible. Especially with people that actually prayed for the end to come and would right now be thinking they would be a martyr to the cause if they happened to lose — the man didn’t look like he thought he would.

Here goes nothing.

Edsel knew he would be useless in a knife fight. The man was chucking it from one hand to the other with a wicked smile on his face like he was having fun.

Normal people don’t act this way. This isn’t the movies where the hero always wins.

He was the hero, right? He couldn’t help but smile at that.

“What you smiling at?” growled the Eventual.

“Oh, nothing. Just realized I’m the hero.”

“Not for long.”

Shit!

The man lunged at him fast, aiming right for his stomach. Edsel did the only thing he could think of and rolled onto the floor, asphalt ripping at his skin, gravel bringing The Ink screaming back to life, flesh flaying yet again.

I’m gonna kill them all, rip the goddamn flesh from their bones. Ugh.

Edsel swung the pole low and caught the man’s shin and he staggered backward, banging into the car door and putting a hand out to steady himself.

Edsel tried to get to his feet as fast as he could but already the man was moving forward; he knew it was going to all be over. Pain screamed for release as Edsel scrambled about in the trash, almost up but the man was going to get him before he could right himself and try to defend himself properly.

Miss you Kathy. Love you...

He was still alive.

The man fell face down to the floor with a thump, splatting into the asphalt. He looked as surprised at the outcome as Edsel. Edsel looked up to see Aiden smiling down at him, bloody pole held in both hands.

“Good job mate, good job.” Edsel got up smiling and grimacing at the same time. “High five.”

Aiden high-fived and Edsel screamed out in pain. “Argh.”

Idiot!

“Sorry.”

“My fault, I forgot. Hey, good job there. Right, one second...” Edsel ran around to the passenger side and manhandled the dead Eventual out, dumping him unceremoniously into the trash. “What you waiting for then? Hop in.”

“The plan?”

Edsel ran around to the driver side as Aiden crossed his path going the other way.

“Yeah, the plan. Sort of.”

***

“So that was the plan?”

Damn, this kid is too smart.

“Well, yeah. I’m kind of thinking on my feet here in case you hadn’t noticed. And my feet are very sore indeed. At least we got away, right?”

“Right.”

“What?”

“Well, we need to know where we’re going to, otherwise how will we get there?”

He ran it through in his mind, and looked at Aiden suspiciously. “You messin’ with me?”

“Me? As if.”

They both burst out laughing.

DAD

Edsel and Aiden were very similar in a lot of ways: both only had one parent around once The Lethargy came, and neither of them found it in the least bit surprising. When it was all you knew then what was strange about it? But Edsel had two parents before then, so maybe he was lucky? Aiden only ever had one parent it seemed — poor kid.

Maybe that was better. My dad was always a waste of space anyway.

Edsel found himself drawn into a conversation he didn’t think he would ever have with anyone else now Kathy was gone — especially a little boy.

It had started as Aiden called him Ed again and Edsel nearly exploded before containing himself, thinking maybe an explanation would be better.

“Look, sorry about that, it’s the tiredness, this damn Ink, and the stress. I didn’t mean to snap, okay?”

“Okay,” mumbled a scared looking Aiden.

Get it together Edsel, he doesn’t know. How could he?

“I’ve never told anyone this, but it’s probably best you know so I don’t snap at you again, and if I do then you know why. My dad used to call me Ed, used to always call me that. It was kind of our thing, you know?”

“Yes, my dad always called me Aidy.” He smiled sadly, clearly remembering.

“Right, well my dad up and left when The Lethargy came, and we never saw him again. Not me, not my sister, not my mum. So I never let anyone call me Ed after that. You know, as it was what he called me? You understand?”

“Sure. Sorry. Where did he go?”

“He joined The Eventuals, took The Ink, got shipped off somewhere I think. Never heard from him again.”

“Is he behind you being attacked then?” asked Aiden, eyes wide.

“Nah, that would be too convenient, right? We lived somewhere else then; he wouldn’t know anything about where I was. Chances are he’s dead anyway. Wouldn’t surprise me. Well, anyway, I know it’s a bit childish, silly really, but he was the only one who ever called me Ed. Even in school they called me Edsel, so I really don’t like being called it. It’s simply not my name.”

“Okay. Um, thanks.”

“For what?”

“For sharing. For talking. I haven’t spoken to anyone since my dad died. Only Martha.”

“Hey, we’re buddies, we can tell each other anything. Okay? And yeah, I bet Martha wasn’t much of a conversationalist; chickens are like that.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“So we’re good?” Edsel looked over at his new partner, checking the boy was all right. The last thing he wanted to do was scare him, but he really couldn’t stand the name.

“We’re good,” nodded Aiden.

As he drove, Edsel thought back to the time when his father had left. Edsel was growing into a man, his sister was ten, and The Lethargy had ruined almost everything. His father just finished things off.

***

“Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t know,” said Edsel’s mother, whispering so they wouldn’t wake his sister.

“He can’t just get up and leave, it’s not safe.”

“He hasn’t just gone out Edsel,” she said, trying to explain. “He’s gone. For good.”

“How do you know?”

“Because all his clothes are gone. He’s taken most of our food, some of our water, half the weapons and pretty much everything else of use. He’s gone.”

Edsel couldn’t believe it. Sure, the man had been completely miserable since things fell apart, and had grown increasingly insular, interacting little with his wife and family, but this? “Did he say anything?”

“He didn’t say he was going, but he’s been talking more and more about The Eventuals ever since they first appeared. He’s gone to them, I’m sure.”

And that was it. He never came back. He left them to fend for themselves and that was when Edsel had to grow up fast. He looked after his mum and sister as best he could, learning how to find provisions on his own, although it got increasingly dangerous, especially without backup. He had always gone out with his dad before — two made things much easier.

The trips had always left him with a knot in his stomach though — not out of fear, but dread of spending time with a man that was always abrupt, never good company, and didn’t believe in showing love to his son, or the rest of his family for that matter. It was almost a relief when he finally left, and Edsel coped — he cared for them. First his mum became permanently lost to The Lethargy and he helped her make the final journey to The Noise, then his sister — she was already broken. He suspected the slow decline of their mother was a large part of the reason why his little sis succumbed to The Lethargy — she was already half way there already.

“Hey, hey hey hey. Edsel, look out!”

Edsel came out of his reverie and slammed on the brakes, just missing a car abandoned across the road. “Sorry, I was thinking.”

“We nearly hit it.”

“I know, I said I was sorry. Promise me something?”

“What?” said Aiden, worry spread across his face.

“If you ever have a family, always look after them, always be there for them. Tell them you love them.”

“Um, okay. But I’m only twelve, I won’t have a family for a long time. If ever.”

“You’d be surprised, things will change, already have. People will have kids at younger and younger ages, they already do. Just, you know, in case...”

“In case they get The Lethargy.”

“Yeah. Anyway, promise?”

“Promise.”

“Good lad.”

“Now, you ready to fill your belly? I know I am.”

“Too right, I’m Marvin.”

“Marvin?

“Starvin’ Marvin,” said Aiden, smiling.

“Nice one.” It was good to see the young boy smiling, because there was very little to be happy about.

Edsel performed a quick three point turn and slowly backtracked until he could take a different route around the outskirts of the city. The car had been a real bonus, even if it was a rather cramped Seat Leon. Although the roads were hard to navigate they weren’t impossible if you knew them well. Edsel had spent a number of years now roaming the city so knew the main routes and whether they were passable or not — he remembered where he could and couldn’t get through. Often when roads seemed impassable there was a way if you took it slowly or didn’t mind a few dings. He’d walked most of them, only driving sporadically as it was a real giveaway if there was anybody out to do you harm.

He’d made his way out from the heart of the city, taking larger roads that were easier to scrape through if he took care and nudged abandoned vehicles out of the way. He’d made this trip before, not long ago actually, just a few months, fretting all the way about Kathy being safe while he went to try to find them food. On such trips he would leave her at home even though she protested, but he’d explained that it was safer if he went alone, and he’d be able to focus better.

I love you Kathy, but boy were you a distraction when I was driving.

He couldn’t help but smile at memories that now would never be built on year after year.

Although he’d not exactly been on top form since his escape from The Eventuals, he did actually pride himself on surviving quite well within the urban environment. But as time went on he knew it was becoming an increasingly dangerous place to live, as well as ever more difficult to find food.

He’d struck gold though, and was sure that there would still be plenty left unless someone had all of a sudden discovered his find accidentally, just as he’d done.

It had been a rare occasion that he’d taken Kathy out with him, her protests at being left alone again were simply too insistent. He hated risking her safety, knowing it was safer to stay indoors and take the random chance that somebody would check the house looking for food and find her there and have bad intentions. Going outside increased the risk of attack tenfold, not to mention injury as many buildings became more and more unstable as they were gutted from fires.

Kathy had loved the lake, and they spent a pleasant, if cold afternoon walking around its perimeter until she pointed out that there were fish in abundance. He wandered back to where he’d parked the car and picked up the sign that was face down on the ground — he’d ignored it on the way in, assuming it was just a board naming the lake or something similar. It was a stocked lake, there for fisherman to idle away a few hours with a guarantee that they’d get a bite. He’d wandered over to a small hut only to find that it served as a place to buy a license, get bait, and even buy rods or tackle.

An hour later, with a tiny fire burning brightly against the cold, they’d eaten freshly caught trout straight from the lake. It was one of the best days of his life.

***

It looked exactly the same, the little wooden hut was still in order, the car park — more a muddy patch of ground than anything — was empty, and all seemed quiet. Edsel walked over to a tree near to the hut and scooped away the earth. He’d found a good Shimano reel and rod and had buried them shallowly in a well-wrapped bag after use, just in case the hut got ransacked.

Luckily he’d also buried a lighter, a torch for if he decided to stay or got stuck, and a knife that he’d gone out and bought only days after The Lethargy had been officially announced, even though his mum went mad and told him not to be silly. It wasn’t long before she changed her mind about that though.

At least something’s going right at last. Now we can eat.

His stomach gurgled in eagerness as the day wore on and the sky cleared of clouds — it was going to be a cold night.

Edsel felt better already. They may have only been a few items, but they were his — something personal, familiar — and he felt a little more at ease knowing that he had the lighter and knife even though he was no fighter.

It always amused Edsel when he watched movies after The Lethargy, until the power died totally — the hero always able to fight off hordes of attackers with guns and knives, the loner coming out victorious each and every time. The reality of life once society collapsed was very different and there were actually very few people that didn’t just completely freeze and begin to whimper when confronted by those trying to take what wasn’t theirs. Life was scary, the mean came out on top, and the kind-hearted were not the ones most proficient at fighting.

Plus there were no damn guns either. The UK didn’t allow firearms unless under very strict control, and Edsel didn’t even try at the time to make his way to the few places that were allowed to stock such things — reports on the news in the few days after The Lethargy had repeatedly announced that those were the first places to have been raided by anyone smart enough to get a head-start on the fast crumbling society. He’d gone looking eventually, but it was a waste of time.

Still, he had his knife, he had a rod, now he just needed some worms and to get a fire going.

“So, you have two choices,” said Edsel. “You can either be on worm duty or fire duty. Which is it?” Edsel knew the answer, but thought it would lighten the boys spirits.

“Worms!”

Yes, result.

“Oh, okay, wasn’t expecting that.”

“Haha, just kidding. Fire, definitely.”

“Okay, you hunt around for some dry wood and here’s the lighter. Do not, and I repeat, do not, lose it, get it wet, let it run out or lose it.”

“You said that.”

“I know.”

Edsel dug in the dirt with his knife until he found a few worms and popped them into a rusty can. He watched to see that Aiden was all right making a fire by himself and was pleased to see the kid had already got it going — nice and clean, no smoke.

Smart kid, he knows to only burn properly dry wood.

Edsel went fishing and tried not to think about the last time he’d stood on the very same spot, Kathy waiting by the fire, excited at the promise of a fresh meal.

Half an hour later, with a whole trout eaten each and another cooking away, the man and boy shared the last can of Pepsi between them and were, for a brief period of time, almost happy.

BRR

Edsel woke in the middle of the night absolutely freezing. They’d moved from the campfire into the car, but it was colder, so had returned to the fire, burning as much wood as they could without it acting like a beacon saying ‘come get us, we’re over here’ — a real possibility if The Eventuals were now out in force after him. Them.

Even during the summer it was incredible how cold it got at night without a sweater on, and despite the burning of his skin, and the slight fever he was sure he was running, Edsel shivered uncontrollably, the fire doing a poor job of keeping him warm.

Aiden snuggled up next to him, amazingly trustworthy for a child that had led such an unfortunately sheltered life thus far. Maybe it was simply the need for a father, that familiar male bond that the boy had obviously been missing so much. Something Edsel missed too if he would but admit it. Maybe not missed, as he had never had it — wanted, he wanted that bond, now never would.

But I can give it, can’t I? Give Aiden what he definitely needs. Maybe I do too.

Deep murmurs came from Aiden as he fidgeted in his sleep, the flickering fire highlighting frowns as the boy worked out whatever was happening in his dreams. He kicked out with his legs, moaning about Martha it sounded like, clutching in the cold air for his lost companion.

Comes to something when your only company is a chicken.

Sleep evaded Edsel as the night slowly crept toward morning. He’d gone so far past mere exhaustion that unless he actually blacked out he couldn’t just let go of his thoughts and drift into sleep. The pain was a constant now, a part of him, but the frigid air had helped, if not to ease it, then at least partially numb him to it.

Must be the boy. Gotta watch over him; keep him safe.

Shifting carefully, Edsel got a little more comfortable and lay down, curling in tight to try to keep the boy as warm as he could. In the morning they would have to wash in the lake — already Edsel could feel the tiny pieces of gravel from where he’d fallen into the road bring up even more sores and scabs on his already ravaged back. He would have to soak, try to get them out somehow, although he didn’t know how.

As the night slowly wore on there was an easing of some of the pain; the poison called The Fire had obviously peaked so now would hopefully recede rapidly. Not that he didn’t ache, burn, itch and feel like just stepping clear out of his skin — he did, and the constant hurt felt like it was now his companion for life.

How long has it been now? Three days? Four?

It was difficult to think straight, hard to remember just how long he’d been out of their clutches.

Think Edsel, think. What’s that sound? Jeez, it’s my bloody teeth chattering.

The darkness continued to do what it did to all that found sleep elusive — it sent his thoughts reeling fast and randomly, everything becoming extreme, jumbled and prone to lead to bad decision making. It was easy to get lost in a mire of self-pity. This was no time for wallowing in misery though, he had to think about what to do now. This child, how long had he known him? It was only a day. That’s right. He’d gone to the boy’s house the evening before, collapsed and then woken up that morning and then they were chased, and chased, and chased some more.

The result? He’d introduced the child to the killing of another human being, and the worst thing was that Aiden didn’t seem all that concerned about what he’d done.

Should he? Should he feel remorse? That wasn’t the point though — sure, The Eventuals would have killed them, but he was a child and boys of twelve should be terrified at having committed such a crime.

Things are different now. Kids grow up fast. They have to. Yet they are also more innocent than we were.

Edsel thought back to what he was like at twelve. Damn, he would have peed his pants if a grown man started chasing him, let alone one tattooed red from head to toe.

Maybe it was because Aiden was partially Awoken? Maybe that made things different somehow, like he understood more of the world than ordinary people? Could peel back the layers and look into the true hearts of men. Edsel didn’t think that would be a pretty sight.

The news had talked about such people being the beginning of a new species, or advanced humans anyway. Nobody really understood it, but one thing was for sure: they weren’t normal. They could enter the minds of animals, control people, talk to the trees and understand the way the world really worked.

It was scary stuff.

And The Commorancy, the tales of Marcus Wolfe and his building of the most insane complex of structures, all designed to allow those lucky enough to enter to reach their full potential. A safe haven.

It turned to myth and legend in the dying days of the media, but there were hints and clues spread through books, magazines, and the tatters of the Web still active if you were lucky enough to have access to a power source. Edsel had tried to find a way in, more out of curiosity than anything else, half not believing it was real, but he gave up, mostly as he knew they wouldn’t ever accept both him and Kathy together — that was one of The Rules.

Edsel wondered what was going on inside Aiden. Awoken were supposedly capable of halting the aging process, changing the way their bodies worked from the inside, and so much more. He wondered how much the boy could already do and what he would be capable of in the future.

Hopefully we’ll live long enough to maybe find out. Maybe.

But what was he to do with him now? Should he try to get him back home? Take him far away then come back to try to get his revenge? He simply didn’t know what was best. Would the boy be all right on his own? Well, he had been so far, but one chance encounter with the wrong kind of person and it could all be over. Sure, the streets weren’t exactly crowded, but humanity wasn’t totally extinct, not yet.

On and on the confusion of thoughts went, going around and around in his head, leading nowhere, no decisions made.

The only thing Edsel was absolutely sure of was that he really needed a sweater and Aiden needed a coat. They would have to deal with that and many more things come morning, but he had to make a decision about the boy.

GONE

Damn, where is he?

Edsel looked around frantically, expecting a red devil to grab him and slit his throat at any second.

“Aiden. Aiden?” whispered Edsel, scanning the area nervously, getting a really bad feeling.

They’ve got him, taken him. I must have finally nodded off.

Edsel wandered over to the car — no sign of him. But then, no sign of anyone else either.

Get it together dude. If they were here they would have killed you, not just taken the boy.

Slowly, he calmed himself; he was just overreacting. Aiden had probably gone off for a pee or something.

“Hi,” said Aiden, proudly holding two fresh trout high in the air. “I thought I’d have a go; it’s easy. Although the worm bit is kinda gross. Bleh.” Aiden poked his tongue out but still held his prize catch proudly in the air.

“Phew. You had me worried for a minute there. Nice job my man. But listen, let’s stick close together okay? I don’t want to lose you or anything. You are kind of my responsibility now. Do you understand that?”

“Sure. Sorry. And thanks.”

“What for?”

“For, you know... caring.”

“Come here you.”

Aiden walked over to Edsel cautiously, looking like he was expecting a scolding. Edsel put his arms around the boy and hugged him tight.

“You’re getting fish all over you,” laughed Aiden, returning the hug best he could while holding onto his catch.

“Some things are more important than fish,” said Edsel.

Much more important. I think I need this more than he does. Feels good.

“Doesn’t it hurt though? Hurt your skin.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe buddy, like you wouldn’t believe. Some things are more important than that too.” Edsel held the young fisherman at arms length and got serious. “Just be careful okay? And we need to talk. A proper talk, after breakfast. But first, I’m afraid it’s time for a wash and to brush our teeth. I don’t know about you but my mouth feels like a cat’s bum has been rubbing over my tongue then someone stuffed moldy bread in and left it there overnight. And added in some worms just for good measure.”

“Ugh, that’s gross.”

“Tell me about it,” said Edsel, smiling. “Now, where is your bag with all the gear from Boots in it?”

Aiden ran off to grab it while Edsel got the carton out of his bag that he’d filled with water what felt like a lifetime ago. He undid the cap and sniffed.

Ugh, still smells like gone-off milk. It’ll do to brush our teeth though.

After some rather hesitant scrubbing of teeth and foul-tasting rinsing, Edsel reluctantly stripped off and lowered himself slowly, and very carefully into the lake, gritting his teeth and asking for the soap. He told Aiden not to watch, but it seemed they were both past caring about modesty or getting freaked out by the abomination that was now Edsel’s skin — it had got even worse through the night. He moved his tongue over his teeth.

Feels good, clean. Bet they dazzle.

“How’s the water?” asked Aiden.

“Not too bad actually, once you get in. Refreshing.”

After a doubtful look, Aiden slowly stripped down to his underwear and lowered his legs into the water. “Ooh ooh ooh. It’s freezing!”

“Yeah, well, it might be a little on the fresh side. Good for the soul though. Teaches you... um, how to be cold and wet.”

Aiden splashed at Edsel accusingly, smiling despite the freezing water.

“Gee, thanks for that, very profound.”

“I do try my best.” Edsel smiled back, secretly thankful for the freezing water — if his body was numb then at least it wasn’t in pain. The kid needed to be clean too, and this would wake them both up properly, make them alert and ready for what was going to be a long, and if it went the way he hoped, then bloody day too. He just needed to chat with Aiden about a few things first.

In less than a minute Aiden pronounced himself thoroughly clean and climbed out, his pale skin covered in goosebumps. He poked at the fire, dropping wood on and shouting back that they were both stupid for not getting it going better before they jumped into the water.

He’s smarter than me; I need to get my act together.

While Aiden prepared the fish and got them cooking, Edsel slowly took stock of his body and tried to clean himself up. The aloe was gone now, so he needed to look after his skin the best he could. With a little lather from the soap he sat on the side of the lake and cleaned his body. His skin felt gross, like some kind of animal hide. Most of it was now rough with scabs, but they were beginning to heal a little.

I’m like a bloody rhino, just a red one.

The worst seemed to be over; he could see that the thick scabs were beginning to grow translucent in places and flake off naturally, but it was obvious that it would leave him with incredibly patchy and weird looking flesh.

Better than being dead, and at least they didn’t get my face. God, they would have done my eyelids, my ears, even my lips. Ugh!

The worst bits were the soles of his feet, between his toes, his groin, the backs of his knees — what were they called? Knee-pits? — and under his arms. Anywhere that chafed or got naturally sweaty was the worst affected. But it was where The Ink had been applied to the boniest parts of his body that actually ached in a way that felt like they must have penetrated right down to the marrow. The thin skin covering his ankles, knees, elbows and who knew how many other parts of his body as it all blurred into one deep ache, felt so sensitive that he could imagine the skin peeling away revealing bone that was no longer white but as red as the rest of him. Blood red inside and out, that’s what he must be.

I’m the stained man. I’m marked for life. But I’m still alive and I am a man.

“Breakfast’s ready,” shouted Aiden.

“Coming.”

***

After breakfast, and with the fire roaring higher than it safely should be so they could dry off fast, Edsel had approached the subject of what Aiden really wanted to do.

He tried his best to not make it seem like he wanted to abandon the young boy — which he didn’t. Much as he was still reeling from the death of Kathy, and if he thought about it too much he knew he’d be no good to anybody, especially himself, he knew that Kathy and Aiden would have gotten on so well. She would have loved the cheeky little chappy, so he felt a responsibility partly because no twelve year old should be alone, and partly because he knew that Kathy would have loved Aiden.

We could have been like a proper little family. Even kept Martha too.

The best thing he could think of to do was simply to be honest. So they sat by the fire and talked.

It didn’t really come as much of a surprise that Aiden absolutely didn’t want to go back to his home, or be taken anywhere else where he would be alone for that matter. He wanted to stay with Edsel, even if he was red. Edsel had to smile at that, his Ink was about the only constant there was at the moment. He was red, would always be red, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it.

Apart from have my revenge.

Slowly through the night a tentative plan of sorts had formed, but if he was honest with himself it wasn’t much of one — the chances of him coming out of it alive were not really very optimistic. He was a young man that had no experience fighting, kept to himself most of the time, out of necessity really all through his last few teenage years and beyond, and didn’t really know what he was doing half the time — just your average guy that found himself living through the Apocalypse, albeit a rather subdued one.

But he had to try. He simply had to at least attempt to have his revenge, whatever the cost to himself personally.

But Aiden? What about Aiden?

All of this was explained — he held nothing back. Friendships were based on honesty, and if he had to be the adult then he needed to say things to Aiden like he was too — the kid was old beyond his years anyway, that was more than obvious.

“Watch,” said Aiden, part way through their conversation. He pointed at the fire.

Edsel scampered backward quickly as the fire roared higher for a second, then returned to its normal intensity.

“I’m not just a normal twelve year old.”

“Well, um, yeah, I can see that. How’d you do it?”

“It’s hard to explain. I can kind of see the fire. Not see it — ‘see’ it. Not just in the normal way; I can see that it feeds off oxygen and that the more oxygen there is the hotter it will burn, so I can sort of... I can kind of send it sort of energy through The Noise, but it’s my energy. Ugh, it’s hard to explain. I don’t really know, but I can release what’s in the wood maybe, or give it more oxygen, I’m not exactly sure, but I can influence some things. Sometimes. But it’s tiring, and it makes me incredibly hungry, so I don’t do it much.”

Wish I could just point my fingers at The Eventuals like a magician and watch them burst into flames, that would solve everything.

“Okay, point taken then. You aren’t just a normal kid and you have magic powers and you can bend reality. What a pair eh?” Edsel chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. The Lethargy really had changed humanity forever. Maybe it was something brought down by God to put mankind on a new path. If so then it was no God he wanted to be friends with — it was kind of an extreme way to reset the evolutionary clock.

“Let’s catch another couple of fish then be on our way. There’s no telling when we will get to eat next.”

“I’ll do it, I’m good at fishing.” Aiden ran off to catch their second breakfast, leaving Edsel to ponder the actions of the child that he’d just witnessed.

From everything he knew about The Awoken, and admittedly it was limited, doing what Aiden had just done was an outlier even for the lucky few. Manipulating matter in that way was not what most could do. It was more of a cerebral thing, focused on minds and energies that were unknown before The Lethargy to all but the Enlightened few. It was about the life-force of all things, the matter that made up the Universe, not physically changing things as the boy had demonstrated.

He wondered what on earth he would be like once he grew to become a man. Let alone if he turned out to be an angry and moody teenager.

God help us.

Edsel smiled at the thought of a fire wielding mopey teenage boy.

Jeez, that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Life was different. Very different. He wondered what it would be like hundreds of years from now; it had only been seven since the world had changed so dramatically.

If there would be anyone left by then anyway.

He had his doubts about the next few years, let alone centuries.

And for me? Maybe days if I’m lucky.

Edsel caught himself just as he was about to scratch at a naked armpit.

Bad idea dude, very bad idea.

He gritted his teeth and waited for the day to warm up.

HOPE

The fuel tank on the Seat was relatively low, but Edsel estimated they would have no problem making it back to the city, even with a few stops along the way. The first and most important thing was that he needed clothes. He felt extremely self-conscious about his naked torso, and he kept catching Aiden staring at his skin, clearly very uncomfortable about it.

I look like I just stepped out of a burning building, and look at all these damn flakes.

He didn’t blame him, he looked like a damn mangled lobster, all red and like he’d been thrown on the barbecue but simply forgotten about until he’d gone all crispy. The warmth of the car had dried out his skin and already it was beginning to itch with a vengeance again.

Is there no end to this bloody nightmare?

The skin wasn’t bubbling like it had been though, which was something, and the scabs weren’t as thick and crusty. They were a lot flakier however. He looked down at his lap and the only comparison he could make was that he’d been eating chips and rather a lot had spilled into his lap. Or bits of torn red paper, scattered on his trousers like some kind of sick confetti after a marriage that definitely wasn’t going to end with a happily ever after.

“I know, gross right?”

“Absolutely,” grinned Aiden. “You look like a salamander.”

“You know about salamanders?” Edsel was surprised.

With a look that would wilt the most confident of men, Aiden said, “I can read you know? There’s not a lot else to do.”

“Yeah, right. Of course, sorry.”

“S’all right, but Daddy taught me lots of things, I can take care of myself. Dad, I sound like a baby keep saying Daddy.”

Edsel focused on driving, they were in quiet lanes now and the going was tough — the overgrown hedges a real hindrance. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. You’re a lot smarter than me. And you keep right on saying Daddy, there’s no hurry to grow up.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m still only twelve so aren’t smarter than you, but I really can look after myself. And thanks.”

“I know. I’m just sorry I got you into this mess.” Edsel stole a glance over at Aiden, just to check he was holding up. “You doing okay buddy?”

“I’m fine. Where we going?”

“Well, I need some clothes, so hopefully there will be something suitable in one of the houses. Look, here’s one now.” Edsel pulled up to a large wooden gate, hopped out and opened it up, then jumped back in and drove slowly up to the small house. He figured it would be a more fruitful search out in the countryside on the outskirts of the city than in the city itself, where looters had gone door to door repeatedly the first few years since The Lethargy. The scenery was a lot nicer too.

All seemed quiet, so they got out and wandered around the grounds of the house. Edsel actually felt more comfortable without anything covering his upper torso, but the day promised to be a warm one and he didn’t even want to think about what it would feel like to have strong sunlight on his skin.

I’ll probably burst into flames like a vampire.

They skirted around the side of the old brick and flint cottage, roses, clematis and a huge wisteria clinging to the house delighting with their strong perfume and color.

Like none of it ever happened. Like some old man will be stooped over his roses, his wife calling him for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

He knew it wouldn’t be like that though, but maybe, just maybe it would. Not everyone was dead, there were probably still hundreds of thousands of people left alive in the UK, or tens of thousands anyway. He didn’t really know, he wondered if anyone did. But there were Whole people living in cities and he guessed that more and more of them had abandoned the urban sprawl and left to live as quiet a life as they possibly could — grow vegetables, raise some animals, get on with life the best they knew how.

That sounded nice; maybe they could move here after he’d done what he had to do? Grow cabbages, watch tomatoes ripen in the erratic sunshine. Find a chicken and name it Martha II; get some pigs, maybe cows. Mmm. Steak! What he wouldn’t give for a nice juicy rare stake with onion rings and—

“Ow! What the hell?” A fiery explosion sent shockwaves spreading out from his ribs. Aiden had elbowed him hard. “Waddya doing?”

“Look,” said Aiden, pointing ahead. “We have company.”

“Don’t you move one goddamn muscle or I’ll blow your bloody heads clean off. I mean it, you better not mess with me. I was in the war you know?”

“You look like you died in it too,” said Edsel. “What are you, like a hundred or something?”

This is just what we need, some gung-ho old veteran. Looks like that shotgun is older than him.

“You cheeky bugger. Gerrof my land, this is private property I’ll have you know. I’ve dealt with your sort before,” the man scowled at Edsel’s blistering body, “and I’m not afraid to do it again.”

“Look, sorry,” said Edsel, “didn’t mean to be rude. It’s been a long couple of days is all. We don’t mean you any harm, and if you mean The Eventuals, then I’m not one of them. I escaped before they finished the job. Honest.” Edsel held out his hands, palms pointing to the blue sky as an act of submission, then realized it probably just made matters worse showing just how much Ink he had.

Idiot. What’s wrong with you?

“Honest mister, we are the good guys,” said Aiden, in such a pathetic, sad tone of voice that Edsel stared at him like the boy he knew had been swapped for another one. Aiden gave him a wink before resuming. “This big lobster here is telling the truth. He saved me, although we lost Martha, and The Eventuals are after him. After us.” The old man looked around worriedly so Aiden said hurriedly, “Oh, it’s all right, we got away. They didn’t follow us, we stole their car. I smashed a pole over one of their heads and we went fishing and we made a fire and Edsel...”

“Okay, okay. Gee whiz, what do I look like, your damn priest?”

Gee whiz!? He really is from another century. But he’s chilling out. Good. He could’ve had our heads off with that old shotgun.

The old man lowered his weapon and stared at them warily. “Why’d you come here? What do you want?”

“To tell the truth,” admitted Edsel, “we just drove down the lanes and stopped at the first house we saw. I, um, lost some of my clothes, and I’m not exactly a nice thing to look at currently. Little bit crusty.”

“You can say that again,” said the old man gruffly. “You look like my tomatoes if it rains too much and they split.”

“Hehe, he does, doesn’t he?”

“Hey, how about a bit of sympathy here? Have you any idea what they did to me? How much this hurts? I feel like I’m constantly on fire and you think it’s funny?”

Damn, what’s this? A new bloody double-act.

“Sorry.”

The old man shuffled about a bit in his slippers and pajamas. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You sure you’re not murderers or thieves?” The old man began to lift his shotgun again, looking like he’d been duped somehow.

Edsel sighed. “Do we look like we are? Do we look like we are here to murder you and take your slippers or your split tomatoes? I just wanted a sweater, a shirt, anything. We assumed the place was, you know, not currently occupied by the living. Or by anyone that would care anyway.”

“Well, I may be old, but I ain’t dead yet.”

The man turned and shuffled slowly around the back of the house, kicking gravel noisily as he moved, the gun dangling loosely in a thick calloused hand. He shouted over his shoulder, “You comin’ or what? The kettle’s on.”

Aiden and Edsel stared at each other. With a shrug of the shoulders, and a few nudges back and forth, they followed the old man into the house, for whatever passed as a morning cuppa to the old man.

***

Their host introduced himself as he poured the coffee. “I’m Bob.”

“I’m Edsel, this is Aiden. Pleased to meet you Bob.”

“Nice to meet you Bob.”

“Yeah, well. You too I guess. Maybe.” Bob busied himself in the compact kitchen where every surface seemed to have some kind of knick-knack, and the walls were covered in shelves with blue and white plates on display. Bob shuffled over and placed two mugs of coffee down on the table, then went back to get his own. He returned and with a sigh he carefully lowered himself into a chair.

I bet his wife was responsible for the decor, he doesn’t seem the type to be so interested in plates.

“Good?” asked Bob, encouraging them to take a sip of what he said was coffee and actually smelled like coffee too.

Edsel took a sip warily. “Aah. Oh boy, that is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted.” Edsel took another sip greedily, trying not to scald himself with the piping hot brew.

It’s been a long time since I had anything this good.

“Hot.” said Aiden.

“Hot? That all you got to say?” said an amazed Edsel. “Don’t you know how precious this stuff is? It’s rarer than... well, it’s rare.”

“I just never drank it much, didn’t get a taste for it I guess,” said a subdued Aiden.

“Boys, boys, no need to bicker. I’ve got tons of the stuff anyway.” Bob looked like he’s said too much; he looked worried. “Well, a little bit anyway.”

Edsel patted the man on the shoulder, a surprisingly firm shoulder actually. “Don’t worry Bob, we aren’t going to rob you and slit your throat.”

“Um, good? But just you try young man, I was—“

“In the war, yeah we know. But you weren’t really, were you?”

Aiden turned to Edsel. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this old geezer here was definitely not in the war. He’d be ancient if he was, ain’t that right Bob?”

“Maybe,” came a quiet grumble.

“What’s that Bob? Must be my hearing in my old age,” said Edsel, cupping a hand to his ear.

“I said maybe, no need to get cheeky.”

“Hey, what’s going on?” said Aiden.

“Bob here, ‘old’ Bob, has been duping us a little, isn’t that right?”

Bob sat up straighter in his chair, suddenly seeming younger and a lot larger than he had a moment ago. Edsel had known something was going on the minute he put his hand on Bob’s shoulder — there was a fair amount of dense muscle there, not the kind of muscle an eighty or ninety year old geriatric would have. And with his cap off inside the house it was obvious that Bob wasn’t as old as he’d pretended to be. His face was sun-aged, but he was no decrepit old man that was for sure.

“Well, maybe a little. Ha, clever boy. I figured I’d stand a better chance of dealing with intruders if they thought I was some rather defenseless old man.”

“How old are you then?” asked Aiden.

“A man of certain years never divulges his age,” said Bob with a wink.

“Sixties is my guess. Early sixties.” Edsel looked at the ‘old’ man closely, noting faded tattoos on his forearms — thick and densely muscled, dark from the sun, wriggling with veins. Thick fingers too, and calloused palms; gray hair but still a hint of dark on top.

Bob zipped his mouth shut with his hand and just smiled.

“Looks like we have ourselves a man of mystery here Aiden.”

“Drink your coffee,” said a grumpy Bob.

What’s his story then? He’s a sly old bugger and no mistake.

Edsel drank his coffee.

Bliss.

BETTER

“How do I look?” asked Edsel, twirling in the cramped kitchen, showing off a dark blue short-sleeved shirt. It was in surprisingly good taste for something Bob owned, and the thin cotton barely irritated his skin at all.

“Less red,” said Bob.

“Like a lobster with a shirt on,” said Aiden.

“Gee, thanks guys. Look, not being funny or anything, but can we do away with the jokes about The Ink please? In case you didn’t realize, it’s kind of personal, and a little insensitive to be honest. Do you know what this feels like, knowing I’m going to look like this for the rest of my life? Not to mention that it hurts like hell.” Edsel’s voice was rising, he was getting angry, angry at everything.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude.” Bob busied himself washing up the mugs and the few plates he’d served some simple fresh vegetables and assorted fruits on. He was obviously a very keen gardener.

“Yeah, well. Thanks for the shirt Bob, I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure, anything I can do to help. Now, how about you boys tell me your story? What exactly has been going on with you two? You aren’t father and son, or related, I can tell that much.”

“It’s kind of a long story,” sighed Edsel. “And you may not like where it’s headed either. Maybe we should go, just in case. I’ve already caused enough trouble for Aiden here, I don’t want to drag anyone else into it too.”

“No chance,” said Bob, brushing away with a hand the very idea of them leaving without him being fully up to speed on the current situation. “You two are staying right here, I want to help.”

Aiden and Edsel exchanged glances, then nodded in agreement.

This is a bad idea. But he may be able to help.

***

“Wait, so they captured you, thinking they would turn you by giving you The Ink? Why?”

“That’s another long story, but years ago I’d met the man that is now a Bishop, and he saw me, remembered me. They must have followed me then and just grabbed me.”

“Okay, but you escaped. How’d you manage that?”

Edsel began to tell his story.

After they grabbed him off the street, bundling him into the back of a car as he was wandering down a narrow road in the more built up part of the city — a risk he was taking less and less frequently anyway now he had Kathy — they had driven him back to their church, one of many that they had taken over all across the country. They were used more as a meeting place than anything, nothing like a real church for praying in.

It was a small Protestant church of old, abandoned now much like most other religions of the world, apart from the new religion: The Church Of The Eventuals. They manhandled him through the heavy wooden front door, where there must have been almost fifty men and a few women, all tattooed red, all fanatic followers of the new faith.

He was frogmarched down the aisle between a mishmash of tables and chairs, tables loaded high with food supplies, weapons of all description, and clothes of various quality and size.

Into the back room, the old vestry, the room where you were given The Ink.

Edsel saw the table, a gurney actually, covered in white linen, a huge mirror on the ceiling, some kind of large portable mirror on an extending arm to one side. Against the wall there was a collection of small portable medical tables with bottle after bottle of red Ink, others holding clear solutions, gauze, bandages, gels and who knew what else.

Edsel went cold when he saw the two tables with the tattoo machines. He didn’t know anything about tattoos, but it looked scary as hell. Steel gray machines sat on the top looking like insects ready to pounce. There were an assortment of blister packs with different sized collections of needles in different arrangements, and various spherical things he assumed were grips, as well as spare parts, tubes, and a number of small boxes on lower shelves he guessed were for power. There were cables, adapters and LCD digital displays he had no idea as to what purpose they served. All he knew was that he was scared out of his mind.

It was frightening as hell and Edsel struggled manically to get away, but he was held fast by three men and even if he got out of their grasp he had a church full of Eventuals to contend with.

Suddenly he felt his consciousness slipping away, but before he fell to the floor he was hoisted onto the gurney and they began to take off his clothes.

Edsel awoke to a buzzing sound and as his eyes came into focus he realized he was staring at himself, looking up into a mirror, reflecting his body, strapped down tight. He blinked but couldn’t, and realized he couldn’t move his head, move anything, even his eyes were clamped open.

They were shaving his entire body, and just as he came fully back to consciousness they had finished.

While he lay there, unable to move, all he could think of was that Kathy would be worried sick. She wouldn’t know what had happened to him. She needed him; he needed her, and she would be frantic with worry.

He had to get away, he simply had to.

As they began tattooing between his toes they argued first over the best needles to use for the delicate work they were doing, then in-between telling him exactly what they were going to do, and as they moved on to the large areas of the bottoms then the tops of his feet, the two men argued over whether a 15 Mag was better than a 13, the 15 Mag user saying he preferred the arrangement of seven needles over eight offset ones as it covered the easiest, the other man snorting derisively, saying that the 14 Round needles were just as good for the large work but speed wasn’t the point anyway, uniformity of color was.

On and on it went, a dizzying surreal nightmare that he felt must be happening to somebody else. He wasn’t really there — not really.

All Edsel could think about as the idiotic banter continued was that who the hell cared? It was all the same color, there was to be no shading, no subtle work, just needle after needle penetrating his skin, staining him red for the rest of his life. On and on it went, Bishop coming in now and then, joining in on the cajoling and the beginning of his indoctrination, the two tattooists arguing over different needle types, regularly swapping them out for different sizes and combinations depending on the area of his body they needed to cover.

The pain built, never reaching a crescendo.

After hours of work, as the day wore on and sweat beaded the men’s brows, they paused for a break. All Edsel could hear was the buzzing of the machines — it had become a part of him now, a constant background to his new life. It was all there was: buzzing and searing pain.

Edsel was panicked more than he’d been in his entire life. Just when existence finally had a meaning, had a purpose, it was all being taken away from him. But more than anything else he worried about Kathy. She was shy, not a fighter, not that he was either, and had found it hard to survive on her own. When he’d met her she was half-starved, constantly wary of sounds, and it took her some time to completely trust him. It wasn’t surprising — she’d had a hard life, most people did.

But they clicked, they were a team, company for each other and it went a lot deeper than that.

Now she was alone, probably terrified. He tried to think what food there was in the house and how long it would last, but he couldn’t think straight. Panic was rising and he knew he had to get away or he would never see her again and would forever be trapped in the clutches of The Eventuals, or simply be killed for not accepting their warped faith.

Hour after hour it went on as The Ink crept slowly up his legs and the pain intensified. Already his lower body was oozing — it was too much for a body to take without days, weeks or months between sessions. Large tattoos were done over countless hours, and they certainly were not blocks of the same color on every surface. The body reacted to the foreign invasion, causing adrenaline levels to rise dangerously high, lowering the immune system and sending antibodies to fight what were to all intents and purposes multiple tiny wounds. Thousands and thousands of them.

Edsel could see bumps forming around parts of The Ink after the blood was wiped away — granulomas, they had informed him. He’d probably get keloids too, where too much scar tissue formed — often common when such extreme body modification took place.

On and on it went, more horror stories of what was happening, new blisters, bumps and strange markings appearing on his skin as the body tried to fight off the incessant assault.

Time blurred, it had no meaning any longer; just the mindless droning of the two men, the buzzing of the machines, the swapping out of needles, changing their torture devices, and bottle after bottle of Ink being replaced before they bent to their work once more.

It was a living nightmare. The Ink crawled up his body toward his face.

There had been screams, loud and bone rattling, terror and pain that was indescribable, and it simply built and built as his body went into shock at trying to cope with such a continual assault. They gave him a drink at rest intervals, and the longer the torture went on the more they gave him. It was to stop his body simply shutting down from such a stressor, they told him, it contained important electrolytes, salts and antibiotics to help with his recovery.

How very generous of them.

Existence blurred, nothing had any meaning any longer.

All that existed was The Ink.

God, I haven’t replayed it like that before. It’s like a surreal nightmare, it doesn’t seem possible.

“And how did you get away? C’mon, tell us.” Aiden was staring wide-eyed at Edsel, totally engrossed in the story.

“Leave the poor fellow alone Aiden, that’s enough for now I think. Look at him, he’s too stressed.”

It was true, Edsel had broken out in a cold sweat just recalling the events of a few days ago, although he wasn’t sure exactly how long the torture had gone on for as time quickly lost all meaning to him. His body began to burn as the sweat stung his sensitive skin; he got up from his chair and shook his head.

“Another time okay? I’m beat. But do you see why I didn’t want to bring you along? Why I’m so worried? These people are absolute maniacs; they think they are right. There’s nothing more dangerous than people like that. Nothing.”

“I’ll make us a cuppa,” said Bob, getting up sharply from his chair, all pretense of being a crooked old man now well and truly gone. “Hey, tell you what,” he said brightly, “Aiden, why don’t you tell me how you two met and what’s happened since then? Give poor old Edsel here a chance to drink his coffee and then we can help to formulate our plan. Sound good?”

“Sure,” said Aiden, “although it’s not quite as gross a story as Edsel’s. But we did have chases and we did steal a car. And Martha, we lost Martha.”

“Tell me all about it,” said Bob. “And I’m so sorry, was she your mum?”

“No, she was my chicken.”

Bob looked at Edsel, who nodded in confirmation. “A chicken,” repeated Bob.

“Yes, she was my only friend, now she’s gone.”

“Hey, hang on a minute,” said Edsel, suddenly catching up with the conversation. “What do you mean formulate ‘our’ plan? What do you mean by ‘our’?” He knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“Look Edsel, no offense or anything, but you don’t seem like much of a fighter. You don’t seem to really have a plan yet, not a proper one, unless I am very much mistaken?” Bob looked at Edsel, who just shook his head.

Bob’s too smart by half. He’s got me beat already.

“Right, so you need help, and I’m going to give it to you. We can’t be having people running around tattooing innocents and making life worse than it already is, so I’m going to help. And obviously young Aiden here is in, aren’t you young man?”

“Absolutely.”

“Jeez. You guys.”

“So, Aiden,” said Bob, “how did you meet our lobster friend here? Oops, sorry Edsel. Or can I call you Ed?”

“No, you may not. And stop calling me a lobster.”

Bob winked at Aiden and made the coffee.

All I wanted was a sweater.

CREEPY

“Um, Bob, not being rude or anything dude, but this is kind of creepy. You do know that, right?”

Bob had led them out into his garden, then into an Anderson shelter, one that was already in the garden when he bought the place many years before.

“What? What’s wrong with it? I thought it would be a good idea to stock up as soon as the news talked about The Lethargy.”

Edsel stared around him at the old-style bunker, now much extended by Bob to go deep underground as well as simply be a shelter in case the bombs fell during the second world war. The place was jammed floor to ceiling with a cornucopia of items — from piles of clothes to bottles of water, to rope, tinned goods and other useful things like large propane bottles, cleaning supplies and even bicycles and replacement tires. All of that seemed like very good thinking and something Edsel had done himself, but then it got weird.

“Why have you got a box of women’s tights? Why have you got a whole shelf of woolly hats? Why are there, let me see, one, two three, four five six seven eight,” fired off Edsel rapidly, “nine printers and four TVs? And why on earth would you take up valuable space with a load of junk like that?” Edsel pointed into the far corner that was piled high with everything from decades old telephones to vinyl, bits of metal, old shop signs and a large number of obviously broken lamps.

“Hey, this used to be my storage shed all right? As I managed to find stuff I kind of just piled it in and never got around to moving out the old junk. I was going to do it, but, well, you know, stuff happens.”

“Fair enough, it sure does. You’ve done pretty well here though, I bet it took a while?”

“It did,” confirmed Bob. “A lot of this stuff I got the first year after The Lethargy. I sort of had a head start on most people. I saw it coming even before it was reported actually.”

Judging by the mostly useful items and the way it was neatly arranged before chaos took over near to the back, Edsel judged that Bob must have been some kind of military type. Ex-military anyway, or a policeman at the very least.

“So, what was it? Armed Forces? Air Force? Something like that?”

“Oh no, I was a postman,” said Bob proudly.

“Oh.”

“I thought you were going to be some kind of spy,” said a dejected Aiden.

“It was better than that. Oh, the stories I could tell,” said Bob, lost in reverie.

“What, about lost parcels and dogs trying to bite your hand when you posted letters?” said Edsel, winking at Aiden who stifled a snigger.

“I will have you know that it was a fine position, until, you know...”

“The Lethargy.”

“Right.”

“But it put me in the perfect position to get all the goodies,” said Bob slyly. “I knew something was going on, mail had been increasing for years, everyone buying stuff Online meant more packages to deliver. Then things slowly changed. It got so nobody showed up for work, nobody answered their doorbell, and then there weren’t many packages left to deliver anyway. At first I’d report things to the police, like when people I saw every day no longer answered their doors and I could see the mail piling up when I looked through the letterbox, but they never did anything. Then there weren’t any police anyway. So I started breaking into the houses, finding them with The Lethargy — it had a name by then, and lots of them were dead.

“So I took their stuff. It wasn’t stealing,” said Bob hurriedly, “they didn’t need it anymore, but I did. I brought it back here, put it in the shelter, put some in the house, a few other places, just in case you know? I got there first, before everyone started going door to door, even stealing from those still alive and Whole, just taking their things and killing them. Awful times, just awful. I stopped then, it was too dangerous.”

“Well, you sly old fox you.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of cool Bob. What was the best ever thing you found?”

“One time I broke into this house as nobody had answered for days, a regular of mine, so I figured she must have been dead, or sat like in a coma, you know, like they do? So, I go in, only she wasn’t dead, far from it, she was standing in the kitchen with this French Maid’s outfit on and... Oops, forgot.”

“Yeah, maybe another time,” said Edsel, smiling at Bob, glancing at Aiden.

“What? What happened next? Did she want to come and help you out here?” asked Aiden.

“Um, yeah, something like that.”

He really is a sly old fox. Or a dirty old bugger anyway.

“Now,” said Bob, rubbing his hands together, “about this plan, or lack of one.”

“Hey, I have a plan. I came up with it last night and I will have you know it’s a rather good one.”

“Well, let’s hear it then? Let’s walk in the garden while you tell us.”

***

“No offense Edsel, but that is the worst plan I have ever heard.”

“Bet you’ve heard loads,” mumbled a rather put out Edsel.

“You’d be surprised. Now, let me tell you what I think we should do.”

“Now look, let’s get one thing straight. I wasn’t planning on taking Aiden with me, and I certainly wasn’t planning on taking you with me. I don’t want to get anyone killed. It’s my fight and I can manage alone.”

“No, I’m coming. We have to fight back.”

“I’m coming too,” said Aiden. “If we don’t stop them then it will only get worse.”

What a pair. What a bunch of misfits we are.

“Okay, but please don’t get yourselves killed. I don’t think I could bear the burden of more deaths because of me.”

“Nobody’s getting killed. Not us anyway. The three musketeers.”

“What’s a musketeer?”

“They were... Um, actually I’m not sure.”

They continued talking as they wandered around the garden, with Bob showing them the colorful plants as well as the vegetable plots and the small orchard. He obviously spent a lot of time working his land. There were a few pigs, chickens and even a goat too; he was pretty much self-sufficient.

Edsel was getting increasingly uncomfortable. Not like he had been, but his body had tightened up throughout the morning and the pain was growing rapidly. The day was getting hot, set to be a real scorcher, and as the sweat flowed so the burning increased — the scabs began to tighten until every movement meant he could feel another one tear, and tiny stains of blood, pus and who knew what else popped up on his clothes.

The cuts on his arms hadn’t healed well either, and his back was getting lumpier from the gravel stuck under the surface. His forearms had come up in some kind of thick shiny skin, and it was clear that this was a reaction where scar tissue formed in abundance — he would be not only tattooed for life but also severely scarred there and probably other places too. He didn’t have the heart to look any longer, it was just so damn depressing. The wound from when Aiden grabbed him still felt like somebody was helping themselves to slices of his succulent flesh.

“What? Sorry, I was miles away.”

“I said do you want a shower?”

“Oh yeah.”

Warm water? Clean water too. The lake was probably a bad idea.

Bob had hooked up portable propane bottles to heat the water through his existing boiler, and used a header tank in the loft to keep the pressure high — the private well that served the house and land had never run dry yet. As Edsel showered carefully then patted himself dry, dark stains appearing on the fluffy white towel, he could almost believe that life was normal and he’d step out to see Kathy in the bedroom. They’d often showered together and what he wouldn’t give for that again.

But things weren’t normal. He was in a strange house, he had a young boy to be responsible for, and he hurt like hell.

Edsel rubbed at the steamed-up mirror to clear it, then thought better of it.

Why put yourself through it? And let’s face it, a shave isn’t going to make you look much better at the moment, is it?

***

“Ah, that’s better,” said Edsel, walking into the kitchen, trying to hide the mess he’d made of the towel but also not wanting to just leave it in the bathroom either. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said Bob, surprisingly kindly. “I’ve got lots, and what’s a towel between friends? Take a seat, I was just about to tell Aiden here all about Marcus and The Commorancy. You know about him, it, right?”

“Yeah, pretty much. It was all over the news until it went dark. Stories about him controlling Lethargic to try to save that village that got flattened by a satellite or something, right? There was loads of stuff, but then he kind of went quiet, stopped feeding what was left of the press. Whoosh, gone like Keyser Söze.”

“Who?” asked Aiden.

“Oh, just a character from a movie, don’t worry about it.”

“So, as I was saying,” said Bob, giving Edsel a foul glance for getting off topic. “Nobody knows where The Commorancy is, or even what it is, or if it’s even actually real.”

“It’s real,” interrupted Edsel. He got another foul look for his trouble.

“Or if it’s real...” Edsel kept silent as Bob gave him the daggers. “The story goes that Marcus Awoke naturally, like you have a little Aiden, but he was incredibly powerful. He could control people with his thoughts, Whole and Lethargic, enter the minds of animals, talk to the trees, all that kind of stuff.” Bob waved it all away with his hand. “But there was much more to it. He was, or is, a real man of mystery. He gave out information now and then, printed stuff himself. He even keeps the small Internet we still have going from The Commorancy you know? And he has seven Rooms there that people are lucky to get if they try hard enough and find out even how to apply.

“Nobody knows anyone that has come out yet, as the story goes that what happens inside is so special, so wondrous, that nobody would ever talk. And they learn the secrets of truly being Awoken. How to live forever, change their bodies, who knows what else.”

“Do you believe all that?” asked Edsel.

“Sure, why not? After The Lethargy it’s kind of easy to believe anything isn’t it?”

“You have a point there,” agreed Edsel.

“Right, but there’s more. Did you hear about how lots of famous buildings and landmarks have just disappeared? How all those super-secret storage facilities where they store seed and eggs and sperm of animals were raided and everything taken? Well, he’s collecting everything that is important, and keeping it in one place, to protect the future of humanity, in case everyone dies.”

“Wow! I knew a little bit of it, but not all that. We never really used the computer much, then the power went, so I never learned how to use the Internet or anything like that,” said Aiden mournfully.

“Not missing much,” mumbled Edsel, remembering what it used to be like when the Web was a worldwide ever-present obsession for much of the populace. He often thought that it was tied up with The Lethargy, but his musings never went beyond that.

“Stop interrupting,” scalded Bob.

“Sorry.”

Bob continued. “Of course, it’s all a mystery really, nobody knows for sure, and if any of it is true then he must still be constructing such an epic undertaking, but he is taking guests, if you can find a way to get an invitation. It’s too late for me, but for you two... Well, you could try. It might be fun. It might mean you could save the world.”

“Do you really think so? I always thought it was just a myth, a fairytale,” said Aiden, perched on the edge of his seat.

“I don’t see why not,” said Bob.

“I tried. To find out how to get in,” said Edsel.

Aiden turned to him and asked, “What happened?”

“I stopped, once I met Kathy. Everything I read said you had to go alone, no company, just you and your Room.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, enough of this, it’s time we got ready.”

The three of them stood, lost in their own thoughts for a moment of a safe place, a refuge, away from the degradation, the horrors, the emptiness that filled the streets, the houses, their souls.

RETURN

By noon the vehicle was loaded, and they were heading back to Manchester. Bob had an old Suzuki Vitara that was battered but had never let him down, and it was much better than the little hatchback they’d used to get this far.

This is not a good idea.

There was no time to think, Bob was a man of action and he was extremely efficient. Edsel had agreed that the sooner they made their move the better. The Eventuals would catch up with him soon enough, so better that they were the ones making the decisions, rather than just running away. It meant that in under an hour the car was loaded, the plan that had been discussed earlier was gone over again, and then they were on their way.

I must be mad. They must be even madder.

“Guys, are you sure about this? It seems kind of wacky you know? Aiden, please reconsider. Why don’t you stay with Bob at his house, wait for me to do what I have to do?”

Silence.

Edsel stared in the rear-view mirror. He’d argued until Bob agreed to let him drive, explaining that he knew the streets that were clear better than Bob, although you never knew when another one would be blocked off. The old man and young boy sat staring straight ahead, a look of determination locked on each of their faces. Resolute.

“Look, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but this is my fight and I can’t be responsible for any more deaths. I think it would crush me if you two got killed because of me. You going to say anything or what?”

“We’ve made up our minds,” said Bob.

“Yup,” said a tight-lipped Aiden.

“But why? This isn’t going to change anything you know? Not really. This is just a small faction of The Eventuals, the religion is still spreading like wild-fire, this won’t make a dent in it. It’s personal.”

“We know,” said Aiden. “But we’ve had enough, we want to fight back.”

The three of us against the world; not very good odds.

Edsel glanced in the mirror again quickly while trying to focus on the car-strewn street. Also trying to not grip the steering wheel too tightly and hoping his feet weren’t getting too damaged from using the pedals. At least the clutch was nice and loose so didn’t take much pressure when he changed gears. “What do you mean?”

“What my young friend here is trying to say,” lectured Bob, leaning forward from the back so he was almost peeking through to the front, “is that we are fed up with being scared of things. We’re fed up worrying about if we will get The Lethargy. We are fed up worrying about people coming to rob or kill us. We are definitely fed up with not just being able to go for a walk and not be scared, and we are certainly fed up with The Eventuals trying to kill anyone they see, or pouncing on the depressed and unfortunate, sucking the life out of them until they are brainwashed into helping their cause.” Bob leaned back in his seat, lecture over.

“Oh. Well, okay. So you aren’t doing this just for me then?”

“No.”

“I am,” said Aiden. “Plus what he said.”

They couldn’t help it, they laughed, and kept on laughing until Edsel nearly killed them as he wasn’t keeping an eye on the road and he nearly hit a man walking down the side of the street to avoid the debris from a burned out building that had finally collapsed.

Edsel kept on going, watching the road carefully.

“What a world we live in,” said Bob, “where you are too scared to stop and offer assistance to somebody just in case they would rob you blind or worse.”

“I know. I know. Not everyone is bad though. I’ve met a few nice people, plus some that weren’t so nice.”

“But what happened to everyone? Why would they change so quickly?” said Aiden.

Bob turned to Aiden. “It’s just human nature. People look out for themselves and their loved ones first. As soon as things went wrong and money became meaningless then it was every man for himself. Everybody got used to having what they wanted when they wanted it, then in a flash it was all gone. So people just did what they had to in order to survive.”

“He’s right Aiden, most didn’t have much choice. But it’s skewed in the city. Worse. Lots of people left for the country; things are different there I’ve heard. Calmer, not so mean, not so dangerous. The city brings out the worst in people. They cling to old ways, wanting to go to stores, get what they want. Stupid really, I should have left too — with Kathy.”

“It’s always been the same,” said Bob. “City life is different to country life. I’ve been lucky, I had the best of both worlds living so close to Manchester. But people are different in cities, less friendly, used to hustle and bustle and not looking you in the eye — the fear was always there, just under the surface, ready to bubble up and explode.”

“And now it has,” said Aiden.

“Oh yeah, with bells on,” said Edsel.

“There just aren’t the resources any longer to make such places work, not unless basically everyone leaves. Everything was looted, the food’s gone, people don’t know what to do.”

“So why don’t they leave?” asked Aiden, turning to Bob, who seemed like a fountain of knowledge to the young boy.

“Because they are scared. Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t Edsel here? It’s fear of the unknown.”

“Okay, enough chit-chat. You sure we are doing this? It’s time to get busy you know?”

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

God forgive me.

MAD

They parked up a little over a half mile from the small church where Edsel had been given The Ink, and each of them hefted a rather substantial backpack onto his shoulders. The roads were blocked from there on in apart from a single route watched by a few bored sentries. It was on foot from now on.

They walked through a narrow alley after leaving the car by the side of the road — just another car, nothing out of the ordinary for anyone spotting it.

Things went wrong immediately.

Edsel directed them down a narrow alley, almost impassable with years of detritus: ripped black plastic bags, mattresses, old make-shift hovels made from cardboard where those lost to The Lethargy died and still remained. Having to deal with shopping trolleys and way too many rats made the going treacherous.

“Where are we going?” asked Aiden.

“To get revenge,” said Edsel, face set in determination, senses hyper-alert to any Eventuals.

“Bob, keep a look-out behind, okay?” Bob was at the rear, Edsel at the front, the formation they’d agreed upon.

“Bob?” Edsel turned when there was no answer. “Oh shit. Aiden, change of plan, move to the wall. Now.”

Aiden did as he was told, confused but obeying.

I don’t believe this, the stupid old bugger. Unbelievable, totally bloody unbelievable.

Bob was stood in the middle of the alley, still close enough to the street that he would be seen if anyone happened to be walking, driving or cycling past — which was a very real concern given their proximity to the church. He was just standing there, not moving, arms hanging by his sides, eyes spun back in his head, mouth drooping on one side like a stroke victim, drool already dropping from his chin.

Stay calm, stay calm. Shit, shit, shit! You stupid old man. This can’t be happening, not here, not now.

Edsel looked back up the alley to make sure it was clear, then put a finger to his lips to make sure Aiden stayed quiet. The boy looked totally freaked out, and knew as well as Edsel did what Bob’s actions meant. He had The Lethargy, and the daft old bugger had put them all in extreme danger if he knew he had it and this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Edsel had the sneaking suspicion it was far from the first time, and it was why Bob was so keen to help them out. It was understandable, he didn’t just want to waste the life he had left; he wanted to do something. His actions had put them all in grave danger.

Edsel waved a hand in front of Bob’s face, but there was no reaction. His eyes were up in their sockets, staring at nothing. Vacant. He grabbed hold of the strong shoulders of the older man and steered him deeper into the alley. Bob walked like a zombie, one foot in front of the other, no knowledge of what he was doing, acting purely on instinct.

As they reached Aiden, who was freaking out a little, Edsel whispered for him to follow them deeper into the gloom of the rat-infested alley. Eventually they came to a junction where another narrow alley bisected theirs, and Edsel took a right. Innocuous doors lined one wall, some for stores, others for the grouping of pubs that lined the street they were at the rear of.

With one hand on Bob’s shoulder, pushing him gently as he repeatedly stopped moving if he didn’t, Edsel tried the doors that had handles on their exterior. Finally one opened. He gestured for Aiden to follow and once the boy was inside he maneuvered around Bob, went in himself, then grabbed Bob’s hands and pulled him in before shutting the door.

It was dark, very dark.

Just great. Perfect.

“Right, talk quietly, just in case somebody’s here. You okay buddy?” Edsel couldn’t see a thing.

A voice came out of the dark, “S’pose. He’s got it, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah, and the daft old bugger never said. He could have got us killed.”

“He just wanted to do something. I should have seen it, I never looked. I can see in The Noise he’s got The Lethargy. He hasn’t had it long though, a couple of months at most.”

“We’ll talk in a minute. First we need to get him hidden. I’m going to crack the door a little, just so I can see, okay?”

“Okay.”

Edsel opened the door a fraction, then peered up and down the alley. He turned back into the space and noted that there was a short flight of stairs leading upward.

Great, just great. Bob isn’t exactly going to be light.

“Okay, wait here, I’ll be quick. I just need to check it’s safe to go up. You good?”

Aiden nodded.

Poor kid, this will be bringing back all kinds of memories.

Edsel tried not to think about his own losses to The Lethargy — now wasn’t the time or the place. He went up the stairs as fast as he could, putting his hands out to the walls on either side of the narrow space to help speed him up. At the top of the flight of stairs was another door; it opened when he turned the handle. Down another corridor and the smell of the stale air brought memories of times long gone flooding back. He was in a pub. The smell of the toilets; the smell of the booze — what he wouldn’t give to hand over a note and down a cool pint of lager right now. His dad had taken him to countless pubs, and although he’d always been ignored by him Edsel always enjoyed the smells, the atmosphere, the sneaking of a sip of someone’s drink if he could get away with it.

He scouted out the pub quickly; all seemed quiet. Obviously the booze was long gone.

Damn.

Back down the stairs and he told Aiden what to do. Edsel grabbed Bob under his arms and began dragging him up the stairs while Aiden helped by pushing his feet. It was exhausting and The Ink screamed at him as his back split open again and the sweat began to burn his body with an all too familiar pain. Once up the stairs the load lightened, so they took an arm each and dragged him into the open space that contained a long bar with a few small tables that were toppled, as well as fixed booths around the edges. They dragged him over to the bar and propped him up so he was sat leaning against the dark wood.

Lighting was diffused inside the pub, the security shutters were still down — slatted metal that gave a low light but hid the interior from outside.

“Just going to close the door,” whispered Edsel, before descending the stairs once more.

He was back in a few seconds.

“Any change?”

“No, he’s still the same. Why didn’t he tell us?”

“Because he’s a silly old bugger and probably thought he was doing something useful. Ugh, what a nightmare.”

“What are we going to do?”

Edsel stared at Aiden. “What can we do? We can’t just leave him, as if he comes out of it soon then he’ll probably try to find us and we could all get killed. We’ll have to wait for him to wake up then shout at him for being an idiot.”

Or just wring his bloody neck for being so stupid.

Aiden smiled, neither of them really finding the situation funny though. “I liked Bob.”

“Me too buddy, me too. We’ll do what we can, look after him after this is all over. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Right, how about you take a look around and see if there is anything left for us dudes. Dragging Bob is thirsty work.”

Aiden scampered off, clearly pleased to be given something to do.

Bob, what were you thinking mate? You put us in a very bad situation here my man.

SORRY

Edsel wanted to tear Bob limb from limb. How could he have put them in such a dangerous situation? He knew what he had, knew that it could come on at any time, take him away from reality and leave him half floating in The Void. What was wrong with him?

Bob obviously had the early stages of The Lethargy, the mystery epidemic, infection, virus, scourge of God, or whatever the hell it was as nobody had even the slightest idea. Whatever it was, Bob would have been all too aware of what was going on. Victims in the early stages would phase in and out of consciousness, knowing what had happened when they were fully aware again, until gradually they became more and more listless in their waking hours and lost the ability to interact with anything around them. As their interest in anything and everything waned so did their time staying aware, until finally they simply never returned to a conscious state and then either died from lack of food or water, or clung to life if they had others to tend to their every need.

They were the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones had a form known as Creeping Lethargy, where they were slower to lose their desire for living, came in and out of awareness on a less frequent basis, but could carry on in that way for year after miserable year. It all resulted in the same end though: an inglorious death that you were never even aware of.

Now Bob had put everyone in a terrible position by coming along knowing that at any moment he could be lost to them and be nothing but a shell of a man, unaware of anything around him, nothing but a lump of meat that could be cajoled into moving if you were lucky.

So much for his kick-ass plan. Man, I need a drink.

Edsel crunched over broken bottles and the shards of broken pint glasses, making his way behind the bar. There was nothing, not even a nasty liqueur, definitely no whiskey. The large mirror behind the bar was still intact, and the shelves either side of it too, but they had been totally emptied, not a drop left. Edsel had an idea, hoping beyond hope that it would pay off. He dragged a bar stool over and took it back behind the bar, then stood on it and reached up high onto the very top shelf; it appeared empty from on the ground.

He fumbled about until he felt a glass bottle.

Please, please, please.

“Yes!”

He pulled the bottle out and was only slightly saddened to find that it was Stolichnya vodka and not whiskey, but it had been so long since he’d had a drink that right now he really didn’t care. He’d seen a barman get a bottle from a similar place once before, and understood it was quite a common thing — stashing a bottle for after hours somewhere where nobody else would get their hands on the good stuff.

“I didn’t find anythi—“

“Aah, shit, shit shit.”

Edsel turned at the sound, not realizing it was Aiden for a split second, and wobbled on the stool. He began to fall.

You idiot, it’s Aiden.

It was too late. Edsel waved his arms about wildly, trying to regain balance, but it was no use.

“Aaargh, aargh, get it, get the bottle. Quick!” Edsel was on fire, a searing, impossibly hot fire that would strip his flesh from his bones and leave him praying for the flames of hell just to cool down.

The bottle had broken when it caught on a shelf as he fell, the expensive vodka pouring over his body. It soaked through his shirt and his upper body erupted into a pain he thought impossible. He believed he had experienced as much hurt as the human body could experience, but he’d been wrong.

As the forty percent proof alcohol made contact with the open pores of his tattooed skin and the scabs, scar tissue, gashes and myriad points of infection, his skin erupted into a sickening pain that stung like a million bees and he honestly thought that the alcohol had caught fire. He batted at his shirt as Aiden ran around the counter and grabbed the bottle, but it was too late, the bottle was empty.

“Am I on fire? Am I on fire? Ugh, ugh, argh,” shouted Edsel in a frenzy, turning this way and that, batting at the green shirt, trying to douse the flames that didn’t exist.

“No, no, you’re not on fire, it’s just the stinging from the vodka.”

“Stinging? Stinging? STINGING!? Oh my god I think I’m going to explode. Bathroom, where’s the bathroom?”

“That way,” said Aiden, pointing to the sign for the Ladies and Gents.

I am the stupidest man in the history of the world. I can’t believe this, I really can’t.

Edsel ran off quickly, adrenaline surging through his body, every nerve alive with pain, his plans forgotten, the whimpering turning into shouts, the day going downhill at every possible turn.

What am I thinking? Damn, there isn’t any running water, hasn’t been for years. Get it together. Stupid.

He ran back out into the main space. “Have we got any water?”

“Yes, here. I wondered why you wanted the bathroom so suddenly.”

“Not thinking straight; too much pain. Here, pull it off, quick.”

Aiden grabbed a sleeve and pulled the already ripped open shirt off Edsel while Edsel unscrewed the cap from the bottle and poured the water over his skin. If he thought it had been red before then now it was glowing. The alcohol had wreaked havoc with his healing, or trying to heal skin, and it had erupted into pure agony, the redness more extreme than it had ever been. Edsel poured more water over his back, down his chest, lifting an arm one at a time to douse the invisible flames.

“Phew, sorry about that Aiden. I kind of freaked out a little then. Man, this is killing me. So stupid, ugh.”

“Sorry for making you jump, and sorry you spilt the vodka. Bet you need that drink even more now, right?”

“Oh god, don’t even joke about it. I’d suck the glass if I thought it would work.” Edsel looked at the skin he could see. Was there no end to this? The redness was receding already as the water cleared off the alcohol, but it was still burning terribly and he just felt like sitting down and crying. When would it all be over? “Okay, back on track. Deep breaths, phew, phew, phew. Right, did you find anything?”

“No, nothing at all. But I did think of something...”

“Okay,” said Edsel warily, knowing it wasn’t going to be good.

“Um, how far away did you usually get before they found you again? I mean, was there a pattern? I can only pick up the presence of other people if I’m really close and really focused in The Noise, but I don’t know what it’s like for others. Properly Awoken. You know, like some of The Eventuals are.”

Edsel went cold. What the hell was the matter with him?

“Usually just over half a mile. Much closer than that and they usually seemed to be able to pick me up, and then the chase would be on again.”

“And when we got out the alley, then came in here, were we getting closer or further away? I know it wasn’t very far, but... Um, are we safe?”

Oh boy.

“Honestly? I don’t know. I got caught up with Bob here and didn’t think about it. But you’re right, I should have thought of it. And we came closer to them, not further away. Not much, but a bit.”

“So we need to go?”

“Yes, we do.”

“And Bob?”

“Well, Bob better wake up real fast, as otherwise he’ll have to stay here. If they find us then he’s dead anyway, and we can’t carry him around.” Edsel looked at Aiden but the boy seemed to have come to the same conclusion. “Right, let’s take a look at this silly old bugger then.”

Edsel walked carefully over to Bob, now naked from the waist up once again, his skin red and a mess of raised welts, cracks, random eruptions where it had reacted in strange ways — cuts across his belly and arms. The contrast between the tattooed areas and the pale skin from his neck upwards made him look like a painted mannequin, or a man wearing a Halloween costume — one that really would scare the kids.

“Can you do anything? You know, through The Noise?”

“I don’t think so, not really. Maybe make him walk a few steps, not much more.”

“Okay, no point in doing that. Especially as I assume it will make you hungry?”

Aiden nodded.

They waited, and they waited some more. Edsel got more and more jittery; Aiden kept looking at his watch. Both glanced continually out of the window, or walked around nervously, but it was no use — they would have to go.

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Edsel. “We’re going to have to leave him. I know it’s hard but I can’t see a way out unless we just wait for him to wake up. Come on.”

Aiden put his backpack on, and Edsel did the same even though it sent his back into spasms and the synthetic material rubbed the flesh raw in an instant. Once again it was the shoulders that were the worst.

I can’t seem to keep a shirt on to save my life. If this was a movie I’d at least have huge muscles and be all buff.

“I guess we will have to— Ssh, quiet? Did you hear that?” Edsel’s voice dropped to a whisper.

Aiden nodded, and made a walking motion with his fingers, nodding in the direction of the stairs.

Wish Bob had actually had cartridges for his shotgun instead of bluffing. Daft bugger.

Edsel pulled the poker out from his backpack, and Aiden pulled out a long knife that Bob had given him. It glinted evilly in the low light, but Aiden was less of a fighter than Edsel. Twelve was not an age that you became an experienced knife fighter, Edsel had said, when Bob gave him the knife. Bob had said that he knew that, but better to stand a chance, rather than no chance at all, if it came down to needing it.

They crouched down low so they were hidden by the counter, and Edsel whispered instructions to Aiden.

As quietly as possible, they crept over to the door that led to the corridor and stood either side of it, Edsel on the side where anyone would come through. He pulled the knife he had stashed from the lake out of a pocket in the backpack and swapped so the poker was in his left hand.

They got ready.

Muffled sounds came from the other side of the door; Aiden signaled ‘one’ with his finger. Edsel nodded and got ready.

Well, this is going to be either one less of them or two less of us. Three if they bother with Bob.

The door banged open, smacking into Aiden, and Edsel struck out fast and hard. The knife went in deep with a sickening squelch and he pulled it out quickly. A man in his forties, wearing a still relatively uncommon acolyte’s blood-red robe, grabbed at his belly, and as he bent over Edsel swapped his weapons around and swung hard one-handed with the poker at the man’s head. The strike was off, but it caught the man on the temple and scraped past his eyes, sending him reeling back into the corridor, screaming and clutching first at his face then at his belly.

Edsel ran forward fast, leaping onto the man whose knife had been dropped the second he was stabbed, jabbing down hard with his wrong hand at the man’s throat. The knife went in awkwardly but the man stopped screaming instantly, and as blood spouted from the severed carotid Aiden came up behind; they both watched transfixed as the life ebbed out of the man.

He was dead.

That’s it? Just like that? A person wiped out, gone forever.

It seemed too quick. Not easy, but surely such a heinous crime should be more visceral?

“Okay, let’s go. Get to the end of the corridor, see if you sense anyone, if not go down and do the same again. Okay?”

Aiden nodded, skirting around the man, trying not to step in the huge pool of blood that was already soaking into the beer-stained carpet. Edsel stepped back to the doorway, grabbed the knife and put it into the backpack, then caught up with Aiden. “Anything?”

“No, nothing. All clear.”

“Okay, let’s go down together.”

They descended the steps in the dark; the door was closed at the entrance to the alley.

SUN

The alley was clear. Edsel couldn’t see anyone, and Aiden said that he couldn’t sense a soul, so they made their way back out the way they had come, moving fast as there was no doubt the man that had found them would be missed soon enough. The alley was an assault on the nostrils — the day was warming up and with it the stench was rising.

I can’t believe I stayed living here for so long. How could I ignore the stink?

Edsel grew nervous as they got out of the shade of the alley: he knew what was coming.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” He gritted his teeth, but the pain flared up into impossible new heights. The sun on his skin was pure agony; it felt like every single needle that had injected The Ink into his body, in the countless thousands of places, was erupting in the sunlight, spouting out its foul liquid right through his skin and bursting into flame, burning as hot as the bright orange orb in the sky.

“You okay?” said Aiden with concern. “You look terrible. Your skin’s getting redder. I didn’t think that would be possible,” he added helpfully.

“I know, I know. It’s the sun, it’s burning me like crazy. Over there, quick.” Edsel pointed to a shaded area across from the alley, a place where a few cars were parked neatly, as if the owners had turned up for work that morning.

“Aah, that’s better.” Once in the shade his skin immediately began to stop screaming at him quite as loudly. “Right, we are still on track for the plan, we just need... damn, we forgot Bob’s backpack. Should have brought it with us.”

“Shall we go back?” asked a worried looking Aiden.

“No, it’s not worth the risk. The Eventuals could be here any minute. We need to keep moving, keep them from getting our location pinpointed. Are you sure you want to do this? I can take you back to Bob’s place, you can lay low until I come get you.”

“If you come get me,” said Aiden grimly. “But no, I’m staying with you.”

“Okay buddy, let’s get to it then. You know this is going to be nasty, right?” Aiden nodded. “Okay. Just try not to look if you possibly can, but these guys have to be stopped. You understand that? The things they do, it can’t be left, they have to pay. Let’s go.”

Who am I kidding? This is personal and nothing more. It’s for me, so maybe I can sleep at night somewhere down the line. Sleep alone.

They made their way across the back streets, heading right towards the small church where the Manchester Ward of The Eventuals were based — their numbers growing daily as more people gave up what little hope they had been clinging to.

Although Edsel would have preferred it for Aiden to stay away, the truth was that he was invaluable as an ally. He could sense others if he focused, meaning that as they made their way slowly but surely into the lion’s den Edsel at least knew when it was safe to proceed. But conversely, any Awoken Eventuals would feel them approaching too, and these were men who may have a lot more experience of their Awoken states — Aiden was a boy of twelve and very scared, although he was doing amazingly well, there was no denying it.

They made their way closer.

This is like the absolute opposite of what any sane person would do. Am I thinking straight? This is suicide. Is that what I want?

The small church was on a relatively quiet back street, surrounded by other streets just like it. They intersected at junctions, curved around to meet with once busy thoroughfares, with a few cul-de-sacs mixed in too. An urban sprawl with little in the way of rhyme or reason as far as Edsel could see, when he’d studied the map of this part of the city. But at least it gave them opportunities and alternate routes as they made their way closer to the church.

Moving fast, and trying to stay in the shade as much as possible, they got closer street by street. Now they were well within the half-mile radius that seemed to be the tipping point for many Awoken to sense others, so adrenaline was pumping hard and Edsel could see Aiden’s nerves were fraying the closer they got. The boy was locked in a frown of concentration, trying to direct them in the best way to keep them from being seen. The chance of there being any Awoken near was remote, as they would be spread all over the city looking for new recruits, seeking out those with nothing to lose — shining brightly in The Noise like beacons of vulnerability and despair. Easy pickings.

They crossed a quiet street and went down the side of a semi-detached house, through the garden and out into a small piece of scrub land, full of the junk of years. Pile after pile of refuse, discarded furniture and countless other abandoned household items.

Aiden put a hand to Edsel’s shoulder delicately and whispered that there was a man to their right, somewhere on the street they were heading for. With a nod, Edsel signaled he understood and whispered for Aiden to stay put and wait for him to return. Aiden looked worried, but agreed with a reluctant hint of a smile. The weather was really hotting up, the air was heavy and silent, as if holding its breath to see what would happen, burning Edsel into action, making it impossible for him to stay out in the open.

Insects buzzed around the few tufts of grass and weeds trying to survive amid the junk, teasing Edsel, landing on his skin, daring him to try to swat at them. His seeping sores were a magnet for the creatures; he had to go.

Edsel went to hunt a man for the first time in his life.

***

He crept through the detritus of modern society, careful to avoid the trash, the bicycles, old mattresses and wardrobes; a small patch of the city that had become a dumping ground when there was no other option. The heat pricked him as the sun came out from behind a wisp of cloud — relief that had lasted mere seconds — and the sweat fizzled to the surface again. The insects got busy, becoming more and more animated at the welcome intrusion. His skin was slick yet dry at the same time, itching as the scabs tightened in the heat, the red shining like the stop sign on the traffic lights that once controlled the flow of vehicles around the busy metropolis.

Like this isn’t stressful enough, now I have to deal with these damn flies. Ugh, geddof me, leave me alone.

Edsel found it nigh on impossible not to slap his skin, the torture escalating to new heights, mocking him as he tried to make his way through the reminder of all that was lost.

Finally, he made it to the glorious shade at the side of a row of houses, and skirted to the end of the row so he could get out to the front and find his quarry.

I’m a bloody stalker. I’m hunting a man, this is insane.

There he was, a man as red as him, yet clothed, only hands and head showing The Ink. He was going from door to door, checking manually for anyone hiding out so close to the church. He looked bored, like it was a daily patrol and he’d done it countless times before.

Probably just a simple duty he has to do, just to check the area is clear around the church.

As the man went into a house, Edsel ran down the street and went through the open gate and stood to the side of the bright green front door. He could hear the man stomping loudly up the stairs, hear doors being flung open, the house checked for occupancy.

Bet he doesn’t even bother looking really, just doing his patrol as those are his orders.

Edsel stepped inside, pushing the door closed quietly behind him, flipping the latch so it locked.

Payback.

He heard the man coming down the stairs, clearly unconcerned about declaring his presence. Edsel moved into the kitchen; he hid behind the open door and waited. The footsteps got closer; Edsel held his knife in his right hand and tried to stop his heart hammering in his chest. Surely the man could hear it? It beat louder than a drum.

Get ready, get ready. No fear, just do it. Like in the pub, don’t think, just act.

Edsel’s heart hammered louder and louder, the blood pumping so fast it was making his ears pound. His head throbbed like an inflating balloon.

The man was in the kitchen, just inside the doorway, quickly scanning the room. Edsel focused on the red skin at the nape of the man’s neck and lunged silently with the knife. It buried deep, just to the side of bone. Edsel’s hand was soaked in blood in an instant, and the man fell to the floor as he let go of the knife. Edsel crouched quickly and went to pull it out — it was surprisingly hard to reclaim and he had to put a foot onto the man’s back for purchase. Knife retrieved, he rolled him over. He was dead.

Just like that? So quick, so easy. It isn’t right.

It felt wrong, like life shouldn’t be so simple to take. Was it really so easy to kill a man? Just a quick stab and you had taken a life, on purpose, fully aware of what you intended? Shouldn’t it take more than that? It felt the same as in the pub, as if there should be a banging of drums, a crashing of cymbals, the Grim Reaper himself appearing, a bolt of lightning coming down, declaring the gravity of such an event.

Nothing. Just a quick movement of the hand and you were a murderer.

I should feel more, puke up, fall into a heap, be a gibbering wreck. What’s wrong with me?

He felt light-headed, almost as if he were leaving his body. This was wrong, so wrong. To take a life fully aware of what you intended to do, a crime against the preciousness of existence; one more person gone from the planet that now held so few. But these people were the ones that happily corrupted the desperate and the lonely — the takers of souls, the scourge that wanted to wipe the world clean of humanity and let it flourish without man’s interfering.

It still felt wrong.

After all, maybe this man had been taken and indoctrinated just like so many others. Or maybe he fully believed in his new religion. It didn’t matter, he was dead now. He had been a part of The Eventuals and they were ruining what was left of humanity. He had to do it, for those hiding in the dark, for those trying to make lives for themselves. For Kathy.

For myself.

Edsel prised open the fingers of the dead man and pocketed the knife still grasped tightly, then quickly ran up the stairs into the bedroom. In the wardrobe was a row of shirts on hangers — a reward for heinous crimes committed it seemed. He picked a black one, a short-sleeved modern style with distress at the sleeves and collar, slightly washed out, graying.

Probably done on purpose to make it look older. The things we did.

Gratefully he put it on, did up the buttons with ever-sore fingers, then descended the stairs and went to get Aiden.

***

“You okay?”

“Fine. You did it didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Edsel grimly. “I did it. Come on, let’s go.”

They walked toward the street Edsel had just returned from, getting closer and closer to the church. Edsel knew that the chances were high it would be mostly empty. There was a daily routine that involved them meeting there in the mornings and the evenings, but for most of the day there were only a few people present. The tattooists were usually there, giving The Ink to some poor soul, or grateful devotee, depending on the circumstances, and Bishop was usually present, checking on things, taking reports from the Ward he was in charge of.

Others came and went, but mostly they were out spreading the word, hunting those that could swell their numbers, tracking and killing any Whole they could find that didn’t support their ideology. They were little more than a death-squad when you got right down to it. A mockery of a religion that preyed on the weak and unstable and killed anybody that stood in their way.

Well, not today. Today there would be a little bit of payback. The hunted had become the hunter; he would have his pound of flesh.

NEXT

“I could do it, I think. I could kill him through The Noise, like I did the man in the apartment building.” Aiden looked at Edsel to see what he thought.

“I don’t want you to, that was different. So was the man at the car, but this?” There was another Eventual, this time a young kid really, nothing more. He was just stood around, obviously charged with searching the area like Edsel’s last victim, but not really having the heart for the job. He was leaning against a lamppost, doing nothing. Bored.

Kids are all the same. And look at his head, obviously had The Ink just recently, he’s still scabby. Bet he has some nice soothing lotion and painkillers though.

Edsel didn’t want Aiden to be involved in the killing if he could possibly help it — he found it hard enough himself to think about killing another man once the strange feeling settled in the pit of his stomach after the life he had just taken. It wouldn’t go away and he knew it would be there with him forever. He was changed, he had taken a life on purpose, planned it, wanted to do it. It was wrong, but they were worse than the act; there was no choice.

There wasn’t, was there?

“I don’t think this is a good idea? Do you?”

Aiden shook his head. “No.”

“You’re right, it’s not. Killing is wrong. I thought it would be the right thing to do, make it better, but I don’t feel better after killing that man, I feel worse. It’s wrong to take a life, so wrong. Maybe we should leave, just get away? Leave them to it? I don’t know.” Edsel’s head was a mess, he didn’t think it would affect him like this but it had. Was he just as bad as them? Was he a coward? Would all of this make a difference? Maybe it would. Maybe fighting back would be the spark others needed to try to stop the insanity of The Eventuals — already it had spread right across the country, the only real religion left in any meaningful number.

Aiden interrupted him. “If we leave though, they’ll carry on killing everyone left, all of them. Women, children, everyone.” He looked to Edsel for the answer, but he didn’t have one.

“I know buddy, I know. It’s just... the killing, it’s like I broke the only thing keeping me being the man I am. Like I damaged what was good inside, and now... I don’t know, what can we do?”

“We have to do it, we have to stop them. Some of them anyway. The Bishop, the one running it at least. And the men that give The Ink. If we stop them then it’s something, right?”

“Yeah, maybe that’s enough. For Kathy, for me, for you too. Come on, let’s leave that kid alone, I don’t think he’s anything to worry about.”

With thoughts in turmoil, the plan he’d envisioned no longer the straightforward image of him wreaking bloody revenge, with no thought as to how it actually felt, gone from his mind, they skirted the street and made their way closer. They left the boy to his idleness, a bored red devil in a street otherwise devoid of people.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, it wasn’t supposed to make him feel so much. He thought it would be all bloody and vengeance-soaked, not full of emotion.

It really isn’t like the movies. Killing hurts, it rips at your soul.

He’d had a vision of himself bringing down bloody retribution on such corruption, but all he felt was sick to his stomach for taking lives — who knew life could be extinguished so easily? This was what differentiated him from them though, right? What made him the good guy? He hated it; they reveled in it. Wanted it.

Better to be a reluctant killer than one that enjoys it like they do. That’s got to count for something.

Edsel’s head was a mess; nothing made sense.

No, this isn’t right.

“Come on,” said Edsel, grabbing Aiden by the arm, turning him around and beginning to march away.

“What? Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you to Bob’s, to somewhere safe. This may be wrong, but it has to be done, but I will not be responsible for the corruption of a young boy. I don’t want you involved in this, it’s not right. You shouldn’t be here.”

“But you need me, you need me to help you get to them. They’ll get you if I don’t.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take, but I’m not willing to risk your life like this. I wasn’t thinking straight because of the pain, but I see it now. I’m as bad as them, corrupting children.”

Aiden pulled up short, staring defiantly at Edsel. “I am not a child, I hate them too you know?”

“I know, but it doesn’t make this right. No arguments, we’re going. When you’re safe I will come back and finish this, not before.”

Aiden was silent, but he let himself be directed away from the hive of Eventuals, tracing back the route they had already taken.

“Bob?” asked Aiden hopefully.

“Bob,” agreed Edsel, nodding.

Daft old bugger.

***

“Sorry, I’m so sorry. I waited, but I really didn’t expect you to come back for this old fool.”

“You’re part of the team now,” said Aiden, running to Bob and giving him a big hug.

“You’re awake,” said Edsel, a statement, not a question.

“Well, yeah. Please, let me explain. I know what you must think of me.” Bob suddenly realized something, “Hey, have you done it? Is this still the same day? Was it that quick?”

“No, change of plan. I’m not going to be responsible for the corruption of a child. Sorry, young man. Can we go to yours?”

“Eh? What? Of course, I understand. Can I please explain, about The Lethargy?”

“Later, we need to go. They’ll be after us.”

Edsel wasted no time, he went ahead and this time he checked there were no Eventuals waiting and in a few minutes they were back in the car, heading away from the city once more.

What was I thinking? What kind of man gets kids involved in things like this? The world is messed up enough already without making it worse. Damn, he should be out kicking a ball around with his mum shouting to him to come in for his supper.

Dark thoughts crowded Edsel’s mind as he drove away from the corrupted city. Bob and Aiden were quiet, sensing the mood. Finally, Bob spoke up, clearly unable to bear it any longer.

“Please, you have to let me explain.”

“Okay, go ahead. Look, it’s not like we blame you, we understand.”

“Really? Wow. I figured you would have gone ballistic when I... you know.”

“Is it The Creeping?”

“I think so.”

“It is,” said Aiden. “I can see it.”

“What? How?” Bob focused on Aiden. “Oh, you’re Awoken. I forgot.”

Aiden just nodded, clearly still smarting from Edsel’s decision.

“I’ve had it for about four or five months now, but it hasn’t been too bad so far. I can still do everything for myself, manage the garden, the animals. But, well, it just comes over me, like it does everyone I suppose. One minute I’m fine, the next I find myself coming back to reality and don’t remember what happened. Usually it’s a few minutes, an hour at most, and it only happens once a week or sometimes less often... I think.”

“So why didn’t you tell us? You put us at risk back there Bob, we could have been out on the street, or having to run from them. You wanted to drive!”

“I know, I know. When you came? When I realized you were good people? I thought that I had sort of a last chance. A chance to do something good, to fight back. I guess I wanted to feel useful before it was all over and I wasn’t capable of anything apart from just being a vegetable.”

“You should have said,” muttered Edsel.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s done, and I understand. The Lethargy has taken everything away from us, all of us. You wanted to do something, feel like you were rallying.”

“Exactly. I’m glad you understand.”

“Well, now you really can do something to help Bob. You can look after Aiden while I go back and do what I planned to do. Those buggers can’t be allowed to get away with it, they simply can’t. I’ll deal with them. I’ll do it for you, I’ll do it for Aiden and me, I’ll do it for everyone that lost everything. I will kill those men for what they did to Kathy.”

***

Edsel pulled up outside Bob’s house and helped unload the car.

“Promise me you’ll look after him,” said Edsel, putting an arm on Aiden’s shoulder and squeezing.

“I promise,” said Bob.

“And you,” said Edsel, crouching down and staring Aiden right in the eye, “you promise me that you’ll look after Bob, just until I get back.”

“I promise,” said Aiden, hugging Edsel. He tried not to wince as the boy clutched him tightly.

“Right, see you soon.”

Edsel got back into the Suzuki and headed once more for the city.

SLAUGHTER

Edsel watched from across the street; it was quiet. It was still only early afternoon so the church should be relatively empty. He didn’t kid himself, he was no idiot either, he hoped anyway — if the church was full then there was no way he would win; they would kill him for sure.

He knew that dealing with all of The Eventuals was also impossible, and besides, this was a tiny Ward, there were more of them all over the country. But if he could just get those that gave him The Ink, and Bishop, that would be something right? A stab at the red heart of their sacred institution. Their corruption of all that still held meaning in the world.

I must be bloody mad doing this.

He stayed still for ten minutes and nobody came or went. They didn’t think they needed protecting: they were all there was. Nobody fought them; nobody had the will or the inclination. Surviving was all that mattered for most people.

So he walked across the street and went up the concrete steps to the front door.

I definitely am mad. I feel like they are all inside waiting for me, laughing at the idiot coming back for more.

The door squealed loudly as he tentatively pushed it open.

Empty.

He could hear chatter in the back, and buzzing. The sounds turned him cold even as sweat pricked his skin just like the needles had.

Edsel turned to a man of ice. He didn’t think or feel, he just walked. He picked up a long machete from the weapons table and walked down the center of the once holy room — now corrupted, making God weep for the acts of his children.

The chatter was interrupted with laughing, and the buzzing stopped for a moment. Edsel stood at the entrance to the room and took in the scene before him.

A man was strapped down to the gurney, but unlike when Edsel was in the same position this man actually looked happy. He was shaved and naked just as he had been, and bent over him were the two tattooists. The man’s feet were bright red and The Ink was already up to his shins. One tattooist was refilling his machine and the other was dabbing at the new Ink with a cloth to blot the blood. The man on the table was half mad with euphoria and pain, babbling about how he was humbled to finally become an Eventual and couldn’t wait to enter The Void.

Well, maybe I can help with that.

Edsel became vengeance.

The room went silent as the man on the gurney turned his head — no head straps for him, noted Edsel morbidly — and the other men slowly became aware that something was not quite right.

“What the hell?” managed the man on the left, his machine clattering to the table, red Ink spilling, running down a metal leg, pooling on the gleaming tiles.

For you Kathy. For everyone.

With a cry, Edsel charged into the room, all fear gone, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, acting on instinct. The rage and sorrow of days brimming over, vengeance reigning down death on those that would corrupt the souls of men.

Edsel watched as if in a dream as he ran across the room, the machete descending as he moved. He hacked hard and went clean through the arm of the man closest to him, his hand dropping to the floor, splashing in the spilled Ink. The man clutched at his stump as it squirted out his life-force, lost in a confusion of Ink and blood. It was impossible to tell which was which any longer, as the spray spouted a fine mist over them all.

Edsel pulled his arm up over his left shoulder and sliced down to the right, a horrible sucking sound as he slashed clean through the throat of the injured man. His esophagus opened up, blood bubbling in his throat, as he keeled over and stared at his own severed hand bathing in Ink while he died.

The man on the gurney screamed and squirmed, but his restraints held him tight — there for his own safety during the procedure. The other tattooist was up and almost across the room, heading for a rare handgun that was on one of the tables. Edsel sprang for him, slicing out as he did so, but just catching the man’s shoulder the lightest of touches with the edge of his blade. The man lunged for the table, grabbed the gun and turned.

Acting fast, Edsel hacked again and moved to his left as the man raised the gun, catching a glancing blow on the man’s knuckles that sprouted a line of blood immediately, hard to see on the Ink-red skin. He howled but didn’t let go of the weapon, and Edsel understood on an instinctive level that he would be dead in a second if he didn’t act fast. His mind was empty, there were no thoughts, only actions — revenge. Blood.

Instinct was still driving him; his body knew what to do even if he didn’t. He grabbed the lip of the small medical table and shoved it hard into the man, needles and unopened blister packs flying in all directions. The man staggered back and Edsel shoved again, harder. Then he lashed out with the machete, slicing his opponents’ arm. Edsel jumped on him and they went crashing to the floor amid the bottles of Ink and the tools of the tattooist.

Edsel kicked and punched wildly, out of control and frenzied. He was a berserker, mad with hate for the man that had marked him like a leper for the rest of his life. The tattooist smacked him hard in the nose and Edsel was blind with tears as his nose screamed in pain and his body erupted into fire from the contact with his foe. Edsel felt a punch to the ribs and hit back blindly, his knuckles hurting as he made contact with something. His vision cleared enough to let him shuffle back away from the man and he saw that the gun had skidded across the floor, taking a trail of blood and Ink with it as it slid through the red corruption.

The man was up and hunting for the gun. He saw it and jumped for it, but Edsel was on him, his own weapon lost, hammering on his back and his head with fists lost in pain. They squared on each other, fists held high, and the man punched out hard and precise. Edsel’s head snapped to the side, but he barely felt it; he charged the tattooist. They clattered into the wall, grabbing each other in a frenzy, trying to gain the advantage.

Snapping his leg up, Edsel kneed him in the groin and stepped back, panting hard. The man bent over and Edsel kicked at his head but he was so tired, the pain shooting along his thigh as he moved suddenly, that it didn’t make the best contact. Still, the man’s head whipped to the side, but he bulldozed forward and caught Edsel in the stomach with his head. The wind was knocked out of him as he staggered back, only to be stopped by the gurney. The strapped-down man was shouting obscenities about how Edsel was ruining what should have been his glorious acceptance to The Eventuals, so Edsel slammed a fist into his face before moving around to the other side of the gurney.

The tattooist was panting just as heavily as Edsel, but scanned for the gun. Now it was in the corner, kicked away during the scuffle.

He went for it.

Don’t let him get it. Go!

Edsel dove after him, grabbing the tattoo machine off the table as he flew toward the man, wires trailing where they ripped from the power supply.

The gun rose, time slowed, then Edsel was on him — stabbing out blindly in a panic as the gun centered on him. He caught the man’s arm and the needles went deep. The gun clattered to the tiles and Edsel pulled the machine out and smacked the side of it into the man’s face, the wires whipping about like viscera as he pulled back and did it again.

The tattooist went down grunting, not up to the ferocity of Edsel’s mindless onslaught.

The man was a mess, his face swelling as Edsel hit him again. Blood was pouring out of the man’s nose as Edsel leapt on him and raised his arm high overhead.

“You missed a spot,” hissed Edsel, and brought the tattoo machine down needles first. The man’s eye popped as the needles went in deep. Edsel left it there, sticking out of the broken face as he pulled his knife from its sheath at his side. Grabbing it with two hands he stabbed down into the man’s chest until the knife was buried up to the hilt.

He was dead.

Mindful of the messy floor, Edsel got to his feet carefully, his body on fire, his heart hammering, lungs sucking in air like a bellows.

“You killed them. You killed them!” shouted the man on the gurney. “My Ink, my sacred Ink. They didn’t finish it.”

“And they never will,” whispered Edsel, as he pulled his knife out of the dead tattooist and walked slowly over to the prone figure.

“You’ll burn in hell for this,” spat the man.

“Not before you do,” said Edsel, in a surprisingly calm voice. “Say goodbye.”

“Wha—“

Focusing on a mole, Edsel stabbed the man in the side of the neck. Blood spurted in a high arc, hitting the floor and mingling with Ink that would never mark his skin.

BLOOD

Blood. Everything was red.

There was blood everywhere and Edsel felt no sense of satisfaction. None at all. All he felt was sick, and empty. Like each life he took also carried away a part of him to The Void. If he believed in a soul then it truly was as if the killing took a chunk of it away and now he was left without one, alone in a world that didn’t care about the actions of one broken man.

Is this enough? Do I finally have my revenge? Is this supposed to be satisfaction?

He felt ripped open, gutted like a fish; empty of everything.

Edsel stood in the back of the church, in the very room where his life had begun to be indelibly taken away from him one painful pinprick at a time.

The room was red, just like him, just like he would always be. Ink and blood mixed on the floor, congealing and staining the tiles. Men lay dead: one with a hand cut off, another with his work tool sticking awkwardly out of his eye.

And the foul gurney? Home to a dead would-be Eventual, now never going to have his Ink finished.

Edsel was numb inside, but his body screamed its torment to him.

Pain was his only companion now. Pain and emptiness.

Is this what I wanted? Am I like them now? Bishop, what about Bishop?

Edsel knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t have it in him. This was doing more damage to him — his body, but more importantly his mind — than it was doing to The Eventuals. He’d had his revenge; it was time to go home.

Home? Where’s home? What’s anything without Kathy?

Edsel left the room, walking through the silent church, a smile forming on his face.

I have a new home, a new family. A chance to do something good still. Aiden. And that silly old bugger while he’s still alive.

He would bring up the boy, protect him from the horrors of a world where once normal people grow into men that kill other men in previously sacred buildings because the world had turned mad and everything was ruined.

I’ll do something right. I’ll do something good.

Edsel closed the door behind him, shutting away forever that part of his life, and staggered down the steps into the warmth of a glorious summer’s afternoon. He felt half a man, not only because of the things he had just done, although it certainly stripped him of much, but the pain clouded his mind, making everything feel like a dream.

Had he really just done that? Him, a man that would balk at having a fist-fight. The day blurred into one of pain and death — a reminder of all that he had lost.

But maybe he had gained something too? A slight chance at redemption. Aiden.

His legs roared in anger at being called upon to take one more step. His upper body cried at the punishment it had undergone. The fighting had torn away countless scabs and Edsel could see through his tattered shirt that his body was bleeding profusely in numerous places, mingling with the blood of those he had killed, Ink he had spilled.

He felt like he was being roasted slowly over an open fire, turned on a spit until every part of his body was crispy and he was cooked to his very core.

The sun shone down, burning his already battered arms, as Edsel moved fast across the street into the shade. He tried to calm himself but it was no use, he was in a half-panic, expecting an attack at any moment, but none came. He ran even though his body protested violently, forcing him to stop twice to vomit up foul bile, the stress of the day and the thought of what he had done too much for him to take.

Then he was safe, driving away, back to the quiet country home where an old man slowly faded away and a young boy needed a guardian to help him survive in a world that now had little meaning for Edsel — apart from maybe, just maybe, a shot at salvation now he had taken as much revenge as his body could stomach.

I can’t let them take everything away from me. This is over.

***

As he drove back toward what he felt of as his family now, Edsel couldn’t help going over the insanity of recent events. From what he had just done, going backward to killing a man and how easy it was, to darker thoughts of the pain of The Ink, of the vision of Kathy in the living room — something he could never forget — to trying to avoid re-capture after escaping, weaving home as fast as he could, always having to hide, then run. Always running.

Edsel thought of his escape, unable to shake the memory of lying on the gurney after just killing a man in the very same position he himself had been in; the difference being his was less than a voluntary sacrifice to The Ink and the perversion of faith that was The Eventuals.

They had got up to his lower chest and he still didn’t even consider escaping. Strapped down tight to the gurney it was impossible. There was no way he could get away; he couldn’t even move his eyelids for god’s sake.

As he lay there, the buzzing of the power source for the tattooists’ machines, their chatter, the humming of the stark white strip-light all conspiring to send him mad, Edsel suddenly decided there was only one thing to do. He clenched his stomach, pushed as hard as he could, and peed in a huge arc, his shriveled penis — which he thought was understandable considering it had just been manhandled by two men that stuck tiny needles into it — was hanging limp between his legs, pointing down toward the tattooists who were busy changing the needles on their machines and reloading with Ink before they continued their sick ritual.

“Argh.” Edsel couldn’t believe the pain. He was on fire from the waist down, the urine burning even though he assumed it would act as a way to soothe his skin. It worked for jellyfish stings didn’t it?

“Oi, watch out!” shouted one man, as he got pee all over his stained apron.

“Stop it, stop it!” shouted the other, moving quickly out of the way, pushing his trolley aside so it didn’t get wet too.

“I can’t, I can’t,” gasped Edsel. “And I think I’m going to crap too. I need to use the bathroom, quick, this is burning like you wouldn’t believe. Please.”

The two men busied themselves unstrapping him, arguing about who had let Edsel up last for a break. Neither of them had, and they were supposed to unstrap those that came for The Ink if necessary, and certainly well before now. They hadn’t done it, even though both had taken breaks themselves — not showing the courtesy to Edsel as he wasn’t there of his own free will.

As they unstrapped him they mopped at his wet skin, muttering that he would ruin their perfect work if he did things like that — a blasphemy against Him, against His Will. The Ink must be perfect; no flaws, no blemishes, no color variation whatsoever.

They think more of The Ink than they do of people; more worried about their work than what they are doing to me.

Edsel smiled to himself as they removed the foul contraption that held his eyelids open, then unstrapped his head. He wiggled it from side to side, his bones clicking noisily after the forced immobility.

“Don’t move suddenly,” said the larger man, “and don’t touch The Ink.”

“What about, you know?” said Edsel, staring down at his crotch.

“Not even that, or as little as possible. And after you’ve had a crap make sure you don’t rub your arse hard. You’ll know all about it if you do.” The man walked over to a table while the other kept an eye on him, pointing a gun for extra measure, and then returned with a pack of unscented wet-wipes. “Use these, but sparingly. I’d rather you stank a little than you messed up our work.”

Man, these guys are insane. Who cares if The Ink on my bum isn’t perfect?

They continued to argue about who was supposed to have taken Edsel to the bathroom, finally deciding that the one who’d had a break more recently should go. With a lot of grumbles he finally agreed, and as the one taking him muttered about how they should be using catheters and the like and the other one said they couldn’t as those getting The Ink were supposed to be as pure as when they were born for it to mean anything, Edsel was guided very gently out of the room, through the door, then taken down a corridor, right to the back of the building.

“There you go,” said the tattooist, pointing at the open door to a sparse but spotlessly clean bathroom. All Edsel wore was a pair of paper disposable slipper-type things, and he couldn’t believe how much more he hurt after such a short walk. “Be quick, and be careful. Try to lift a foot up and then swap to the other while you sit, it will mean The Ink won’t get as damaged.”

“The Ink,” muttered Edsel.

“Yeah, The Ink. This is a great honor you know? Once it’s done you will be like us, one of us. Bishop thinks you are going to be a valuable member of the Manchester Ward, so don’t let him down.”

“I won’t,” said Edsel, shuffling carefully over to the lavatory then turning before he sat.

“A little privacy?”

“You have got to be joking. The door stays open, the gun stays pointed.”

“Not exactly conducive to a man answering a call of nature, is it?” said Edsel, hoping the plan would go his way and the man would relent.

The man just shrugged. “You either need to go or you don’t, no skin off my nose.”

“Fine.” Edsel sat on the toilet after lifting the seat, and panicked — now what?

Then it came to him, and he didn’t like it one little bit.

Edsel squeezed down hard, trying to will himself to evacuate his bowels even though he didn’t need to.

Here it comes, here it comes, this is going to be so gross.

Edsel picked out one of the wet-wipes and moved it behind and to his backside as if to wipe, but instead he caught the feces as it dropped. The wet-wipe was already released into the bowl, as he needed to be sure that he had his own excrement in his hands so he was sure not to miss.

This is not how they do it in the movies.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Catch.” Edsel flung the wet lump of feces at the man’s face and it hit the mark dead on. The man freaked out big time. Edsel was up and at him in an instant, his body screaming at the fast movement, erupting into agony, feeling the backs of his legs almost rip as he got up from the seat. He pushed his filthy stinking hand right into the man’s screaming mouth then smeared the crap splattered all over the man’s face into his eyes. The man staggered about screaming and Edsel dodged past him, shoving him from behind and locking the door behind him.

Damn, the bloody gun. No time. Bugger.

Edsel ran — down the corridor, away from the dreadful room they’d given him The Ink in, and to the back of the building. Locked.

He spun around, his body pleading with him to stop and care for the terrible pain that was threatening to send him unconscious, but he ignored it and just ran down the corridor, out into the main part of the church. It was empty, The Eventuals all out performing their duties for the day.

Edsel ran. Out the building, into a light drizzle; naked, tattooed red right up to his neck, one hand covered in his own bodily waste and he had only one thought on his mind.

Kathy.

He ran.

He kept on running until he made it home.

It’s all over now. I have a chance to do something worthwhile. Aiden needs me and I won’t let him down.

***

He pulled up into the drive and couldn’t help but smile at the seeming normality of the situation — a nice country home full of provisions and a shot at a decent, hopefully boring life.

So much for the plans of men.

CHASE

“Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet in his head right now.”

Edsel had walked into a nightmare.

He was whistling as he got out of the car, the normality of the sight of Bob’s home, the sun shining, the plants in full bloom, bees buzzing about busily, all of it allowing him to believe for a moment that life really could be normal. Happy.

Then his heart had frozen as he walked into the kitchen and saw Bob laying by the stove, blood staining his shirt where his heart once beat, now still forever.

Sorry Bob. I’m really sorry.

Bishop had one arm tight around Aiden’s neck, the other held a gun to the boy’s temple.

Edsel’s world crumbled around him.

I’ve lost. Lost everything. Again.

“Let him go,” said Edsel, surprising himself with how calm he sounded.

“I don’t think so, do you? I must say, you look like you’ve been busy. I wasn’t really expecting you back, I assumed you would have been killed the minute you tried to... to what? Get revenge?”

“Something like that.”

I got it, fat lot of good it did me.

“Well, no matter. Whatever you did it won’t make any difference; you wasted your time.”

“So are you. What do you want with the boy? Isn’t it me you’re after? To finish the job?”

“Oh, we are well past that point my friend. No more Ink for you. Just The Void I’m afraid. You know, I almost didn’t bother following you when I saw you heading away from the city, but something told me I should. Now I’m glad I did. When I saw you leave on your own, looking all mean and serious, I just knew that you’d try something stupid, but I can honestly say I didn’t expect to see you again, not alive anyway. Aiden and Bob here? Well, we had a nice little chat until Bob decided to try and be a hero, so I had to take care of him. Aiden’s been good so far though, haven’t you?” Bishop ruffled Aiden’s hair; Edsel tried not to show his shock when Aiden just winked at him.

For a kid that’s going to get his head blown off he’s awfully calm.

Bishop went to move the gun back to Aiden’s temple but his arm hung motionless in the air above the boy’s head. A look of total surprise came across Bishop’s face as veins bulged and his face contorted with the effort of trying to move.

Aiden moved Bishop’s hand easily from the hold around his neck and shouted, “Run.”

They ran.

Out into the bright afternoon, Aiden going first, Edsel taking up the rear, looking behind them where Bishop was already out the door and pointing the gun.

“Behind the car,” shouted Edsel, just as a bullet whizzed past his head. Aiden ducked down on the driver side, and Edsel was there a split-second later. “Good to see you buddy,” whispered Edsel hurriedly, before opening the rear door and Aiden jumped in. Edsel yanked open the driver’s door and tried to keep low while turning the key in the ignition. The old Suzuki spluttered to life just as the windscreen on the passenger side cracked as a bullet made contact.

This is never going to end. Never. Stupid, they followed us home earlier. Idiot!

Edsel crunched into first gear and turned the wheel sharply to the right, spinning on the gravel drive before finding purchase. He headed toward the gate, gaining speed as fast as possible.

“Keep your head down, lie flat on the seat. And hold on.”

Edsel was in third by the time they got to the gate and he spun the wheel hard to the left, not quite making it and catching the hedge. He plowed on through, finally getting back onto the lane, and floored the accelerator as he moved into fourth gear. Edsel glanced in the rear-view mirror and was dismayed to see that there was already a car behind them. It looked like there was more than one of them inside.

Bishop’s got company. Not good.

“How many are there? And are you all right? What did you do back there?”

“I’m fine, you look terrible though. Good to see you Edsel; glad you made it,” said Aiden, smiling yet looking terrified at the same time. “There was just one man with him. He was out by their car, keeping watch. They parked it around the side of the house and they messed up Bob’s lawn. He went ballistic. Then they killed him.”

“I’m sorry about Bob, silly old sod. Did they hurt you?”

“Not really, no. That man, Bishop? He was just a bit rough. He knew I was Awoken though, but didn’t know I could do what I did. He’s quite powerful but I had the element of surprise. I did good, right?”

“Good? You did amazing buddy, amazing. I really thought it was the end for the both of us back there, but... Hang on, here they come.”

A fairly rugged Jeep gained on them fast and rammed into the back — Edsel struggled with the steering wheel as he almost lost control of the car.

You have got to be kidding me. There will be a spaceship or something next, or men on motorbikes.

Again. And again. The Jeep kept pulling back a little then speeding up to them and ramming them from behind. The poor Suzuki was going to come apart soon — it looked like it was only the rust that had been holding it together in the first place.

“So, what’s the plan?” said Aiden, finally sitting up, leaning forward.

“First, hop in the front, and then get low. It’s safer than being back there when they ram us.”

Aiden moved into the front quickly and sat down.

“Seatbelt.”

“Right.” Aiden buckled up and kept his head low.

What a day. What a life. And what the hell are we going to do now? I thought this nightmare was finally over.

Edsel raced through the lanes, overgrown hedges on either side clipping the car, ripping off the wing mirrors and smacking at the already cracked windscreen. He had no idea where the lanes went so was driving blind, and fast.

At least they’ll be in the same boat. Gotta think Edsel, have a plan.

They sped on. Luckily the sun was behind them or Edsel knew he would have crashed by now. A signpost indicated a junction up ahead where the narrow lane met a main road and he could really get up some speed. But for how long? Bishop and whoever he had with him would be on them soon enough — they had a lot more power in their vehicle than he did. Edsel met the junction at full speed and hung onto the large steering wheel as he dragged it hard to the right to take the turn.

He righted them and pressed hard on the accelerator until the pedal was down as far as it would go. The speed crept up, but nowhere near fast enough — already he could see that Bishop was gaining on them.

Edsel leaned over and opened the glove compartment. “Okay, you’re gonna have to use this.” Edsel showed Aiden the gun he’d taken from the church. “Ever use one?” Aiden just stared at him like he was stupid. “Okay, sorry.” Edsel fiddled with it while trying to focus on the road, then handed it to Aiden, keeping it pointing forward.

“Do not point it at me, or yourself, ever. It’s good to go, just pull the trigger. Now, don’t aim for them, aim for the wheels. I’m going to slam on the brakes and you shoot the tires. Okay?”

“What if I miss?” asked a worried looking Aiden, the pressure of the situation clearly getting to him in a big way.

Poor kid, bet he wishes he was at home being bored with Martha. Wish I was.

“Then shoot again, and again, until you hit one. Don’t think about it, just point and shoot.”

Edsel moved the car over to the right hand lane then slammed on the brakes and they were thrown forward. The seatbelts restrained them and before the other car could react they were alongside it. Aiden leaned out the window and shot at the driver side wheels.

Crack.

He missed.

Crack crack.

“Yes!”

“Got it?”

“Got it,” confirmed Aiden.

“Good job buddy.”

Edsel drove off as fast as he could, taking the weapon off Aiden then throwing it out the window.

“Hey! What did you do that for?”

“Out of bullets. There were only three.”

“What? I could have missed, why didn’t you say?” said Aiden, voice rising higher and higher.

Edsel smiled at him. “Would that have made it any better? If I’d said you had three shots and that was it?”

“Hmm, doubt it,” said Aiden, smiling back. “Now, what was the plan again?”

“We’re going home,” said Edsel defiantly.

“Home?”

“To Bob’s, that’s going to be our home, right?”

“Our home? You mean you and me? Really?”

It nearly broke Edsel’s heart to hear so much hope in a child that had been dragged into such a nightmare because of him. He had to find a way out of this, he simply had to. “That’s right buddy, you and me. Home.”

Edsel took the next right turn and made his way back through the lanes in the direction of Bob’s house. It took a few wrong turns and a little bit of bickering over which lane to take — they all looked the same — but they made it.

Now all they had to do was wait for Bishop and whoever was with him to show up.

Looks like I’m going to kill Bishop after all. Hopefully.

The second Edsel saw Bishop he knew he would have gone back for him eventually — there may not have been satisfaction, but it had to be done. Bishop had to die for what he’d done to Kathy.

HOME

On the way back Edsel explained what he assumed would happen, but said he would tell Aiden later about his own adventure earlier in the day, not wanting to get into it at the moment.

Edsel guessed that with their car out of action then Bishop and his partner would make their way to Bob’s on foot, so they could get the Seat that Edsel and Aiden had arrived in that morning. It felt like a lifetime ago. Could it really only have been that morning when they pulled up at Bob’s and the silly old sod had pointed his empty shotgun at them?

Crazy.

If they were quick then they could get back to the house, hide their car, and hopefully have an actual plan of action by the time The Eventuals arrived.

It wasn’t much of an idea, but then, he hadn’t had a good one since the nightmare had begun and they strapped him down and started tattooing his feet.

They finally managed to navigate the lanes until they realized they were back on the road leading to Bob’s house. A few minutes later Edsel drove a route he felt like he’d already seen a million times. There was the gate again, there was the quaint old house, the flowers and the gravel drive, the blooming borders and ancient oak trees shading the lawns.

It had probably only been twenty minutes since he’d last seen the exact same thing but now it took on a sense of foreboding, rather than optimism and a feeling that life might just turn out all right after all.

I’m just going around and around in circles, dragging death along with me. Soon it will all be over. One way or another.

After parking the car out of sight, Edsel got out and scanned around — there was no way Bishop would have made it back yet, but it was best to be cautious. He opened the door for Aiden and he jumped out, looking worried. Aiden made no move to enter the house, which was perfectly understandable.

“I’m sorry about Bob.”

“Me too. They just killed him Edsel, just like that. Like it was nothing.”

“I know. They don’t care Aiden, they think they were doing him a favor, doing the planet a favor by getting rid of one more precious person. They’re insane, all of them. Come on, we have things to do, and fast.”

Edsel led the way down the garden to Bob’s Anderson shelter. He rummaged around inside until he found what he wanted, then got Aiden to help him move it back toward the house.

This will either work or it won’t. Either way this ends today.

Edsel and Aiden worked hard for all of five minutes, then they had done as much as Edsel thought was safe to do before risking being seen if Bishop made good time back — assuming that he did come back. Edsel knew he would. It was the logical thing to do, and they wouldn’t think him and Aiden would return.

Just like they didn’t think I’d go back to their corruption of a church. Seems they underestimated me again. If they do come back.

Edsel frowned at his own confidence, knowing it was unfounded and he was alive because he’d been lucky, and stupid. He prayed his luck would hold out a little longer.

He took Aiden past the gardens and the animal enclosures, then out into the orchard. At the far end was a small tool shed where Bob had shown them he stored various pruning and crop gathering equipment. He explained to Aiden that he couldn’t face anything bad happening to him and that he wanted him to hide in the shed. If he didn’t come back for him by the time it got dark, then he was to make sure Bishop had left then try to find somewhere else to live, just in case The Eventuals came back to take what provisions and equipment they could salvage.

Aiden argued vehemently, reminding Edsel of how he had helped him survive and escape a number of times throughout the day, but Edsel was adamant. There had already been enough bloodshed and he could not, would not, be responsible for losing someone else he cared for.

That swung it, Edsel knew. Understanding that he cared for him, Aiden promised to hide and do what Edsel asked, even though he clearly wanted to help if he possibly could. Edsel left the boy in the shed, the smell of apples permeating the wood and everything inside. It smelled like the country; it smelled like home — back when his mum would bake an apple pie on Sundays and they would sit around the table, eating a roast dinner, arguing over who got to have the last of the Yorkshire puddings and whose turn it was to do the washing up.

Edsel closed the door behind Aiden and made his way across the short grass of the orchard. He went to fight what he prayed was to be his last ever battle. His legs felt like dead-weights, his skin felt like molten wax — as if it was dripping off him as the flames licked higher, and he couldn’t stop the thud, thud, thudding of a mantra running in a loop around his head.

Kathy, Kathy, Kathy.

Over and over it played, the happy life of just a few short days ago taken and replaced with red. Red Ink, red blood, cuts and pain and the lack of satisfaction after his partial revenge.

Well, it looked like he had the opportunity to complete his revenge now, maybe that would give him the peace he craved?

He didn’t believe it would for a second, but at least his attempt at vengeance would be complete one way or the other. Whether or not it made him feel better or not, Kathy’s death would have been avenged and he would be free to try to build a life, if for no other reason than so Aiden never had to live through what he had.

Edsel went to wait for his tormentor.

This had better work.

***

Reality became dream-like. As he stood, then squatted without realizing, on the gravel at the front of the house, Edsel lost himself in a summer haze that lifted his thoughts to dance in the sky with the fluffy clouds. His thighs burned from his position, The Ink, and the trials he had endured since he had been captured.

His forearms burned in the sun, and the smell of the blood of others tickled the cilia of his nostrils as he drifted further and further away from the present.

He felt something wash over him, almost like The Lethargy in reverse. This wasn’t simply energizing his body and mind though — it was something different entirely. Edsel watched from far above himself as the wreck of a man below began to shimmer orange, fractal wisps of energy crackling around him like the sun was shining through his pores. Waves washed over the man he felt only remotely connected to, gentle lapping then a fierce pounding, like the tide coming in and out with all the force of the oceans of the world behind it.

He became the ocean, vast and deep, dark and heavy; light and gentle at the shore.

Life stirred inside. Edsel fell from the clear sky and became a man again, but somehow not the man he had been. He could feel the beginnings of a new him shifting inside, hinting at things, at mysteries and at knowledge, at futures infinite in possibility, each decision, each act, branching off into countless futures never ending in scope.

Focus became sharp, vision cleared, and Edsel stared out at the world like a newborn — everything was fresh, clear, deeper and more complex than he had ever imagined. Telling tales of the way the world really was, of what was possible — the nature of things; of nothing. He caught glimpses of The Noise, and The Void, the only enduring non-thing there ever was. Where everything came from and everything returned to in the blink of a cosmic eye.

Edsel had begun to Awaken.

It wasn’t a sudden opening up of the vast potential one man had inside him, to play in The Noise and for all things to be known to him, to be able to alter his body chemistry and never age a day. No, it was just a tickle under the chin, a slight hint of what could happen if he ever did truly Awaken, like those at The Commorancy, like a man named Marcus Wolfe he had once sought out but given up on when he found happiness with Kathy.

Edsel stood slowly, his limbs screaming but somehow different. There was a tiny hint of control, a lessening of the pain if he focused and tried to soothe his ravaged body.

The Ink?

It would always remain, a reminder, a brand telling of the bad in men — him and others, and the man that was taught a valuable lesson by the cruelties of human beings.

Someday he might even understand what that lesson was.

Edsel wandered as if in a daze as he heard two men approaching. He went around to the back of the house, then returned a few seconds later to where he had been standing.

He stood in the sunshine and watched as two men walked up the driveway.

I am ice. I am patience. I am calm and I will watch them burn in hell for their crimes.

NEWS

“You know I could just shoot you right now, don’t you?” said Bishop, looking tired and harassed, Edsel was pleased to note.

“Go ahead then, what’s stopping you?”

Edsel registered the look of confusion on Bishop’s face; the man next to him just stood there impassively, a red statue.

He didn’t think I knew, but now he’s not so sure.

“Where’s the boy?”

I knew it! They want Aiden; the game has changed now. They know he’s Awoken and they want him.

“Gone. Away. I sent him back to the city. You’ll never find him.” Edsel hoped that the sweat trickling down his forehead wasn’t giving the game away.

“I don’t believe you, you haven’t had time. Where is he?” Bishop demanded.

“The kid’s smart, as I’m sure you know. He can drive pretty good for a youngster.” Edsel stared at Bishop, understanding what had changed the situation so drastically. He figured something was different as they were being chased in the car. Why didn’t they just shoot at them? Why just try to ram them off the road? He knew they didn’t want him, knew that Bishop just wanted him dead for his blasphemy of escaping and denying The Ink. So it had to be the boy. He was very young to be Awoken, that could be a real help to the church, and he was still immature and impressionable enough that he assumed they thought they could brainwash him into being one of them.

“Bet he’d be invaluable, right? A young boy, able to sense the presence of others, enter their minds. Wipe them out with just a thought, like the flip of a switch?”

Damn, too much information. Keep it together Edsel, just a little longer. You are ice.

Bishop looked shocked. “He can do that? He’s more powerful than we thought. I never even considered that he’d be able to make an Awoken stop moving like he did. Wonderful.”

Edsel noticed that Bishop had said too much as well. “We?”

“I have my orders,” was all Bishop offered. “Now, where is he?”

“I told you, he’s gone.”

“And I don’t believe you.”

“Whatever.”

Bishop and his silent sentry took a step forward, each probably knowing what the other was about to do, or talking silently through The Noise.

Did he sound casual? Relaxed? Like a tough guy? He hoped so, but doubted it. Edsel reached into his pocket, while Bishop trained the gun on him. He fumbled for the lighter there and said, “You mind if I smoke? It will be my last, right?”

“Right. Go ahead, be my guest.”

Edsel squatted down, fumbling in his pocket for a non-existent pack of rare cigarettes. He dropped the lighter. “Oops.”

“Hey, hang on, what are you up t—“

Edsel brushed aside the gravel, turned the valve and flicked the lighter.

Light first time, light first time. This better work.

He repeated it like a prayer as time slowed and his thumb scratched along the roller of the disposable lighter. It sparked into life and Edsel heard a satisfying whoosh before he even had the chance to look up at his handiwork. Edsel moved away from the tiny spout of flame coming toward him, nothing like the one that was right now shooting out at the two men.

Bishop’s goon was screaming, running around in a mad panic, swatting at his clothes as the burst of flame engulfed him.

Bishop was trying to dodge the flailing garden hose that was now spraying flame incredibly fiercely in random directions. Edsel had connected it up to the propane and left it lying on the gravel like it was there ready to water the pots lined up around the front of the house. He was surprised it had worked, even though in his mind it should have. He’d checked the gas bottle that ran the boiler and it was pretty full, so he’d simply connected the garden hose to the bottle, put a valve on it where he had decided to wait in full view, and turned on the gas.

He’d wrapped some tape around the hose just after the valve, then made a tiny hole in the hose — he had his marker so he knew where to direct the lighter. Edsel was no engineer but he assumed, and he really hoped he was right, that the non-return valve he’d hooked up would mean that when he lit the propane then the flame would have only one way to go and wouldn’t just explode the bottle, and maybe the house along with it. He was getting rather fond of the house.

It worked.

The second he flicked the lighter into life a fountain of flame shot out of the open end of the hose, spraying fire randomly, the hose dancing like a cobra.

Yes!

It had been risky, he’d had to time it just right. Staying calm and talking to the men until they were stood just in front of the innocuous hose had been tough — it felt like they could see right through his dubious and desperate plans.

Bishop’s companion was tearing off his clothes, screaming as the flames licked at his face, the skin on his bald head already bubbling under the heat. Bishop hadn’t fared half as bad, although the shock of the spouting flame had caught him off-guard and he got a nasty hit to his gun arm. The cloth was melted on his forearm and the gun clattered to the ground, forgotten in the panic as Bishop tried to douse the flame before it got worse.

Finish it, finish it, finish it. Now.

With the smell of burning flesh heavy in the air, Edsel ran at them. Already the flame was dying down, now nothing but a tiny flicker that stuttered and died before he even reached his tormentor. He grabbed the gun but it was scalding and he had to drop it immediately. The other man was on the floor now, moving slower and slower, moans subsiding as his life bled into The Void. The fire had done its work and he would be dead soon, throat burned out, lungs irreparably scorched.

Bishop was becoming aware of his situation now, and as Edsel lunged at him with his knife Bishop chopped down with his left arm and caught Edsel on the wrist, deflecting the strike down and away. Bishop kicked out and caught Edsel hard in the groin; as he doubled over Bishop ran, clutching his burned arm, toward the side of he house where he knew the cars would be parked.

Damn, the keys are still in the cars. Stupid.

Edsel hadn’t had time to think of everything, the plan he had come up with was full of flaws he knew, but at least it was a chance, and that was all that had counted at the time. He sprinted after Bishop, coughing and doubled over from the fierce kick. His groin screamed in agony, the force of the kick adding to the ever present torture of The Ink. Sharp pains stabbed him as he moved, hard shards of scabs poking him that had been dislodged by the kick and now the strange crab-like running he had to do to keep moving.

Never gonna end. Never.

A car sprang to life before he reached the corner, and gravel kicked up as it roared right at him in reverse — it was the Suzuki that Edsel had parked behind the Seat. Edsel jumped out of the way, landing hard on the gravel, his ravaged body screaming for him to stop, to never move a muscle again. Was there no end to the pain one man could endure?

He scrambled to his feet, palms bleeding and ripped from the gravel that was now stuck to the wet skin. The car was reversing to the gate. Was Bishop leaving? Edsel assumed the man would fight, but then he remembered his arm, the skin bubbling like marbles under cellophane.

He probably can’t stand the pain. Well, welcome to my world buddy.

Edsel was about to run for the car he’d arrived in that morning, but then thought of Aiden. He couldn’t just leave the boy, not after everything that had happened. He’d be alone with this goon all crispy on the gravel, with Bob dead inside. He couldn’t decide — part of him wanted to look after Aiden, at least tell him that everything was going to be okay now, but was it? Was it really? Unless he stopped Bishop now then he’d be back in the city in ten minutes and ordering his Ward to rain down bloody hell on Edsel and Aiden. They’d lose, no doubt about it. If they came in force then they’d kill Edsel and they’d take Aiden and try to turn him into a red abomination like them.

It’s okay, go. Finish it. For us, for Bob, for Kathy.

“What? Where are you?” Edsel turned in a circle but couldn’t see Aiden anywhere.

I’m talking to you via The Noise. I’m thinking what I want to say. I can feel you, sense what happened. Hang on.

Aiden appeared from across the orchard, running fast. Edsel was confused; could he hear the boy’s thoughts like Aiden could sense his? This was different though, like a normal conversation.

It’s what happens to a lot of Awoken. They can talk via The Noise, especially when close like we are.

Wow. You mean you can hear me?

Um, a little. I missed some words, but I felt it when you sort of began to Awaken. It’s weird, isn’t it.

“Oh yeah, and it’s just getting weirder. Okay, this is it buddy, I’m going to end this. They won’t let us have any peace otherwise. Okay?”

“Okay.” Aiden nodded his approval, smiling weakly.

I’ll wait.

“And I will be back,” said Edsel resolutely, running for the car despite the pain, half of him hating himself for feeling the adrenaline rush of the chance to finish his revenge. He was going to let Bishop live, too sick of the killing, afraid of what it was doing to him. He’d been wrong, these people wouldn’t stop, not until they got what they wanted. It had been just him, now they wanted the boy too.

Well, they aren’t going to get him. Not now. Not ever.

Edsel pulled up next to Aiden. “Be on your guard, but I think they were on their own. Just lay low and I’ll be back, then it will be over.”

“Okay, please be careful. And good luck.”

Thanks.

“Hey, I’m getting the hang of this.”

Edsel spun the wheels, turned in the drive and followed after Bishop...

“That was quick,” said Aiden, two seconds later as Edsel reversed back up to him.

“Um, yeah. The gun?” hinted Edsel, pointing at it on the ground. “Careful, it’s hot. Here.” Edsel rooted in the glove compartment and passed a cloth out to Aiden. He picked the gun up with it and handed it to Edsel.

“Bye again,” said Edsel, sure his face now looked like it had The Ink too.

Some hero. Never forget the gun Edsel. Never.

AGAIN

I’m on a goddamn merry-go-round. This is getting ridiculous.

Edsel felt like he was living a perverted version of Groundhog Day — a movie he’d seen when he was young and TV still ruled. Back and forth, pain and anger, hope then despair. In the city, out the city, back again. Go to Bob’s. Leave Bob’s. Then back again and around and around in ever-decreasing circles that threatened to send him spiraling down into madness, just as he spiraled around the city and the surrounding countryside.

Was there no end to the madness?

This is it, the last time I ever set foot in this stinking place.

Edsel approached the city once more; he could see the Suzuki up ahead. He wondered if Bishop was screaming in pain. Hopefully the answer was yes.

He had to admit it, he felt absurd. Here he was, a slight hint of new car smell still lingering after all these years, an air freshener in the shape of a tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, and him — a man screaming to get out of his own ruined skin, every inch of his body apart from his head feeling like it would be better if he just clawed it off with his broken, dirty fingernails, chasing an Awoken man that was in charge of a handful of zealous acolytes that made up a tiny fraction of the most depressing religion he’d ever heard of, let alone been kidnapped by.

But even that wasn’t the worst of it. He was driving as fast as he dared down a wide road that headed into a city he’d just managed to escape from with his life and sanity hopefully still intact. All around were abandoned cars like see-through coffins, some with skeletal remains still inside. The streets were piled high with the trash of countless thousands of people before they too succumbed to the scourge that ripped around the globe, indiscriminately taking away the energy that allowed people and society to function.

How could I have lived here? Ignored all this?

Buses were blocking parts of the road. There were huge delivery vehicles abandoned by drivers that simply stopped and wandered off in a daze before coming-to in strange parts of the city. Mums taking kids to school; mums with babies in the back that died slowly after she succumbed to The Lethargy and sat there in a stupor, never hearing her child’s screams.

Pedestrians who wandered the streets in a waking nightmare, not knowing what to do, where to go, searching for somebody to talk to — he’d seen it all, and worse. That’s all it got: more of a nightmare. Now there was nobody — people didn’t venture out in the daylight, what few there were, not unless they really had to. Eventuals roamed the streets looking for Whole, killing or converting, following their directives. Any Whole with any sense were cowering behind closed doors, hoping that there was a chance their home wouldn’t be searched, or that they had enough food and water to last another day.

It had to end, something had to change. The Commorancy, if it really was real, that seemed to hold the answer. Helping people Awaken, hide them from The Eventuals, give them a chance. Maybe in time those lucky few would emerge and set the world to rights?

Edsel had his doubts.

No, all there was now was revenge. A newly sparked need for vengeance after finally thinking he’d done enough. He hadn’t, but he would.

The Suzuki slowed, there was no choice, and Edsel had to do the same as the road became if not impassable, then slow and dangerous. One wrong turn and you would be stuck, no way to move forward, and a puncture was a very real danger.

Bishop was crawling along at a snail’s pace now, weaving in and out of abandoned vehicles, dodging the trash that rose in mounds around vehicles like a snowdrift after a storm.

Edsel crept after him.

I’m coming for you Bishop.

A clear patch opened up before them. A large forty foot container had almost completely blocked the road so ahead of it was open. Already Bishop was speeding away by the time Edsel made it past. He raced after him, knowing he wouldn’t stand a chance if Bishop made it close enough to call for help through The Noise, or got back to the church where his Ward would now be beginning to congregate, witness to the vengeance that played out just a few hours ago.

Something ran out into the road far ahead and Bishop stupidly swerved to avoid it, but failed. Instead, he simply plowed right into it.

The Suzuki began to slow, smoke coming from the front of the vehicle — the grill obviously jammed with whatever animal it was and the car overheating. Or something stuck under a wheel? It didn’t matter.

Edsel sped forward as Bishop got out and began to run. He unwrapped the gun and checked it wasn’t too hot — it was fine.

Should he shoot now? Wait until he was closer? What was best? What if he missed and Bishop got away?

Edsel put the gun back on the seat and floored the accelerator pedal. He watched as the speedometer climbed. He drove straight for Bishop.

Thunk. Thunk thunk.

The car bounced as the suspension tried to compensate for the rough road, no mere bump but a human being. Edsel slammed on the brakes and looked in the rear-view. Bishop was on the ground, blood smearing the asphalt where he’d been dragged a few feet after Edsel had run him over.

Edsel got out of the car, remembered the gun, then grabbed the keys from the ignition too.

I’m learning.

He walked toward the body of Bishop lying in the road, clothes in tatters, Ink showing between the rags, his right arm a huge mass of blisters that were almost black, oozing thick pus. His legs were mangled, splintered bone poking through his thigh and a shin. Bishop’s back was flayed, strips of skin peeled back revealing flesh free of Ink so far beneath what was once the surface.

But he was alive. Bishop was trying to drag himself away with his left arm, the only part of him not ruined. He was panting heavily and his chest rattled terribly, probably full of fluid.

Edsel walked slowly up to him, feeling a gentle breeze on his skin, tickling his scalp and cooling his body — a welcome relief from the hot afternoon sun. He prodded Bishop with his foot, then used it to turn him over so he was flat on his back. Bishop moaned loudly, his broken body protesting at being disturbed.

Bishop was smiling; a smile of the insane. A man who thought he was going to a better place.

Maybe he is; it can’t be any worse than this madness.

Edsel pointed the gun at Bishop’s face, but then lowered it, thinking better of it as something caught his eye.

END

“All of this because we gave you The Ink?” hissed Bishop through smashed teeth, his lips swollen horribly, half ripped away.

Edsel looked at him, confused. “The Ink? No. I would have just run, tried to get away if I could. But you killed Kathy.”

“Kathy? I don’t understand?”

“At my house, you killed her.”

“I’m sorry, I really am. But she came at me, I had no choice.”

“No choice? LIAR!”

“It’s the truth, I swear.”

“You killed Kathy. My dog, my friend. Such a beautiful Golden Retriever, pure and innocent unlike the rest of the world now. You killed her with a poker! Like she was nothing,” spat Edsel. “She was everything to me, my little bit of normality. I loved her. Kathy.”

“This was all because of a dog? You’re insane.”

“I’m insane? Look at you. Look what you did to me. You ruined everything.” Edsel lifted the broken traffic light high above his head, towering over the prostrate figure of Bishop. He brought it down hard and fast, smashing Bishop’s face into a messy pulp of brains and bone.

“I loved that dog.”

The End

Book 2 is INK: Black

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Bet you didn’t see that coming, right? Or maybe you did. If so, then damn!

INK has been a real blast to write — I love the characters and I hope you got something out of it. INK is set in a world explored very thoroughly in the five part series The Commorancy. Edsel isn’t in it, well, nothing more than a cameo appearance in book 5, but the world is the same. It’s not a fast-paced series of books like INK has been, it focuses right in on a large cast of characters and explores the world very fully from the beginning of The Lethargy right up to hundreds of years in the future.

It’s bizarre, sometimes confusing, and as much a fantasy book as anything termed Sci-Fi or speculative fiction (although labeling the series is kinda tough).

If you want to get immersed in the world of The Commorancy, and are up to the challenge, then the first book is absolutely free. Just visit my website for links to all the books.

Can you do me a favor? Tell your friends about INK, and if you want to say a few words in the form of a review at your favorite bookstore then it would be greatly appreciated. The more reviews, the more chance of others stumbling across this book. Plus it makes me sit down every day and write new stories.

Thanks for reading. Drop me a line any time at al@alkline.co.uk if you want to say hi.

Stay jiggy.

Al

P.S., Don’t forget to read books 2 and 3 in the INK series. There’s plenty more action, and a new love interest for Edsel. I think you’ll agree he deserves it.

Book 2 is INK: Black

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NUMBERS GAME

Rebecca Rode

For my husband, Francis, who will always be my Number One, and for my daughter, whose beauty and spirit transcend numbers altogether.

PART ONE

1

TREENA

The biggest event of my life was minutes away—thirty-nine minutes, to be exact—and my two best friends couldn’t stop fighting.

Dresden rode his custom-made, sleek, silver bicycle to my left. His clean white uniform was tailored tightly to his firm shoulders, and he moved with a certain ease, a confidence that seemed to draw the eyes of every student around us. Fates, he was beautiful. I still couldn’t believe he’d chosen me for his girlfriend. He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Come on, Treena. Pick up the pace.”

Tali, pedaling her dull black bike to my right, snickered. “Such a gentleman.”

We usually headed for work at the broadcasting center after school, but that was over now. Today the yellow lanes were clogged with Level Three graduates, all headed in the same direction—the city center. We would enter as kids and emerge officially Rated adults. My stomach twisted at the thought. I’d looked forward to this my entire life, and now that it was here I just wanted to be left alone. I checked my techband again. Thirty-eight minutes.

A wide-set guy with a black bike pedaled hard in front of me, taking up half the lane by himself. Traffic was especially bad today, but only in the yellow lane where we traveled. The green lanes were clear as could be.

“Look at that line,” Dresden said with a chuckle. “It’s disgusting how desperate people get.” I followed his gaze to the Appearance Sector. A long line of desperate, last-minute customers in purple watched us pass with closed expressions. Advertisements for plastic surgery—“Get Your Rating-Preferred Nose Here!”—vision correction, advanced-formula nutrition pills, and eye tattoos battled for attention on the storefronts and ad boards above their heads. Tomorrow was Rating Day for them. As graduates, we got our numbers a day before everyone else. Lucky us.

The traffic light flashed, and we dragged to a stop. Dresden loved this section of town, where the skyscrapers loomed high above us. The tallest one, a shiny copper edifice, stood at the corner to my right. I pointedly ignored it.

Dres shaded his eyes with one hand. “It doesn’t look eighty-two floors high from here, does it?”

“I’m sure it looks higher from the top,” Tali said.

It did, but I didn’t say so. That meant admitting I’d been up there. The tower housed the Olympus Credit Office, but it was better known for what happened there the night of Rating Day each year. The building’s guards would conveniently disappear, and some of the newest reds and yellows—the year’s “loser crop,” as Dresden called them—would climb the stairs to the top and jump. The morning road-cleaning crew swept up their broken bodies along with the dirt and trash.

The noblest decision they could have made, my stepdad often said.

“Some of the guys are coming to watch tonight,” Dresden said. “There were six jumpers last year and four the year before that. Maybe tonight there will be even more.”

I fought a sudden nausea and looked away. The light stopped blinking, and Dresden pushed off. He was halfway through the intersection before I managed to follow.

“I don’t get why you like him,” Tali said next to me. “Are you okay, Treen? You look pale.”

“I’m fine. Give Dresden a break, Tali. He’s a good guy. There’s a lot more to him than you think.”

“There better be.” She gave a loud sigh as we caught up to Dresden. “Fates, I can’t wait for the ceremony to be over. Then everyone will be halfway normal again, and we can just live our lives in peace for another year.”

“And that is exactly your problem,” Dresden said, glancing at us. “You don’t live in spite of your number but because of it. Ratings are the whole point. At least for those of us living in reality. Peak was a genius when he came up with the system.”

Tali rolled her eyes. “That’s stupid. The numbers shape themselves to fit us, not the other way around. Ratings are supposed to make order of chaos, make it easier to live our lives. Not become our lives.”

“Taliyah,” I warned. After my big speech about Dresden’s qualities, she had to bring up the one subject he wouldn’t back down on.

“You don’t get it,” Dresden said. “And you never will. It’s people like you who become yellows and reds. Treena, I can’t believe you call her your friend. I hope associating with her didn’t pull your score down.”

“If you dorks don’t stop fighting,” I said, “I’m throwing you both off the tower.”

Tali chuckled and leaned toward me. “Don’t worry about him, Treen. He doesn’t often surround himself with us lesser folk. When it comes to himself or others, he’ll always choose himself.” Her voice rose as if to make sure he could hear. “In fact, if you were lying in the street dying, he wouldn’t give you a second thought. Unless you were a green, of course. Not even that—no, you’d have to be a higher green, and he’d make sure everyone was watching before he helped.”

“Taliyah,” I broke in, my voice flat. “That’s enough.”

Her mouth snapped closed, but her cheeks flushed pink. Dresden glared at his bike handles, his knuckles white. For him to reply would only add truth to her words. Tali would just have to get used to this. Dresden had been in my life for months now, and if we scored within a hundred points of each other, he would be a major part of it. Forever. She’d have to keep her angry rants to herself.

“Taking the shortcut,” Tali grumbled as we approached Harbor Road. “See you there.”

“Wait!” I called after her and gave Dresden an apologetic look. “Let’s go with her. It’ll be faster.”

He exhaled hard, but his desire to get there quickly must have overridden his disdain for my friend, because he turned to follow. I felt like a mother juggling two toddlers, trying to keep them both within reach, trying not to choose one over the other. I guess I kept hoping they’d grow up instead of forcing me to make that choice.

Tali was already down the block, pedaling hard in the empty lane. We’d get there faster this way, but we also had to pass the Red District, which was one good reason we usually avoided this route.

“You could at least pretend to be nice to her,” I told him as we followed. She was riding faster now, probably because her attempt to escape Dresden hadn’t worked. “I’m nice to your friends, you know.”

“My friends come from high families, Treena. Tali lives in a different world than we do. You’re above her in every way. You’ll see that soon enough.” He gave me a sideways glance. “That’s the beauty of the numbers—it puts everyone where they’re supposed to be.”

“Shh. Not so loud.”

The road was rougher here, and so were the people. They filled the sidewalks, their red numbers glowing on their foreheads like blood. Beggars in worn uniforms lined the filthy street, watching us carefully, as if trying to decide if we carried nutrition pills. I didn’t, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they approached us to find out. An image of a mob attacking us as we rode past flashed through my mind. I shuddered and pedaled harder.

It felt like forever, but we finally emerged from the Red District and cut across an empty park. At first glance the city center looked like any other old-fashioned government building, little more than a six-story box with white marble and stately Roman columns. Transports were lined up in front, delivering important people like a giant anaconda giving birth to various shades of purple uniforms. These were the city’s elite, people like my stepdad. The side entrance was full of students in white clamoring to make their way inside.

Tali had already parked her bike. Well, thrown it to the ground, more like. She strode toward the doors like a determined soldier going to war. I could only hope she wasn’t too mad to save me a seat. We parked our bikes.

Dresden started toward the building, but I held back. “You ready for this?”

He chuckled. “Of course. I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. You have too, remember?”

“Yeah, but I can’t help thinking that there’s something I’ve missed—some little score I haven’t earned yet.”

He snapped his fingers. “I know! You forgot to organize your shoes by color and style this morning.”

“Very funny.”

“Look, I’ve never seen anyone align their life to the Standards as closely as you. You’re almost obsessive, Treena. If anyone doesn’t have cause to worry, it’s you. Now, what’s really going on?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Have you ever wondered if you really want this? The Rating, the implant, everything?”

He cocked his head and examined me like a scientist would study a bug. “You’re joking, right? That doesn’t sound like the kick-butt Treena I know. Come here.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a tree. A fir tree, I guessed by the needles, although it was plastic. Real trees hadn’t existed in NORA for decades.

When we were out of sight, I rested my head against his chest, feeling him exhale in a contented sigh. It was easy to pretend that nothing would ever change when we were together like this. It almost felt like tomorrow was just another school day. Like our first official steps into adulthood were years away instead of minutes.

“You’re just nervous,” he whispered. “Let me help you forget.” My pulse quickened as he lowered his head to mine, and I lifted my face willingly. Our lips met. He was a great kisser— passionate and hungry—and he didn’t hold back. I melted into his chest as the heat between us intensified. But all too soon he pulled away, gasping for breath. I groaned, and a goofy smile spread across his face. “And now, it’s time to go.” He released me and threw his arms wide. “Our destiny awaits!”

I threaded my fingers through his. Dres was right. We’d prepared for this since we could crawl. It was a celebration, not a sentence. I checked my techband. Twenty-two minutes. “Together, right?”

“Absolutely. No matter what.”

2

VANCE

I glared at the concrete sidewalk. The late afternoon shadows inched their way toward the street, taunting us, reminding us that we’d awaited orders for over two hours. Apparently our superiors thought twelve guys had nothing better to do than stand around in the heat. We could sit in the transports, but for me, sore feet were preferable to slow-baked internal organs.

I looked for shade without success. Even in a smaller city like Olympus, everything was hard—the sidewalk, the road where thousands of bicyclists had passed within the last hour, the tall buildings surrounding us like an ugly concrete forest. It was ironic. The only real colors in sight were the Ratings people wore on their foreheads.

“Vance?”

The voice blended with the hum of bike traffic, and it didn’t quite register. Then a hand grabbed my shoulder. I moved instinctively, twisting to pin the offender’s arms, a quick leg sweep, right fist cocked and poised for the next strike. I didn’t realize who my opponent was until he had already hit the ground. Neb, the new boy, was spread flat on the concrete, staring at me in stunned surprise.

“Fates!” he said, his voice catching. “S-sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out. A little jumpy today, aren’t you, Vance?”

I groaned and pulled him up from the sidewalk. The kid barely weighed anything. He shook himself loosely, as if to show that he’d meant to end up on the ground all along. But then he reached up to rub the shoulder I’d nearly yanked out of its socket.

“You need something?” I didn’t try to keep the irritation out of my voice. If Neb could creep up on me, anyone could. That would never have happened two years ago.

“Poly has an update for you,” he muttered, taking a small step backward.

I wiped my sweaty forehead for the trillionth time. Why they made us wear black uniforms in a blasted desert, I’d never know. “Coming.”

Poly stood with one leg in the first transport, his dark arms resting on the top, sleeves rolled up to expose dark biceps larger than most men’s thighs. He stood upright as I approached, and the metal vehicle groaned in protest. The yellow numbers on his forehead, more orange in the sunlight, glowed a bright 501—the lowest Rating possible before becoming a red. One of the biggest insults a NORA citizen could receive.

I resisted the urge to brush my fingers over my own Rating. Not that I cared about the number, of course, but the implanted device made me feel branded. Like the cattle my father and I used to—

Stop. Thoughts of my father were pointless, and I had no time for that now. I accepted the water pouch Poly offered and took a big gulp, swallowing quickly. The nasty aftertaste of NORA’s water was something I’d never get used to. “So the Demander finally decided to tell us what we’re supposed to be doing?”

Poly sighed, more a deep rumble of air than an exhalation. He hated my nickname for Commander Denoux. “Backup at the city center for the Rating Ceremony. There’s word of an unusual Rating being awarded or something.”

“Better than chasing smugglers, I guess.” At least it was indoors. We’d caught five smugglers today, two of them kids. Hopefully that was sufficient to convince the Demander that Olympus was subdued enough for us to go back to the capital city. I dreaded another night of uncomfortable surveillance in a transport. Besides, being so close to the integration camp brought memories to the surface that I preferred to forget.

Traitor.

The thought came frequently these days, though not as often as it had at first. The first year had been pretty bad. The second year I’d learned how to dam the guilt inside like the frozen, hardened soldier NORA wanted. What would the third year bring?

How many more years could I take?

“We’re to report in twenty minutes. But before we go,” he said in his deep voice, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

I looked away with a grunt. He was nice enough, a good team leader, but his dark eyes reminded me too much of my dad’s.

“It’s coming up soon, right? The anniversary.”

I shrugged. “Let’s just go.”

“You’ve been with us almost two years.”

I didn’t answer.

He paused, then plunged on. “If you’re choosing the work-camp route, I need to know soon. I’ll need to train someone to replace you.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said. “We shouldn’t waste time.” I stalked to the end of the transport line where my team waited and gave them the update, feeling Poly’s eyes on my back.

As always, the guys stuffed themselves into the backseats, fighting over the edges with the most legroom. They stayed away from the passenger seat. That was mine. I climbed in and slammed the door a little too hard.

The anniversary, Poly had called it. Anniversaries were for happy married couples, for men who rode in transports to their assignments and came home clean, unstained by blood and guilt. Anniversaries were definitely not for people like me—someone who’d fought for his life around the twisted bodies of his neighbors and friends, their charred remains still smoking in the early morning light.

I tried to think of something else, but the sounds echoed in my brain as sharply as they had that awful night almost two years ago—people shouting, children screaming as their parents collapsed. The sound of gunfire, the rifles held by my clan members, and the chilling accuracy of NORA’s strange, silent weapons. Dad’s order to take our family to safety.

It was the last thing I’d ever hear him say.

I shoved that thought away and focused on Poly’s words. If I decided to extend my military service, it would always be like this. One assignment to another, then another. More lives destroyed. If I chose the work camps, at least that part would end. But so would my freedom.

Not true. I didn’t know what freedom was anymore.

Poly wanted my decision. So far, my decision was to not decide at all. “City center,” I told the driver and sat back for the ride.

3

Welcome to the class of 2094’s Rating Ceremony.” The official over Level Three education, Professor Bold, ran his hand over his head as if making sure his hairpiece was in place. Or maybe he was making sure we could see the green number on his forehead: 883.

The students and parents in the audience gave an excited cheer. My stomach felt tingly, but one glance at Dresden soothed my fears. He sat with his khel team on the boys’ side, relaxed as always. I turned and looked for my mom, Lanah, in the parents’ section. I caught a glimpse of her near the back, staring at the floor. Her husband wasn’t with her. Good.

I caught a glimpse of Tali’s mother as well. She owned a stonecutting shop and was a bit eccentric, but I liked her. Last time I’d visited, she’d gone on and on about how the posterity of NORA’s founder, Richard Peak, were all named after stones and how rocks had life cycles just like people did.

“Watch and see if I’m right,” Taliyah whispered into my ear. Luckily, her anger at me seemed to have dissipated. She was focused on her latest conspiracy theory—something about the government purposefully creating more yellows and reds than in years past. “It’s like the foundation of a pyramid,” she had explained. “You need more people at the bottom to support the few on top.”

Tali refused to believe the truth. People earned the Ratings they got, and that was that. I shrugged. “Sure.”

She gave me a sharp look. “Don’t ‘sure’ me, Treena. I’m right.” When I didn’t answer, she turned away, crossing her legs in complete confidence. Her face faded into the darkness as the lights dimmed. The room quieted and we settled back in our seats.

Suddenly the auditorium doors slammed open. Dozens of blond-headed monitors in silver uniforms streamed in and lined up along the walls and down each aisle. The audience murmured. There was usually high security at an event like this, but there had to be over a hundred of them. Were they looking for someone?

“Wow,” Tali breathed. “Check him out, Treen.”

A dark-haired guy with broad shoulders had just taken his place at the end of our row and now scanned the audience with his stunner raised. I blinked. He wore black, not silver. Military, maybe? But I caught my breath at the sight of his Rating. Bright red.

A red soldier? I didn’t know that was possible.

“Fates,” Tali said. “Look at his shoulders. I’d love to uncover those rippling biceps.”

“Tali!” I hissed.

His dark eyes narrowed. “Keep talking, ladies, so I can arrest you. Didn’t want to stand here for two hours anyway.”

“Anything for you, baby,” Tali muttered.

“My friend says she’s very sorry,” I told him. “She prefers to look at you rather than Professor Bold, for some reason.”

Our gazes locked. The hardened mask slipped for a split second, and there was a hint of amusement. My face grew hot, but I couldn’t look away. He watched me for a moment more before breaking eye contact.

Fate’s sake, Treena. You have a boyfriend. I focused on the stage.

The shuffling noises died down and the auditorium went still. Professor Bold looked uneasy, but none of the monitors approached him. He cleared his throat.

“Here we go,” Tali whispered. “My favorite history lesson again.”

That got a half smile from me. Professor Bold was known to ramble on about NORA’s proud past. He’d done it at every school event since we had entered Level Three. I almost had it memorized. Taliyah did. She began mouthing the words as he spoke.

“The New Order Republic of America, or NORA, has a ninety-year history—one that began after the old America broke apart, when Richard Peak stepped forward with the Rating system.” Professor Bold glanced at the monitors and ran his hand over his head again. “While previous civilizations—and even the outlands today—have continually fought for order and peace, it is only we who have succeeded.”

He paused, and the audience applauded politely. It was the same every year. If we didn’t read his cues, the speech would become unbearably long.

“Peak’s Rating system solved the ultimate human problem: greed. As long as human beings think first of themselves as individuals, their society will fail every time. When we see ourselves as a thread in the tapestry of a nation, we find happiness as citizens and individuals. It is only through aligning ourselves to our ideals and striving for the very best that is within us that a society like ours can thrive. And thrive, we do.”

More applause.

“Right, like the Rating system took away greed,” Tali grumbled.

“Shh,” I whispered.

Bold continued. “Today we enjoy a society of peace, filled with citizens who contribute to the well-being of society cheerfully, peacefully, and productively; citizens who strive diligently for the Ratings that truly encompass them, their passions, and their potential. Citizens who follow the Standards of Excellence.” He paused as if about to recite the Standards, but he continued. “Today, as in past years, I certainly hope to see many strong greens created. And now we will watch as our graduating students receive their hard-earned and well-deserved Ratings.”

The audience applauded. Taliyah and I looked at each other in relief. This speech was shorter than usual. A favorite topic of Bold’s was how it was the individual’s responsibility to earn their place in the family and society, how we weren’t worth the nutrition pills we consumed unless we contributed more than we took. It always reminded me of my stepdad, Konnor—addition and subtraction, contributions and mistakes.

Professor Bold lifted his hand to touch his hair again but stopped in midair and thrust it into his pocket instead. “What do you say, students? Are you ready?”

Louder applause. A twinge of nervousness fluttered in my stomach. Since our nation’s leader, the empress, was female, the guys would go first. Tradition and all. I just wanted to get my Rating and be done with it. Luckily, Dresden had already turned seventeen, making him one of the oldest, so he’d be close to the beginning of the list. My heart raced in my chest.

“Let us begin.” Professor Bold reached for the first card.

Taliyah suddenly glanced at me with a knowing smile, and I realized that I was gripping her leg. “Sorry.”

“No worries.” She leaned over. “You have nothing to stress about, you know. There’s no way you guys won’t come within a hundred points of one another. You’re”—she batted her eyelashes and swatted a dainty hand dramatically—“made for each other.”

I bit back a smile. She couldn’t stand Dresden, but she knew exactly how to cheer me up.

“Shh!” someone behind us whispered, and I noticed that the auditorium had become deathly silent.

“Lile Demenger.”

Lile stood and joined the professor, blinking in the spotlight. By the looks of his rust-colored hair, he’d tried to dye his black hair the appropriate shade of blond. Cheap dye, most likely. I fingered my own hair. I’d been dying it for so long I couldn’t even remember what my true color was.

“Your score is . . .” Professor Bold read the card. “739. Congratulations.”

Lile’s head bobbed as he accepted his card and stepped back. His parents stood in the crowd and applauded wildly. His score was probably higher than either of theirs.

“Chan Norwell.”

Chan hesitated before standing. When he joined the professor, he stared at the floor. He’d been in several of my classes, but I’d never heard the guy speak before.

“Your score is . . .” Bold paused. “636. Congratulations.”

The crowd gently applauded. 636 was high-yellow range. Chan accepted his card and stepped back, head down. No one stood to cheer for him.

“Poor guy,” Tali whispered, and I knew what she meant. Kids who scored less than their parents were what adults called “at-risk,” or the type to jump off the tower. I’d never quite understood their motivation, but today it made a little more sense. What could be worse than becoming a yellow, branded as mediocre, for everyone to see?

Jumping off the tower. That was definitely worse.

“Dresden Wynn.”

My breath caught. He stood and strode to the front, his lanky frame seeming shorter from this far away. A silly grin was pasted on his face. I could tell it wasn’t entirely natural. The rustling movements in the audience stopped as every ear perked up.

A figure behind the guys’ side leaned forward in anticipation. Dresden’s dad, tall and regal, just like his son. The Wynns wore some of the highest Ratings in the city, and they lived in the most expensive corner of Olympus.

“Your score is . . . uh . . .”

Professor Bold looked at his assistant and showed her the card. Her eyes widened, and she glanced at Dresden, shrugging her shoulders.

My teeth began to grind. Tali put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Your score is . . . 942.”

There was a collective gasp from the audience. My stomach fell to the floor. What?

Everyone around me exploded to their feet, screaming and jumping in their excitement. The applause was deafening. Someone grabbed my shoulders and yelled something in my ear. I just sat, staring numbly at the back of the student in front of me. The number echoed in my head.

942.

Professor Bold’s desperate voice came over the speakers. “Students, please. Give me your attention.”

“Dresden! Woohoo!” someone yelled behind me. A girl.

The chant started to rise over the noise. “Dres-den. Dres-den.”

“Students!”

“Dres-den. Dres-den.”

942. Olympus’s previous record was 936, by a near genius. His assignment had been to the Leadership Academy. Some said he was training to become tribune, second only to the empress.

Dresden, what have you done?

One hundred points. My score would have to be at least 842, or the law said we couldn’t be together. The numbers ran through my head. Only 5 percent of the NORA’s population had scores that high, and I doubted any of them were freshly Rated graduates.

“Dres-den. Dres-den.”

The monitors moved then, turning to face the audience and raising their stunners. The chanting broke down into confused conversation as everyone lowered themselves into their seats. Cheering and standing had never been against the rules in the past. Of course, we’d never had this many monitors in the audience before, either. Maybe they’d anticipated Dresden’s score and sent in extra security.

“Students,” a younger voice came over the speaker. It was Dresden. Interesting how a number changed things. We were his friends one minute and students the next. “Students, thank you for your support, but please listen to Professor Bold. Thank you.”

The tall girl in front of me sat down, and I could finally see Dresden’s face. Flushed. Triumphant. Very, very happy. He searched the crowd, looking for me. I sank lower in my seat. What was wrong with me? I should have been clapping enthusiastically, like everyone else. No, I should have been more excited than everyone else. Instead, I felt sick inside.

Professor Bold took the mic back. “That is an Olympus city record, Dresden. Congratulations. We will watch you with interest.”

Dresden’s beautiful voice replied, “Thank you, sir. I’m very excited for the future.”

Tali turned to me with an enthusiasm I hadn’t expected and began to whisper. “That record will last what, fifteen minutes? You’ve got to be at least ten points above him.”

My voice sounded mechanical. “As long as we’re within range of each other, it doesn’t matter.”

The rest of the names blurred together. Before I was ready, it was the girls’ turn. Professor Bold seemed calmer now, his voice more confident. “Lorena Conway.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Dresden. He wore a brilliant smile as he watched the stand.

“Your Rating is . . . 822. Congratulations.”

The next four students received their Ratings, three in the eight hundreds and one in the seven hundreds. Then Professor Bold called Tali’s name. She stood slowly, eyes fixed on the stage. When she got to the front, she simply glared at the crowd.

Professor Bold didn’t even look at her. He squinted at the card and said in a monotone voice, “Taliyah Fairbanks. Your score is 651. Congratulations.”

A gasp ripped from my chest as the audience politely applauded. Yellow. High yellow, yes, but yellow. Tali’s expression was hard. She turned to the professor, who soberly handed her the card. Anger flashed in her eyes as she uttered a quick thank-you before walking stiffly down to the aisle. There was murmuring in the audience.

“It’s a mistake,” I muttered. “She should be in the eight hundreds at least!”

The girl to my left, Rena, pursed her lips. “Eight hundreds? Look at her hair. She didn’t even try to dye it blonde.”

The girl next to Rena shook her head. “It wasn’t that. I heard her mom is a yellow, and nobody knows where her dad is. Besides, her uniform is always so . . . frumpy.” She shrugged, a cute, petite gesture, as Tali reached our row. “Seems like she fits the yellow mold pretty well.”

The anger welled up inside me like fire. I wanted to slap Rena. She hadn’t even tried to lower her voice. Tali stiffly lowered herself into her seat, head held high.

How could Dresden and Tali, my two best friends, have scores so vastly different? How well did the Raters, strangers we’d never met, really know us?

“Ametrine Dowell.”

My body stiffened and time seemed to stop. The whisperings in the room came to a halt. Students turned in their seats to stare at me until I felt like everyone in the city was watching me. They probably were.

Somehow my feet knew what to do, and soon I was standing next to Professor Bold. It was the closest I’d ever been to the man. He smelled like sweat and heavy cologne. A genuine smile spread across his face, his teeth bright in the dull light. In his hand was a card. I had a sudden urge to grab it and run away. But I forced my hands to my side and stood tall, facing the silent crowd. The spotlight was too bright to see Lanah, my mom, but I knew she’d be clasping her hands like she always did when she was nervous.

“Ametrine Dowell,” he said too slowly. “It gives me great pleasure to tell you that your score is . . .”

My gaze was fixed on the card as he squinted at it and then rubbed his eye with one slim finger. Someone coughed, and I nearly jumped. Every muscle and tendon in my body was taut. I found Dresden’s still-grinning face in the audience.

Except that this was taking too long. Something was wrong. I tried to lean over and see the card myself, but he turned and held it up to his assistant behind us. She stepped forward and stared at the card, raising an eyebrow. Professor Bold cleared his throat and ran a shaky hand over his sweaty head. The dramatic pause before another record-breaking score? My heart felt like it would leap out of my chest.

“Ametrine,” he repeated, his voice somber. “Your score is 440. Uh . . . congratulations.”

My expression must have been one of utter shock, because Professor Bold looked very serious as he handed me the card. There it was, clear and in black:

Ametrine Dowell: 440

Implant Level: Red

The auditorium was deathly silent. The squeaking of chairs and low whispering had stopped, and it seemed as though nobody dared breathe.

I was frozen in place. I stared dumbly at the audience, my neighbors and friends and people who had come to celebrate with us. Someone cleared their throat.

This was a nightmare. It wasn’t really happening. Sixteen years of work couldn’t end this way. My dreams, my relationship with Dresden, and my future—all shattered by one number. 440. It couldn’t be real. No Olympus graduate had ever gotten a Rating below five hundred. Especially not a student who had consistently been at the top of her class. This was dreadfully, horrifyingly wrong.

The audience began to murmur.

A stern-faced female with a tight bun stepped out of the shadows beside me. The woman wore the standard purple NORA uniform, but her right arm had three golden stripes. The Ratings Department. She gestured for Professor Bold to give her the mic and turned to the crowd.

“Students, I am a Ratings official. I ask you to remain quietly seated.”

The whispering decreased, but it didn’t disappear. A lone figure stood in the back, hands covering her mouth, and I didn’t need to see her face to know it was Lanah. She was too shocked to process the official’s order. A monitor headed in her direction.

“Young lady, give me the card.” The official stood next to me, her hand out expectantly. My eyes burned, but I pushed the emotions back. Maybe it really was a mistake. Perhaps she was about to say so. She’d fix it, and I’d go home and celebrate with my classmates, and everything would go on as planned. 440? It was nearly impossible to be that useless. I quickly handed her the card, as if it were smoldering.

“Students, let me explain something to you.” The official paused. “Your parents already know this, but it’s important that you understand something. The Rating Department regulates the data that determines your score through a massive interconnected network. The data is sent and stored from the moment you’re born. The Raters know more about you than you could possibly imagine. The Raters analyze the data, assign your scores, and finalize the numbers by printing these cards and affixing their signatures.” She finally turned, but she looked past me. “Young lady, will you tell us what is written in the bottom right-hand corner?”

I stared at it, numb. There it was, scribbled in ink: RMR

“Out loud, please.” She held the mic up to my lips.

I tried to speak, but I knew I’d lose control if I did. I just shook my head.

“It’s a signature,” the official said, her voice hardening. “That makes it a valid Rating. NORA doesn’t make mistakes. Enjoy the rest of the ceremony.” She handed the mic to Professor Bold, who stared at it, red-faced.

The audience was quiet. I looked out at the faces of students I knew well and professors I’d studied under. Their collective shock and confusion slowly dissipated but was replaced by something else. Disgust. I could see it in their downturned mouths and sour expressions. They assumed I had done something horrible to deserve this. And why not? That’s what I would have thought.

I caught a glimpse of the soldier in black. He stood at attention like the others, but instead of watching the audience, his gaze was locked on me. He frowned, eyebrows creased in something that looked a lot like concern, maybe even pity.

I pulled myself together. I didn’t need the pity of a red, because this was all a terrible mistake.

A hand touched my back, and a square-faced monitor eased me gently toward the steps. “Come. I’ve been instructed to stay by your side until implantation.”

I just nodded. Of course. They were afraid I’d run away. Too bad I hadn’t thought about it before now. When I started back toward my seat, he shook his head and pointed to the exit. “For your protection,” he whispered.

Protection? From whom? The words swirled in my mind, fading in and out like everything else. I felt thousands of eyes on my back as I shuffled down the aisle toward the doors. But the image that would haunt me forever was the expression on Dresden’s face. His eyes were dark, his mouth set into a hard line, his jaw tight. He leaned forward in his seat as if he wanted to leap up and run. I had a million questions, but only one mattered as I left the auditorium.

Did Dresden want to run to me—or away from me?

4

It was as if I’d stepped right into my nightmares. A bonfire, hot and crackling, threw shadows across the town square. Except this time the people surrounding it weren’t running in panic but dancing. And the soldiers who stood about weren’t destroying but protecting. Watching. There was a big difference this time.

I hated fire.

“Look at those bubble blowers,” Semias said. “Dancing around like fools, celebrating their new implants. It’s not like they’ve never seen fire before.” He turned away, disgust evident on his round, shadowed face. I’d caught him gulping down nutrition pills again today, probably stolen from some poor family in the Red District. I’d kick him off the team, but we were down a guy from last month’s raid.

His name was Harell, Vance. Is that how you see it now—addition and subtraction instead of lives and people?

“Bubble blowers?” Daymond repeated. He absently fingered the scar on his cheek.

“You know. Kids. Whities. Newbies.”

“They’re only two years younger than you, Semias,” Daymond replied.

“They probably haven’t seen fire before,” Ross said in a thoughtful tone, as if he’d missed the entire exchange. “Look at this security. I doubt NORA will let this tradition go on much longer.”

I had to agree with him, but for different reasons. This was the wrong time of year to have a bonfire—the heat was already unbearable, and the fire made it a hundred times worse. No less than two-dozen monitors were stationed around the city square tonight, silver uniforms braided into the purple crowd, and the new graduates looked uncomfortable as they danced. They glanced often at the flames and the pile of blackening white uniforms, but stole glances at the monitors. If this uniform-burning ceremony was their graduation party, I actually felt sorry for them.

My team watched the crowd with envy and admiration. These guys had all grown up this way. The bonfire was a rite of passage for them, a point of no return. A last chance to be carefree and goof off, trying to impress the girls they knew they’d never see again.

A horde of blonde girls stood front and center, all wearing stiff, newly purchased purple uniforms and blazing green Ratings on their foreheads, chattering to each other like little birds.

Rating ceremonies were the worst. At least with criminals, I knew what they were thinking. It was the cold glares of green citizens I couldn’t stand. Those who didn’t look down their noses looked quickly away or pretended I wasn’t there, which was just fine with me. Except today, a girl in the audience had stared me down in curiosity, even responding to my smile with one of her own. And, strangely, she’d later become a red. She was the talk of the entire city tonight.

“Poly’s coming,” Neb announced. “Looks like they caught the kid.”

I straightened as Poly’s team approached dragging a scrawny kid with messy black hair. He wore red girls’ shoes that were too big and made him stumble. Those unfortunate shoes had cost him his freedom.

“I’m no smuggler, I swear,” the boy said when they stopped.

“Sure, kid,” I said. They always said that, but it didn’t matter. Our job was to deliver him, not interrogate him. That made seven smugglers today. Hopefully that was enough to curb the Demander’s appetite and let us leave this blasted city. The heavy rotten-lake smell was driving me insane. “We’re going to test you now. If you pass, you can go home free.”

He paused. “What kind of test?”

Poly retrieved his testing device from the transport and held it up to the flickering light. He’d helped invent it himself. It was simple, smaller than his hand—even though everything was smaller than Poly’s hand—but he never let anyone else touch it. “Hold out your arm.”

The boy’s eyes went wide. “Wait. What does it test?”

“Food,” I said. “If you haven’t eaten real food recently, you have nothing to worry about.”

“What is going on?” a woman shrieked, her voice bordering on hysteria as she pushed her way through the murmuring crowd. Apparently our presence had caught the attention of the graduates, and they watched us in fascination. The woman planted herself in front of me, hands on her hips, her long hair tucked over one shoulder. I stared at her in shock. It was Selia Dunstrep, wearing a yellow 629 Rating. She’d been in my clan—at least, when it had existed. Not only that, but she’d served in the Circle and worked with my father.

“Your mom?” I asked the boy. He trembled, his eyes shifting from the woman to me. Then he nodded.

Blasted woman, I thought. It would’ve been so much smoother if she hadn’t come. Quicker than anyone could react, I leaped and yanked her arms behind her, locking her wrists together. She let out a surprised gasp and tried to jerk away, then gritted her teeth in pain. Her bonds were linked to her techband, so she’d feel that jolt every time she moved. I knew all too well how that felt.

“You are ordered to submit to a food test,” I said.

“This is ridiculous! I just came to see—”

“Are you the boy’s mother?”

“I—” Her mouth tightened in pain. “I will not submit to a test, and neither will he. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

“The boy has already been tested.” Poly watched his device, holding the boy’s shoulder with his other hand. His deep voice rumbled over the growing noise of the crowd. “He’s positive.”

The boy stared at his mother in shock. Her mouth dropped a little. “It must be the device! He wasn’t—you can’t take . . . Please. I have other children at home.”

Great. Our last smuggler had just become an entire family. I motioned for a couple of guys to assist. They hurried to obey. “We’ll need to test all of you, then,” I said.

Poly waved his device over the woman’s skin, making her flinch. It took a couple of seconds for the result to appear. The light turned red. Positive.

“It’s all my fault,” she said. “Just let my children go. Please! They’re innocent and still getting used to this place. Whatever the punishment is, I’ll take it instead.”

I forced my face to remain impassive, sending a quick techband message to the monitor station to request a search team for the woman’s home. They’d be there within minutes. “Your family will meet you shortly,” I told her. “Whatever happens, at least you’ll be together.”

“Don’t you dare pretend to care about us.” Her eyes flashed in the firelight, giving her a strangely demonic look. Her voice dripped with venom. “You’re taller now, but I know who you are. You’re Iron Belt Hawking’s son.”

“Daymond, put her in the transport.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your father was a good man!” she snapped. Daymond grabbed her arm, but the woman twisted away. Her hair fell into her face as she spat the words. “He would be ashamed of you now, hunting down your own. Becoming one of them.”

I refused to reply. It wasn’t the first time a member of my clan had recognized me, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Sir?” the boy asked next to me.

I’d forgotten about him. “What?”

He winced at my tone but seemed to gather his courage. “Um, what will happen to us?”

I glanced at Poly, but he chose this moment to stand and walk away, flipping the screen up on his techband as if calling someone. With a heavy sigh, I leaned against the transport. Kids were the worst. I could handle hysterical mothers and angry, fist-throwing fathers—but when they dragged children into this stuff, nothing good came of it.

“Look, kid, I doubt we’ll even catch the rest of your family. Your clan members will probably hide them before we get there. That’s what usually happens.”

The boy shook his head. “No. We can’t be separated. My mom said we have to stay together.” He paused. “Was she right? Are you really a Hawking?”

I yanked the transport door open and motioned to the boy. He hesitated before stepping in and settling onto the oversanitized plastic seat. Parents didn’t know everything. They meant well, but there was a lot they couldn’t control. It was about time this kid learned that lesson. “I was, once,” I said and slammed the door shut.

It wouldn’t take him long to grow up. NORA would make sure of that.

5

My stepfather always complained that our unit was too small, even though it was bigger than most high-density blocks. But tonight I had to agree with him.

Konnor’s voice wafted in through the vent, angry and loud. “I’m telling you, it’s a mistake!”

“I thought so too,” Lanah said. “But the official quashed that theory pretty decidedly. Poor Treena.”

“Poor Treena? The timing of all this is just a little suspicious. Do you realize that Councilman Alden’s medical report leaked today? Everyone knows about his heart problem now, and there’s no way he’ll retain his position. I’m next in line, Lanah. Me, a councilman! And then she goes and does this the day before Ratings!”

“We don’t know why this happened, Konnor.” Lanah’s voice was soft.

“Yes. We do. Your daughter has managed to drag our name through the mud and ruin my career, all in one day.” He paused. “I suppose that’s what I get for marrying a rejected woman with a baby.”

Anger rose to the surface of my thoughts. Konnor was striking my mother where it hurt the most. He did that often when he was upset—sometimes with fists, other times with words. But as scary as his temper was, I knew the cold silence that followed was even worse. Those moments of cruel clarity were the true danger. Even Lanah knew better than to defend me now.

Indeed, there was no reply, and for a moment the only sound coming through the building’s old ventilation system was the tapping of the air conditioning.

He would confront me soon. I could only guess what that confrontation would mean. For a second I had a flashback, a memory of hanging over a rail, looking down on the city streets below, feeling helpless as my sweaty five-year-old hand slipped farther and farther. “Don’t forget this feeling,” Konnor had said. “If you fail our family, I expect you to find your way back here. I expect you to make the noble choice.”

I sat in my room alone, fingering the tiny round mirror I’d borrowed from Lanah months before and never returned. Just fourteen hours ago I’d woken from a deep sleep, contemplating my future with Dresden. We were supposed to go to the academy together. He would study broadcasting, and I’d become a Rater. We’d already bought a list of professors and their grading practices from a former student—it had cost Dresden over four hundred credits.

I felt sick. Education scores, volunteer hours, khel tournaments. It all seemed so silly now. What was the point? If it didn’t matter, why had I dedicated my life to it all?

Why did it matter for everyone else but not for me?

I left the vent where I’d been listening and sat on my bed next to the pile of new purple uniforms, neatly pressed and folded. I hadn’t changed into one yet. As a child I’d fingered my mom’s dark uniforms, wondering how it would feel to be an adult, to wear a number that showed the world who I was. What was the protocol with reds in a green household? I’d never heard of it happening before. Reds didn’t live in comfortable homes with families. They ended up in work camps and distant manufacturing plants. They didn’t deserve the pills they took, the water they consumed. The physical space they occupied. Would they kidnap me in my sleep tonight and dump me in the Red District?

I picked up my mom’s hand mirror. The reflection that stared back at me seemed completely foreign. Puffy circles under the eyes, redness around the pupils, a haunted expression. Most glaring, however, were the glowing numbers burned into the forehead: 440. Bright red—as if etched in blood.

The implantation process had been nearly painless. If I hadn’t been undergoing the surgery myself, I would have been fascinated. The implant was simply a thin gray screen, so thin it was nearly transparent. It was placed under the first layer of skin. A tiny line in my skin was the only indication that any incision had been made. The line would disappear within days, they had said. If only the same could be said for the implant.

My hands itched to scratch it away, to tear at my skin until the numbers disappeared. Until I could see only myself again. But it wouldn’t work. It was connected to the techband somehow. If I messed with it, it would trigger a painful electric punishment.

The tower came into my mind again, and I pushed it away.

The sudden rapping on my door made me jump. The mirror vanished into my pocket, and I sat down again. “Come in.”

Lanah entered, her face drawn and her eyes swollen. She’d been crying too. The thought gave me a guilty bit of satisfaction. The bed sagged as she sat next to me and handed me a nutrition pill and some water. I tossed it down my throat and swallowed, ignoring the water.

“I have something for you,” she began. “It’s from your dad.”

I leaned back against the wall, arms folded. “What, he’s too good to come in and give it to me himself?”

She blinked. “No, I mean your biological dad. Jasper.” Her hand fumbled in her pocket for a moment. “He wanted you to have this on your Rating day. I don’t think even he anticipated how hard this day would be for you.”

“My dad?” I repeated dumbly and sat up. “You’ve seen him recently?”

She put a finger to her lips and whispered, “No, no. He’s in prison now. Before you were born, he showed it to me. It was a couple of weeks before . . . he left.”

“He’s in prison?”

“That’s the rumor. I don’t know for sure.”

“But . . . why? What did he do?”

“Let’s just say that Jasper was a traitor—to his family and his country.”

I sat back, stunned. I was the daughter of a convict? “Why haven’t you told me this before?”

“Konnor forbids it. He doesn’t want any connection between us and Jasper. He’d go and burn my marriage record if he could. But I thought you should know. Maybe it will help you understand what’s going on.”

“So you don’t think it’s my fault.”

“No. I don’t.” She took my hand and put something into my palm before I could pull it away. It was hard and cold. Did my con-man biological father think a gift would make up for a lifetime of pain?

I inspected it, tempted to throw it out the window. “A rock?” It was half the size of my palm, smooth and flat, the edges round.

“His favorite stone,” she said. “Your father had a special interest in geology. He drilled a hole through it so you could wear it as a necklace if you wanted.”

I gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Yeah, because I’ve always wanted a purple rock that belonged to the man who ruined my life.”

She sighed. “I wanted you to know my theory, but we don’t know anything for sure. Don’t place all your problems on his shoulders quite yet.”

I stared at her. After everything that had happened today, and after everything she’d been through, she was defending him? Before I could reply, her eyes grew misty, and she turned away.

It wasn’t right. Lanah always blamed herself for other people’s mistakes. She’d taken the heat for my stepdad—and from him—for as long as I could remember. But there was something stronger than guilt in her eyes this time. “You really did love Jasper.”

She sighed, wiping her eyes. “I loved him, and I thought he loved me. Obviously I was wrong.”

I couldn’t imagine leaving Dresden for anything, especially if we were married. Well, that wasn’t going to happen now. Jasper had taken Dresden from me, too.

“Ametrine—”

“Treena, Mom.”

She paused. “Jasper gave you your name, you know.”

“All the more reason to change it.”

Lanah gave a wistful smile. “Treena, my mother always said I’d know whether a guy loved me by his willingness to sacrifice—that my well-being would come before his. The man you marry will give up what he wants most for you. That’s how you’ll know.”

“Dresden is totally like that.”

She bit her lip but nodded, her eyes flickering to the stone in my hand. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a thin piece of metallic string. She looped it easily through the stone, then latched it around my throat. We looked at each other for a long moment, then she pulled me in for a hug. I went rigid, and the embrace didn’t last long. When she pulled away, her face was sad. “Jasper always said there was a time to run and a time to fight, and the trick was knowing the difference. I couldn’t face it, Treena. I ran. But you’ve always been a fighter like your dad. Maybe that’s the message you’re supposed to take from this necklace. Just know that I support you, wherever you go from here.”

She stood and kissed me on the forehead like I was five. I threw her an absent wave.

After she left, I stared at the rock in the dim lamplight. It was a deep purple, nearly the same shade as NORA’s official color. Purple was really just half blue, half red, my teachers had said. Blue for the peace we now enjoyed, and red for the blood of those who had sacrificed their lives for our comfort. Was it a message from my dad that I should submit to NORA’s will? That I should wait for them to relocate me, slink into the shadows, and accept my fate?

The thought made my stomach churn. If that was what he wanted, I’d do the opposite.

I turned off the light but stayed awake in the darkness. A plan began to form in my mind, fuzzy at first, like the tendrils of fog that gathered in the early morning, and then firm and cold, like the strange purple rock my traitorous father had insisted that I receive. The rest of my life stretched before me in the thickness of night. I lay there, watching the hours click by on my techband, waiting for sleep to bestow the slightest bit of relief.

It never came.

6

The bonfire consumed my dreams, and the nightmare came again. It was hazy at first, like watching a projection through smoke, but then came into focus, burned into my mind as if with a branding iron.

I lay in bed on the verge of sleep, listening to my twin sisters’ heavy breathing. I was just drowsy enough that I didn’t hear the shouting at first. After a moment, there was a sharp crack as the door banged open.

“Vance, wake up!”

The panic in my mother’s voice shocked me fully awake. “What?”

“They’re setting the cabins on fire. Everyone’s evacuating to the shelter. Go check on the other wing, then help your father!” She strode quickly to my sisters’ beds.

Before I fully understood, I was running down the hall. My feet clapped all too loudly against the wood floor I’d helped lay one board at a time. Our entire settlement was wood. If there was really a fire . . .

A faint smoke smell reached my senses, and horror forced my body into high speed. I reached the door and pounded on it. “Fire! Get to the shelter!” The voices on the other side told me that they were already awake. Two wings, all exiting safely.

I leaped forward again, headed for the lookout platform. The air grew thicker and heavier with every step.

All of our cabins were connected underground, but NORA didn’t know that. My father was a brilliant leader. Our people would be gathering in the shelter now, where food and water storage could keep them alive for months. But we hadn’t counted on fire. Cold and hunger, yes, but not fire. Such a stupid, naïve oversight.

When I reached the loft, I could barely breathe. The smoke was so thick that I wondered if my dad was even alive, but then his figure emerged. He was nearly unrecognizable, his face black as if painted, and he held a wet piece of cloth over his nose and mouth. He handed me something—a plastic canister with a band, obviously some kind of breathing device. I slipped it on, and suddenly the air was easier to breathe, though painfully hot and dry.

“Dad,” I croaked. “We can’t fight from here. We need to get to the shelter and make a stand!”

“The men are lining up now, ready to strike. Are the women and children headed to the shelter?” His voice was crisp, hard. This wasn’t a father talking to his son but a commander barking orders.

“Yes, sir.”

“I sent Rutner to drench the northeast building in water, but that won’t hold the fire long. We need to defeat the soldiers now, or evacuate and risk capture.”

I glanced at the tree line, straining to see through the darkness and the heavy smoke. When my eyes adjusted to the black, I saw figures. Vehicles. They had us completely surrounded, and they stood around as if bored, like students with nothing to do after school. “Do they really think a fire will send us out with our hands up?”

Dad just let his shoulders slump as if I’d voiced his biggest concern. “Seems strange to me too.”

NORA soldiers had attacked twice before, but they’d seemed reluctant to kill anyone. We’d taken out two dozen of their soldiers, and all they’d gotten for their trouble was a few stunned settlers. Why they needed people so badly in that swollen mess of a country, I had no idea, but at least we knew they wanted us alive.

“This seems like the perfect time for them to attack,” Dad said as if talking to himself. “They’ve permeated our defenses, and now they’re just standing there. What are they waiting for?”

I gripped his arm. “What was that?”

“I said—”

“No, no. Listen.”

He started to protest, but a low rumble began to fill the air. It didn’t come from the earth but from the sky. Dad went rigid. An expression of utter horror spread across his face, as if he’d just seen the reaper himself. His eyes fixed upon me, and for the first time in my life, I saw fear.

My father was afraid.

“What? Is it a bomber jet?” I glanced upward and caught a flash of light from above, then another. There were more than one, and they seemed to be circling us like ravens circling death.

Dad just stared at the sky. I wanted to shake him, to force him to snap out of it and tell me what to do. He opened his mouth to speak but coughed instead. I reached up to tear the mask off my face and hand it to him.

Dad just shook his head and swatted my hand away. “Bombers,” he managed.

“But why would . . .” The answer slammed into my mind like a fist. “They don’t want to capture us anymore, do they?”

The wood groaned beneath our feet. The fire had reached the top of the platform now, climbing and snapping like a hungry dragon with ferocious claws. We only had a few minutes before the fire drove us out or the building collapsed under us. I hoped Rutner was protecting Mom and the twins. Was he ordering them to evacuate, or had they hunkered down, determined to die rather than give themselves up?

“The empress warned me this would happen” Dad said, his voice distant. “But I didn’t listen.”

“You’ve been communicating with their leader?”

“She tried to make a deal. I refused. I thought we were safe here, so far outside the borders. I thought if we defended ourselves, they’d see we weren’t worth it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

He turned to me and gripped my shoulders, and suddenly the commander was back. “Get them out. Take them to the hunting shelter in the forest. You’ll be attacked, but gather the men on the outside of the group. Hopefully a few of you can make it.”

I stared at him, letting his words sink in. “What do you mean, you?”

He dropped his hands. “Maybe I can draw their fire, distract them for a bit, so you can break through their line.” At the last word he broke into a fit of coughing and covered his mouth.

“It’s too late for that!” My heat-singed voice sounded hoarse. “Dad, this building will burn down—if the air teams don’t blow it up first.”

He coughed into his wet cloth, and his face constricted. “Then you’d better hurry.”

I tore the mask off, barely feeling the wall of heat slam into my face. “No, Dad. You’re their leader. You’re the first person who should be getting out of here!”

He shot me a stern look, an expression I knew well. “You have a lot to learn about leadership, son. It’s not about privilege but about sacrifice. You’re their leader now. If I can buy you a little more time, I have to try. Now go!”

He moved more quickly than I’d ever seen. One second he was standing there, and the next he grabbed the breathing mask and slammed it onto my face. I twisted away, but his strong arms shoved me off the highest level. It wasn’t a hard fall, only about ten feet, but I landed on my back. I lay there, stunned.

I stared at the man who had raised me, the man who had taught me how to fight without weapons and to lead using only words, and an angry sob tore from my throat.

“Keep them safe, Vance,” he shouted through the haze, and then my father turned back to his vigil on the platform. He pulled out his long-range rifle and glanced back at the darkened sky. Two more aircraft had joined the group, and they seemed to be gathering into some kind of formation.

With a growl, I bolted for the shelter. The only way to save Dad was to obey, quickly. Only when we broke through the enemy’s lines would he follow. It would take every weapon we had, and we’d probably lose half the settlement—but if we attacked all at once, it was possible.

Together we’d have a fighting chance.

Keep them safe . . .

7

The first rays of morning light shone through the window. The traffic was just beginning to flow on the street below; I heard talking and the shifting of gears as people rode past. It was Rating Day for regular citizens, but it was also Assignment Day for graduates. Today we found out what our Ratings truly meant.

Which was why my plan had to begin immediately.

I dressed in my new purple uniform, straightening the stiff shoulder seams in the mirror and trying not to look at the glowing red number on my forehead. If my plan worked, it would be fixed before my assignment came. Hopefully.

With a quick jog downstairs, I gulped down my pill and asked to borrow my mom’s makeup. I only used it on special occasions. She stared at me, a strange look on her face. “Where are you going so early?”

“To meet Dresden,” I lied. “He wants to talk. I won’t be too long.” If she knew the real reason, she’d never let me go. I swallowed hard. Dresden hadn’t tried to contact me. A part of me was withering inside, the darkness of rejection spreading through my wounded heart. But there was still hope. If my plan worked, it could change everything. We still had a chance.

“All right.” Doubt shone in her eyes. “Good luck. Call me if you need me.”

“Sure, Mom.”

The late-spring heat was already stifling when I swung onto my bike. It was a grim omen of the type of summer to come—more water restrictions and more greenery regulations. Lanah wasn’t going to be happy. She loved her flower garden too much. She gave her allotted five plants some of her personal drinking water every day. I thought it was a little ridiculous, but she just said she missed the feel of real leaves. Whatever that meant.

It was fifteen minutes of hard riding before the Block came into view. It was a simple cube-shaped office building that housed most of the government officials in Olympus. My stepdad was summoned here on occasion for his job in Integration. I could only assume that the Rating Office was here as well.

After a few minutes I located a nearby bike rack and took a deep breath, smoothing my uniform. I wore no ornamentation, unlike the men and women who ascended the staircase and entered the building. They had bands of varying thicknesses and colors on their arms, and an older gentleman actually had multiple stars beneath his collar and a silver stripe across his chest. I squinted to see his face. The tribune himself, the empress’s personal assistant, here in Olympus. I’d never seen him in person before.

I hesitated. What I was about to do was risky enough, but the tribune was here, of all people. It could just as easily go bad as good, and I couldn’t afford to backslide any further. I watched the tribune disappear through the doors, surrounded by an entourage of guards and assistants. I could wait outside for a few hours, maybe, until he left.

No. I’ve spent my entire life doing what I’ve been told. It didn’t work out. Now it’s time to try the opposite.

The crowd was dissipating. I forced myself to take one step, then another. The doors loomed closer. At the last second I swooped my hair across my forehead, glad for the frizziness for the first time in my life, and strode inside.

No one noticed me at first. There were a dozen different hallways, but the entire crowd of people turned left when they reached the main hallway, all headed in the same direction like a school of identical fish. I felt odd stepping out of the crowd and into the massive center room.

This wasn’t my first visit. I’d been here once before as a child on a field trip. But the enormity and the grandeur of the room still took my breath away. A large dome in the center full of stained-glass pictures rose high overhead. The sun colored the glass so majestically that its rays shone down like pink spotlights. Glittery spots of dust made their way slowly down to the hard marble floor.

“Can I help you?” a voice asked.

I jumped. It was an older lady, silver roots peeking through her bleached blonde hair. She eyed my forehead with suspicion. I stood straighter, ready to plead my case.

The woman simply pointed overhead. “Visitors always stop and stare at the dome,” she said. “Easy to tell who should be here and who shouldn’t.”

“I’ve come to see my Rater,” I said quickly.

“Ah,” she said knowingly. “Come to file a complaint?”

So this was a common occurrence. A surge of courage welled up inside me. “Yes.”

“Do you know your Rater’s name?”

The woman was small, but her voice was sharp. She had probably worked here for decades, asking the same questions of dozens of grumpy graduates like me. “I know his initials. RMR.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Roulon. I should’ve guessed. I’ll take you to his office, but I doubt he’s there today. You can leave your complaint with his assistant.” Her legs carried her quickly away, and I had to jog to catch up.

“What happens if I file a complaint?” I asked.

“He looks at your data again. If he thinks there’s a discrepancy, he fixes it.”

“But if not?”

The woman turned a sharp corner, and I nearly ran into a soldier in a gray uniform in my effort to follow. I mumbled an apology, but he just stalked away. My guide didn’t look behind her as she spoke. “Then your Rating stands.”

“That’s it?”

She finally turned, her movement making me pull up hard. “NORA doesn’t make mistakes. Get that through your head while you’re young.” With a quick yank, the woman opened a heavy metal door and held it for me. “Good luck.”

To my surprise, the blond boy at the desk was only slightly older than me. Or maybe his freckles—a red mass of dots giving his face an orange hue—just made him look young. His eyebrows were reddish, which I guessed was his real hair color. The guy was bent over his work, arms moving frantically, knocking things over in his haste to tidy up.

A glass door behind him read “Rater Roulon.” A framed photograph hung beneath the name, depicting a round-faced man with dimples. So this was the man who’d held my future in his hands, then tossed it into the wastebasket like a bag of old parts. I stood on the tips of my toes to see through the glass, but the room was empty. Mr. Roulon wasn’t there.

The assistant finally looked up and rolled his eyes. “Of course. Today, of all days. Can you come back tomorrow?”

“No,” I said, straightening. “I need to—”

“File a complaint, yeah. I’m sure you do. Hold on a minute.”

With a final sweep of his arm, he wiped all the objects off his desk into a drawer. Then he punched something into the screen and grabbed my wrist, scanning the techband into the system. “Your name is . . . Ametrine Dowell.”

“Treena,” I corrected, feeling my determination drain away. This wasn’t going to work. I needed someone above the Rater to look at my case. My Rating needed to be fixed before my assignment was issued, or I’d be shipped off without options. Why had the Rater chosen today to be gone?

“And your Rating score is—Oh.” I pulled my hair aside to show him, and his eyes widened even more. Then I saw it—a small, nearly imperceptible downward turn of his mouth. Disgust.

“My scores are nearly perfect in every area,” I said, forcing down a shiver. His reaction was understandable, but still. “My Rating is a mistake.”

He turned to the screen again, his face suddenly closed and distant. “Even perfect scores wouldn’t guarantee anything. They don’t include the Rater’s overall impression points or the interview score.”

“Then look at my impression points and my interview score. I know you can’t tell me what I got, but just peek at them really quick.”

He sighed loudly, muttering something about a “high-profile job,” and his fingers flew across the glass screen. Then he squinted, a puzzled expression on his face. “Your impression score is fine. Your interview score too, actually. One of the highest scores I’ve seen.”

My heart skipped a beat. So there was a chance that this really was just a mistake, after all. He gave me a long look, and I simply shrugged.

He cleared his throat. “As a Rater’s assistant, I can’t change anything. The only thing I can do is make a note of your complaint. And, honestly,” he said, leaning forward, “I’ve been here two years and seen hundreds of complaints. The Rater never overturns a Rating once he’s signed it.”

I shook my head. “I can’t accept that.”

The guy made some notes on the glass screen, then stood up. I wished the screen were visible from this angle. “Your best bet is to fulfill your new assignment in a way that exceeds their expectations. That may actually get you somewhere.” He made sure the screen was powered off, then stepped around the desk. “Wish there was more I could do. Sorry.”

With that, the assistant made his way to the door and opened it for me. I had no choice but to leave. To my surprise, the guy followed me out. The door’s lock clicked behind us with chilling finality. He gave me a last look and headed down the hallway as if in a hurry to get somewhere. Sighing, I made sure my frizz securely covered my forehead once again.

Great. What now?

The assistant wasn’t the only one rushing away. The hallway was a mass of purple uniforms. Excited conversation buzzed in the air. As before, they all headed in the same direction.

Curious, I poked my head around the corner. The crowd was entering a set of double doors at the end of the hallway. Two guards stood on either side of the doors, their eyes sharp and probing.

“Excuse me,” I said, touching the elbow of a man passing near me. “What’s going on?”

The man looked surprised. “The empress’s visit, of course. Didn’t you get the network message?”

I felt my eyes widen. “I must have missed it. Thanks.” He was gone before I finished, pushing against the purple exodus that filled the hallway.

The empress? She was coming here? I’d never actually seen her in person, but every citizen knew what she looked like. I had studied her life story in history class, trying to figure out what she’d done to get the Rating that had propelled her to the throne at age eighteen.

A thrill of excitement surged through my veins as I forced an opening in the mass of people. A visit from the empress definitely explained the crowds and my Rater’s absence. He would be here somewhere, headed for the auditorium. I tried to remember what his photo had looked like, tried to hold it front and center in my mind. I wasn’t leaving this building without talking with him, empress or not.

“Ouch!” a woman cried. I had just stepped on her foot.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, but the pushing of the crowd didn’t allow me to do much else but follow. We inched our way closer, taking small steps and easing toward the double doors. The guards seemed alert, but they hadn’t stopped anyone yet. Of course, everyone else around me was a green. I pulled my hair forward again, hoping the lights were bright enough that the red glow wouldn’t shine though.

Right before stepping into the auditorium, one of the guards glanced at me. I looked away quickly, rubbing a fake headache, hoping he hadn’t looked too closely. The seats were nearly full, all facing a polished wooden platform on the stage. A dozen more guards surrounded the platform. The redness of my new Rating would be extremely noticeable when the lights dimmed so I had to be careful. I passed under a blast of cold air conditioning and shivered.

Keeping my hand up, I caught a glimpse of the Rater’s assistant slowly climbing the staircase to the left. Hoping the Rater would also be nearby, I followed, choosing a seat two rows behind him. It would only allow for a side view of the speaker, but it was the closest I could get to the front. A thrill of excitement shot through my body. I was about to see the empress in person.

Dresden will be so jealous, I thought with satisfaction.

I scanned the room for a few minutes, feeling my heart sink slowly to the floor. There were probably a thousand people in here, all greens, all blonde. It would be nearly impossible to find the Rater. A thousand people, I thought. It seemed strange. There couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred who worked in the government building. Maybe the higher officials of the area were here too. That meant my father was probably in the crowd as well. Slouching in my seat and keeping a hand over my forehead, I glanced at the rows behind me. No one looked familiar.

The guard who had watched me enter began climbing the steps on the far side, searching faces. My breathing quickened. I forced myself to sit normally as he turned and headed my direction. Twenty meters. Ten.

But before he reached our section, the lights suddenly dimmed. The guard’s outline froze and then retreated down the steps. I gave a sigh of relief.

The audience immediately quieted in anticipation. Within seconds the tribune rose to introduce the empress. When she appeared, we stood and put our fists over our hearts in respect. And then I gave a start. This woman, wearing a curvy, sequined uniform dress, looked different from the lady I’d seen in the transmissions. The face was the same, but the youthful intelligence she was famous for was replaced by irritation. She just looked . . . older. Her usual intricate braid was gone. Instead, her long blonde hair hung straight, with a few haphazard streaks of purple and silver. I knew that I was witnessing the birth of the latest appearance-points obsession.

Her hair wasn’t what had surprised me, though. It was her unnatural, highly arched eyebrows. Too many face-lifts. I chuckled to myself. Tiny embedded jewels and intricate tattoos—and the highest Rating score in the entire nation, 974—framed her forehead. She had managed to keep her position for almost seventeen years. Her score had decreased, though. It had been 976 before today.

She nodded to us, a polite smile pasted onto her painted face, and then she tilted her head gracefully. “My dears, thank you for your greeting.” The audience caught her meaning and sat down. “I have only a few minutes, so allow me to deliver my message. Then I will take a few intelligent questions.”

She stood a little taller, as if gathering her thoughts. “You’ve likely heard the rumors about food smugglers, especially in this area, for several years now. It will not surprise you to hear that most of them are Integrants. These people attack our borders, steal precious resources, and smuggle food. In the past, we’ve allowed them a second chance through integration and the reform system. But that is not the worst of it.” She paused dramatically. “Now they have repaid our kindness with an uprising within NORA’s borders.”

The shuffling sounds in the audience went silent.

“The smugglers don’t see the danger they’re perpetuating,” she continued. “Since the beginning of time, food has been the common thread in every war. Battles rampant with death and horror have been waged over its acquisition, those with food always holding the power. Food used to be the root of illness, the source of poisons and toxins, and always fostered inequality. People had too much or too little and consumed the wrong kinds, which caused their bodies to become inefficient and their lives wasteful. I will not allow our nation to crumble under the problems we’ve worked so hard to eradicate. The nutrition pill is all we need. And I certainly will not allow these miscreants to hold power over our people or overthrow our peaceful government. It is time to act, to cleanse our streets of the black market forever.” She paused for effect. “As of today, NORA is under martial law.”

There were some audible gasps, but many covered their shock with polite applause. I sat back in my seat, stunned.

The empress waited for the clapping to stop before she went on. “In the past, citizens found to be in an unscheduled location during daily techband sweeps were simply docked Rating points. It’s clear that a more effective form of remediation is necessary. Starting tomorrow, citizens caught anywhere they’re not authorized to be will receive an electric punishment from their techband.”

The crowd stirred, a low murmur sweeping the room like a shockwave. I remembered all too well pulling on my techband as a child, wondering if it would come off, and feeling a sudden electric jolt. That jolt, or punishment mode, happened anytime someone messed with their techband. As I got older, my professors had insisted that it was for our own protection. The techband held all our data—personal records, schedules, schoolwork, personal finances, and more. We scanned it to buy things and unlock doors. It was just part of life in NORA.

The empress was inflicting the tightest security measures NORA had ever seen. The consequence of disobedience wasn’t simply a Rating reduction. It was pain. The woman who stood before us wasn’t the humble, everyday hero I’d studied in history. A shiver spread through my body, and it wasn’t from the cold.

A flicker of movement caught my eye. It was the suspicious guard. He stood against the wall now, arms folded, waiting. He looked ready to move as soon as the lights came on.

“Some will say this policy is too strict,” the empress continued, turning toward our side of the room. Her high eyebrows made her look like a surprised deer. “Know this. Where there is division, there is unrest. Our frequent wars with the outlands are devastating enough. We cannot afford to battle amongst ourselves any longer. It is time that our children felt safe in their own streets. Once that is accomplished, we may reconsider.”

The audience was silent, everyone turning the idea over in their minds. A woman near the front stood and bowed. “Excuse me, Your Majesty. If I may . . . When will the new policy be announced to the public?”

The empress frowned. “This evening, at 1700 hours.”

Several other people stood and bowed, and the empress sighed. “Very well, you may ask a couple of quick questions.”

The standing figures started to talk over each other, but a man from the back shouted, “Does this apply to everyone? Government workers? Children?”

The empress pushed back from the platform a little, her lips pursed. “Yes. Those in the military and administrative positions will have an adapted version of the punishment, for obvious reasons.”

As the man sat, a dazed look on his face, a woman jumped up. “Your Majesty, may I ask a question?”

“Speak,” the empress ordered impatiently.

The lady looked around the room for a second, as if unsure about her question. Finally she blurted, “Is this policy in reaction to what happened to your Rating today?”

The audience froze as every eye turned to our leader. Her expression darkened as she raised an eyebrow—if that was even possible—and stared at her questioner as if considering how to squash an insect. The questioner shifted her weight nervously, then looked away.

The tribune stepped forward on the platform. “We are out of time,” he began, but the empress waved him away. She gripped both sides of the podium tightly and leaned forward. “As stated under law, I will remain your leader as long as I’m the most highly Rated individual. That does not appear to be changing anytime soon. I am most insulted by your insinuation.”

The woman jerked back as if she had been slapped. Then she slowly sat, sinking low into her chair. I knew her Rating would be affected by her outburst, even though she’d only voiced the question most of us wanted answered.

The empress stalked off the stage. We stood and saluted again, but she didn’t give us a second look. The commander cleared his throat. “The empress has been very generous to deliver this message in person. She relies on you, her most trusted and most highly Rated citizens, to ensure that her message is well received. You are dismissed.” He glared at the humiliated woman in the audience before following the empress out.

I tried to imagine the impact this announcement would have on NORA. Since Olympus shared a wall with the integration camp, it would affect us the most. An alliance between the food smugglers and the Integrants must have been threatening, indeed, to prompt such stern retaliation.

The audience began to disperse, the noise level rising as the crowd filed out the doors. I watched the crowd, looking for a round-faced man with dimples, but he was nowhere to be seen. The guard who’d been watching me stood in the middle of the doorway, a steady rock in the midst of a flowing river of people. He wasn’t about to let me get by again.

Pushing down a rising sense of panic, I turned my head and looked for another exit, but there was nothing. I started making my way down the stairs, holding my forehead again, but that must have been what the guard was looking for. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him push his way forward. I was in big trouble now. If I was arrested for sneaking in, there would be no Rating reconsideration.

With a quick glance at the platform, I noted that the empress and all her guards were long gone. That meant there was a back door somewhere. I reached the bottom of the platform and leaped up onto it. The guard picked up the pace behind me. Leaping again, I threw myself behind the curtain the empress had disappeared behind. The guard shouted something, but I couldn’t understand his muffled words.

Ahead was a dark hallway. At the end of it, light shone around the outline of a doorway. I sprinted down the hall, nearly tripping over my feet. Please be unlocked. With a mighty heave, I threw all my weight against the door. It opened more easily than expected, sending my feet stumbling forward.

Suddenly I found myself in a heap on the floor in front of a pair of silver-sequined high heels.

“Sorry,” I muttered, looking up. Several guards stood immediately in front of me, stunners aimed at my head, protecting the woman at whose feet I lay. Her two arched eyebrows stared down at me, framing eyes that registered irritation and confusion. Then her painted lips curved downward like a disapproving parent.

It was the empress.

8

My jaw dropped as I stared, horrified. Her sternness melted away as she realized my mistake, and an amused light reached her mascara-plastered eyes.

“Don’t move,” a stocky officer said, his stun gun still trained on my head.

“She’s little more than a child,” the empress said, studying me. Her manicured fingers reached out to brush my hair away from my Rating, and then I heard a sharp intake of breath. Every stun gun in the vicinity was immediately aimed at me—the center of a semicircle of unwanted attention. The empress made a tsk-tsk sound.

I heard the door open behind me, and the suspicious guard nearly bowled me over. When he saw the empress, his face went a sickly white, and he stood uncertainly, as if unsure whether to grab me or stand at attention. He chose the latter.

I felt nauseated as I raised my hands in surrender, still sitting on the ground. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—”

“Don’t talk in Her Majesty’s presence, red,” the tribune snapped.

“I haven’t seen a Rating that low since that serial killer from Alta,” the empress mused, still studying me. “And such a pretty face—proportional and intelligent. What a waste.”

“Please—” I began, and the tribune stepped forward with his arm raised to strike, but the empress put a hand up.

“Let her speak,” she commanded. “Stand up, red.”

I stood. “I didn’t mean to follow you, Your Majesty. I just came looking for my Rater, to ask for a reconsideration.” My voice wavered. It was too late to be shy now; if she had me arrested, it was over. “But now that you’re here . . .”

She gave a soft chuckle. “My dear, I don’t oversee Ratings. I’m no councilwoman.”

“I know,” I said quickly. This was my last chance. “But my Rater won’t change it, and there’s been a big mistake.”

“NORA doesn’t make mistakes, child,” she said, folding her arms. “You must have done something to deserve it.”

I thought again of my biological father and gulped. It was probably the last thing I wanted this woman to know. “My scores are nearly perfect,” I said, knowing as the words left my mouth that I’d lost the battle. The guard behind me grabbed my arms and locked them behind my back. It was over.

“Wait,” the empress said suddenly. Her eyes narrowed, and she circled me like a vulture examining its prey, her pointy shoes tapping sharply on the hard concrete. “What is your name, child?”

“Ametrine Dowell.”

A flash of recognition appeared in her eyes—or was it my imagination? Her face darkened. My wrists felt clasped together in some sort of device, which sent a painful current of electricity shooting up my arms when I moved too quickly—probably connected to my techband somehow.

“Ametrine, hmm? An unusual name.”

“My father named me.”

A strange look came over her face, but she hid it quickly. “Well, Ametrine, I see a certain stubbornness in you. Perhaps that alone is the cause for your Rating. You should accept your fate with grace. It will make your life a lot easier.”

Her words should have made me more docile, but they made me angry. It couldn’t end like this. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and they were determined to make me into something I wasn’t. I looked up at the empress. My eyes met hers, steady and undefeated. I was ready. “This is wrong, and I won’t accept it.”

She looked down her nose at me for a moment, eyes flickering to the red numbers on my head. “I can see that.” We were inches away now. The tattoos on her forehead were laced with golden thread and tiny precious jewels. I didn’t know where to focus. “Well, you did get past my guards. How you did that,” she said, shooting a glare in the sheepish guard’s direction, “I can’t imagine.”

“We’ll take care of her immediately, Your Majesty,” the tribune said in a terse manner.

“No. She’s coming with me.” She waved her delicate hand. “This one is interesting to me. I’m sure we’ll find something to talk about.”

Before I knew what was happening, two guards shoved me toward the largest transport I had ever seen, its reflective, reinforced steel designed to deflect bullets and stunners alike. Despite its size, it smoothly hovered above the ground as they forced me inside, whacking my head against the doorframe before I fell onto the seat. I rebalanced myself and looked out the window. The guards stood at attention. As the empress set a dainty foot inside, I caught the last part of her whispered conversation with the tribune.

“. . . absolutely unacceptable. If I’m not safe here, then where?”

“He’ll be stripped of rank immediately.”

“No. I want him executed.”

I gave a little gasp, which resulted in a painful jolt from my bonds.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the tribune replied sharply, his voice tight. She climbed in with a sweet smile and watched the two armed soldiers sit on either side of her. The guard who’d chased me stood stiffly as the transport eased away, but his face had turned yet another shade of pale. Maybe he’d heard their conversation as well. He knew what was about to happen. And it was all because of me and my stupid, selfish stubbornness.

“Please—” I began, about to plead for his life, but she cut me off immediately.

“So, Ametrine,” she said in a bored tone. “Let’s have a little chat.”

><><><><><

It was my first ride in a transport. Most citizens rode their bikes to their assignments, but the privileged few got driven around. My stepfather was one of those. I’d asked him once to take me for a ride, but the request had only made him angry. “Work hard and get your own someday,” he’d said. Somehow I’d never imagined my first ride would go quite like this. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore my racing heart.

The interior was of soft leather, white and almost silky to the touch. It smelled of disinfectant and lipstick. There were only two small windows on either side made of reinforced, double-paned glass. The realization gave me little comfort.

The city sped past quickly. We were headed west, toward Brighton, surrounded by several armored transports on either side, in front, and behind. I was still confused as to why she’d insisted on my presence here. I could tell that the guards on either side of her didn’t understand it either. I was the one who deserved to be executed. And yet, I was sitting here, relaxing in the empress’s transport. Not in comfort, exactly—but still alive, at least.

Why had I sneaked into that meeting?

“You want a higher Rating,” the empress said. “Why do you think you deserve it?”

My mouth was dry, but I couldn’t help but blurt out, “Please, Your Majesty—the guard tried to do his job. He nearly caught me before—”

“Nearly doesn’t cut it here,” she snapped. “And neither does try. He had his chance. If I can’t count on my personal guard to protect me, who can I count on?”

The guards stiffened, but they continued to look ahead. Their faces were chiseled and tanned like models. It seemed the empress liked to surround herself with visual perfection, even when it came to her guards.

“Well?” she asked. “Answer me or you’ll share his fate. Why do you want a higher Rating?”

Could she really do that? Execute an innocent citizen just because they failed at something? I nearly snapped at her again, but I knew it wouldn’t help. Why did I deserve a higher Rating? I thought about my accomplishments. Something told me she didn’t care about all that. “So I can be with someone.”

“Ah. A boy worth risking everything for, right?”

I blinked, wondering if her words were an act, a ploy to get me on her side. But it was true. Dresden was worth it. “Yes.”

“What is his Rating score?”

I paused. “942.”

She whistled. “That is a problem, isn’t it?”

She’s toying with me. I kept my mouth shut.

“The way I see it, you only have two choices.” She turned to look absently out the window. “You fulfill your assignment well and work your way back up.” There was a hint of a smile on her pouty red lips. “Or you can accept a special assignment—one that will be very worth your while. If you fulfill it, of course.”

Trying to hide my sudden interest, I slouched against the seat. The movement, slight as it was, sent an electric jolt up my arm. I swallowed. “What assignment?”

“It’s dangerous,” she cooed. “Risky, foolhardy, and downright painful. But I have a feeling you’re up to the challenge. And,” she leaned forward to whisper, “if you can manage it, I’ll personally order a Rating reconsideration for you.”

I took a deep breath, taking a moment to consider her words, my mind whirling. A second chance, from the empress herself. Was this really happening?

She sat back, watching my face. “I have a personal law-enforcement team stationed in the capital city, Aiguille. They take care of things for me, things the monitor force doesn’t have the competence for.” One of her guards swallowed hard, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, but she went on. “We’ve recently discovered that a member of the team has been leaking information to the Integrants. Unfortunately, I don’t know who it is. The team is far too well-trained and valuable a resource to disband.” She gave a wry smile. “They call themselves EPIC—Empress’s Personal Intelligence Contingent.”

“You want me to join them? To catch a spy?”

“Exactly.”

I thought back to the Rating Ceremony. “Are they the ones in black?”

“Yes. You’ve seen them, I assume?”

“Just one.” I hadn’t understood how a red could serve in the military. Now I understood. Had the guy from the ceremony been handpicked by the empress too? “So I travel around like they do and catch criminals.”

The empress looked bored. “Smugglers, mostly.”

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

“Two weeks.”

“That’s not very long.”

She sat back, crossing one leg over the other. “My dear, I could stop this transport and have you dumped out the window right now. Or, if I were in a bad mood, I’d simply order you to fulfill this assignment. But being the benevolent creature that I am, I’ve given you a choice. And, to be honest”—she examined her manicured fingernails—“it doesn’t seem like the choice should be all that difficult.”

My mind spun, trying to take it all in. A dangerous assignment, a secret ploy to uncover a government spy. I’d barely had the guts to visit my Rater this morning. Not only was the empress’s offer the quickest option, but it was the only real option. Whatever assignment came my way would be in the dregs of society, probably working in manufacturing or refuse. It was extremely hard to work your way out of that. It would be years—a decade, perhaps—before I became a yellow.

And then there was Dresden. His face flashed into my mind—his laughing blue eyes, the hint of curl in the light hair above his collar, his strong cheekbones. The feel of his arms around me. I couldn’t imagine a life without Dresden.

The empress’s painted lips curved into a smile as she watched my face, as if knowing she had convinced me. And as much as I hated to admit it, I knew it too. I felt a little dizzy. Dresden and Tali would be getting their assignments today, which meant they’d probably be gone within days.

“Can I tell my family good-bye?”

Her hands clasped into fists, but her voice was controlled. “Of course not. Your family will be notified. You’ll only be gone two weeks, after all. Assuming you survive.”

I gripped the seat with my thighs to steady myself. “Survive?”

“Of course. I told you it was dangerous. We’ve lost several soldiers in the last couple of years. Smugglers can hide weapons as well as food, you know. And then there’s the danger of the traitor discovering your mission and taking you out. So, yes, if you survive.”

My stomach twisted. All I’d wanted this morning was a second chance. Well, this was it. This was my assignment, my one and only opportunity to change the future. I’d worked too hard to have it all taken away from me. A surge of determination grew inside me, and I lifted my chin. “I’ll do it.”

“Excellent.” She flipped open her techband. “Ruben, take us to the train station.”

PART TWO

9

My legs moved to a rhythm, predictable and steady, and I barely noticed the citizens and vehicles around me. Running was a huge relief after a difficult mission and cramped transport ride. I required my team to run with me every week for conditioning, but that was only a small part of it. For one precious hour, I could leave the past behind.

Someone behind me sucked in a ragged breath and then coughed. I smiled. Tormenting Semias, who had to stop every few minutes to catch his wind, was yet another perk.

We were three miles from the bunker—I refused to think in kilometers—when my techband suddenly vibrated. Murphy was back with the newest recruit, no doubt.

I slowed to a walk and accepted the call, wondering what the latest unskilled and sorry trainee would be like. “Vance here.”

“I thought we talked about the running thing,” Murphy said, using his most authoritative voice. “You scare the citizens. I probably have a dozen formal complaints on my desk already. “

“What’s wrong with scattering the stuffy businessmen on their way home? They could use a little more exercise anyway.”

He muttered something under his breath. “Get out of the bike lanes and onto the sidewalk. Meet me at the furniture store in five minutes.” The screen went blank.

I forced back the irritation. We’d passed that a mile back, and since he could track us, he probably knew it.

“Time to sprint, boys,” I shouted, smiling at the groans that followed.

When we got there, Murphy leaned casually against his transport. Casual for him, anyway. He probably stood at attention in his sleep. The guys, still heaving from their run, crowded the transport for a look at our newest recruit. I pushed my way through and froze as Murphy opened the car door. The passenger stepped out and stood, blinking in the bright sunlight.

A girl.

The other guys quieted, and someone cleared his throat. The girl was of a slight build, with searching dark brown eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, although the front part was swept over her forehead and pinned into place. I saw the soft red glow of the numbers underneath. She shifted her weight from side to side as if wishing she could run away or climb back into the vehicle. She looked at me, and I stiffened. The girl from the Rating Ceremony.

Daymond cleared his throat. “You’re the new recruit, then?”

The girl nodded, her eyes still glued on me. It was hard to tell she was the same person I’d seen in Olympus. Her shoulders slumped a little, and her haunted eyes darted around like a cornered raccoon; her new purple uniform hung poorly on her petite frame.

The Demander had gone too far this time. If he thought sending a girl would hold us back, he was dead wrong.

“This is Ametrine Dowell,” Murphy announced. His voice held a hint of amusement at our reaction. “Treat her well, boys. And good luck to you, Ametrine.” He strode around to the driver’s side and climbed in. The transport pulled away and disappeared into traffic. She stared after it, looking a little lost.

“A girl,” Daymond said. “What the fates were they thinking?”

“She’s pregnant,” Semias said, staring at her. “That’s the only explanation.”

Ametrine gasped and whirled to face him.

“Don’t be stupid, Semias,” Ross said with his I-know-everything air. “They send pregnant girls straight to the medics, then to the work camps.”

“How do you know? Experience?” Daymond asked. Ross opened his mouth, but Daymond talked over him. “Well, what are we supposed to do with a girl?”

“I get her first,” Semias said. His eyes slid slowly down her body.

The guys instantly went still. The girl froze. Before I even realized what I was doing, I had slammed Semias against the store wall. His expression was stunned, then turned murderous. He was several inches taller and thicker through the shoulders, but my hand tightening on his esophagus effectively encouraged him to be still. “One more comment like that,” I spat, “and it’ll be your last.”

He swatted at my hand and gave me a death glare.

Daymond jumped forward and extended his hand to Ametrine. “I’m Daymond. You’ve already met Vance, leader of Team Two. I guess you’re one of us now. You’ll meet Team One back at the bunker.”

I pulled away from Semias, who was peeling himself off the wall, and nodded. Handshakes were a NORA thing. “Don’t mind Semias. He’s all mouth, especially when it comes to stuffing himself.”

Semias swore under his breath.

“You’ll be with me until you’re trained, Ametrine,” I told her.

“Call me Treena.”

Neb pulled on my sleeve like an eager toddler. I tried to ignore him, but the tugging became more insistent. I shot him a glare.

There was an unnatural hint of color in his cheeks. “I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“Um, where’s she gonna sleep?”

Someone coughed, and I felt anger rise up inside me again. What was the commander thinking, sending a girl? This really complicated things. “We’ll put her in the bathroom—I mean, washroom.”

“Excuse me?” Treena said.

It was suddenly very quiet. “But,” Neb continued, “what if we have to—you know—”

“I’m sure she’ll share.”

“Hold on,” Treena said. “There’s no way I’m sleeping in a washroom.”

“Three-quarters pace, men,” I ordered. “See you at the bunker.”

The guys looked grumpy, but they got the hint and took off at a jog. Semias lumbered along after them at a walk. If only I could get Poly to take Semias. He wasn’t ready to advance yet, but . . . a girl? This was going to be tough.

I motioned for her to walk with me, but she shook her head. “No. Let’s run. Why are you treating me like a porcelain doll?”

With a shrug, I started to jog. Her legs were shorter, but she kept pace pretty well. “The bathroom offers a lock and privacy. I don’t trust these guys, and neither should you.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. If she couldn’t trust yellows, could she really trust a red? For a while there was only the sound of traffic and the steady rhythm of our breathing. After about a mile, she was still keeping up. At least they’d sent me a girl who could run.

“Fine,” she said after several minutes. “I’ll sleep in the washroom until they’re used to me. But only if it’s clean.”

I gave her a sideways look. She’d just joined the most dangerous military unit in the nation, and she was worried about sanitation. “We do our own cleaning, so I can’t promise anything. But it could be worse. You could be sleeping in the stairwell.”

She shot me a glare. Treena looked like any other NORA girl, but I sensed an intense anger under the surface. She was obviously not happy to be here. What could she possibly have done to warrant 440? And why had they sent her here, of all places?

There was only one way to find out.

I clicked my techband screen up and called Daymond. His face came into view, bouncing with his strides. “Yep.”

“Change of plans,” I said. “Let’s stop at the Red District. I think it’s a good time to get Treena’s initiation out of the way.”

“Yes, sir,” Daymond said with a grin.

It gave me great satisfaction to see Treena swallow hard.

10

I’d been here before.

At least that’s what it felt like. The Red District in Aiguille was similar to the one in Olympus: very few bikes and hordes of people shuffling around, their eyes darting sharply, missing nothing. Dozens of children dodged through the crowds, laughing and playing, their uniforms dirty and unfitted. I wrinkled my nose. The roads were black with filth, the buildings shorter and dusted with various shades of grime. The street cleaners obviously didn’t come here either.

The citizens’ faces showed a practiced boredom, but they clung to their kids with the ferocity of a mother bear. The EPIC team lined up on the curb, still sweaty and panting from their run, and suddenly there was a stillness to the crowded square, as if we’d dampened the sound. Nearly all motion stopped. A few people actually turned around and headed quickly in the opposite direction.

“If you were trying to sneak in,” I said, “you failed miserably.”

Vance glanced meaningfully at his guys. Two of them broke off and trotted after the people who had left. Then he turned to me. “You ready, Treena?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t. Without a thought, I patted the hair covering my Rating.

“Today you’re a beggar,” Vance said with a chuckle, and he smoothed my hair out of my face. His fingers were calloused but gentle, and it sent a tingle down my spine. “If there was ever a time to show your Rating off, it’s now.”

“No one will believe she’s a beggar,” Semias said with a frown. “She looks too clean. Her uniform looks fresh out of the package.”

Vance opened his mouth to argue, but Daymond—the one with the scar—spoke up. “I actually agree with Semias this time. She doesn’t look desperate enough.”

“I’m happy to dirty her up a little,” Semias said, still staring at me. “We want her to look authentic, after all.”

I glared back. “Do. Not. Touch me.”

“Semias,” Vance said quietly. “You and Day sweep the north alley. I’ll contact you when you’re needed.”

“Yes, sir.” Daymond shot me an apologetic look before striding away. Semias just smirked and shuffled after him.

I let out an exasperated breath. “You don’t need to protect me.”

Vance ignored my comment and reached into his pocket, pulling out a set of tiny black devices, then fastened one to his ear. It looked like an earring. “Put this on so we can communicate. I’m staying out of the way, but I’ll be there in seconds if it sounds like you need help. Any questions?”

A million, actually, but few he could answer. I knelt and rubbed my hand in the dirt, then brushed it onto my uniform. “So, I’m supposed to catch a smuggler? Is that all?”

“You can catch more than one,” he said with a slight smile, “if you’d like. Semias arrested three at his orientation.”

That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant, but it seemed simple enough. “Do I get a weapon or anything?”

“No. You haven’t been trained to use one, and it would be too conspicuous. That’s why I’m listening in. You’ll be fine, though. They won’t hurt you.”

No weapon, no help. My mission was to identify the traitor, and I couldn’t do that unless the guys trusted me, which meant passing this test. If Semias could do it, I could. I hesitated, then stepped up against a shop corner and leaned against the building. Sure enough, a layer of dirt attached itself to my uniform. I rubbed against the wall on all sides like an itchy cat, then nodded in satisfaction. “All right, I’m ready.”

“Good luck.”

It wasn’t long before I stood on the first floor of a high-occupancy apartment building, trying to decide where to start. I chose a random door—plastic, covered in dark fingerprints, and much too thin to provide its owners any sense of security. Everything was the same gray color. I felt an overwhelming urge to find a rag and start scrubbing like a crazy person.

Instead, I tapped on the door, trying to look hunched over and miserable. There was no answer. A mixture of disappointment and relief flooded through my body as I moved on to the next door. No answer. If nobody opened up for me, would I fail the initiation? Or would I just have to do this again another day?

At the sixth door, an eye almost completely covered with mousy gray hair appeared at waist level. “What?” a tiny voice whispered. A child.

“Uh, I—just wanted to know if you have any extra nutrition pills? I’m really hungry.”

The door opened a little wider, and I could see two eyes now. “You talk funny. Like the soldiers.” She—I assumed it was a girl—glanced at my forehead. “’Cept soldiers don’t have the red numbers. Just the green ones. Lemme ask my papa.”

The sharp crack of the door slamming made me jump.

“Treena,” Vance’s voice said over the feed. “You in?”

“Not yet,” I whispered. “Give me a minute.”

“Let me know the second you get inside.”

“I will, I will.”

“Lady,” the kid said through the door. She messed with the knob, and the door swung wide open. The girl couldn’t be more than six years old. “My papa still gots the sickness, you know? But he says you can have one of his pills. They taste gross anyway.” She held the tiny gray pill up for me to see. The material inside was coarse and cheaply made, like the ones Tali used.

Part of me wanted to take it and run away. If this kid was a smuggler, I didn’t want to know. I accepted it, rolling it over in my palm. The outside was a little slimy from her hand, but she beamed up at me with a brilliant smile.

“Thanks, cutie.” I forced a smile and started to turn away.

“Wait,” she said. She leaned forward and whispered, “I have a potato. It smells bad, and it has the white pokey things, but you can have it. I’ll go get it for you.”

The word no got caught in my throat as she dashed off again. A potato. We’d done a unit on illegal substances in school, and I knew it was some kind of root-based food. Smugglers grew a lot of them because they were easier to hide from scouting planes.

Food. This girl and her father were smugglers. Or customers, at least. A sick feeling anchored me to the spot, and I felt numb. Could I destroy a family? Could I achieve my goal at the expense of a six-year-old kid? Did I have it in me to send an innocent child to the work camps so I could have my Rating changed? Was it right to take my happiness from someone else?

I suddenly felt nauseated, and I swallowed hard. Of course it was right. I hadn’t written the law—I was just enforcing it. It wasn’t like she’d be harmed, exactly. Just sent elsewhere. Surely the work camps weren’t much worse than living in the Red District.

The girl returned, hands cupped around something small and brown. Her face radiated excitement. “I like it because the white pokeys look sharp, but they’re not. See? It doesn’t even hurt.”

“You can’t give this to me.”

“Yes, I can. Papa said I could use it how I wanted, so you can have it.” She thrust it into my hand and pulled away.

Smugglers were supposed to be evil-looking Integrants, violent and greedy men with scars and tattoos. Not little girls. I slipped the potato into my pocket. “Thank you. You’d better get back to your dad now.”

Footsteps echoed up the stairs behind me, and I turned in surprise. Neb, Ross, Daymond, and Semias appeared out of the dim light and headed toward us. My heart sank into my toes.

“Vance said you needed backup,” Daymond said.

“Your first door, huh?” Neb said. “Not bad.”

Before I could speak, they leaped past me and through the doorway.

“Look out! There’s a—”

It was too late. The shock on the girl’s face turned into horror as the guys nearly ran her over. She hit the wall and fell to the ground. The EPIC guys just stomped past her, weapons up and ready.

“Are you okay?” I reached out to help her, but she stiffened and slapped my hand away. “Don’t touch me. You’re a soldier!”

“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled.

Shouts from deeper inside the apartment told me her father had been discovered. Within seconds, a pale-faced, skinny-figured man was shoved into the hallway, his arms already fastened behind him. He wore a wrinkled, worn uniform that desperately needed washing. “We haven’t done anything wrong,” he insisted, his voice weak. “I have no food here.”

“Daddy,” the girl exclaimed. “I gave her the potato. I didn’t know!”

He glanced at me, and his face went dark.

Suddenly there was a shrill cry from a back room, and then another nearly identical cry. The father groaned. As Neb went in to investigate, the little girl ran to her dad and wrapped herself tightly around his leg. “Daddy, why did they tie your arms again? Daddy, hold me.”

“Twins!” Neb exclaimed, and came out holding two screaming babies wrapped in tattered blankets. One was flailing, and he struggled not to drop it. I started forward to help him.

Semias, who held the father’s elbow, shoved the little girl aside, and she stumbled to the floor. “Someone tie this kid up, will you?”

“Leave my daughters alone,” the father snapped. “They’re innocent. They can stay with a neighbor while I’m gone.”

“You aren’t coming back,” Semias said. “Possession of an illegal substance is punishable with a one-way trip to the work camps. Your kids will be fostered out.”

The father growled and lunged for Semias.

Semias was ready. He stepped aside and shoved the man sideways, slamming him roughly into the wall. With a grunt, the man fell to one knee and struggled to right himself. Before he could blink, Semias had his stunner pointed it at the man’s face. The sickly man breathed hard as the two stared each other down. Their Ratings were only twenty points apart, I noticed.

“Welcome to NORA,” Semias whispered and pulled the trigger. I gasped. The little girl screamed as her father crumpled to the floor. The twins’ wailing rivaled hers in volume and intensity.

Daymond groaned. “Was that necessary, Semias? Now we have to carry the guy.”

I gaped at them in disbelief. I’d never seen someone get stunned before. Semias knelt down and grabbed the girl’s shoulders, wrestling her arms together to bind them. Her sobs had turned into hysterical shrieking.

“Nice try,” Daymond said. “You’re taking the old man. You shoot ’em, you carry ’em. I’ll take the girl.”

Semias grumbled, but he backed away.

“Treena, come get a baby,” Neb said.

I shuddered, stepping over the unconscious man, and took the more upset of the two babies. Her cheeks were wet with tears as she gasped for breath between screams. Pure terror reflected in her dark eyes. I pulled the hole-filled blanket up to cover her again.

“Four at once,” Ross said. “You hold the record now, Treena. Not bad for your first time.”

“Shh,” I told the baby and pulled her close, bouncing to give her some measure of comfort, to stop the crying. “It’ll be okay.”

But the truth was, for this family, things would never be okay again.

><><><><><><

“You sent them in, didn’t you?”

Vance didn’t respond. We watched as the captured family’s transport disappeared into the late-afternoon traffic. The father had been deemed dangerous, which required two monitors to escort them as well as the driver. I was relieved that someone else was taking them to their fate; but I’d almost rather have chosen that above walking home next to Vance.

Something very close to rage surged through my veins. “It wasn’t necessary. I had it all under control.”

He met my gaze. “Under control. That’s what you call it?”

“How do you know I wasn’t playing along? Maybe I was just biding my time.”

“But you weren’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s not what you expected, is it? You thought you’d be catching the bad guys, when really, you are the bad guy. And you couldn’t handle that realization.”

My mouth dropped open a little. “Well, technically we’re enforcing the law. That doesn’t make us bad.”

“Technically. But you’re missing the point. There’s one rule in EPIC, Treena, above all else. Until you believe it, you won’t survive here. The law comes before the people—before Integrants, before smugglers, and even before EPIC. We fulfill the job no matter what. That’s the lesson you’re supposed to learn here.”

My anger surged, then exploded. “Don’t you dare lecture me about following the rules. I’ve obeyed every stupid law that’s ever been written. I spent my entire life following orders and pleasing people, believing that if I did my life would be perfect. Look where that got me!”

He gave me a long look. “Whatever happened in your past, this is the time to be very careful. You think you’re safer here, unwatched? You really think the empress would allow a bunch of reds and yellows to roam the country without very close supervision?”

“Just two reds.”

He let out a frustrated breath. “Some of my guys have died, Treena. This life is dangerous. We had to send you in unarmed for initiation, but I’ll issue you a weapon as soon as you’re trained. Smugglers won’t hesitate to kill you if it means their freedom. Add that to the fact that most of the nation hates us, and you’ll see why it’s so important to follow orders exactly.” He started to turn, then paused. “Oh, and by the way, you’ll want to dispose of that potato before we get back.”

“She was just a little girl,” I whispered. “I couldn’t trade her happiness for mine.”

Vance’s expression hardened. “You’ll get over that soon enough. Time to head for the bunker. Try to keep up.”

With that, he turned and jogged away.

><><><><><><><

Major Murphy, the stern-faced man who had met me at the train station, had told me about the bunker. But I hadn’t expected it to be an actual bomb shelter far beneath the Council Building. Had the guys chosen this place, or was it all NORA could offer them? Was it intended to protect EPIC from the world, or was it the other way around?

We must have descended a dozen staircases before we reached the bottom. My ears felt fuzzy as the stairwell grew darker and the air became heavy and cool. It was hard to believe that we were only a few kilometers away from the empress’s palace and the famous square where Peak had first delivered the Standards. This felt like an entirely different world. At the very bottom was a dirty concrete wall and a single door. With a shove, Vance flung the door open and held it for me.

The front room wasn’t what I had expected. There was no furniture at all, and workout equipment lined the walls. A thick, rectangular training pad sat in the middle of the floor. The stale air smelled like sweat and urine.

On the wall closest to the door was a shelf full of stunners. Helmets and gear had been shoved haphazardly into the bins below, and a combat boot lay on its side on the floor.

“The bedroom is down the hall, and the washroom is to the left.” Vance still held the door for me, and I realized that I was standing there like an idiot.

“Lovely,” I muttered and stepped inside. “Home sweet home.”

“You’ll get used to it.” He closed the door, pushed on it, and slid some kind of metal device closed. It snapped with a click.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A dead bolt,” he said. “It’s not exactly NORA approved.”

“A lock? But why?”

“I don’t trust NORA’s locking system.”

There was a slight hesitation in his words, which made me realize that it wasn’t the locking system he didn’t trust. What kind of guy led a group of misfits, arrested children in the name of the law, and locked himself underground? A part of me—a very small part—was intrigued. There was distant laughter from the other room, and I remembered that there was a whole other team I had yet to meet. More stares and more doubts.

“Wait,” I said before he could walk away. “Do you think I can do this?”

Vance hesitated. That was all I needed to know. So much for a good first day in EPIC.

“Training starts tomorrow,” he said. “You’d better get some rest.”

11

I slammed the screen closed in frustration. My techband’s error message displayed no matter who I tried to call. Either we were too far underground to receive a network signal or I wasn’t allowed to contact anyone. Something told me it was the latter.

The guys were still using the washroom. I sat on the dirty floor in the hallway next to the bedroom door, my knees propped up casually. After initiation, what was one more dirt stain? Besides, soon I’d receive a black uniform instead. As far as the guys knew, I’d passed with flying colors. Vance hadn’t told a single person about my failure, which both relieved and bothered me. If he thought I owed him anything, he was flat-out wrong.

I sighed and clicked the screen open again. While on the train, I’d gotten one last note from my mother. It was a text message, not a real recording, but better than nothing. I scanned the list and found it again.

As you asked, I told your friends you got a second chance. They’re excited for you. Dresden is going to the academy, Broadcast Division. He says to tell you good luck and he hopes to see you there soon. Taliyah’s assignment is laundry for the military. She leaves tomorrow and says to keep fighting for what you want. Your father and I wish you the best. Mom.

P.S. I sure hope you’re doing this for yourself and not for Dresden.

Dresden’s assignment wasn’t a surprise. He was probably packing right now, getting ready to board the morning train. At least we’d be in the same city, even if I couldn’t contact him. There was a heavy ache in my chest. He was moving on without me. And I was sleeping in a washroom, arresting children and searching for a spy.

And then there was Tali. Laundry wasn’t the most glamorous of jobs, but she’d always wanted to get out of Olympus. It was a change of scenery, at the very least. If only I could have said good-bye.

Laughter floated down the hallway from the bedroom. I got on hands and knees and snuck a peek—if they weren’t dressed by now, it wasn’t my fault—just in time to see Ross stepping out of the washroom with a towel around his waist. I pulled back, my cheeks burning.

Team One had been nice enough during introductions, but now the guys basically pretended I wasn’t there. I didn’t complain about that. In a way, I imagined myself being pretty comfortable here. At least everyone seemed to see each other at the same level despite the hundreds of points that varied between them. It was almost like Ratings didn’t even matter.

Minutes later, Vance peeked his head around the corner and nodded. His dark hair was combed neatly back, and he wore a gray T-shirt. The old-fashioned soap smell that always followed him was stronger now.

“It’s all yours.” He handed me a folded black uniform. “Hope you find it clean enough to suit you.”

I shot him a look and stood, trying not to notice how his T-shirt accented his rock-hard chest. A few steps through a noisy room full of laughing, half-dressed men, and I entered my new “bedroom.” The mirrors were still misted with steam. A blanket and pillow—both off-white, and both well used—sat by the door. That was the extent of my bedding for the next two weeks.

“Lovely,” I muttered and went back out to the bedroom. I swiped the pillows off the two nearest beds and strode back into the washroom. If I had to sleep in here, at least I’d be relatively comfortable.

I decided to camp out under the sanitation sinks jutting out from the wall. It had a clear view of the door, and the floor wasn’t wet there. I slid the door closed and shoved the lock into place before settling down on the hard tile.

Now, if only I could do something about the smell. Stuffing the pillows under my body and the clean one under my head, I pulled the blanket over my shoulders. The blanket smelled. Didn’t they sanitize their fabrics down here?

Night had fallen long ago, but the guys didn’t quiet down a bit. They were discussing the day’s events, and occasionally the sound of arguing floated through the door. I strained to hear and caught a word here and there: Mission. Frenzy. Rating Day. Council.

The word council made me think of Konnor. His plan to unseat the current councilor of integration made me uneasy. If by some miracle he did get the position in the next few days, my parents would have to move here. He’d be working in the very building above us. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It would be nice to see my mom again—I didn’t like leaving on such uncertain terms—but it was nice to be out of the house, even if it was . . . this.

I hope you’re doing it for yourself and not for Dresden, Lanah had said. Was she really more worried about my motives than my safety? Wouldn’t most mothers have said, “Be careful,” or “I love you” at that point, and not lectured about a boyfriend?

And why not do it for him? I’d had a huge crush on him for years. I’d tutored him into the top ten for academic scores, and he’d trained me to become a pretty decent khel player before we finally hooked up. Together we made up a perfect person.

My fingers found their way up to my forehead again, and I jerked them away. Who are you kidding? Dresden is a perfect person without you.

My thoughts soon grew fuzzy, and a warm sense of comfort spread throughout my tired body. My last thought was One day down, thirteen to go.

><><><><><><><

A harsh banging shattered my dreams, and I sat up too quickly, completely disoriented. My head whacked something hard with a painful thump.

Groaning, I held my head in my hands so it wouldn’t explode. Where was I? It was so dark I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or awake. My head throbbed as it all came back. The washroom. EPIC. The mission. But what was that pounding noise?

I stood slowly and made my way to where the door should have been, feeling along the wall with one hand and holding my sore head with the other. It took a few seconds of fumbling to find the lock, and then I opened it a crack. “Hello?”

“Time to train,” a gruff voice whispered, and a hand yanked me through the door.

“What? Let go of me!”

The hand dropped. “Let your eyes adjust for a second,” my captor whispered. “You’re about to run into a wall. Here, follow me.”

“Vance?”

His hand reached for mine, more softly this time, and pulled me through the darkness.

It really was Vance. “But where are we going?”

“Training,” he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Neb was waiting for us in the training room, bleary-eyed and shirtless. Other than the three of us, the room was empty. The lights that had seemed sufficiently bright yesterday were barely adequate now, and shadows haunted the corners of the training arena. Now that my heart had slowed a bit, my mind was finally working right.

“You really are serious?”

“Our team has missions day and night. The sooner you get used to it, the better. Besides, the training room is all ours.”

“If I accidentally murder someone tomorrow out of exhaustion, I’ll blame you,” I muttered.

Neb barked a laugh, then clamped his mouth shut when Vance shot him a look.

“Why is Neb here?” I asked.

Vance paused. “Observation.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but suddenly understood the real reason. Vance was, in a small way, being a gentleman by refusing to be alone with me.

“I still don’t know why you’re really here,” Vance said, walking to the far corner. “But I’m going to find out right now. Let’s see what you can do.” He tilted a padded black cylinder and rolled it toward us. I eyed it with confusion. “This is a training stand,” he said. “I want you to pretend it’s a person. Punch it, kick it, whatever.”

I raised an eyebrow. This was training? Beating up a black piece of padded foam? This would be interesting. With a mighty heave, I threw my fists at it. I nearly fell over as the stand twisted under my weight. With a flush of embarrassment, I set myself again and kicked at it, almost missing altogether. Then I tried to use my shoulder to shove it aside. It didn’t budge. The thing must have weighed as much as a transport.

Neb was trying so hard not to laugh that his face was bright red. Even Vance had a smile tickling the corners of his mouth. I felt utterly and thoroughly humiliated. Putting my hands into fists, I faced them. “What?”

“Well, that answers that question,” Vance said, and Neb finally exploded with laughter. His snorts were so ridiculous that I glared at him, rubbing my sore shoulder.

“So why did they send you, then?” Vance muttered. “If you’re inexperienced, there could really only be one reason.”

“What’s that?” Neb asked, leaning calmly against the wall.

“A tool,” Vance said. “They want us to use her as a decoy or something. The Demander and the empress must not be satisfied with our performance.”

You could say that. I kept my face impassive.

“If that’s the case,” Vance said slowly, “it’s even more important that you learn to defend yourself, Treena. Neb, come here.”

Neb jumped to attention like a lapdog. I almost expected his tongue to start flapping. “Yes?”

“Teach her the basics. Just punches and kicks for today. Tell me when she’s got it.” He didn’t wait for an answer but retreated to the corner of the room where he’d gotten the stand. Then he sat on the floor, back to us, rigid and straight. I watched him in confusion.

“What good are kicks and punches when someone points a stunner at you?” I muttered. “I thought we’d be doing shooting practice or something.”

“They didn’t give me a stunner until I’d been here a month,” Neb said. “Gotta prove yourself first. Now I’ll show you how to punch. Make a fist and bend your thumb around the front.”

><><><><><><><

It was hard to pay attention to Neb’s droning when Vance was training across the room. He had spent the first ten minutes sitting still, completely ignoring us. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while he stretched. Neb was making me punch the black stand—the bag, as he called it—and soon I could make it buck backward a little. It was a small feat, but it was progress. Then we moved on to kicks. It was about then that Vance started fighting the air.

It was the strangest, most intoxicating thing I’d ever seen. His breathing deepened and came out in short bursts as his arms and legs whipped through the air—faster and faster. Soon his entire body was a black, dancing blur. Even Neb had stopped talking and stared in awe.

Vance dropped to the ground and spun as if kicking the feet out from under an invisible opponent and then leaped forward with a yell. Then there was a series of bullet-quick punches just before he leaped again, avoiding an unseen attack. His arm whipped out behind him as if he were holding off another man to his right, and his leg swept out again as he turned. Three quick kicks, each in a different direction, and another yell. I hardly dared blink.

I’d watched Dresden get sweaty playing khel hundreds of times, and his tall, lean body was carefully toned. But there was something raw about Vance, something wild and powerful. His build was shorter and wider than Dresden’s, yet somehow he seemed much quicker. And there was something unsettling about his eyes.

Suddenly those eyes were on me, and I realized I was staring. With a quick clearing of my throat, I turned back to the bag. Vance straightened and wiped his forehead. His shirt, wet with perspiration, clung tightly to his hardened frame. “Let’s see what you’ve learned.”

“You just want a break,” I said and swallowed hard. Vance had taken off his sweaty shirt. I tore my eyes away and locked my gaze onto the bag. My cheeks were hot as I kicked it again with a grunt. After Vance’s performance, he probably thought I was the weakest, silliest girl he’d ever met.

He didn’t smile. “Show me a punch.”

I hit the bag as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.

Vance shook his head. “No, I mean punch me.” He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and eased me toward him.

I shrugged. “Fine.” With a heave, I threw my fist toward his chiseled stomach still glistening with sweat. He grabbed my fist before it connected. “Not there. If I were trying to attack you, that wouldn’t even slow me down. Aim here.” He pointed to his solar plexus, where his rib cage met in the center.

“All right,” I said slowly and struck again. This time I nearly touched his skin before he swiped my fist away. I hadn’t even seen his hand move.

“Better. Your aim is actually pretty decent. You’re putting your whole body into it, but you still don’t have much power.”

I blinked. “Um, I’m not a huge person. What else am I supposed to do?”

It was a sarcastic comment, but he stood straighter, his expression thoughtful. A flash of movement in the corner caught my eye. It was Neb, trying to imitate Vance. He kicked and punched the air, but his movements looked awkward and disconnected. There was nothing of the smooth and flowing dancelike movements Vance had just demonstrated.

“What was that?” I asked. “I mean, what you just did.”

My question pulled him out of his thoughts. “Oh, just something my father taught me. Martial arts. It’s a kind of combat.”

“Will you teach me?”

A flicker of surprise flashed across his face, but he covered it quickly. “I’ve never taught anyone before.”

“Really? But you’re the trainer.”

“I show everyone the basics, but these guys prefer boxing. They think all you need is a hard-enough punch to the face and your opponent is out for the count.”

“Isn’t he?”

Vance gave a sideways smile, really looking at me for the first time. “Sometimes.”

I pulled my arm up for a stretch, feeling my muscles stiffening already. I’d be very sore tomorrow. Or, rather—looking at my techband—later today. We’d burned an hour already. The other guys would be up soon. Somehow the realization made me want to enjoy these quiet moments while they lasted. I felt Vance’s eyes on me as I settled myself in front of the bag again, pulling my arms behind me for a series of punches. After a couple of minutes, I felt my body warming up comfortably, my breathing becoming quicker and more rhythmic. I had almost forgotten about Vance when he spoke.

“Yes.”

“Hmm?”

“Yes, I’ll teach you.” He grabbed the bag and leaned it onto its side, spinning it effortlessly out of the way. “But I want you to practice on a real person from now on.”

I hid a smile. “Fair enough.”

“And,” he continued, “you need to throw away everything you have been up to this point.”

“Excuse me?”

“Watch,” he said. I barely saw his arm move and realized he was throwing a punch. My body instinctively leaped backward. Vance’s fist stopped just short of where I had stood. “See that?”

Adrenaline coursed through my veins as I gaped at him. “What was that? You showing off now?”

“You retreated.”

“What else should I do, get hit?”

“That’s just it. You’ve been taught by NORA to be docile and obedient, to run away from conflict. Conquer that reflex. Smugglers will only attack if they think they can beat you. Fight back, and suddenly you’re not worth the effort.”

What did he mean, you’ve been taught? The guy had obviously been in this dungeon too long. And I was anything but docile. “Fine, then teach me to defend myself. But I’m not sitting around until I get attacked, Vance. I want to get in the first strike.”

His expression was thoughtful as he nodded. “Deal.”

We practiced for another hour before I couldn’t take any more. My body was stiff and sore from what felt like an actual beating by the time the first guy awoke. My “room” was quickly occupied by a group of sleepy, dirty, sour-breathed men who just kicked my pillow aside. There would be no nap this morning.

Day two had begun.

><><><><><><><

While the men did their business, I ran through my stretches, sitting on the mat in the training room. “Two weeks,” I muttered. It felt like forever. There were twelve guys, six on each team, which meant I’d have to rule out one guy per day. I sighed. It didn’t make sense to hide in here, pretending like I wasn’t a part of the group. It was time to start asking questions and getting to know the team. I forced my aching legs to stand and started for the bedrooms.

The sound of muffled voices, low and deep, stopped me. It came from the stairwell. I moved to the door, straining to hear. The voice was unfamiliar.

Curious, I put my ear right up against the heavy door, but it didn’t seem to help. I sat against the wall and grabbed my feet into a leg stretch just in case someone walked in. I could only pick out a word here and there. Promise. Tomorrow. Resistance.

I perked up, straining to hear over the sounds of the guys getting ready in the other room. What conversation was so secret that a guy had to sneak into the stairwell?

He must have finished his call, because the talking stopped and I heard the snap of a techband screen closing. I leaped back and grabbed a weight, pretending to have been lifting for a while, although I didn’t have to pretend the shakiness. A bulky man from Team One entered and nudged the door shut. I couldn’t remember his name. He glanced at me, murmured a hello, then disappeared into the bedroom.

Neb peeked in from where the large man had just gone. “The guys are done. You can have the washroom back now.”

“Who was that again?” I asked.

Neb looked down the hallway, then shot me a strange look. “That’s Poly. He’s the official leader of EPIC, although he’s given Team Two over to Vance. Why?”

“Nothing. Just hadn’t met him yet, is all.”

Neb nodded and turned back. I followed slowly, reviewing the bits of conversation I’d overheard and committing them to memory.

Poly, the Team One EPIC leader, was my first real lead.

12

At least the girl could take a fast shower. I’d walked in ten minutes after she had, and she was already in the bedroom, all dressed.

She glanced up at me and froze. Her uniform hung crooked on her slender neck, nearly exposing a bare shoulder. Her wet hair fell down her back, messy and wild. Her hand was extended over Daymond’s bed, and various personal items were spread across the blanket.

The horror in her expression made me raise an eyebrow. “Looking for something?”

She jerked her hand back and shoved it into her uniform pocket. “I—uh—just needed . . . I was looking for a comb.”

My mouth twitched. “A comb.”

“I left mine.” Straightening her back, she stared at me.

She hadn’t brought anything with her, which seemed weird for a girl. Even the guys had a few belongings from home. It was yet another puzzle piece in the mystery of her past.

“You can use mine.” I retrieved a black, fine-toothed comb from a bag under my bunk. She held back when I approached, as if unsure she should accept, but I gave what I hoped was a friendly smile and handed her the comb.

“Thanks,” she muttered and inspected it before working it through the tangles on her head.

I sat on my bed and watched. Her hair seemed darker wet, more of a light brown color than the standard fake blonde.

That thought disgusted me. Treena was no different than every other NORA girl. I was fascinated because of her Rating, but that was it. Besides, there was an important matter that needed discussion. I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Why were you spying on Poly?”

She stopped, the comb frozen midswipe. “What?”

“Trying to get the mission details in advance?”

“No. Of course not.”

“It’s probably weird for you being the only girl, but the same rules apply to you as the rest of us. When Poly receives orders, he’ll share them with us when he’s ready.”

She sighed as if angry at herself. “I don’t really care what our orders are. I’m stuck here, like it or not.” She bent over and began swiping at her hair with my comb again.

An uncomfortable silence filled the air as I processed her words. Most new trainees were excited to be here, but Treena obviously wasn’t. She’d also failed her initiation, although I had passed her anyway. The other EPIC guys hadn’t hesitated at all on their first mission. They’d been totally fine—even eager—to arrest anyone who broke the law.

She whipped her hair back and straightened, and for the first time I noticed her necklace. It was a delicate silver strand that disappeared inside her uniform, held there as if by something heavy. When she saw me looking, she tucked it out of sight again. A gift, maybe?

A realization hit. “You have a boyfriend. That’s why you’re here.”

“What?”

“Let me guess,” I said, my voice flat. “Blond, just like every other pill gulper in NORA. Really smart. High Rating, of course.”

“That’s none of your business.”

Yes. Definitely a boyfriend. “You just joined my team. You’re spying on our leader and poking through our things. I’d say it’s definitely my business.”

If she’d been pale before, now she went bright red. The rush of color to her cheeks only confirmed that something was up. I was definitely going to find out why she was here. I’d protect her, but I wouldn’t trust her.

If only she wasn’t so blasted nice to look at.

I stood and walked out, calling over my shoulder, “Keep the comb.”

13

I waited exactly two minutes after Vance left before entering the training room. So much for being clever. Even if I could find the spy, how could I go to the empress without proof? If Vance already suspected me, my time alone would be limited from now on. I had to be more careful.

As I walked in, Poly tossed me something. I caught it in one hand and examined it. A nutrition pill, but twice the size of my regular ones. I wiped it clean as discreetly as I could, then popped it into my mouth. Seconds later, a fullness filled my stomach, but there was also something else. A sudden burning sensation.

“What the fates is in that pill?” I asked.

“Caffeine,” Neb said. “The capsule gives you constant energy for about four hours. We only get these ones right before a mission.”

“We have a mission? Like, this morning?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly our techbands vibrated as one. I flipped my screen. “EPIC Team: Report to chopper pad immediately.”

Chopper pad. That could only mean one thing—air travel. I swallowed, trying to keep my breathing under control.

I should’ve gotten more details from the empress before I agreed to this.

“Like, right now,” Neb replied with a wink. “Let’s go have some fun.”

><><><><><><><

The helicopter pad at the top of the Council Building was already buzzing with activity. Two shiny helicopters with four rotors on top of each caught the sun, their reflective armor so bright I had to shield my eyes. Obviously this mission wasn’t going for stealth.

A dozen tan-clad workers trotted around, loading them with equipment. The other EPIC members stood aside, already dripping with sweat. Was it hotter today, or was I already getting used to the cool underground bunker?

Probably the million stairs we had to climb to get up here, I realized. Thank the fates for my khel training, or I’d have given up by floor fifteen. I focused on my breathing and ignored the shiny death traps they called choppers.

Vance and Poly stood next to the pile of supplies, speaking with Major Murphy. The stoic man who’d brought me here seemed unusually animated about something, flailing his arms wildly as he talked. Occasionally Poly would ask a question. I wished I could overhear the conversation, but Vance had made his opinion on eavesdropping quite clear.

“Where’s Poly from?” I asked Neb, who had followed me to the rail.

“He doesn’t talk about it, but he’s a medic. At least he was. There’s a rumor that he couldn’t save a famous green’s baby, and they sent him here to punish him.” He grinned. “Just don’t ask him about his name.”

“Why?”

“He hates it. His real name is Palani, but Poly just stuck. At first he kept telling us that Poly means something in his father’s language, but he wouldn’t say what.” He turned and motioned toward the city. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

The view was incredible, I had to admit, despite my determination to stay far away from the edge. One tower poked out from the rest of the modern part of the city like a shiny, pointed finger. Lesser buildings clustered around it, although they were probably still hundreds of stories high, then flattened out like an outside circle, ending at the older district where we stood. It was beautiful. Which one was Dresden in right now?

“Let’s go,” Vance shouted. Poly was already climbing into the first chopper, and Vance gestured for his team to enter the second. I let my feet follow them and tried to think of something else, anything else. The floor of the aircraft just looked so . . . thin.

I was the last one. I glanced longingly at the doorway that led back downstairs. My mission was to catch a spy, not pretend like I belonged here. Maybe I could fake sick. My body was certainly shaking enough to make it believable.

“Does the princess need help getting in?” Vance asked.

I shot him a glare as I jumped inside. He grinned.

We weren’t even seated yet when the door closed and the noise started. A loud pulsing began from the chopper, and then the world became a whirlwind of sound. I held my breath, resisting the urge to scream and cover my ears, feeling a surge of adrenaline. My body seemed to feel the sound deep down inside, and the vibration spread through me like electricity, accentuating my wildly beating heart.

The rest of the team fastened themselves into their seats like they’d done this a million times. After fastening mine, I forced my hands down and gripped the seat front as if the thin floor would fall away at any moment. Neb watched me curiously from across the aisle. I just turned away and focused on a metal screw in the floor.

Daymond, seated to my right, handed me a headset. I nodded gratefully, although it was too wide and barely stayed on my ears. It muffled the sound a bit, but I also realized that it made communication possible over the noise.

“So, where we going this time?” Semias asked with a bored air. “Mopping up another botched military mission?”

“Get over yourself,” Daymond muttered, then he caught my eye and shook his head like an ever-patient parent. I tried to smile, but it probably looked more like a grimace.

Vance finished checking the gear fastened to one wall and plopped down into the last empty seat. “It’s another smuggling operation. Large group this time, so we’ll have to be alert.” His eyes flicked to me. “They found a smuggling hub in a Meridian warehouse. An informant says there’ll be a drop in a couple of hours.”

Everyone else nodded, and I sat up. Meridian. The closest military base to the border. It was famous for its skirmishes with outlanders. Konnor had gone there before, but with no less than three bodyguards. My fingers tingled from lack of circulation, so I unclasped them from the seat and tried to relax.

“A large group,” Ross mumbled, his voice so low I could barely hear it.

“Won’t be any different than catching three or four,” Vance said. “Formation is the same as always, but Treena goes with me. Semias and Day, stay together this time. That was a blasted close call last week.”

“Wasn’t my fault,” Semias grumbled. The safety belt puckered the fat under his uniform, making him look like an infant in an ill-fitting child seat.

“You wandered off to steal something and left my back exposed,” Daymond said. “The guy missed me by centimeters. How is that not your fault?”

“We’ll position—” Vance began, but just then the helicopter lurched, the noise rising in pitch. The windows on the right side filled with a view of the city. It was all so small—the streets, the bicyclists, everything. I tried not to imagine the door sliding open and sucking us out, the helpless feeling of falling, the horror of wind flying past.

I forced my breath out slowly and tried to focus on anything but the windows.

“Anyway,” he continued when the chopper steadied out, “we’ll position ourselves at the transport station and catch them in the act. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Why haven’t the monitors done it, then?” Ross muttered, voicing my own thoughts.

“They’ve tried,” Vance said. “Apparently the infiltration goes pretty deep. Either they’re rewiring cameras and scrambling communications or the smuggler network has spies embedded deep in Meridian’s security.”

“What about the empress’s new techband regulation?” I asked. “Why don’t they just zap those who aren’t where they’re supposed to be?”

Vance’s mouth twitched. “Zap?”

“Punishment mode. Whatever.”

He suddenly looked serious, a deep irritation crossing his features. “I don’t think zap is the best choice of words, Treena. The empress is essentially electrocuting her citizens. You probably don’t even know what getting zapped feels like.”

“Of course not. Why, do you?”

Daymond belted a laugh. “You know what? I like her.”

“What about us?” I asked, eager to change the subject. “Can we get za—I mean, trigger punishment mode? By being in the wrong place, I mean.”

“We’re exempt,” Neb said with a satisfied smile.

Vance sat back, a disturbed look on his face, but he didn’t say anything more.

14

The base was huge, and my relief at landing was overshadowed by the fact that I was surrounded by people who fought and killed for a living. We had been given silver uniforms to blend in. The guys had changed into theirs on the chopper, but I had hopped out and slipped mine over my new black uniform. I wasn’t about to strip in front of five guys, team members or not.

Several buildings laid out in a giant triangle, all identical, surrounded us. The guys were well trained. Vance gave them their locations, and they disappeared into the crowd of silver uniforms crisscrossing the sidewalks. Poly’s team had disappeared minutes before. Vance nodded to me and began striding away. I followed.

We approached what looked like a series of linked warehouses. Huge docking doors, all closed, lined the north side. When we entered, I blinked to adjust to the sudden darkness. It was narrow and packed full of storage on either side, with metal shelving and neatly catalogued signs. The roof was glass, but it rose up sharply in the center to allow a tall platform to stand majestically within view of the entire series of buildings. A lone figure stood over the rail. A supervisor, probably.

“Very little traffic here, and low visibility,” Vance muttered. “Perfect for a drop.”

The center platform wasn’t just a supervisor station but also a crane of some kind. There was a heavy metal arm attached, although it rested silently against the back side. The supervisor leaned over the railing of the center platform and exchanged words with a worker below.

A buzzer sounded, and the supervisor began the climb down from the tower. Break time. He stalked toward the door, ignoring the workers who stood back to let him pass and ignoring us as if we weren’t even there.

Vance mumbled, “North corner, two-yard—meter, whatever—square box with a gray blanket over it. Hide there until I come.”

“Oh no,” I said firmly. “You are not handling this alone. I’m your partner.”

“Exactly. I’ll position myself across the way. Just tell me on the feed if you see something.” He kept walking nonchalantly, as if he were merely a worker on his way to the locker room.

I let out a frustrated breath. I didn’t have much training, but it didn’t mean I was useless. The fear I’d harbored earlier festered into irritation as I found the plastic container he’d described and settled myself behind it. Flanked by the corner, I would be out of sight even to the supervisor on the platform, but I could still see everything. Vance had chosen this hiding spot well.

Four minutes later, the giant crane gave a metallic groan, swung its arm around, and reached for a crate full of barrels. I perked up. The supervisor had already left, and there didn’t seem to be anyone up there. Was it programmed to work during break time, or was this connected to the drop?

The crate must have been heavy, because the electric engine groaned under its weight. After making a pile of several similar crates near the closed docking door, the machine creaked to a stop. There was a sudden silence, followed by a strange clanging sound. Curious, I leaned away from the box to get a better look.

Someone was climbing down the platform pole, his hands and feet a blur. He disappeared behind a stack of crates before I could get a good look at his face. Seconds later the heavy loading door began to open.

I waited, expecting Vance to leap into action, but no one came. “Vance,” I whispered into the feed. “Someone’s here.” There was no reply. I glanced around the room, wondering where he had hidden himself. Was this the drop, or had he rushed to the aid of his guys the next building over? Why hadn’t he told me exactly what to look for?

A scraping sound from across the room jerked my attention forward. Carrying a cloth bag, the figure climbed over some boxes. He struggled to hold the bag, then swung it over his shoulder so he could jump to the floor. He wore the same gray military uniform we did, only it hung loose, and his face was blackened with dirt. A yellow, although I couldn’t make out the numbers.

Suddenly an arm covered my mouth and yanked me backward. I squirmed and tried to elbow my attacker, but he stepped easily out of the way and put me in a chokehold. His grip tightened, and my vision began to spin. A twinge of panic flew through my mind. Need . . . air . . .

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t get anything out. My throat was in a vise—being squeezed, closed off. My body lurched as black spots appeared in my vision. I threw my head backward. It didn’t free me, but it allowed me to turn enough to see part of the man’s face. I forced my eyes to focus. A stubble-lined chin. Heavy black eyebrows framing muddy-green eyes. The hint of a hungry smile.

My thoughts had almost completely slipped into darkness when a dark figure leaped over the crates. The movement jerked my attacker’s attention away, and the slightest bit of air slid into my aching lungs. It was the boy, the dirty one with the bag. He swung it over the crates with difficulty but stood up straight and dropped it on the floor. “Stop!” he hissed.

My captor dumped me to the side. I gulped in huge breaths, forcing my throat to reopen, trying to focus. In. Out. In. Out.

“What’s wrong with you?” a gruff voice whispered behind me. He pointed to the strange red and green balls that now cluttered the dirty floor. “You don’t just drop an entire bag of apples. Bruised apples cut our profits in half!”

Smugglers. And I was powerless to breathe, much less report it.

The boy shook his head in response and removed his hat. “They’d eat year-old moldy bread at this point. Bruised apples won’t matter.” Choppy, dark hair. Something about the figure was strangely familiar. The face was dirty, so it was hard to tell, but that voice . . .

“Tali?” I squeaked.

“Hi, Treen.” She stepped softly over the scattered balls on the floor and pulled me into a crushing embrace. The gruff man moved to gather the food back into the bag, eyeing us with disdain, but Tali ignored him. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“You’re—you’re a smuggler?” My thoughts were still foggy, but I stared at the food on the ground. It seemed unlike any other illegal substance I’d learned about in school.

She laughed, the sound musical and happy. “I’ve wanted to tell you so many times. Wait—this is your special assignment? You joined EPIC?” She shook her head. “Fates! A bunch of soldiers, all to yourself! Why didn’t I think of that?”

I glanced around, but Vance was nowhere to be seen. “Tali, you have to get out of here. When my team finds you, you’ll be—”

“What, given a low Rating? Sentenced to laundry transportation?” She shook her head, bitterness evident in her eyes. “There’s nothing more they can do to me, Treena. In fact, they gave me the perfect cover. I get to travel all over and make deliveries.”

My jaw dropped. I didn’t know what to say. Then it hit me. Her late-night shifts at the dock moving merchandise. Her anger at the system.

I was a lousy best friend. Perhaps the fates had brought us together so I could make Tali see reason. “Do you know what the punishment is for smuggling?”

“Oh, Treena,” she said, and I almost expected her to make a tsk-tsk sound. “Work camps don’t scare me, even the worst ones. I’m making a difference here, you know? Haven’t you ever been part of something bigger than yourself? Something you believed in so strongly you’d give your life for it?”

“I . . . uh . . .”

When I failed to answer, she gave me a long look. “Oh, come on. It shouldn’t be that hard. Listen, if you let me ‘capture’ you, maybe I can talk them into letting you join us.”

I stared at her, stunned. “What?”

“I know you want Dresden, but, Treen, they’ll never let you be with him now—even if by some miracle he still wants you. Please believe me. There’s something coming, something big. And we can be part of it together.”

My stomach sank. Not only did she refuse to leave this group, she was trying to recruit me. Even worse, a part of me wanted to go with her. But that would shut the door on my dreams forever, and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t choose Tali over Dresden. She shouldn’t force me to make that choice. I glanced at the yellow Rating on her head before I realized what I was doing.

Tali watched me, and irritation passed through her expression. “You’ve changed, you know. The Treena I grew up with was fun and carefree. Then you went all point-crazy. Do you even see people anymore, Treena?” She leaned forward and spoke more softly. “Or do you just see their numbers?”

I recoiled like I’d been slapped, and a searing heat spread throughout my chest. Tali had always been my best friend, the one person I could confide in. If anyone had changed, it was her. How could I trust her now, after years of lies? What kind of friend pretended to be one person at school, then turned on her own country?

The attacker stepped up beside me and waved his hand dismissively. “Time’s up. The other EPIC team’s evaded our trap. They’re on their way here.”

“Don’t worry,” Tali whispered. “We haven’t killed anyone. They’re just knocked out.”

The man grabbed my wrist, twisting it painfully, and I cried out. He wrapped something rough around my hands, fastening them tightly behind my back. He reached to put something in my mouth.

“Wait, Ben. I’ll give it to her,” Tali said.

“Right. I’m not an idiot.”

“Give it over. You can’t go shoving girls around like that. All you have to do is say please.” He glared as she swiped something out of his hand and showed it to me. “It’s just a knockout pill, Treen. You’ll wake up in a few hours. Open wide.”

I stared at her. She gave me a pointed look, the kind that said I was being stupid. Could I trust Tali? The man watched me carefully, and I knew there wasn’t time to think. I opened my mouth a crack. She pretended to stick the pill into my mouth, but palmed it instead. I pretended to swallow, then swayed and fell onto my side.

“See?” Tali said. “Manners. You go ahead. I’ll pick up the apples and catch up.”

Our act must have fooled Ben because he walked away muttering something about girls under his breath. Tali gathered the apples back into her bag before rushing to my side. “Surprised he bought it. You’ve never been a good actress.”

I sat up. “You’re making a huge mistake, Tali. EPIC will catch you sooner or later.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But at least I’ll go down fighting. See you, Treen. I hope you figure out what you want.” She turned and sprinted away.

><><><><><><><

After Tali left, I heard voices across the warehouse. I let the facts run through my mind. Tali was alive, and she had just helped me. Tali was a smuggler, and I was supposed to catch smugglers. My team was gone. My wrists were tied. Was I supposed to wait for Team Two to come, or did I dare risk capture again by running to looking for them?

“Treena,” a deep voice on the feed said, so suddenly that I jumped. “Do you copy?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Yes, I’m here, Poly. Where are you guys?”

“Thank the fates,” he said. “I think they’ve taken out the rest of Team Two, but we’re closing in. Just hang on.”

“I am.”

“What was that?” a male voice asked from the loading dock.

“I heard it too. From over there, I think.”

Fates. I lifted myself higher on my knees, just in time to lock eyes with two men. I jumped up and sprinted toward the exit, back the way we’d come.

“Don’t let her escape!” a voice echoed behind me. I put on a new burst of speed and sprinted with every ounce of energy I had left. My raspy breathing grew heavier and more desperate as the doorway grew closer. My boot caught on something and I stumbled.

It was just the break they needed. A hand clasped my shoulder, and I shook it free only to have my arm grabbed. I fought, but it was too late. Three men had me secured in seconds. A tall yellow with lean features stood between me and freedom, his techband screen still up as if I’d interrupted a conversation. He glanced back at the screen. “Wish you could see this, Mills. It’s a girl EPIC soldier. And a red, no less.” He leaned over me, and I felt his hot breath on my cheek. “What’d you do, pretty little lady? Must’ve been pretty bad to be pegged as a red so young.”

I struck. It took one kick, more a desperate toss of my leg than a true strike. It wasn’t powerful, but it landed true. The techband screen nearly tore right off. Its owner gasped in shock and grabbed his hand in horror, his mouth working soundlessly. In slow motion, he sank to the floor. I hadn’t shattered the screen, but the impact had been enough to trigger punishment mode. The hands gripping my arms suddenly loosened.

I was up and running before his companions knew what had happened, stumbling for the exit. Poly and his team had to be in position by now. I was out of time.

Incoherent shouting followed, and the wild footsteps behind me moved faster this time, taking advantage of my awkward strides. Why did Tali let them tie my hands? I summoned every ounce of speed I could, leaping toward the door with a yell, but it wasn’t fast enough. A hand whipped out and hooked around my waist, yanking me to a near stop. I turned and swung my elbows upward, hoping to make contact with the man’s face, but he was ready. He grabbed my shoulders and shoved me roughly to the ground. I landed with my nose in the dirt.

“Stupid girl,” he said, then grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled, lifting me painfully to my feet. I yelped, but he didn’t let go.

A skinny man sneered right in my face. “We’re out of knockout pills, but no biggie. Let’s find out if reds bleed like the rest of ’em.”

He straightened. I realized what he was about to do, but my shaking, oxygen-deprived body was frozen in place. Just as his fist cocked, a figure jumped out from behind a crate.

“No!”

I felt the impact. Then everything went black.

15

After leaving Treena hidden, I did a quick perimeter check. Very few workers lingered here—they mostly trotted past without even glancing at me. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Either I was well disguised, or they knew exactly who I was and pretended not to see. In either case, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I found a corner stacked with dusty crates and crouched down, intending to get a location check on my guys. But just before flipping open the techband, I caught sight of something etched on a metal box in front of me. I squinted at it, then froze. Two curvy lines with a square in the middle. An iron belt. The sign of my clan.

I rocked back on my heels and brushed my hand over the uneven surface. Someone had used a laser to mark the box, and by the absence of dirt and rust, it had been done recently. That could only mean one thing.

I leaped up, searching wildly for the men I knew would be here. This end of the room was completely empty of workers now. A perfect time for a drop, although I knew now that wasn’t their true intention.

If my clan wanted to talk to me badly enough to set all this up, it meant they were ready for us. It meant my men were in danger.

Your men are armed, I reminded myself. It’s the girl who isn’t. And you just left her alone.

With a curse, I sprinted back toward Treena’s hiding place.

><><><><><><><

They were already there. Ten of them surrounded Treena, who lay on the ground.

A thick guy yanked her up by the hair. She glared at her captor with determination, breathing hard. Marshall, my clan’s metalworker, said something—I couldn’t hear what, from my position—and then cocked a fist.

I jumped up. “No!”

His fist made contact, and Treena crumpled to the ground. I swore and leaped forward, shoving Marshall against a stack of crates. I nearly landed a punch to his already bloodied nose before he had sense enough to block me. He spun out of my grasp and swung a fist toward my head. I redirected his punch toward the ground, stepped in, and kicked him hard in the groin. He collapsed with a moan.

“Punching a teenage girl in the face, Marshall,” I muttered. “Are you really that insecure?”

“Vance,” Anton, my former best friend, said. “Wondered when you’d show up.” He stepped forward as if to pat my shoulder, but one look at my face made him pull his hand back.

“Nice of you all to gather in one place,” I told him. “It’ll make my job much easier.” My gaze flickered to Treena, her unconscious body twisted on the ground, her face turned toward me. She looked peaceful, her dark eyelashes even more apparent against her smooth skin. A nasty red mark marred one cheek.

“Oh, you won’t arrest us,” Anton said. “We have a message for you from the clan.” His voice was smooth, confident. He barely looked like himself. His hair was too short, his teenage tufts of beard had been shaven away, and a bright yellow 611 glowed on his forehead. Strangely, his wrist was bare. No techband.

“Our clan doesn’t exist anymore,” I said.

“Just because they scattered us doesn’t mean we don’t exist. We’re gathering again, and our freedom will come very soon. You’re lucky we’re even telling you of our plans. Most of them didn’t want Vance the Lapdog included at all.”

“I’m no lapdog.”

“Not a well-trained one, I’ll admit,” he said, grinning at the others, “but a lapdog in every sense of the word. Don’t you want to hear the message?”

That stopped me. I glanced around the group. Half of them had familiar faces; they were men who had families and vocations. Men who had followed my father with loyalty. Now they watched me with hatred and disgust. They couldn’t blame NORA for their fate. It was too big, too far above them. But they could blame me, a seeming traitor who had defected to the other side. I was just one person, and I was right here.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Amnesty. They’ll allow you back if you leave now. Undefect yourself, Vance. Come help us overthrow that stupid empress and her clones. If you tell us everything you know, we can succeed and be home within the month.”

“Home.” I nearly spat the word. “There is no home. Remember, Anton? It’s just a pile of charred rubble now. Besides, you’ll lose. The empress—”

“Implemented her new law too late,” Graydon interrupted. His slender form made him appear taller than he was. “We’ve ditched the techbands, Vance. The military workers have to keep theirs to get us in, like this unfortunate fellow.” He nodded toward a body on the ground. “But the rest of us are free. She can’t punish us now unless she catches us.”

“And she won’t,” Anton said. “Not this time. Join us.”

I glanced back at Anton, who watched me carefully. Maybe too carefully. He’d never been a good liar. He stood a little too straight now, his face shiny with sweat, his manner nervous. It was interesting that they had chosen my best friend as their representative. If they thought that would get into my head, they were dead wrong. Unfortunately, Anton had brought nine men with him, men who now encircled me like they would a prisoner.

It wasn’t much of a choice at all. If I left, the Demander would kill my family. They were no safer now than that awful day two years ago. Besides, I’d spent every day since then being manipulated and used. I would not switch from one master to another.

“No,” I said.

Anton’s mouth actually dropped. “No?”

“No. And I suggest you get moving. Team One should be here in . . .” I glanced at my techband, “hmm . . . about twenty seconds.”

“I’m getting sick of this traitor’s mouth,” Darrell said with a growl. He pushed himself off the floor and lunged in my direction. I stepped aside and let him stumble past, then twisted his arm into a wristlock. In seconds his arms were fastened behind his back. The cuffs weren’t as effective without the techband connection, but he wouldn’t get far. One down.

“You chose the wrong side, man,” Anton said. “They’ll never let you go, and you know it. Join us and we can take her down together. Besides, something’s coming. You don’t want to be here when it does.”

“I’m on nobody’s side, Anton, yours or theirs. It’s just me.”

“Let’s go, Anton,” a smaller man said. “If he really does have backup—”

“Nah, he’s bluffing. We took out his team, remember? You’ll regret turning us down, Hawking.” Anton motioned to two of his men, who started to approach. That was Anton—he never did his own fighting. I let my anger flow freely, feeling the surge of fire in my veins. As soon as they attacked, I struck—a kick, an elbow to the temple, a blur of motion. I took a punch to the nose and returned the favor with a shot to the ribs. Within seconds both men were moaning on the floor, wrists bound. Two and three.

“Oh, come on, Anton,” a smaller man said, backing away. “We’ll put out a call for the people to take care of him. He won’t last a week.”

“Yeah,” another guy, Gregor, muttered. “Just tell Mills that Vance has turned on us. Again.”

Anton glared, and his hand itched toward where he’d once kept his pistol. He didn’t have one now, of course. Pistols would give them away in a second, not to mention how a gunshot echoed for kilometers.

Kilometers. Now I was even thinking like NORA. That was unacceptable.

“Don’t move.” I snatched up my weapon, aiming it at Anton in one swift motion. The color drained from his face. The other guys spun and began to run. I kept my weapon trained on his chest.

The footsteps faded into the distance as Anton’s guys found their way outside. The sound of distant yelling broke the silence. Poly’s team was closing in. The settlers had taken out five of us, but it looked like we’d get all ten of them, in addition to whomever Poly had found. The cold satisfaction that accompanied my thoughts shocked me out of my anger, and I lowered my weapon.

Anton dropped his hands and cocked his head to listen, his expression hardening. “You have your revenge,” he nearly spat. “I should have known you’d betray us again. That’s just who you are. But if you want me, you’ll have to shoot.”

I wanted to. Man, I wanted to shoot him, if only to make myself feel better. But the adrenaline surge was wearing off now. I tried to imagine him a foot shorter, his hair long over his ears, his face freckled and tan. Anton had once been the best trapper in the settlement, and I’d gone with him to catch rabbits and squirrels before we were technically old enough to be alone in the forest. We’d almost trapped a bear once.

He stared at me accusingly now, as if I’d been the one to set fire to the settlement and destroy his way of life. The innocent Anton was gone forever. I could tell he was thinking the same thing about me.

“Climb the platform pole,” I said. “I’ll tell them I checked it myself. But try to trick me again, and you won’t even make it to the safety of prison.” Without waiting for an answer, I strode past him and made my way to Treena’s still form. Anton scrambled away.

I turned her onto her back as gently as I could. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, and she looked fine except for the deep purple bruise. What kind of leader left his most inexperienced soldier alone to go meet with the enemy? Treena had even followed my orders despite her objections, and she’d paid the price for my idiocy. She’d trusted me to protect her.

That was her biggest mistake.

16

She’s waking up,” Poly said.

With a moan, I tried to force my eyes open, then slammed them shut again when the headache hit. I was lying on a hard floor—the washroom? One eye allowed a sliver of light in, just enough to see faces above me.

“Welcome back,” Vance said softly.

“What happened?” I tried to ask, but it came out as a groan. My jaw wouldn’t work right. The pain was terrible—a throbbing in my cheek, my head, and even my teeth.

“Triggering punishment mode on his own techband,” Neb muttered. “That was brilliant, Treena. I wonder if it works the same way if you mess with someone’s implant?”

His words disintegrated in my foggy thoughts. What was he talking about? I tried to sit up, and Vance reached out to steady me with a gentle hand, but I shrugged him away. “Where are we?”

“We’re still at Meridian. Take it easy,” Poly said. “You may have a concussion. Fates, what I wouldn’t give to have my pharmacy rights back—a pronopolyne pill would have you up in no time. At the very least, you’ll have a bruise for a few days.”

“Bruise?” Daymond mumbled. “If that’s just a bruise, I’m emperor of NORA. She’s lucky he didn’t cave her face in.”

“I think I can stand.” I pushed myself up. The ground swayed for a second, and I closed my eyes against the light. “Where is everyone?”

“Escorting our smuggler friends to town,” Vance said.

Neb broke in. “Vance kept them distracted until Poly could get there. He got three of them by himself.”

Poly turned to me. “We think one of them got away, Treena. Do you remember how many there were?”

I glanced at Vance. He was staring at the ground. “Ten?” I guessed.

“All males?” Poly prodded.

I hesitated, then nodded, instantly regretting it when the pain slammed into my head again. “Yeah. Why do you ask? Did you catch any women?”

“Nah,” Poly said. “Just making sure we got ’em all.”

I let my breath out slowly. Tali had escaped. I hoped she knew what she was doing.

“There are no available choppers,” Poly began, “so we’re taking transports back. I’ll escort Treena—”

“No.” Vance interrupted. “I’ll take her. Can she walk?”

“I don’t see why not,” Poly replied. “She probably has a huge headache, though. She may need someone to steady her.”

“How about you stop talking about me like I’m not here? I can walk fine,” I said.

“Come on,” Vance said, avoiding my eyes. “It’s parked out front. This way.”

To my dismay, Vance insisted on riding back with me. I wanted to tell him he was the last person I wanted to ride with, but he hopped in and slammed the door before I could protest. We watched the military base disappear into the distance.

It was several minutes before I broke the heavy silence. “Where did you go?”

“Perimeter check. And you didn’t obey orders.”

“Excuse me?”

“I told you to stay down and notify me if you saw something.”

“I did say something. You never answered. Besides, they jumped me from behind. What was all that ‘stay together’ junk, anyway, if you were planning on ditching me?”

He stiffened. “I thought you’d be safe there. I wasn’t gone ten minutes.”

“Good, then you caught the big finale. You know, the part when I was running for my life and you sat behind a crate and watched? I hope it was a good show.”

He turned to look at my face, his brown eyes flashing. “They paid for it. Besides, they wouldn’t have hurt you. Just knocked you out with their pills, just like the others.”

I snorted and pointed to the swollen mass of my cheek. “Wouldn’t hurt me! You don’t think this hurts?”

“If you hadn’t fought, he wouldn’t have assaulted you.”

“Didn’t you train me so I could defend myself?” I yelled. “Didn’t you, just this morning, tell me to attack rather than run? What the fates is the matter with you?”

“You were completely surrounded and unarmed. The smart thing would’ve been to surrender and wait for backup.”

“You were my backup. For all I knew, everyone else was dead.”

“I can’t protect you!” he thundered. The poor driver jumped, then eyed us in the rearview mirror. Vance sighed and lowered his voice. “I mean—I won’t always be around, Treena.” He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Just forget it.”

The anger drained away. “I never asked for your protection.”

“Yeah, well, I never asked them to send a helpless, untrained girl that I’d have to protect.”

“I am not helpless.“

“I saw the whole thing, Treena. You have courage, but your skills aren’t there yet. Until they are, it’s my job as your trainer to keep you safe. Those smugglers weren’t the murdering kind. They were just proving a point.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were on their side.”

His jaw tightened as he turned away.

We ignored each other for the rest of the trip.

17

So, what now?” I asked Neb when we walked into the training room. My argument with Vance had only compounded my headache, which was now affecting my vision. Vance had stormed off into the bedroom, so I decided to wait awhile before going to bed. Or, rather, to my pile of pillows.

He shrugged. “Downtime. I’ll probably go work out.”

Ross chuckled as he walked past. “You? Since when?”

Neb glared at him, and I hid a smile. “Practically every day,” he shot back. “I can lift my own body weight. I can probably lift you, Treena.”

“I’ll take your word on that,” I said.

Ross, still wearing a grin, opened a closet near the door. There were several chunks of black metal resting on the shelves within. He typed something into a keypad, and one of the masses morphed into a set of weights. He grabbed them and headed for a bench in the corner, and Neb stepped in to take his turn.

There was no way I was working out. The dull ache in my head made me feel grumpy, and the confidence I’d felt this morning had drained completely away, taking with it some of my resolve. Tali was—had always been—a smuggler. How had I not known? What other secrets had my best friend hidden from me? She’d been a little distant since I’d started dating Dresden. Had my absence driven her to a life of crime?

And the bigger question: What could I do about it? If Tali wouldn’t listen to reason and leave her group, at least I could keep her secret. The empress would never know. My friend had nothing to do with the EPIC traitor. I hoped.

The traitor. With all the craziness, I had nearly forgotten about my mission.

There were four guys out here now, all positioning themselves on benches or chairs for a solid weight-lifting session. They seemed so relaxed. I decided to take a risk. “I’ve been wondering something.”

“What’s that?” Ross said with a smirk. “She does talk. I was beginning to wonder.”

I ignored him. “Why are you guys here? You all seem fairly normal. Or are you even allowed to talk about your past?”

The room quieted, and they suddenly seemed intensely focused on their exercises. Daymond, who was on all fours doing push-ups, rocked back and gave me a long look. “Of course we’re allowed to talk about it. It’s just that most of us aren’t here because we’re particularly noble. We just saw an opportunity and took it.”

“How do you know?” Ross asked, settling in for some bicep curls. “I’m very noble.”

Daymond snickered. “Everyone has their quirks. The problem is that ours aren’t exactly NORA approved. You already know about Semias’s pill addiction.”

“Shut it, Day,” Semias snapped.

“Ross constantly pretends to be someone he’s not,” Daymond continued pointedly.

“Not true,” Ross said without pausing.

“And Neb is here to work on his confidence.”

Neb, who had been stretching, froze. His head snapped up. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“That’s pretty much my story too,” I said quickly, hoping they wouldn’t pry. “But everyone has issues, and that doesn’t explain why you’re here. You seem like decent guys.”

“Except for Semias,” Ross said.

“Day was a chopper pilot,” Neb broke in. “Caused an accident or something, and that’s where he got his scar.”

Daymond’s face darkened. “You know nothing about it, Neb. I didn’t cause anything.”

“What? She deserves to know the truth. She’s one of us now.”

Was I? Today I’d done nothing but hinder my team. Tonight I’d sleep in the washroom, and tomorrow I’d probably stumble my way through training yet again. I didn’t belong here, and they knew it.

I quickly changed the subject. “I know this sounds weird, but do any of you feel sorry for the smugglers?”

Someone snickered, and Neb smirked as if I’d said something funny. It was Daymond who spoke up. “They’re criminals. That would be like asking a cat if he feels sorry for mice.”

I switched tactics. “Yeah, but have you ever thought that maybe you and the mice were on the same team?”

They looked at each other, perplexed. Neb cleared his throat. “What’s your point, Treena?”

“Just curious, I guess. Never mind.”

The guys started talking amongst themselves, and I sensed that my interrogating was over. It hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. If I wanted information, I’d have to be much more subtle—without sneaking around, spying, or asking direct questions, apparently.

I reached my corner and sighed. Two days down, and what seemed like a lifetime left to go.

18

I’d known Treena would cause an uproar, but this went way beyond my expectations.

I lay in bed, too angry to sleep, listening to the heavy breathing of an exhausted team. I checked my techband. Four a.m. My two years were up today, and the Demander would be expecting my answer. The problem was, I had no idea what that was myself.

When he’d offered me the deal, I’d planned to escape by now. There hadn’t been a doubt in my mind that I could. I hadn’t taken into account that even if I did, my clan would never allow me back after the things I’d done to my own people. Some choices were final. Working for NORA had eroded my future just as surely as it had destroyed my past.

Poly had taken me in without question, even after being told who I was. The last two years hadn’t been all bad. But it wasn’t possible to continue as we were, not with my clan pursuing me as they had today. Sooner or later I’d have to choose a side.

I’d grown up watching my father guide his people, make sacrifices for them. They loved him, and he’d ultimately given his life for them. He was the type of man I’d always wanted to become. Tonight, I felt further away than ever.

Anger simmered in my chest. I hadn’t asked to be an EPIC leader. I hadn’t asked to be here at all. I was sick of people toying with me, dangling my mother and sisters in front of me like a prize.

Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I dressed quickly and silently. It would be light soon, and the commander would be in his office. He didn’t think anyone knew how early he went to work, but I knew. I made it my business to know.

Just before I reached the hall, the bathroom door creaked open. I froze. It was quiet for almost a whole minute. Finally, I headed for the training room. Seconds later there was a light footstep in the hallway. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Treena asked.

I groaned inwardly. “Not when I can help it. Do you sneak up on people often?”

“I got pretty good at stealing in khel, since I was too short to score much. You know, since I’m so innocent and helpless and all that.”

I caught the coldness in her tone. It was well deserved. “Fair enough.”

“Going for a walk?”

“Running an errand. How’s the bruise?”

“I’ll live.”

“We’ll have to skip training today.”

“Where are we going?”

I gave a frustrated sigh. “We are not going anywhere.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“I don’t really care. I’ve got to get off that hard floor for a while—it’s killing my back. If that means coming with you, so be it.” She took a step forward. “Besides, the exercise would be nice.”

I thought about our mission yesterday and how Treena had nearly outrun men twice her size. She most certainly did not need the exercise. “Don’t suppose you’d follow an order to stay here.”

“Nope.”

“You’re the most exasperating girl I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks.” I could hear the smile in her voice.

For a minute I considered ditching her, but I knew she’d just follow and get me in trouble. “You coming like that?”

She looked down as if realizing she was still in her nightclothes. I couldn’t see the blush, but I knew it was there. “Give me two minutes.”

She dressed surprisingly fast and started toward the door with a single glance in my direction. I shook my head and headed for the corner of the weapon wall. She followed. I ran my fingers along the drywall, relying on touch to find the vent. A wire poked out slightly around the frame. A slight pull and the entire section of drywall came out easily. It was just large enough for a person to crawl through.

“A secret passage?”

“Not as interesting as you imagine. It only goes about twenty feet back and then meets up with the ventilation shaft. It goes up at an angle, and there are grips here and there, but it’ll still be hard. You sure you’re up for this?”

“Why can’t we just walk out the door?”

“They monitor it.” I watched her, wondering if she would lecture me on the greatness of NORA or turn and run to tell Poly I was sneaking out. She met my gaze, steady and determined. There were questions in her eyes, possibly the same questions that I had for her, but she didn’t ask them.

She exhaled slowly. “Okay. Lead the way.”

Twenty minutes later we emerged and climbed into the warm night air. The moonlight was incredibly bright, almost blue in hue compared to the blackness of the compound. I doubted Treena had ever been out this early in the morning before. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sky.

We turned right and headed downtown. Treena stared upward so often that, at one point, she tripped over an uneven piece of sidewalk. I grabbed her elbow to steady her. “Thanks,” she said, looking at my hand. She swung her elbow up and away to break contact.

“You look like you’ve never seen stars before.”

“I haven’t.” She gestured at the sky. “Not like this. We could see a few in Olympus during the winter when it got dark early, but curfew kept us indoors at night. This is amazing.”

“One of the perks of EPIC, I guess. We get to see more than most people.”

We traveled for several blocks before she spoke again. “This is a long walk, isn’t it? Why don’t you ride bikes? Or call a transport?”

“Bikes are too restrictive, and reds can’t call transports.”

“But I came in one.”

“Because it was ordered by a green. We use them for missions all the time, but Poly or Major Murphy have to call it in. Reds live very differently from everyone else, even in EPIC. You’ll get used to it.”

That seemed to bother her, and she fell silent. We walked for half an hour before reaching the modern part of the city. The stores got taller as the electric signs became brighter and more insistent. Everywhere we looked, there were ads for useless Rating-raising products and procedures. I refused to read them. This was Treena’s world, not mine. She watched the signs with childlike fascination.

Suddenly she stopped short, gaping at something overhead. I followed her gaze to an ad board above a bike shop, a picture of a young green. His teeth were unnaturally white, his Rating bright against the drab gray background. He smiled as he spoke the words that appeared on the screen: Kolor Bikes—Because Impressions Matter. The figure smiled, then winked, and the sequence began again.

Treena gasped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Do you know who that is?”

“Everyone knows who that is,” I said dryly. “Dresden Wynn, record-breaking graduate. I think he’s more popular than the empress right now. You all right?”

“Yeah,” Treena said. “Just need a minute.”

She didn’t explain, and I didn’t make her. She stared at the sign for a long time, a funny look on her face, breathing hard. Girls. I’d never understand them.

Finally she nodded and we continued, neither of us in the mood to talk. Traffic was thickening already, bicyclists with their purple-clad riders, and transports with their important passengers. We reached the most crowded part of the city where the brilliant skyscrapers towered high into the sky. The solid steel academy building, with its sharply cut corners, rose high above the rest, absorbing the pinks and oranges of the rising sun. Even I had to admit it was a stunning sight. A sign, high and bright with the NORA symbol above it, flashed overhead:

NORA Academy of Leadership

Taking Excellence to a New Level since 2065

Treena gave a little gasp, nearly bouncing in her excitement. If she thought this was a sightseeing trip, she was dead wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her along after all. I shoved the front doors open, pursing my lips, wondering how to get her to stay in the lobby. But she returned my gaze, her eyes hard and determined.

I pushed down the irritation and held the door open for her. A slight smile graced her lips as she sauntered past me and through the heavy golden doors. “Opening the door for a girl, huh? What is this, the 1900s?”

I grunted.

Despite the early hour, the building was already bustling with activity. I’d been here twice before, but the inside—with its shiny metal walls and gold-trimmed ceilings—was still as captivating as the outside. Some said it was real, but I knew it wasn’t. It was too clean, too uniform in color. Treena walked in awe alongside me, eyeing the overpolished floor as we approached the security desk. The young guard sat, alert, her eyes sweeping everyone who passed through. When she saw our Ratings, her eyes widened. I swiped my techband and nodded to her. The security gate swung open. With a shrug, the woman waved us past.

We passed the main lifts and headed down a separate wing of the building. The sign above the hallway entrance read, Leadership Academy: Military Division. We made our way to a smaller lift and rose to level 89. But the doors didn’t open immediately. “Authorization,” an automated voice demanded.

“Vance Hawking, for Councilman Denoux,” I replied.

“Unidentified companion detected,” the voice said. “Identify.”

“Ametrine Dowell,” she said. “His . . . assistant.”

There was no sound for a minute or so, and I wondered about Treena’s presence here. Maybe it would have been better if she’d stayed in the lobby. But then the digital voice replied, “Entrance authorized.” The doors opened.

Flanked by two soldiers, a short, red-faced man with a wide build greeted us, his lips pulled downward into a frown. “You have nerve, kid, coming here. Your privileges are for emergencies and summons only.”

Treena stood there, dumbfounded, staring at the Demander himself. I knew what she was thinking. It was the same reaction I’d had upon meeting the man two years ago. The man who commanded NORA’s military forces should be strong and tall, not short, balding, and whiny. He was probably a relative of the empress or something.

“Did you miss me, Denoux?” I asked. “It’s been two years since our deal. I’ve come to announce my decision.”

“Deal?” He huffed a little. “You make my orders sound like some kind of bargain, Hawking, and I don’t make deals with Integrants.”

I realized my body was in a defensive stance and forced myself to relax. “Except me, apparently. I’ve kept my end for two years, and I’m done. You will send me to join my family in the work camps immediately.”

Treena’s head whipped around, her expression guarded.

“You are a soldier!” Denoux snapped. “Soldiers are discharged when there is no use for them anymore. And frankly, you haven’t finished your assignment. I recruited you to capture smugglers, to finally end the food trade once and for all.”

“To end the . . . You want me to catch every single smuggler singlehandedly?”

“Of course not. That’s why we assembled a team to help you out. Poly is the official leader, of course, but everyone knows you’re the experienced one. Not that there isn’t room for improvement.” His expression turned smug. “We all heard about your failed mission yesterday. They captured your entire team, as I recall. And yet somehow you’re fine.”

“They knew we were coming.”

He leaned forward. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

I took a step forward. “They knew, and still our group of thirteen arrested twenty-one documented smugglers with no military backup. I’d say we fulfilled our mission.”

“Twenty-one smugglers out of hundreds left out there. You’re barely worth your weight in nutrition pills, boy.” He stabbed my chest with a pointed finger. “You’re getting better, but you have a long way to go yet.”

“Since I joined, we’ve caught four hundred and eleven,” I said, forcing myself to speak evenly, “not including the ones we arrested yesterday. I’m not here to argue. I won’t wait around another year or even another week.”

Denoux snorted, spraying moisture several feet. Treena wiped her cheek. “Let me explain something. Ignore the fact that you’re an Integrant. You’re a red, and reds don’t bargain. They obey. They snivel and cower and respect their superiors because they have no other choice. You’re lucky we spared your life at all.”

“I never asked you to.”

He paused, giving a dramatic sigh like a parent enduring a difficult child. “You forget that I was there, boy. I still remember that night—the stillness of the trees, the heavy smoke. The screaming prisoners. And young Hawking, fighting for his life. Scared. Oh yes, you were terrified. You saw death looming over your head, and it frightened you to the point of madness. As much as you’d like to think of yourself as a hero, or even a victim, I know better. You took the easy way out.” He stood taller and whispered, “You’re no different than the rest of us.”

My fists clenched so tightly they shook. My instincts screamed to take over, to leap onto Denoux and pummel him. With a flick of the wrist and a word, this man toppled civilizations and destroyed lives. There was nothing—nothing—I wanted more than to take his life, as he’d taken my father’s. The guards on either side of him raised their stunners. One clicked his into fatal mode.

“Vance,” Treena said softly.

I let out a slow breath, fighting for control. This was not the time. “They’ll do fine without me.”

A satisfied smile crossed his face. “I must decline, young Hawking. Your day of freedom is not today. The dynamics of our military are changing, and apparently your sad little band is an integral part of the empress’s latest plan.”

“Sir,” a full-figured woman said, coming up behind him. “The empress has given preliminary orders for the next mission. She demands an immediate response.”

Treena began pulling me toward the lift.

“You’ll obey orders, Hawking,” Denoux said as the doors opened. “Or I’ll take you out, empress or not.” Then, more quietly, “Revoke his security privileges immediately.”

I stepped inside. The doors clanged shut.

Silence.

“I can’t believe you talked to him that way,” Treena finally said, her voice shaking, “and got away with it.”

I leaned my head back against the wall and drew in a long, slow breath. She was right. That conversation hadn’t gone as expected, but at least I’d escaped without arrest. I was still free to figure out a new solution. I would have to find my mother and sisters on my own. Once I found them, we would bust out of NORA forever.

When we stepped out, the main floor was packed with students headed for their classes. I started to push forward, but with a shake of her head, Treena eased me gently against the hallway wall. We stepped back to wait.

“So you’re an Integrant,” she said with a nonchalant air.

Before I could reply, an unfamiliar voice spoke up. “Treena?”

“Dresden!” she gasped.

A guy walked toward us, moving with the typical overconfidence of an academy student. A silver pin was clipped to his shoulder above a double-striped arm rank. His Rating actually was that high.

Bike Boy.

“It is you!” Dresden said, his voice registering disbelief. “What are you doing here?” A group of students, probably his friends, pulled up behind him. They stared at Treena’s forehead.

Treena wrapped her arms around his waist. The guy made Treena look even smaller. “It’s good to see you, Dres,” she said.

“How are you? And what happened to your face?” Dresden looked at me as if unsure what he was allowed to say. “Is it—you know, the assignment?”

Treena dodged the question and nodded toward me. “This is Vance, my trainer.”

Dresden gave my Rating a long look. “Interesting.”

“Congrats on the ad board, Wynn,” I said. “Although I think you need to lay off the tooth polish. Those shiners were two shades short of psychedelic.”

“Speaking of which,” Treena said, glaring at me, “you’re a celebrity now, huh?”

He grinned. “I have four sponsors. One of them is for a khel supply store, even. Not exactly what I pictured for my future, but I’ll take it.”

“I’m so glad you’re happy.”

The friends behind him started to whisper to each other, eyeing my Rating, and then Treena’s. They turned away in disgust. A crowd was starting to gather. I knew from experience that this wouldn’t end well. “We should get going, Treena.”

“You’d better keep her safe,” Wynn said in a deeper voice.

“She’s safe with me,” I said.

“Oh, and Treena,” he said, grabbing her elbow. He lowered his voice to a whisper, but I could hear every word. “Be careful. You don’t want to ruin your face for good, in case you get reconsidered. Appearance points count for a lot, you know?”

She had a funny look on her face when he pulled away. “Thanks. See you soon.”

19

When we stepped outside, the heat slammed into my face. I adjusted my too-big uniform again, wishing it was any color but black. Luckily the buildings created long shadows in the streets, which meant a little shade on our walk home.

Home? I shook my head. That dungeon where I slept was not home.

“So,” Vance began as we walked. “That was the boyfriend. Bike Boy, love of your life.”

“I told you before. It’s none of your business.”

“You have secrets.”

“You have more, apparently.”

We passed a stout little man unlocking his shop. His gaze latched onto us as we approached, and I noticed a Greens Only sign in the window. His eyes narrowed when he saw our numbers. If Vance noticed, he didn’t react. How did he live like this—spending day and night protecting people who treated him this way? Not a citizen, not a soldier, but an outsider.

I fell into step beside him. “Do you often subject yourself to humiliation in front of your female trainees?”

Vance gave me a sideways look. “Only the prettiest ones.”

I felt the heat rush to my cheeks. “Not the most effective way to get a girl, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Especially when they’re already taken.” I opened my mouth to reply, but he was grinning. His smile turned mischievous. “Bike Boy seems very . . . athletic.”

“He is. His team won the central khel championship the last three years. He taught me how to play better, and I tutored him in math and science. We evened each other out, you know? I thought our scores would be—I, uh, thought things would be different.”

He looked up at the sky. “You owe me an apology, then.”

“What?”

“I was right about him. Perfect grades, perfect attendance, perfect volunteer hours—”

“He’s more than that,” I said quickly.

“Blonde hair, blue eyes, blinding white teeth—”

“You never mentioned the teeth, so I owe you nothing. Besides, you saw him for, what, a minute? Other than appearance, you don’t know him at all.”

“Don’t need to. One of you is pretty much the same as the next.”

I stopped and glared at him. “Okay, you’d better explain yourself now, because I’m sick of taking the brunt of your problems. I wasn’t there that night, and neither was Dresden, or any other citizen you glare at on the street. Yet you act like we had something to do with it, whatever it was.”

“Don’t worry about it, Treena. Just live your life.” He started walking again. “Enjoy your little rainbow world full of happy people and order and numbers and forget about those of us who see it for what it really is.”

With a growl of frustration, I trotted after him. “What do you think it is? Because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re both reds. I have just as much right to complain as you.”

He barked a bitter laugh. “Oh? So NORA killed your father, burned down your home, and forced you into slavery too? Then I apologize.”

I froze. I thought about what the commander had said, and then it all started to come together. I caught up just as he turned a corner and startled a pair of high-heeled ladies as they tapped their way to work. They gaped at his Rating, then hurried past.

“I want to hear the story,” I said.

“No. You don’t.”

A monitor patrol car went slowly by in the vehicle lane. A sour-faced monitor, a woman, caught a glimpse of our Ratings and glared at us through the glass. The vehicle slowed nearly to a stop, and I could almost see her brain straining for a reason to stop us. Which group had higher jurisdiction, EPIC or law enforcement? They served the city, but we served the empress. Our two goals didn’t necessarily conflict with each other, but the anger in her expression proved that our two groups didn’t mesh well. After a moment, the vehicle finally sped up and disappeared into the growing mass of bicyclists.

A week ago, he would’ve been right about me not wanting to know. I’d walked through Konnor’s integration camp several times without being curious about the people I passed. They were outsiders who had escaped the dismal outside world and come to NORA for a better life. Weren’t they?

“You said NORA attacked you and made you a slave?” I asked.

“Seriously, Treena. Don’t pretend like you care.”

“Fine, then, don’t tell me everything. Just tell me about your dad.”

His gaze grew distant, and it was nearly a block before he spoke. “He was clan leader over almost a thousand people. The Hawking clan was the largest and most powerful in the outlands.”

“Impressive. Where did they come from?”

“We accepted anyone who wanted protection. Our fortress was supposed to be impenetrable, and people traveled for weeks to join us.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“It was—for the first two NORA attacks. But the third time we were taken completely by surprise. They destroyed our surveillance cameras and killed the guards, so nobody knew they were there until they’d lit the fires. My dad stayed behind to hold them off and ordered me to organize our people for an escape.”

His eyes met mine, and the depth of emotion they held made me instantly guilty for having brought it up. “He didn’t make it, then?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t escape, obviously.”

He didn’t answer, but it was enough of a reply.

“And you didn’t cooperate, which would explain the Rating.” I couldn’t believe it. NORA attacked settlements? “I thought Integrants came on their own, to escape the violence of the outlands.”

“Some do, but most of us are prisoners. We’re not allowed to talk about our past. It’s part of the integration process—pretend you’re happy to be here, and you get out of the compound faster. Only I skipped the integration part.”

“How’s that?”

He snorted in disgust. “There I was, fighting desperately for my life and trying to help my people escape, and the Demander thought, ‘Hmm. There’s one who can fight. I should add him to my collection.’ He brought me in, held a knife to my mother’s throat, and threatened to kill my family, one by one, if I didn’t cooperate.”

A knife? Those were illegal in NORA. Knives were tools of the Old America, tools of the violent and uncivilized societies of the past. But then, threatening peoples’ lives was illegal too. The commander was the councilman over our entire nation’s military, and he was breaking our own laws.

“I refused, but he insisted it would only be for two years.” He chuckled bitterly. “What kind of idiot would believe that?”

“I didn’t know your family’s lives depended on your job here. I bet they see you as a hero.”

He shrugged. “I promised my dad to keep my family safe. I’ll do anything to fulfill that, even if it means playing their stupid numbers game.”

“Game. That’s a good way to put it.” I paused for a pedestrian to shuffle by. “What did you think about the Rating system when you came here?”

“When I was dragged here, more like. I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. I mean, why do you let yourselves be controlled by some stranger’s opinion of what you’re worth? Why can’t everyone be valuable for who they are and not just how well they conform to some random ideal?”

My face burned. “I don’t know.”

He sighed. “Sorry, but you asked.”

I had, and I deserved every word. Even stranger, I agreed with him. It sounded ridiculous when he put it that way. “What are you going to do now?”

“No idea. Just don’t tell anyone. Poly’s the only one who knows about all this, and I’ll tell him we failed to reach an agreement.”

“Sure.” I pushed a wayward hair behind my ear—I’d left it down today, and it hung past my shoulders—and smoothed it down, staring at the ground. “Keep my secrets, and I’ll keep yours.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

20

When we got back, the guys were awake and using the washroom. I curled up in the training room and closed my eyes, which were suddenly heavy from lack of sleep. As uncomfortable as I was, it didn’t take long for my mind to drift into slumber.

The end-of-summer air was growing cooler. I was five years old, just weeks away from Level Two school, and I had just told Konnor about my first failed exam. I’d only missed six questions, I reasoned, but he wore a thunderous expression. I winced, ready for the blow I knew would come, but he simply grabbed my wrist and yanked me out the door.

Minutes later, his neck glistened with sweat as he pulled me toward the tower’s front doors. He held my hand tightly, roughly. I asked why we were here. He mumbled something about showing me the view.

It was early evening, the building empty, the hard floors and blank walls echoing the sound of our footsteps. We entered the lift, and Konnor pushed the highest button. Number 82.

My stomach felt tingly for a while, and then the doors slid open, exposing us to a hot, heavy wind. The roof. He pulled me immediately toward the rail.

“Look down,” he said. I shook my head. He yanked on my wrist, but I clung to his leg with my other arm. He reached down and grabbed my jaw, forcing me to look down over the city. “Eighty-two floors up. You won’t learn physics for another three years, so I’ll translate: that’s about six seconds of air time before you hit.”

I didn’t understand, but I hugged his leg with renewed strength. He peeled me off with a grunt and lifted me off my feet. Whimpering, I reached for him, but he lifted me slowly over the rail. I stood right on the ledge now, held up only by his arms. My whimpering turned into sobbing.

“As a kid, I always wanted to fly.” His voice was soft, distant. “I hoped to be a pilot. I even volunteered at the plant where they assemble military choppers. I’m not complaining. My current assignment has much more stature. But my position is precarious, Ametrine. My position is as precarious as yours is right now.”

I shook so badly that I thought he might drop me on accident. I felt the hard ledge under my feet, firm, but Konnor still had full control of my fate. With a flick of his wrist, I would fall. My eyes dropped to the ground, which seemed a hundred kilometers away. The bicyclists on the street below looked like tiny moving toys.

“P-p-please,” I said. “I’ll never fail again! I’ll get perfect scores, and I’ll be your good girl.”

“My good girl?” His voice hardened. “You were never mine. You’re another man’s child, and yet I support you and pay the consequences of your failures. Ametrine, your actions affect your entire family. Six missed questions seem small now, but failing a class—or even one test—can mean an entire Rating point. Understand?” He let my right hand slip a little and I gasped in horror, squirming to grab the rail with my free hand.

“Yes, sir!”

“I’m not convinced. Show me that every time you think about falling short, or letting up, or giving up, you’ll picture this scene right now. Look down, child, and memorize it. Let me help you get a better view.” I let out a wail as he lifted my feet over the ledge. He lowered me then, feet dangling, alive only by his grip on my arms. My body shook violently, and my cheeks were wet with tears. I looked down once more, wishing that someone would look up and see us. Wishing they would help me, that they’d lift me into their arms and take me far away.

“Whether I like it or not, you are a Dowell,” he said. “Dowells do not fail. If such a thing were to happen, I expect you to make the right choice.” He nodded toward the ground. “We all make sacrifices for those we love, and sometimes this, right here, is the noblest choice a person can make.”

He began to lift me toward safety, but his grip loosened and slid toward my sweaty hands. So slippery. Just before my feet made it over the rail, my tiny fingers slid out of his grip.

I woke up gasping. It was the same nightmare I’d had for years, and I always woke up right before hitting the ground. The training room was still empty. I was alone. My lungs sucked in air, and I forced myself to focus on breathing. In. Out. You didn’t fall. In. Out. That was a long time ago.

After a moment, I stood and made my way down the hall. It was strangely quiet. The bedroom was empty as well. Where had they gone? I flicked open my techband and noticed that I had a text message. It was from Vance. Apparently we were allowed to communicate with each other, at least.

Went for a run. You were sleeping so soundly. I didn’t want to wake you. Train on your own, and we’ll see you in an hour. Sorry to lock you in. Orders.

I gave a frustrated sigh. The guys had watched me sleep and then excluded me. No, not all of them. Vance had used the word “I.” He had decided to protect me, to set me apart from them once again. Noble but irritating. The guy could’ve just woken me up.

I read the message again, stopping on the reference to the locked door. Just to test it, I stood and yanked on it. It was locked tight. Who had ordered me locked in? Didn’t the empress trust me to fulfill her mission? My head throbbed with the beginnings of another headache. I decided to take advantage of my solitude by taking a shower.

I’d barely had time to strip down and climb into the shower when my techband started vibrating.

EPIC TEAM: TO CHOPPER PAD IMMEDIATELY.

“So much for that,” I muttered and turned off the water. I toweled off quickly and slipped into a clean uniform.

A banging sound on the door made me jump. “I know. I’m coming.”

“Treena, let me in,” Vance’s voice said in an urgent tone. “I need to talk to you.”

The second I unlocked the door, he pushed it open and strode inside, locking it firmly behind him. It was so unexpected that I stared at him. “What?”

“I just read the details of the mission.”

“What’s wrong?”

He looked at me, searching my face. I felt a warm blush creep across my cheeks. “Our next mission isn’t chasing smugglers,” he said. “Tonight, for the first time, we’re heading up an integration mission.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’re capturing an entire settlement.”

I had to force myself to breathe normally. He nodded at my reaction and leaned his shoulder against the shiny tile wall.

I thought about the girl with the potato, and my heart sped up. “But I thought yours was the largest settlement. You mean there are others still out there?”

He let out a heavy breath. “After they took my clan out, the smaller groups got scared and started to combine into one big settlement for protection. It was a good idea, and they would’ve been pretty safe, except for one thing—their location, high in the Himmel Mountains. They planted themselves right next to the Peak River.”

The Peak River was the main artery of Aiguille’s water supply. I nodded. No wonder the commander was concerned. “I know it’ll be hard for you and probably bring back some horrible memories, but in some ways it may not be so bad, right? If we’re heading up the mission—”

“It means that we’re on the front lines, doing all the work. Taking the losses.”

I rocked back, stunned.

“There’s something else. The orders mentioned you specifically.”

“Me?” A sick feeling swelled inside me.

Vance turned to face me head-on. “You know all about me, but I know nothing about you. What did you do?” He looked angry now. “Why is your Rating so low? I’m sure you know more than you’re telling.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, my mind whirling at the sudden change of subject.

“Right. A girl like you, with a boyfriend like Bike Boy, doesn’t just become a red. Start talking.”

“I really don’t know! It must be my biological father. He’s in prison.”

He considered that. “No. Your score might take a little hit because of him, but nothing like this, and you know it.”

“I’m not lying.” Vance was acting so strange—almost obsessive. I tried to change the subject. “What did the orders say?”

“There are only two reasons they’d send you here,” he grumbled, almost to himself. “One, there’s something about you that our team needs. Since you have no combat training or military experience, I have to assume it’s because you’re a girl. But that doesn’t explain the Rating. Second, whatever you did to earn a 440 was so bad they’re throwing you intentionally into harm’s way. There’s something I’m not seeing here.”

“Vance.”

“What?”

“What exactly is my part in the settlement mission?”

He looked at me, his face drawn in resignation. “They want you to be the bait.”

><><><><><><><

The flying part was getting easier at least. Or maybe I was just too distracted by the impending doom to worry about falling out of the sky. As terrifying as a crash would be, at least there was a tiny chance of survival. But me, alone, at the hands of an entire outlander settlement? It was suicide.

We flew east toward the mountains, far outside NORA’s borders. Below us somewhere were the ruined cities of what had once been the United States before the two government parties had declared war and nearly killed each other off. Supposedly my grandparents’ generation had salvaged what they could and left the rest to waste away.

The vibration of the metal beneath my feet was a little more familiar this time but I still wished it wasn’t so dark. In other circumstances, I’d be thrilled to finally see what a real forest looked like.

I glanced down at my clothing. This time we wore horrid brown coats and combat boots. Mine were way too big. It seemed that destiny wanted me to drown in men’s clothing for the remainder of my two weeks in EPIC. Assuming I survived that long.

When the chopper landed, we filed out quietly. The cold wind literally took my breath away, whipping my hair into my face and stinging my eyes. The coat did little to keep out the cold. Poly’s chopper landed in the next clearing over, then both the machines rose together. They’d deposited us on the opposite side of the mountain from our destination to avoid detection, which meant we got to hike for several hours before arriving. That was fine with me. If we had to navigate the entire continent before arriving, I’d be perfectly content.

“Don’t forget what I told you,” Vance whispered as we started after our guide. I’d clung to every word of his instruction on the way here, knowing it was my lifeline. “Any questions?”

“What if they don’t buy it?”

“I’ll be right behind you, hidden in the trees.”

I shot him a look, and he shook his head. “I’ll cover you this time, I swear.”

Another gust of wind pulled a sharp smell into my senses. I leaned forward and took in a deep breath. It was the trees. Even in the darkness I could see their branches outstretched like fingers guarding the frozen earth. NORA trees stood straight and tall, each with the same number of carefully spaced branches, but the twisted trunks out here were raw and beautifully asymmetrical.

The ground wasn’t flat like at home either. It was uneven and covered in debris, sometimes turning sharply upward and other times rocky, sloped, and slippery. I focused intently on the ground so I didn’t fall. We had hand lights, but they barely lit up two meters at a time.

“Step onto your heel first,” Vance said, “and rock toward your toe. It’ll help you step quieter.”

I glanced at him, but he was already looking away. Looking up, actually. A peaceful calm had settled over his features. He looked almost reverent.

“This isn’t exactly the way I imagined it,” I said. “It’s so cold. Why isn’t there any snow?”

He shook his head. “We only get snow on the peaks. And even then it’s only for a month or two in the winter.”

“Oh. Well, have you ever seen it? I mean, what does it feel like?”

He scanned the forest, stepping confidently as he considered my question. “Only twice, on hunting expeditions, and I’ve only seen it fall out of the sky once. It was . . .” He gave a sideways smile. “Cold.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for that.”

“Anytime.”

We’d hoped the exercise would warm us, but I was numb by the time we reached the clearing. I checked my techband for the time before remembering that it didn’t work out here. According to Poly, punishment mode could still be activated if the techband was tampered with, but it had no network signal. It felt strange to be off the radar.

The soft white glow of a handful of lanterns greeted us. The lights were concealed deep within the branches of the trees, so they didn’t do much more than guide us to the dark outline of the waiting group of soldiers. From what Vance had said, these three hundred were only a third of our troops on the mountain. Apparently NORA wasn’t taking any chances this time.

Poly motioned for us to stay here as he and Vance pushed their way through the ranks. Major Murphy waited stiffly in front of a makeshift shelter in the center, arms folded, wearing the typical armored military uniform. A shorter figure came out of the shelter and stopped next to him. I squinted, trying to see better in the low light, wondering why the man seemed familiar. I leaned toward Neb. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Commander Denoux himself,” he said in wonder. “I can’t believe it. He’s overseeing this mission? This must be really important. “

A sick feeling crept through my stomach, but there was nothing I could do now. I’d already agreed to this. Well, I’d been ordered to do it, and that was the same thing. Nine hundred soldiers waited to be led by the commander and the EPIC team. Was this the commander’s way of punishing us for Vance’s earlier outburst? But if that was the case, what was my part in all this?

If the empress really needed me to catch a traitor, why march me in front of an armed settlement?

After a few minutes, Poly and Vance approached with somber faces. Everyone was alert, stretching sore legs and arms and checking their weapons.

“Why is the commander here?” Neb asked when the EPIC leaders reached us.

Poly glanced away. “This is the first time we’ve combined forces with the military. He wants it to go smoothly.”

“He doesn’t trust us,” Daymond said.

“So what are the orders?” Semias grumbled.

Poly glared at him but continued. “The settlers are getting smarter. They won’t be taken easily. The perimeter wall is made of NeoSteel, electrified and too smooth to climb. We can’t go in with an aerial attack or we’ll destroy too many targets. So a decoy is our only choice. Treena, you will pose as a beggar, approach their front gate, and convince them to let you in. Once you’re inside, get this device as close to the center of the camp as you can.” He handed me a small metal rectangle and pointed to a switch on the side. It gave off a warm vibration even through my gloves. I stuck it in my pocket, feeling another wave of nervousness as Poly continued. “It should disable every electronic lock within a two-hundred-meter radius of the center point, allowing us to surround and penetrate the camp. EPIC will be the front line. These soldiers aren’t familiar with settlers at all, so they’ve been ordered to follow our lead. Oh, and, men, set your guns to stun. Under no circumstance will you shoot to kill.”

“I don’t like this,” Vance muttered.

“Just obey orders this time, Vance,” Poly growled. “Time to get your personal feelings out of the way.”

“How many people in the settlement?” I asked.

“Preliminary estimates are a thousand,” Poly said.

“A thousand!” Neb exclaimed, his voice cracking.

“Poly,” Vance said. “I can’t lead a unit of NORA soldiers. You know how they see me.”

“You can, and you will,” Poly said, his voice low and hard. “I understand your feelings, but if you care about these people, you’ll stun as many of them as possible. It’s the ones who fight back that will get hurt.”

“But the soldiers—”

Poly whirled to face him. “You are a soldier. Act like it, or I’ll turn you over to the commander.”

Vance recoiled, his face hard. Our group was silent for a moment, everyone suddenly very interested in the ground.

“Yes, sir,” Vance said.

The order came to move out. The hike to the structure was slow. There was no clear-cut trail, and at times we had to climb over sharp rocks and leap across streams—all in the darkness of night. I had a dozen cuts and bruises under my uniform, but I didn’t dare stop for fear I’d end up at the bottom of a ravine. I caught Vance’s gaze once, but he turned away in frustration, his body stiff as he looked into the night. No doubt this was bringing back awful memories for him. Except that he was the attacker this time.

After a couple of agonizing hours, the scouts detected four watchers up in the trees, two men and two women. I didn’t know what was happening until the scouts retrieved the bodies from the ground, their movements coldly efficient. I felt sick. The lookouts were probably parents, moms and dads trying to protect their children from danger.

Before the wall was even visible, the order came to halt and take cover. Poly scattered the EPIC team to various checkpoints, then spoke to someone in sharp whispers on his feed. My heart thudded so painfully I could barely hear anything else.

Finally Poly nodded to me.

I took a deep, ragged breath, and Neb and Ross whispered their encouragement as I walked slowly past. Vance clenched his fists and watched me go.

My body shivered violently as I forced one foot in front of the other, feeling hundreds of eyes on my back. The walk to the gate felt like several kilometers, but it probably only took a few minutes. It was the longest walk of my life. The giant steel wall was just in front of me now. A reinforced metal gate at least six meters tall lay silently in the distance between two trees. A faint electric buzz sounded from somewhere. These people were serious about their security.

There was no sound behind the wall. Maybe the settlement really didn’t know we were here. I didn’t dare touch the wall, let alone knock. It was too dark to see anything, so I just stood there and called in a shaky voice, “Hello?”

No answer, but I heard shuffling. Finally a head popped up over the wall. It was a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen. “Stay where you are and put your hands up.”

I complied. At least he hadn’t shot me on the spot.

“Bert,” the boy whispered, and I saw a small radio in his hand. It looked old and clunky. “There’s a girl here. She has red numbers on her head. Want me to shoot her?”

“Please,” I said, trying to hide my sudden horror. “I’m so cold. Do you have an extra blanket? That’s all I ask.”

“Shut up, girl,” the boy said. “Don’t move. I never miss.” He tapped a long wooden stick—a rifle, probably—and halfheartedly aimed it at me.

“If you won’t give me a blanket, can I at least go through your garbage?” The word garbage seemed strange on my tongue, but Vance had insisted. If I said refuse, they’d get suspicious. “I haven’t eaten anything in days.”

The boy hesitated. “You’re from NORA. How’d you get out?”

“They destroyed my settlement a couple of years ago—burned it down, integrated us. I worked with the smugglers for a while, but we got attacked in Meridian. I was lucky to get out in a transport full of apples.”

The boy stared at me, bug-eyed, his gun still trained on my head. “The Meridian hub was attacked?” The gun lowered a bit. “Hang on a sec.” There was a one-sided whispered conversation again, low enough that I couldn’t hear anything this time.

My legs shook so badly I worried they’d give way. After walking for hours, standing still was utter agony. The device in my pocket seemed to burn a hole through the thin layer under my coat, despite the rest of me being past feeling. Just get inside, Treena. Deploy the device and get out—that’s all they want.

“My backup is on the way, but first I’m supposed to ask you a question,” the boy said. “If you’re really an Integrant, what was your clan leader’s nickname?”

Oh no. My stomach sank. Vance’s last name was Hawking, I remembered. But surely that wasn’t what the settlers wanted. I wore an earpiece—the earring kind again, so I knew Vance was listening. But revealing this code word meant betraying his people in a very big way. All he had to do was stay silent, and I’d be arrested. Or shot. Our entire operation would be buried before it even began. There was no sound in my earpiece except the muttering of soldiers in the background.

Please, Vance.

“Well, girl?” the boy said. He clicked something on his weapon and closed one eye as if to aim.

Please.

“His name was Sebastian Hawking,” Vance whispered, his voice hoarse. “His nickname was Iron Belt.”

Hiding my relief, I repeated the words. The boy looked surprised, but he lowered his gun and raised his radio to his lips. “She passed, Bert. Another one of Old Man Iron’s clan.”

The gate didn’t open immediately. I shivered for several minutes while he conferred with two men who had joined him. The three figures kept turning toward me, then talking some more.

I was about to speak when a section of the wall opened. It swung inward into blackness, revealing an opening just large enough for a person to slip through. The large gate had been a decoy.

I allowed myself a tiny shred of hope. If they were going to shoot me, at least it wouldn’t be here.

Several heartbeats later I made my way to the wall and stepped inside. It wasn’t three people who greeted me there but eight, all armed and suspiciously staring me down.

A woman stepped forward. “Hold your arms out. I’m checking you for weapons.”

“Sure,” I said and obeyed. She ran a detector across my arms and down to my feet. I held my breath, but it didn’t make a sound when it ran over the unlocking device in my pocket. Luckily Poly had insisted I come unarmed.

“Nothing registered,” she said.

“See? Told you she’d pass,” the boy said. “Can I take her in?”

The woman hesitated. “Valor, go with them. Keep your weapon trained on her, just in case. I’ll meet you inside.”

A balding man nodded and stepped forward. The boy barely seemed to notice and motioned for me to follow him. “I’m Lowry. My Uncle Drumlin’s the clan leader. Least, he was, before we combined. I guess our clan doesn’t really exist anymore.”

“This is huge,” I said with genuine awe at the settlement that opened up in front of me. Even in the darkness, I could see hundreds of dark structures. Cabins. They surrounded a huge building in the center. I’d never seen so many wooden buildings in my life. We used concrete and steel in NORA. I’d heard that some cities to the east had real trees, but I’d never seen them. Here, there was hardly anything in sight that wasn’t made of trees, a stark contrast to the modern wall that enclosed the place. The low rumbling of a generator grew louder with each step. The ground was packed hard from foot traffic, so it was much easier to walk here than in the forest.

“Four times larger than yours was,” the boy replied with a proud tone. “I’m supposed to take you to that center building. That’s the kitchen. Bet you’re excited to have real food after so long, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said, feeling the nervousness flare up again. Uh-oh.

“I hoped they’d let you in right off. Red numbers are fine. It’s the ones with green numbers you have to watch out for, you know?”

“How long have you been here?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

“Almost a year,” he replied proudly. “Built two of these cabins with my dad. NORA doesn’t know it, but our buildings are lined with metal stolen from their own military base. We have fire extinguishers in each building, and every person has an air mask in case they try to use knockout gas. It’s crazy high-tech. This is the safest place for you, trust me.”

“Impressive. You really think NORA would attack you here?”

“My uncle thinks so, but I doubt it. They wouldn’t dare.”

“Lowry,” the older man, Valor, said from behind us. I had forgotten he was there. “Quit running that mouth of yours. She hasn’t been cleared yet, you know.”

“Sorry.” The boy shot me an apologetic look, then leaned closer and pointed to my forehead. “Does that thing hurt?”

I touched my Rating with one gloved finger. I didn’t even notice it anymore. “No.” Yes. Every day, but not in the way you think.

“Weird. Well, they’ll probably take it out tomorrow, regardless. Here we are.” He headed for a steel door in the north-facing wall of the largest building. Four short knocks and the door opened with a moan. A figure stood in the darkness of the opening.

“This is her,” Lowry said.

“Let’s get started,” a deep feminine voice said from the doorway, and she stepped aside, holding the door open for me. Her smile was forced, her eyes strained and tired. They’d probably woken her up for me.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Why, your dinner. It should all come back to you pretty quickly. Assuming you are who you say you are.”

I forced my shoulders to relax. “That sounds great.”

The door slammed shut behind me.

21

What’s taking her so long?” someone grumbled. “She must be close enough by now.”

“They’re making her eat something,” I said, only half listening. I mentally kicked myself for not preparing her better. Of course they’d offer food. It was the best way to test a former settler. Treena wasn’t handling it well—she was choking like a goat trying to swallow an entire transport at once. “Chew carefully for twenty seconds, then swallow it just like a pill. Wash it down with water if you need to.”

The men in my charge stood there, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, muttering quietly to themselves. One of them shot me an icy glare. I stood a little straighter, meeting his expression. I was the youngest guy in the group, an Integrant, and a red—yet they were supposed to obey me. Blasted commander.

“Whoa there, honey,” the woman’s voice said over the feed. “Take smaller bites.”

“I’m sorry,” Treena responded, her mouth still full. “It’s just that it’s been so long—my jaw must’ve—ugh—forgotten how to chew.”

“Interesting.” The woman wasn’t fooled, and it was obvious in her voice. “I’ll take you to your room, then.”

“Thank you. It’s been a really long time since I’ve eaten.” Treena’s voice sounded a little off. “But my stomach hurts a little. Do you mind if I walk it off?”

“In that case, it’s straight to your quarters for you. There will be plenty of time to explore in the morning after you’ve rested. And after you’ve been cleared, of course.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“Your former clan will have to identify you.”

There was a pause. “That will be nice. Um, can I use your washroom really quick?”

“Our what?”

I cursed, straining to hear better.

“Uh, bathroom,” Treena said quickly. “Sorry, they had me trained pretty well.”

The woman’s voice hardened. “Just up these stairs.”

There was nothing on the feed for a while, then Treena thanked the woman. A door opened and closed. There was the sound of heavy breathing, then a big thud. Silence.

“Treena,” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

Another moment of quiet, and then the sound of heaving. Ah. So she hadn’t been faking her stomach sickness after all.

“What’s going on?” someone asked—a captain, by the bands of rank on his arm.

“She just needs a minute,” I said.

The captain grumbled something, but he sat back again to wait.

Soon a shaky voice came back on. “Sorry, Vance. Don’t know what came over me, but I’m ready now.”

“Are you sure? You can always—”

“Yeah, I can do this.” She coughed. “Here goes. Three. Two.”

“All units, ready,” I said, and the command was repeated down the ranks.

“One.” It was almost a whisper.

A buzzer sounded somewhere, and Murphy’s voice yelled over the feed, “Attack!” Suddenly the ground thundered with the sound of hundreds of heavy feet running through the darkness, all headed for the wall. Then the shouting began.

I looked longingly at the dark and welcoming forest. It would be so easy to slip away and hide. But if I did, my family would be executed. I was as much a prisoner here as I was within NORA’s borders.

The soldiers assigned to me watched me with dark expressions. They seemed to know what I was considering. Had the commander assigned them to me, or me to them?

It didn’t matter right now. I’d promised Treena protection this time. Our superiors had insisted that Treena enter unarmed, as there was no way a real refugee could have obtained a weapon. They obviously weren’t concerned about what would happen to her once her betrayal was discovered.

“On our way, Treena,” I said into the feed. “Just hold on.”

When we arrived, the wall was much higher than I’d imagined. The gate was still closed, and it buzzed loudly with electricity, causing the soldiers to slow down in confusion. A section of the wall stood open, just large enough to allow one person through at a time. I groaned. This would take forever.

A familiar click sounded above my head, and I froze. A dozen rifle barrels sat atop the wall, and one was aimed right at me.

I barely had time to spring out of the way before the shooting started. The thunder of bullets and screams of dying men echoed sharply across the sleeping forest. So much for the element of surprise. Amid the chaos of rifles and stunners exchanging fire, I saw that the thin doorway was closing now, shoved by men from the other side who had finally realized that the locking mechanism was disabled.

We didn’t have time for this.

I leaped over and shoved my way through just as it slammed shut. Surprised grunts were replaced with cries of pain as I let myself loose—a sweep to the leg, an elbow to the face, the crunching sound of breaking bone. A thud as someone fell, then another. And another. There were only two men holding desperately to the door now, both watching me wide-eyed, knowing they were next. One of them looked upward and shouted for help from their armed comrades.

I twisted around them, reaching instead for the solid metal lever above the shorter one’s head. It was similar to the one on NORA’s border wall, almost like they’d stolen the technology. I plunged it downward. The wall emitted a deep moan, and the buzzing of electricity sputtered and died. The two men stared at the lever, then at each other, and took off running and shouting just as the door burst open.

“The wall is clear,” I shouted. Only one of the gunners at the top of the wall remained, and he was facing the other direction. I took off at a sprint.

An alarm started to wail somewhere. If the gunshots hadn’t already awakened the sleeping settlers, the alarm would.

“Open this door, now!” the woman screamed through Treena’s feed.

“It won’t lock,” Treena said into the feed, her voice strained. “Must be the device jamming it like all the other locks. She’s going to kill me, Vance. Fates! I can’t hold this much longer!”

“Is there a window?” I asked, lengthening my stride.

“Well, yeah.”

“Prop something against the door,” I said, panting, “and then climb out the window. See if you can find handholds along the exterior of the building. I’ll be there in half a minute.”

“But Vance, I can’t—I’m not good at heights.”

“Do it now!” By the banging sounds on the feed, the woman was seconds away from pushing through. I checked behind me, surprised to see that my troops had gotten past the wall and followed. “Head for the center structure!”

“Okay,” she said in a tiny voice. She sounded sick again.

Around us, soldiers banged on smaller cabin doors. These people were well trained, though, and many answered with a rifle shot through a window. The few who did come out, bleary-eyed and confused, were stunned unconscious and now lay in a heap.

A figure jumped out from behind a building, fired a shot that struck one of my soldiers, and ducked out of sight again. A surge of pride filled my body before I remembered that resisting would only be more dangerous for them. It would be too easy for a soldier to “accidentally” slip the stunner into fatal mode and return fire. Even now I could see the crazed, murderous look in some of their eyes. I shouted, “Five men per cabin, but drag the stunned settlers to safety until the fighting stops. Remember that the cabins are probably connected underground. The rest of you, follow me!”

My orders were repeated through the ranks, and a few actually broke off and obeyed. I saw Treena immediately. She clung to the window frame, struggling to place a foot in the mortar between the logs but slipping with each attempt. A woman yelled out the window, fist shaking, and then she reached down as if to peel Treena’s fingers off her perch. I took aim and fired—one shot, and the woman spun backward and disappeared. Treena whirled around to see, nearly throwing her off the four-story building completely.

“Someone help her!” I yelled, frantically searching our equipment for another ladder—a wooden one, or a long object—but nothing was long enough. “We need some kind of net!”

Instead of obeying, a line of soldiers surrounded me on either side, gazing upward at the flailing girl, and one of them slowly raised his weapon. My eyes went to the window, but there was no one else there.

He took aim—right at Treena.

“Wait! Don’t shoot!”

He fired, but I swept his leg just in time, throwing him off balance. He landed flat on his back with a grunt. “What’s wrong with you?” I snapped. “She’s on my team!”

“Fates, just following orders!” the man gasped.

“I never told you to shoot her!”

The blast from the stun gun must have hit close because Treena lost hold of the windowsill with one hand. She swung precariously from the other hand before regaining her hold. Daymond finally jumped into action, twisting two rope ladders together to form a makeshift net, and tossed it to Ross. They stretched it taut below Treena’s desperate form.

I didn’t have time to watch, though. The fallen NORA soldier was getting up, and the others had noticed the scuffle. They circled me like carnivores before their prey.

“You’re not talking about my orders,” I said. “You’re getting them from someone else.”

“What kind of fool would follow a red?” a fat-nosed soldier asked, grinning down at me like a boy at mealtime. “At least you’re smart enough to understand that much.” He raised a fist, but my instincts took over. When he stepped forward for the punch, I gave him a swift kick to the knee, dropping him just before the guy behind me attacked. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Treena let go.

“No!” I shouted, but Daymond and Ross were ready. They stretched the rope ladder as taut as it would go, and Treena fell perfectly into it, back first, spreading her weight out like a winged bat. She hit the ground, but the net seemed to have broken her fall just enough. She sat up right away, looking dazed but unhurt.

It distracted me just long enough for a couple of soldiers to grab my arms. I tried to whip around, but a third soldier wrapped his arm around my throat and put me in a headlock. I kicked backward to break away, but the arm tightened around my throat. My vision blurred, and I mentally kicked myself. Any idiot knew not to get distracted. These men weren’t sloppy smugglers but trained soldiers, hardened from decades of careful training.

The captain who’d pretended to relay my orders approached. “Stupid red. I hoped you’d give me a reason to do this.” With a smile that looked more like a grimace, he raised his gun and aimed it at my head.

“Stop!” Treena shrieked as she struggled to untwist herself from the net, but it was too late. The impact exploded into my brain like a transport train.

22

I woke up in the commander’s tent, my wrists fastened to the side of the bed. My guys—well, and Treena—huddled near the opening, dirty, tired, and looking grim. I did a quick mental count and relaxed. Everyone from my team was there. They were so engrossed in conversation that no one noticed I was awake.

“Anything can happen in a battle,” Semias was saying. “He probably disobeyed an order. They would’ve had to shoot him.”

“No,” Treena said quickly. “I was watching. I felt the rush of air from a stunner, then Vance started yelling at them, and the soldiers turned on him right as I fell. If you guys hadn’t made that net when you did . . .”

“Bet it was supposed to look like an accident,” Daymond said. “That’s why the soldier tried to shoot you while you were still hanging.”

Semias groaned. “Fates! This is ridiculous. Listen to yourselves. How do you know the guy wasn’t aiming at someone behind you, Treena? Maybe someone was in the window, ready to attack, and the soldier was trying to save you.”

“Then Vance would have helped instead of attacking the soldier,” Daymond replied. “Face it, Semias. The soldiers were jealous of EPIC, so they tried to take us out when no one was looking.”

“Not us,” Ross said. “Just Treena and Vance.”

“Who’d be jealous of two reds?” Semias muttered. “You’re all insane.” He stalked out without a second look.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Daymond said, finally noticing me. Treena’s eyes lit up, and she headed to my side. She lifted a hand as if to grab mine, then pulled it back at the last second, looking flustered.

“Did we win?” I croaked.

“No EPIC losses, but sixty military casualties,” Daymond said. “About two hundred settler deaths, mostly suicides. The rest are unconscious and headed for NORA already.”

Two hundred. It was far worse than I’d expected. I tried to sit, but something pulled at my wrist. “Why am I tethered to the bed?”

“They said you attacked your own soldiers,” Daymond said. “The commander was furious. The entire unit was backing it up, so it’s their word against ours. Luckily, Poly smooth-talked him into waiting for you to wake up and tell your side of the story.”

I forced myself up into a sitting position. A fresh stab of pain in my side made me wince.

“Poly also said it wasn’t safe to move you yet,” Treena said, “since you were hit in the head. He feels really bad, Vance. Says he should have listened when you tried to withdraw as a unit leader.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad he realizes that.” I swung my legs around and pulled on my bonds, but they were tight.

“I’ll go tell Poly you’re awake,” Daymond said, motioning for the others to leave as well. Treena moved to follow.

“Wait,” I told her. “Are you all right?”

She looked at the floor. “Compared to you, yeah. My stomach still hurts a little.”

“Ah.” Every Integrant knew the pain of hunger, the hollow sickness nutrition pills caused at first. For a stomach accustomed to real food, the pill wasn’t enough. It had taken me a year to get used to it. But I hadn’t thought about the reverse situation. Treena could very well be the only person to experience food after only ever living on pills. “Your stomach may take a while to recover. You’ve just changed the delicate chemistry of your digestive system.”

“Don’t worry, I’m fine. Better off than some.” She took a deep breath, probably remembering those she had just betrayed. I knew the feeling. “Thanks for the rescue. I’m sorry you got hurt because of me.”

“Not hurt. Just zapped,” I said with a forced grin. “It’s not the first time.”

“I figured.” She returned the smile, but it disappeared quickly. “When I saw them aim at you, and you still watching me, making sure I was safe—” Her face crumpled. “I don’t know. It was like something in me snapped. When you fell, one of them kicked you. I stole Daymond’s stunner and charged at the guy like a crazy person.” She chuckled bitterly. “If it weren’t for Daymond pulling me back, they’d probably have shot me, too.”

That explained the pain in my side. “Guess you’re one of the team now.”

“Am I?” Her voice was distant. She reached up and grasped her necklace, something I’d noticed she did often.

“What’s that jewelry?” I asked. “A gift from Bike Boy?”

She shook her head. “My dad.”

I allowed myself a twinge of satisfaction. “You must miss him.”

Her voice grew hard. “I never knew him. He left before I was born, but he told my mom to give this to me on my Rating day. Some father, huh?” She removed the necklace and placed it into my hand, the delicate strand hanging down between my fingers. The stone was still warm from the heat of her body.

“But you wear it every day. Why?”

Her eyes finally met mine, level and determined. “The purple reminds me of NORA. I think he was trying to tell me that I should trust the system.”

“And look where that got you. I see why you don’t like it.” I stared at the stone for a moment, then held it up to the light. “What about the gold, then?”

She brought her head closer, staring at the stone in surprise, and I caught a whiff of pine needles. “What in the fates? I can’t believe I’ve never noticed that before. Must be the mountain light or something.”

I lifted it over her head with my free hand, and she guided it into place with a grateful smile. My wrist brushed against her soft cheek, and she leaned in just a little. I cleared my throat and pulled my hand away. “If I were a father about to leave my family, I don’t know that a rock would be my first choice for a gift. But then again, at least he left you something.”

“What was your dad like?”

“Honestly? Stern and overprotective.” She laughed gently, and I continued. “But a great man. My entire clan adored him. They’d do anything for him, and he felt the same about his people.”

We fell silent, and I sensed the unease in her demeanor. Her eyes flicked toward the door. Before she could leave, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I was wrong about you.”

“What?”

“After we ran into Bike Boy, I accused you of being just like every other shallow girl in NORA. But I’ve never met a girl who would march into a settlement, unarmed and alone.”

“That makes me either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.” She shrugged. “I was wrong about you too. I’ve always thought that outlanders were cruel and violent. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I grew up with.”

“I haven’t eaten a baby in years,” I said. “Well, unless you count that one last week.” She groaned at the joke, and I sobered. “We’re not cruel, necessarily. But violent when we have to be. While we’re on the subject, I’ve always thought citizens like you were stuck-up, selfish robots with numbers on their heads.”

“You weren’t far off.”

“We were both wrong,” I said softly. “And right.”

Our eyes met, and her lips softened into a shy smile. A wayward lock of hair hung over her face, and I had a sudden strange urge to gently brush it back into place.

“Vance?” a voice called from the doorway. I whirled to find Neb standing there, a strange look on his face. He glanced at Treena, then back at me. “Um, Poly’s on his way, and the commander isn’t far behind.”

“Thanks.”

A furious blush stained Treena’s cheeks, and she moved quickly toward the door.

“Treena,” I called after her. “You realize what happened today, right?”

She stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Someone tried to kill you.”

She stared at the floor. “We don’t know that for sure.”

“Yes, we do. And I will find out who it was and why. They will not succeed. Not as long as I’m around. Understood?”

Treena didn’t return my gaze. “Yes, sir.”

23

I felt sick.

It could have been anything, really—the jostling, deafening chopper I sat inside, or Vance’s injuries, or even the real food. But when I thought of what we had just done, my stomach twisted. Two hundred innocent people had lost their lives tonight, and the survivors were prisoners. Dozens of children were probably waking up right now, scared, torn from the only homes they’d ever known, all facing a future of poverty and competition.

All because I was willing to do anything to raise my Rating. NORA had used me, and I’d been completely willing to be used.

I gripped my seat, shivering despite the coat I wore. Team Two sat slumped in their seats, fully asleep, their belts the only reason they weren’t sprawled out on the floor in heavy slumber. Semias’s head had fallen completely forward, a long string of drool swaying with the movement of the chopper.

Vance wasn’t with us. He was probably still being interrogated. Two days ago I wouldn’t have worried for him. But now I knew how precarious his situation was. If he was found guilty, would they execute him? Or would they punish his family instead?

Poly sat rigidly next to me, his dark eyes staring at nothing. As the official leader of EPIC and the person who had appointed Vance, Poly was partially accountable for Vance’s actions. I thought back to the conversation I’d overheard on my first full day. I hadn’t done anything to investigate the EPIC leader. Somehow, after today my Rating reconsideration felt further away than ever.

“What will happen to Vance?” I asked Poly.

For a moment I didn’t know if he was ignoring me or if he simply hadn’t heard my question. I opened my mouth to ask again, but his eyes finally focused on me. “I don’t know.”

“He was only protecting me. They’ll give him another chance, right?”

He leaned forward so quickly that I recoiled. “Did a soldier really point a gun at you?”

“I didn’t see it, exactly,” I admitted. “But I felt the blast go past me. What I don’t understand is why the soldiers attacked him afterward.”

He shook his head and sat back wearily. “They were just looking for an excuse. I was a fool. It wasn’t the first time he’s been attacked, although usually it’s his own people who try it.”

“His clan members have fought him?”

Poly gave me a long look. “Don’t worry, he can take care of himself. Well, except for this last time. Must’ve been too many of them.”

Or he was distracted. I remembered how he’d refused to tear his eyes away from me, making sure I was all right. “Why did you choose Vance as your first?”

“You sure have a lot of questions about Vance,” Daymond said from across the way. He lay crooked in his seat with one eye open. I’d forgotten that everyone could hear our conversation through the feed. “All these guys and you like the Integrant. Girls are strange creatures.”

“I just wondered about his loyalty,” I snapped. “How do you guys know he won’t turn on you and save his friends?”

“Vance has captured four times more smugglers than anyone else,” Daymond said. “And most of them were Integrants. If he’s a double agent, he’s not doing a very good job.”

We fell into silence again as the chopper hit a bit of turbulence. I gripped my seat tightly and took a deep, slow breath, trying to keep my mind on our conversation.

Poly had resumed his glassy-eyed stare, so I tilted my head back and tried to clear my thoughts. Finally, sleep came, but with it came dreams of a guy—not the one I’d come to win but the one who had just sacrificed himself to save me.

The one guy in NORA I should never, ever want.

24

It was dark by the time I got back, and both teams were asleep. My body moved sluggishly, and I knew I wouldn’t last long without a little sleep myself, but my thoughts were still sharp. When I walked into the bedroom, I noticed a soft blue glow in the darkness. Semias, shirtless and bleary-eyed, was sitting up in his bed. As soon as he saw me enter, he snapped his techband screen closed, and the light disappeared.

“Didn’t think I’d find you awake,” I said, sitting on my bed to remove my shoes.

“I—uh, suddenly felt really hungry. I was just checking the time.”

I frowned. That didn’t require opening the screen. Surely he knew by now that our communications were blocked. “I think we’ll wait until everyone wakes up before we break out the pills.”

“Sounds good.” Semias lay back down and rolled over to face the wall. Either Semias was really tired or something strange was going on. He’d never passed up a chance to argue before.

“Vance!” Neb sat straight up in bed, and for a moment I thought he was going to come over and hug me. He seemed to think better of it and kept his blanket on. “They set you free! I knew they’d come to their senses.”

“Don’t get too excited. I’m on probation.” The words felt sour in my mouth. They hadn’t believed a single word of my testimony about Treena and the shooter. It didn’t matter. I would discover why Treena had been targeted. Something told me that if I did, the mystery of her Rating would be revealed.

As always, I lay down on my right side, where I had full view of the room. Semias and Neb had gone back to sleep, and the bathroom door was closed tight. With a yawn, I allowed myself to drift into a fitful sleep.

><><><><><><><

“You can’t pretend you’re not hungry,” Semias’s distant voice said, waking me up with a start.

“Poor baby,” Daymond whined.

There was a beeping sound as someone scanned their techband on the pill cupboard’s lock, and then Poly appeared in the doorway. He tossed the pill container to Daymond, who twisted the tube open. Apparently Poly had asked Daymond to distribute breakfast rather than wake me up. That was completely fine with me. I pulled the pillow over my head and tried to drown out the light and noise.

There was some kind of crash followed by yelling. With a moan, I shoved the pillow away and sat up. There were nutrition pills scattered across the floor. The other guys stared wide-eyed at Daymond and Semias, who glared at each other over the mess. Treena had emerged from the bathroom and stood with her arms folded, frowning.

“That was totally you, man,” Semias snapped, getting in Daymond’s face. “You couldn’t walk straight if someone drew a line on the ground.”

“Nice try, Semias,” Daymond said, “but I’m not stupid.” He held the container out, and the guys started scooping up pills and dumping fistfuls back in. “I know what you’re doing. When we count them, I bet there’ll be some missing, and they’ll magically appear in your pocket.”

“Not so.” Semias knelt and collected a few in his palm. “Don’t blame your klutziness on me. See what a good boy I am? One for you,” he said, handing a pill to Ross, who scowled, “and one for you.” He gave one to Treena. She had come closer to help, kneeling a careful distance from Semias. I watched his hand carefully, making sure nothing disappeared down his sleeve. As the pill switched hands, though, I noticed something strange about it. Was it . . . brown?

She wrapped her hand around the pill and muttered a reluctant, “Thank you.”

I stood.

Daymond slammed some pills into the container with a decisive whip of his hand. “I swear, if you ever trip me again, Semias, I’ll break your leg. And maybe the other one too, just for fun.”

Ross swallowed his pill, and Treena had just tilted her head back to down hers when I grabbed her hand.

“Wait.” I swiped the pill out of her hand and sniffed it.

She stared at me. “What’s wrong?”

I leaped to the floor and gathered up a few more, then held them up to the light. “Freeze. All of you. Don’t touch the pills.”

The other guys glanced at each other uncertainly, but they stood and backed away. Semias glared at me. “Why? You want them all to yourself, Vance?”

“This one’s a different color than the others,” I said. “Dark and coarse. It even smells different.”

Poly shook his head from the doorway “Vance, it’s good to have you back, but you’re acting a little paranoid. They’re just nutrition pills.”

My fist was clenched tightly around the offending pill.

“Where did this pill come from?” I asked Semias.

“From the bottle,” he sputtered.

“Then you wouldn’t mind sampling it. Just to make sure it’s safe.”

“I—I already took one. Another would make me sick.”

“You? Right. You’d take a dozen a day if you could. But no rush.”

Semias glanced at Poly, who looked torn. “I didn’t poison it, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Good. You won’t mind taking it, then.”

“Vance,” Poly said with a warning tone. “You’re looking for trouble where there’s none.”

I whipped around. “Poly, Semias is on my team. With all due respect, let me handle this one.”

Poly’s jaw tightened, and his dark eyes seared into mine. I refused to drop my gaze. This was too important to give up on, even for a man I respected as much as Poly. Finally he nodded.

“Fates,” Semias grumbled, but his voice seemed higher than usual. “I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re just jealous because I’m a high yellow.”

His defensiveness only strengthened my resolve. “You’re doing an awful lot of talking. How about we stuff that mouth with a poisoned pill and see what happens?”

“Shut up, Vance. I don’t have to prove anything.”

“I’m not leaving until you do.”

“I won’t take the stupid pill!”

“You’ll do it, under your power or mine.”

“You’re crazy, man. Poly, you’re seriously letting him get away with this?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “He is. You have three seconds. Three.”

“I’m not. Taking. The pill.”

“Two. Why? What’ll happen?”

“I don’t know.” Semias’s voice trembled slightly. “The commander only said—” He stopped, then gave a strangled gasp.

Everyone looked at him.

“The commander said what?” Poly growled.

Semias looked like a cornered rabbit. His eyes darted back and forth, his chin set in defiance.

Poly stepped forward and took the pill, then sniffed it. “Without a microscope it’s hard to tell, but from the color and the coarseness of the leaves, I’d guess it’s baneberry. Hard to detect, but it paralyzes the heart. Treena wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”

Everyone looked at Semias. His conviction seemed to waver, and then he finally broke. “The message said to slip it to Treena. But I didn’t know it was poisoned, I swear. For all I knew, it just had extra caffeine or something.”

For a few seconds the guys gaped at each other. Treena’s face had turned a sickly shade of white.

“Semias,” I said, “as long as I’m around, you will not succeed with that order.”

“I can’t believe it,” Poly muttered, still staring at the pill.

Semias stood taller, glancing at Poly and then back at me. “I know it’s horrible and all, but we all know EPIC is a tough job. We don’t know why we do half the things we’re ordered to do. It’s not our place to question. If the commander wants her dead, he must have a good reason.” He turned to face Treena. “Maybe your little trainee isn’t what you think she is.”

I took a step toward him, my veins pulsing with anger. “We are a division of law enforcement. We’re not assassins, and we certainly don’t murder each other, orders or not.”

Team One must have felt the tension because several heads peeked in from the hallway. They watched us curiously, as if unsure whether to interrupt. Poly motioned for them to stay where they were.

I grabbed Semias’s arms and wrenched them behind his back. He struggled for a moment but stopped when I locked his wrists. “Unfortunately, I can’t let you roam free now. Not as long as you’re willing to sell us out.”

He gritted his teeth. “Treena isn’t one of us. I’m telling you, there’s something up with her.”

“Wait.” Treena’s face had turned an angry red. “Let me talk to him for a second.”

I shoved him to his knees so he couldn’t hurt her, then took a step back. She bent over and got right in his face. “You said the commander told you to do it. Why?”

“I don’t—He didn’t tell me why. Just that the orders came from higher up.”

There was a stunned silence. Higher up? There was only one person above a councilman.

“The empress,” Neb breathed.

Daymond grunted. “Why would the empress be after you, Treena?”

She just shook her head, absently fingering the rock necklace that hung from her neck. “I don’t know.”

“When the commander doesn’t hear back from Semias,” Poly said, “he’ll know the attack failed. He’ll just send others. The question is, what do we do with Treena in the meantime?”

I put a hand on her slim shoulder. “Protect her. Despite what Semias says, she’s still a member of our team. But I’ll tell you one thing. If the commander and the empress are desperate enough to secretly murder one of us, it means no one is safe. We can’t rest until we know what’s behind this. From now on we implement a two-person watch, day and night—one from Team One, the other from Team Two. We’ll figure out quickly who our teammates are and who can be too easily bought.” I stared into Semias’s eyes, and his gaze slid to the floor. I could feel Poly’s glare from across the room. I’d never ordered his men around before. Hopefully he agreed that this was necessary.

“What about Semias?” Daymond asked.

“Unfortunately for him, he’s stuck here. But that doesn’t mean he’s entitled to our trust. I think he’s about to get some well-deserved rest.”

“Rest?”

“Definitely.” I felt a wicked smile spread across my face. “Tie him to his bed.”

25

I skipped breakfast. The thought of filling my stomach, even with a pill, made me sick. I’d been centimeters away from death, and Vance had saved me. Again. But this time it hadn’t been a stranger that had tried to take my life, and it definitely couldn’t be written off as an accident.

I was an anomaly in EPIC now. Instead of ignoring me like they had to this point, both EPIC teams stared at me with interest. I could just imagine the crazy stories they were attributing to my past. After several hours of training, I thought the whispers would never end. Vance seemed to sense my need for space and suggested an evening run.

We didn’t talk much as we ran, and it was nearly dark by the time we got back, sore and weary from the events of the last forty-eight hours. Poly offered me a nutrition pill—perfectly normal and from a brand-new tube, he insisted—and I swallowed it with reluctance. It didn’t kill me. I retired to the washroom, checking twice to make sure the door was locked.

Sleep eluded me for close to an hour. Every time I felt myself drifting, Semias’s face came into view. Maybe she’s not what you think she is, he’d said. If Semias believed it, perhaps it wouldn’t be long before the others did as well. Curiosity could quickly turn to accusation, and tolerance to hostility. The empress wanted me dead. Why?

How had things gotten so complicated?

Two days, two murder attempts. I wasn’t safe in EPIC anymore. Vance was kind to protect me, but we’d been lucky so far. Each failed attempt would raise the stakes. Besides, there was nothing holding me here any longer. My deal with the empress was most definitely off.

The white-hot anger simmering below the surface began to cool as doubt clutched at my mind. I had to leave. But where would I go? I wouldn’t make it halfway home before they tracked me down and zapped me for not being where I was supposed to be.

My techband. If only I could get it off . . .

I thought back to Tali’s offer. She’d been wearing hers. But what about the man whose disgusting fingers had tried to shove a pill down my throat? I forced myself to think back, to remember what the room looked like. His breath had been hot against my neck, his hairy arm wet with sweat . . .

No techband. He hadn’t been wearing one that day. Somehow Tali’s group of smugglers could remove them. It was the only way for them to travel without punishment. And if they could do it, I could too. But how could I contact them? Surely they were long gone by now.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. A good night’s sleep was all I needed. Hopefully my life would make sense in the morning.

><><><><><><><

It seemed sleep wasn’t on the agenda because after another hour of restless thought, my techband buzzed. It read:

ALERT:

NATIONAL TRANSMISSION AT 2330. PLEASE STAND BY.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I heard someone say through the door.

I just sighed, washed my face to wake myself up, and opened the door just as someone turned on the bedroom lights. True to his word, Vance had posted two men by my door, Ross and one of Poly’s guys—Kraddock, I think his name was. They’d pulled Semias’s bed up against the wall and sat on it like a bench. Semias lay sprawled out on the floor, bonds still fastened behind his back, his face relaxed in sleep. He looked like a weary child several years younger than he really was. It was hard to believe he’d tried to kill me just hours earlier.

When I emerged, my guards sat taller and watched me cross the room. The only other person standing was Neb. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to wake the others. It wasn’t going well. He grabbed a random shoulder and shook it, getting a halfhearted punch in return.

Vance sat on his still-made bed in his rumpled uniform, staring at nothing. I sat down next to him and leaned closer. “What’s this broadcast about?”

“They haven’t told me anything,” he muttered.

“But you have a suspicion,” I said. “It has something to do with our last mission.”

“An opinion, nothing more. And I hope I’m wrong.”

Someone yelped, and a pillow slammed into the wall beside us, pieces of cotton flying into the air. Vance grabbed it before it fell and tossed it to Neb, who whirled it at Ross’s head. Ross snatched it out of the air and held it just out of reach, sending Neb hurling toward the floor.

Daymond growled. “Touch me again and I will ram this pillow down your throat.”

“Give it a rest,” Poly said. He stood in the doorway, still dressed and looking worried.

All too soon another message came over our techbands as they vibrated in unison. I flipped up the screen, hearing a series of clicks as everyone else did the same. It showed a poised woman, blonde hair pulled into a bun, her makeup displaying a perfect set of high cheekbones and arched eyebrows. Intricate eye tattoos framed her green Rating: 932.

“My dear citizens,” the woman said calmly, flashing a white-toothed smile. “Today is an important day in the history of the New Order Republic of America. Tonight we wish to make an exciting announcement. May I introduce the Leadership Academy’s top student and NORA’s highest Level Three graduate, Dresden Wynn.”

A startled gasp tore from my throat.

“Thank you, Cora,” a familiar voice said, and the screen switched to Dresden. His face and hair were so overdone that he looked almost plastic, but it was him.

I couldn’t believe it. My Dresden, announcing the latest news in front of the entire country! He’d done short segments in Olympus before, and that was a big deal for a student. Suddenly I felt a little light-headed. I pressed my eyelids together tightly and opened them, letting them focus again.

“We apologize for interrupting our citizens’ nightly activities,” Dresden continued, “but this is a timely message.”

“Yes, Dresden,” the woman said automatically, and the screen flashed back to her. Now I could see that they were sitting at a large table in some kind of studio—high up, it looked like, from the vast expanse of city below them. The studio had to be on the top floor of the steel Academy Building. “Last night the military had a great victory, and now our borders are that much safer.”

“The military?” Neb snapped. “What about us?”

“Most people don’t know about us,” Daymond said.

“Safety is our first priority,” Dresden said through his too-wide smile. “Which is the reason behind our most recent legislation, the new location law. As you know, each citizen is required to be at a specified location according to the schedule outlined on their techband. Failure to do so will trigger punishment mode. As most citizens have little or no experience with such punishment, we would like to offer you a simple demonstration.”

“Eleven smugglers were recently captured near the border,” Cora said. “Usually, such outlaws are arrested and sent to work camps, where they finish out their lives in heavy labor. But these are citizens who stepped far outside their allowed boundaries, engaged in illegal activity, and resisted arrest. They have been sentenced to maximum-level punishment.”

I glanced at Vance, who looked as stunned as I felt. Eleven smugglers. There was only one group that could possibly be.

The two speakers disappeared, replaced by a darker screen. A group of people, arms locked in front of them, stood rigidly against a gray cement wall. They all wore the latest techband model, a sleek silver color. I strained to see faces and groaned, realizing that I recognized nearly all of them. The man who’d given me the bruise stood close to the back of the group. And there was the first guy who’d jumped me, the one Tali had called Ben. NORA had slapped new techbands on them, apparently.

My heart beat a little faster, and I held the screen closer. None of them were girls. Tali had escaped. Wait. Was that—? A hat too large for the wearer’s wiry frame rested over what looked like a young boy’s face. I drew in a ragged breath. “No.”

Vance jerked his eyes up from his screen, watching me with a serious expression.

No, it couldn’t be! This wasn’t happening. Tali had gotten away. She’d escaped before anyone else. I remembered how she’d bounded away with her bag of food after pretending to knock me out.

“Three,” Cora said in an irritatingly smooth, false comforting voice.

It was my fault Tali was there. She’d spent her last moments of freedom trying to help me.

“Two.”

“No!” I hit the call button on my techband and dialed Dresden’s name, hoping to distract him long enough to stop this. Surely he could stop it! An error message appeared. With a growl, I slammed an angry fist onto the keys and felt a painful jolt.

“One.”

Fates! Stop this now!

There was a sudden buzz, and the entire group stiffened, their eyes round in horror. Several gurgled, trying to scream, and others dropped instantly to the ground. Some thrashed around before they fell. Tali was the last one standing. She looked straight at the camera, right into the eyes of a watching nation. Her mouth was twisted in pain, but her gaze was clear and full of anger. Her body contorted as she fought to stay upright. Then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed.

An anguished cry tore from my throat.

“Thank you for your attention,” Cora said, and suddenly the announcers were back. Cora looked composed, as if nothing had happened. Dresden’s smile was frozen, his face a sickly off-white. His next words sounded hoarse. “Please—” He cleared his throat.

Cora jumped in. “Please consider this a reminder to be vigilant about your location at all times. You may return to your activities. As we align ourselves more closely to the high standards expected of us, we will be stretched and perfected in our collective quest to become the best citizens possible. Our obedience will make this nation a force greater than that which was built in the days of Rome.” She smiled, suddenly looking a lot like the sanitizing-cream ad-board model, and then gave a quick nod. “Good night.”

26

I stared at my empty screen for a long time after the broadcast ended. Four of those men I knew well from my childhood. I could have saved them.

I should have saved them.

It was one thing to send my clan members to work camps. It was a horrible life full of hard labor, but at least they were alive. This—electrocution of prisoners—went way beyond what I’d signed up for. This was murder. The Demander was using me now, messing with my mind. He would pay for this.

I buried the memories inside and focused on my men. Neb stared at the floor, his legs visibly shaking. The other guys weren’t faring much better. Treena stood, dazed, and made her way slowly to the bathroom. Her strides were uneven, as if she were drunk or sleepwalking. The door shut softly behind her.

After a moment, Poly made his way over to me, wearing a deep frown. “I never thought I’d see an execution televised nationally.”

“It’s happened before,” Ross offered. “About forty-five years ago. This mentally disturbed woman who killed, like, seventeen people. Except they didn’t use punishment mode in that case. Instead, they—”

“Not now, Ross,” I said.

“The empress must be really worried about smugglers,” Daymond said. “I bet every kid in the nation will be having nightmares tonight.”

“Maybe it’s good, though,” Semias said. He sat casually on his bed.

“What’s good?” I shot back. “Eleven less people to compete with?”

“Nah,” Semias drawled. “I don’t compete with outlaws. I mean that once all the smugglers are gone, or at least scared into leading honest lives, we can go home. The borders will be cleansed soon, and then our country. Any uprising the smugglers have started will be quashed. The commander won’t need us anymore.”

The other guys considered that, but I shook my head in disgust. “You’re unbelievable.”

Semias’s hand dropped. “What’s your problem, Vance?”

“My problem? My problem is that the outlands don’t need cleansing, as you put it. If there’s corruption and darkness anywhere in the world, it’s here in your blasted Roman Republic.”

Semias bristled, but it was Poly who spoke. “It may be hard for you to understand, Vance, but it comes down to this. First, we need fresh water. Ours is barely fit for human consumption—believe me, I’ve tested it. Second, our cities are bursting with new growth, and we’ll need to expand soon. The only place to do that is outside the current border, and the only way to do that is to displace the settlers who live out there.”

I pounded my fist into the wall. “You know better than anyone that this is not about land, and it’s definitely not about the water. This is about the empress’s little empire, Poly. It’s not enough to rule a nation. She has to control everyone else, too. This New Rome she keeps talking about? It’s a disease. The Romans tried to take over the world, and she won’t be happy with anything less.”

The room was silent.

Poly sighed, lowering his voice. “Vance, I’m sorry about the other night, but you have a different way of looking at things than the rest of us. Every country in the world—and in history—wants to expand its borders. Except that most of them just kill everyone in their path. At least the empress is giving her prisoners a better life.”

“A better life.” My voice was flat. “I thought you, of all people, would understand.”

“Vance—”

“You’ve accepted it, haven’t you? You’re perfectly content doing this forever.”

“Of course not.” Poly bristled. “We just haven’t fulfilled our part yet, apparently.”

“We fulfilled it too well. Now they’re never letting us go.” I turned to the others. “If you don’t want to see the truth, fine. But next time you start to think we’re out there saving lives, think about what you just saw.”

I strode out before anyone could reply.

27

Tali was dead.

Death was for the elderly at the Olympus Sunset Clinic, patients who spent decades waiting to die. Death was for my grandparents and faceless soldiers and for history classes—not for my best friend. Tali was lying somewhere, pale and lifeless. How could she be so alive, so colorful and happy, and then just . . . gone?

I shifted my position on the cold, hard tile, feeling as dead inside as any corpse.

It’s my fault.

I hadn’t pushed the button, but I’d killed her all the same. Why hadn’t I told her to run immediately? Why had I gotten myself captured in the first place so she’d need to save me? Worst of all, why hadn’t I known the depth of my best friend’s passion for freedom? The horrifying questions took root like a poisonous weed. Racking sobs threatened to escape me, but I gritted my teeth. I didn’t deserve to mourn.

A gentle knock sounded at the washroom door. It barely registered.

After a moment, the knob turned and Vance poked his head in. I noticed his red-rimmed eyes and messy hair. “You forgot to lock the door.”

I stared at him, trying to grasp the importance of his words. They slipped through my mind like water. He stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him.

“I saw your light was still on and thought I’d better check on you.”

I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. “What time is it?”

“Three-thirty. The guys have been asleep for hours.”

I didn’t respond. There was a shuffling noise as he made his way over and then knelt in front of me. I forced my eyes open to see him staring at the ground.

“This tile is hard,” he muttered.

“Try sleeping on it.”

“Are you okay? I know that was hard to watch.”

The real question was, would I ever be okay again? I’d just watched my best friend get electrocuted, and it was all because of me. No spy was worth this, no green Rating, and definitely no job as a Rater. Even a future with Dresden felt wrong in a world without Tali.

“My best friend died tonight.” The words slipped out, cold and lifeless.

There was a sharp intake of breath. “Your friend? One of the smugglers?”

“You didn’t recognize her because she was dressed as a boy, but you met her at the Rating Ceremony.” He should have arrested her then. She would have been sent to a work camp, but at least she’d still be alive.

Understanding registered in Vance’s eyes, then pity. He pushed himself off the tile and sat beside me, staring at his hands as if unsure where to put them. His jaw was dark and rough from going days without shaving, and he smelled faintly of sweat and soap. He seemed to make a decision and reached up to wrap one arm around me, pulling me into his chest. I hesitated for a millisecond but allowed myself lean against him, soaking in what little comfort he could give. He reached up and wiped a wayward piece of hair away from my wet cheek, tucking it behind my ear.

His silent actions released the torrent of emotion. I sobbed into his shirt. It was soaked within seconds, but he just held me closer.

I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually my mind took control again, and a shudder racked my body. There were no more tears left. The pain inside threatened to overwhelm me, and I had no desire to fight it.

Eventually he spoke. “I know this means absolutely nothing to you, but I’m sorry about your friend.”

My throat hurt like there was a khel ball stuck in it. I pulled my knees to my chest and hugged them tight. I’d do anything—anything—to take it all back. I’d worried for Tali’s safety in Meridian. Now she was dead, and it was my fault. Self-loathing filled my stomach until I felt like screaming.

“She made her own choice. There’s not a single smuggler who doesn’t know the risk they’re taking.”

I considered that. “She knew exactly where she should be and what she wanted. Me? I don’t know either one. I don’t belong here, Vance. And yet I don’t belong at home, either.”

“Then run.”

I jerked my head up.

His expression was intense, determined. “I’m serious. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about it. If NORA is trying to kill you, your only option is to run. You’ve seen the lengths the empress will go to for control.”

I gave a bitter laugh, sounding hoarse. “And go where?”

“The smugglers. They’re the only ones who can cut your techband off.”

I blinked, causing fresh, hot tears to burn their way down my cheeks. “But there aren’t any left at Meridian.”

“That was only one hideout. There are four others like it.”

A sick feeling swelled within my stomach. Four others. Vance shouldn’t have known that. Not unless . . .

In a cautious tone, I asked, “Why would they help me?”

He hesitated. “Tell them about your friend. When they see your Rating, they’ll believe you.”

Suddenly it was clear. The evidence had been there all along, but I’d refused to see it. Vance’s disappearing act on our base operation, his guilt at my injury, and his sudden determination to protect me. No matter what he pretended, Vance would always be an Integrant.

Vance watched the emotions playing out on my face. “What?”

I forced myself to pull away from him and felt his arm drop. Cold air replaced the warmth of his body. “You’re the spy.”

He blinked in surprise. “The spy?”

I didn’t respond, watching his reaction closely.

Vance leaned back against the wall. “Ah. That’s why you’re here. And the reward was a high Rating with Bike Boy thrown in to sweeten the deal, I’m guessing.”

“You make it sound so cold,” I said, feeling a twinge of anger at his tone.

He shook his head in disbelief, pushing to his feet. “I’m no spy. The rebellion has been trying to recruit me since the beginning, but I refused.”

“You mean the smugglers.”

“No, the rebellion. It consists of smugglers, Integrants, and even lower citizens. NORA calls them smugglers for simplicity’s sake—and because they don’t want word to get out that there is a rebellion. It’s not about the food smuggling as much as the uprising that the empress is worried about. And she should be. They’re planning something, Treena, and they’ve tried everything to pull me over. If there was a spy here, I would know about it.”

He looked deep into my eyes, his expression so full of frustration and hurt, so him, that I somehow believed it. It wasn’t logical, but I felt it deep inside. He was telling the truth, which meant my mission was a sham. “But—but if there’s no spy, why did the empress send me here?”

“Remember that soldier who tried to kill you? I asked around, and a few others were given that same order. Something about you being a traitor.”

“Me?”

“They’re playing games with us, making us all suspect each other, using us as pawns. It’s their way of making us think we’re privileged. Flatter a weak mind like that, and they’ll do anything for you. But I don’t get why they tried to kill you. What would that accomplish?”

I shrugged and forced myself to my feet, wincing at the sudden tingling sensation in my numb legs.

He refused to drop the subject. “Treena, you said your dad was a traitor. Do you know what he did, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I never met him, but his name is Jasper.”

“Jasper.” He felt the word on his tongue. “Isn’t that a type of stone?”

I stared at him. Something tickled the edge of my memory—something about rocks and names. But I couldn’t remember, and the sudden lapse in conversation brought Tali’s face back again. A lump formed in my throat.

“Go,” he said. “If they want you killed, they won’t miss next time. You have a chance if you go right now. I’ll cover for you as long as I can.”

“They’d know you helped me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But what about your family?”

“Let me worry about them.”

I looked up, feeling sudden warmth at the realization that he was staring at me. Our faces were inches away now. His eyes were brown, with tiny flecks of gold and raw with pain. I wanted to reach up and smooth the unruly hair above his ears, stroke his unshaven jaw. My hand started to move on its own accord, but I made a fist instead.

Focus. I could do this. Even if the smugglers didn’t accept me, I had a greater chance with them than I did here. Maybe I could offer them information in exchange for my life.

The thought made me frown. No. That would prove NORA right about me, and they were dead wrong. I was better than that. If I joined the smugglers—the rebellion—it would be despite my Rating, not because of it. It would be because I believed in their cause, not because I had nowhere else to go.

Haven’t you ever been part of a cause worth dying for? Tali had asked.

“No,” I said. “If the empress really wants me dead, I have to know why.”

His shoulders sagged, but he didn’t seem surprised.“They will kill you, Treena. I can’t guarantee your safety here.”

I didn’t answer, and he leaned back with a frustrated sigh. We sat there for a moment in a silent deadlock.

“I’m not leaving EPIC,” I said again, more firmly this time. “But I do need something.”

“What, a bodyguard?” he asked with an exasperated tone.

I thought of Tali’s smiling face and choppy dark hair. I checked the time. There was a salon four blocks away, and they would be opening soon. “Let’s go for a run.”

28

The morning heat was already unbearable. Fortunately, my neck was cooler than it had ever been. After an hour at the salon, my hair was now short and dark. Surprisingly, the lack of weight made my hair wavy and bouncy. No wonder Tali had liked this. I’d even gotten a pleased smile out of Vance, which I took as a good sign.

I felt my time ticking down, so I didn’t dare try to sleep. Instead, I pulled each guy aside in turn for an interrogation. Vance stood nearby, arms folded, pretending not to listen. After the usual formalities, I told them I’d been sent to uncover a spy and watched their reaction.

Most of them were dumbfounded. A few laughed.

When it was Semias’s turn, he just smirked. “Right. We all know that if there’s a spy here, it’s you.”

“Thanks,” I said, dismissing him. Vance had stood at his side, ready to subdue him at the slightest sign of aggression. The only person left was Poly, and I was already certain he wasn’t a suspect. It seemed Vance was right. There was no traitor. Either the empress’s information was wrong, or she’d sent me here to die. Neither conclusion made any sense.

It was during my shower that afternoon that my techband vibrated.

AMETRINE DOWELL. YOU ARE COMMANDED TO APPEAR IN THE EMPRESS’S CHAMBERS IMMEDIATELY.

I stared at the glowing letters, expecting to feel horror or nervousness. Instead, there was nothing. This was it, then. Would they execute me privately, in the seclusion of her chambers? Would Konnor be relieved that I wasn’t staining the family name anymore? Would Dresden miss me at all?

I dressed slowly. When I opened the door, I sensed someone waiting outside.

“I was ordered to escort you,” Vance said solemnly.

I didn’t answer. I just passed him and made my way toward the hallway, feeling the cold more acutely than usual. Maybe it was best that everyone else had gone for a run, leaving us alone. Less awkward this way—no good-byes. I turned on the lights in the training room as we passed through, glancing around one last time. Remembering. The girl that had entered so long ago seemed like a distant memory. Vance was stiff, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here. I knew the feeling.

I reached for the handle, but it wouldn’t open. Vance’s lock was still in place. He stood in silence for a moment before he finally spoke. “You can still run, you know. Just climb out the ventilation shaft.”

“No, thanks.”

“No, thanks?” He stared at me. “I’m not offering you a food pill or a new shirt, Treena. I’m trying to save your life. What’s this about? Punishing yourself?”

“Take a good look at yourself, Vance,” I shot back. “You spend every day arresting your own people and then beating yourself up over it. You keep trying to prove to the world that you’re this horrible person, that you deserve this life. I don’t think you should be lecturing me right now.”

His eyes flashed with anger. “This is not about me. This is about you doing something stupid.”

I yanked at the lock as I’d seen him do before, and the door clicked open. The air in the stairwell was cold and stale, but I strode into it and started climbing the stairs. Vance gave an exasperated sigh and followed.

We walked in silence for a few minutes. I had no idea what we’d find at the top. Guards? Monitors? The commander?

“Your Rating is wrong,” he said. “Their precious Rating system says absolutely nothing about you and what you’re capable of.”

“So far, everything I’ve done has proven my number absolutely correct.”

“Treena.” His tone softened. “I don’t know why that happened to you. But I do know one thing.” He stopped on the step below me, and I whirled to face him. We were the same height now, and his expression was fierce. “You are the most loyal, most determined, and most fascinating girl I’ve ever met. No number could ever describe you.”

The deadness inside me cracked, and the pain came flooding back. I felt like a five-year-old again. Falling, grasping for a handhold, for something to save me. “It doesn’t matter now.”

He gave me a long look. Then he sat down, right on the steps, easing me down next to him. I lay my head on his shoulder and let him pull me close. The warmth of his embrace felt completely and utterly right. For a long moment I allowed myself to forget about the past few days. There was no empress, no punishment mode, and no mission. There was just us. The world was cool and dark, and his touch sent my heart pumping as if it had just awakened from hibernation.

“When my dad died,” Vance finally said as he began to gently stroke my hair, “I didn’t handle it very well. I kept thinking if I’d just disobeyed his order and stayed with him he’d still be alive.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I still think it sometimes.”

“So that’s why you punish yourself.” I tried to gain control of my voice. “But if you’d stayed, you would have died too.”

“Dying isn’t the worst thing to happen to someone,” he continued thoughtfully. “Any coward can die. The hardest thing is being left behind and trying to make sense of a world without them.”

Tali had joined the smugglers to make a difference, to leave a footprint on the world. I’d just wanted to slip into a quiet life, unnoticed. She was the one who deserved to live, not me. “It’ll never be the same,” I whispered.

“No, it won’t,” he agreed, still stroking my hair. It sent ripples of heat down my body. “Do you remember what I told you in our first training session?”

“Yeah. You told me to stop retreating and fight back instead.”

He chuckled. “When you took on a dozen men at the warehouse, I thought I’d created a monster.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” I said. He just hadn’t known me very well yet. I’d never been one to run from a fight. But wasn’t that exactly what I was doing? What would Tali do if she could see me now—beaten, helpless, and too guilt-ridden to think straight?

She’d slap me upside the head, that’s what.

I tilted my head back and allowed myself to look up into Vance’s eyes. They were so dark it was as if they were absorbing all the light that entered and saving it for some future purpose. His eyebrows were choppy, untrimmed, and his were lips chapped. But somehow it worked. It was simply . . . him. No surgeries, no tallies of volunteer hours and checklists. Vance just took life one day at a time, keeping his family safe, trying to put the pieces back together. I could see it, the pain in his heart. It was something we shared now.

“When you see the empress,” Vance whispered, “tell her I’m the spy.”

I sat back, stunned. “What?”

“Tell her you found the traitor and fulfilled your mission. Maybe it’ll make a difference.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. It hadn’t stopped her so far. “I won’t put my problems on you. You’ve spent the last two years acting as the commander’s little slave, arresting people you probably knew well. I can’t even imagine what two years of that must have been like. And you did it all to save your family.”

He looked away quickly, as if my words had stabbed some part of him. He let out a long, frustrated breath. “I tell myself every day that they are the reason. I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

I put a hand on his arm. “Is this about what the commander said? About you being willing to do anything to survive? Don’t listen to him. He knows nothing about love and loyalty. What you did was brave.”

He looked at my hand on his arm, and I wondered if I’d gone too far. But before I could pull it away, he grasped it with his other hand and squeezed.

“If either of us is brave, it’s you,” he said and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “You survived a week in the most dangerous military unit in NORA, with two kill orders and no weapon. Now you’re going to meet with the person who wants you dead, and yet you’re comforting me.” His finger traced the line of my palm, sending tingles up my arm. “You don’t deserve any of this. The least I can do is accept some of your punishment. Just tell her I’m the spy and let the chips fall where they may.”

I didn’t ask what chips were. A warm feeling spread through my chest until I thought I would burst. This was who he really was. The tumultuous battle within him seemed to have trickled away, leaving one gallant, vulnerable boy. A boy who saw me as something precious—who looked at me instead of at my Rating. His eyes stared at me questioningly, his usual confidence replaced with uncertainty.

“I think your first offer was better,” I finally said. “Let’s use the tunnel to escape.”

“There’s the Treena I know.” He gave a tiny smile. “It feels good to finally choose sides, doesn’t it?”

“Whose side are you on, then?”

As he looked into my eyes, I felt like he could see into my soul. His fingers brushed my cheek, then he cradled the side of my face in his hand, gently tilting my chin upward, and I felt his breath, felt the battle within him as well as I felt it in myself. But something pulled me toward him.

“Yours,” he said. He slowly closed the distance between us.

And our lips met.

He was hesitant at first, just a soft brush of his lips on mine. Then the cool, damp air around us melted away in an instant. His strong arms went around me, pulling me closer, holding me tightly. His kiss became more insistent, and the pain and fear within me began to fade as I felt myself giving in. His chin was rough against my skin, but it only fueled the heat that pulsed through my racing heart.

It felt like hours, that brief moment of pure joy mixed with pain and longing. For the first time I saw past the rough exterior he hid behind to the soul beneath, and it was beautiful. It was a world I’d never known existed, communicated with perfect understanding.

And then there were footsteps overhead.

He pulled away, the sudden distance painful, his voice hoarse. “They’re coming for you.”

I tried to stand, but my legs weren’t working right. The moment we’d just shared had made my thoughts fuzzy. “Do we still have time?”

The sound of pounding on the steps overhead got louder with each second. He jumped up, then grasped my hand to pull me to a standing position. The wistful look in his eyes told me enough. “Sounds like there are only three of them, Treena. I’ll keep them occupied long enough for you to get away.”

“Not a chance.”

“You!” a woman’s voice snapped. “Keep your hands up.”

“Go,” he hissed at me. “I’ll catch up.”

I took off running, taking the steps two at a time toward the bunker. There was a shout from above, and the pounding overhead intensified. I grabbed the rail and leaped down the last flight of stairs, landing hard on my feet, and then rushed to the door.

More shouting. They must have reached Vance. I pushed the door open and sprinted inside—only to run into a human wall.

Poly blocked my escape. He wore a gray shirt and training pants, his black hair tousled as if he’d just risen from bed. A deep frown lined his face. “Going somewhere?” he asked. “You were summoned, as I recall.”

“I just—just—” I couldn’t think of a single lie. All I could think about was the muffled sounds of fighting on the stairs. “Let me through! Please!”

Someone cried out in the stairwell, and I turned. Poly grabbed my shoulder, but I twisted out of his grip and tried to slide past him. He caught hold of my elbow and yanked me back. His grip nearly pulled my shoulder out of its socket, and I yelped with pain. In seconds, both of my hands were locked behind my back.

A woman ran inside and stopped when she saw us. “The girl is under arrest.”

Poly shoved me forward. The movement sent an electric jolt down my arms. “I caught her running back inside. Do you need an EPIC escort?”

“No. There are others.” She took my arm and guided me roughly toward the stairs. As we climbed the first stairwell, I glanced at Poly in the doorway. His face was emotionless, his arms folded. Apparently his loyalty to EPIC didn’t extend past the empress’s orders.

A minute later we rounded a stairwell to see her companions. They must have called for backup because there were five of them now, surrounding Vance, who knelt in the center, arms locked behind him. His face fell when he saw me. The monitor’s grip on my arm loosened, and she yanked me forward. I caught myself on the rail just before my face hit the step.

“Careful,” Vance growled.

“I’d say the same for you, EPIC leader,” the lady said. “Both of you get moving.”

29

I pull you out of the gutter, give you a second chance,” the empress said slowly, “and this is how you repay me?”

I’d expected to be shot down the moment I walked in. If not that, maybe arrested by a pair of waiting monitors. But her first words only confused me. I snuck a glance at Vance, who looked as surprised as I felt.

The empress sat on a chair that looked ridiculously similar to a medieval throne, golden and gaudy. Her tight-fitting silver robe, glittering with jewels, brushed the ground. After a moment, she stood and walked to the window, her hips swinging way more than seemed physically possible. The buildings outside were bright with the late-morning light. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the streets were full of citizens riding their bicycles to work and school, unaware of the quiet battle taking place in the empress’s chambers.

“Well? Don’t you have anything to say, child?”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, actually.”

“Of course you are. You’re a bright girl, so let’s be honest with each other. I don’t usually trust young reds with weapons and responsibility, so you owe me the truth, at the very least.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She gave a dramatic sigh. “Did you, or did you not, allow a smuggler to go free because she was your friend?”

I blinked. Tali? “I—I, uh . . .”

Vance spoke up. “The smugglers jumped Treena. She was lucky to escape before they knocked her unconscious, and even then she distracted them for as long as she could. If it weren’t for her, we would have caught half as many.”

He was covering for me, making it sound like I knew what I was doing. But his words stabbed my heart. If it weren’t for me, would some of those eleven smugglers be alive? Even if my best friend hadn’t been one of them, hearing that nearly made my knees buckle in grief. I had been so, so selfish.

She took a step back and glanced at the tribune, who stood beside her throne. If she really was the person who wanted me dead, what was she waiting for?

The empress cleared her throat. “Despite this boy’s outburst, I have several sources who claim Ametrine allowed her friend to go free without any attempt of arrest. What shall we do with you now, child? I certainly can’t leave you in EPIC, and I can’t send you home with that dreadful Rating and no assignment.”

“Is it to be a work camp, then, Your Highness?” the tribune asked with a bored tone.

“Fair enough,” she replied as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her. “Ametrine, you will keep your Rating, as it suits you perfectly. Tribune, make sure she’s assigned somewhere far from here and everything familiar to her. Now get her out of my sight.” She waved her pointy finger away as if shooing away a pesky insect.

“Wait,” I said. “What about the other matter?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said you’d order a Rating reconsideration.”

“If you fulfilled your assignment, which you most definitely did not.”

“I did.”

Vance turned to me, but I held my ground.

“Really.” A frown appeared on the woman’s face as she looked at him. “You found the traitor? Tell me who it is, then.”

The surprise in her voice told me everything I needed to know. There had never been a spy. My mission was a hoax.

I took a deep breath. “None of them.” Vance jerked, but I spoke more quickly. “None of the EPIC guys are betraying you. In fact, they’re the most loyal, hardworking guys I’ve ever met. The only spy there was me, working for you. Can I have my Rating reconsidered now?”

She threw her head back and laughed, a sound so fake it reminded me of Dresden’s plastic smile. “Oh, that’s funny. Really, girl. If we adjusted your Rating, it would only plummet.”

“I’m willing to take the chance,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Vance hissed.

The empress stood again and walked over to me, looking deeply into my eyes for the first time. Her indifference had been replaced with carefully masked uncertainty. “What are you trying to do, child? See how low you can sink into the depths of your society?”

“No,” I said. “I just want justice.”

She stared at me, and I lifted my chin. Her gaze hardened, and I knew she’d caught the double meaning of my words. The empress wanted me dead, and she knew that I knew. And even more important, I could see the desperation behind her stony expression. This woman would kill me before she let the Raters review my score. In that moment I knew I wasn’t safe anywhere, not even in a work camp. No matter where they sent me, she’d win. Vance was right.

“Your Highness,” the tribune said from the corner. “Pardon the reminder, but I do believe the law still requires a Rating adjustment in this case. This must occur before she leaves. It is simply the order of things—otherwise her Rating will not reflect what she has done.”

Rather than arguing, the empress stalked to her throne and plopped into it. “Fine. Guards, put her in the political prison until we hear from the Raters.”

The guards, two young, bulky soldiers with chiseled features, took my arms.

Vance’s mouth was tight as he watched. He didn’t believe the empress’s act either.

“What of the EPIC soldier, Your Grace?” the tribune asked. “This report says he has a pattern of questionable behavior recently.”

“This is the Integrant, yes?” She stood again and made her way over to him. “Hawking’s son, if I recall. Denoux was rather insistent with this one.”

“You murdered my dad,” Vance said.

The guard’s slap came so fast I barely saw it. Vance’s head whipped to the side, then he slowly turned back toward the empress with hatred in his eyes.

“Increase the intensity of his cuffs,” the empress ordered. “My instincts tell me there is still a traitor in your ranks, Integrant. Perhaps EPIC has outlived its usefulness after all.”

“We’ve done nothing but enforce your laws.” His voice sounded strained. “You know, laws—those inconvenient Standards that condemn murder. There are more direct ways than poisoned pills and assassins to get rid of innocent girls, you know.”

The empress slapped him this time. It echoed sharply against the white walls. Vance barely winced, but the guards must have upped the intensity of his cuffs even more because suddenly he arched his back and his face contorted in agony.

“He’s stark mad,” she said to the tribune. “Send him back. I have a surprise in store for him.” She waved a hand in dismissal.

The guards yanked me backward then, and I would have fallen if they hadn’t held on to my elbows so tightly. The last thing I saw before turning into the sterile white hallway was Vance, standing tall, head turned toward me, his face twisted in anguish.

And then he was out of sight.

30

Treena’s gone,” Poly guessed when he saw my face.

I just nodded. The other guys stood motionless, wanting to ask but unsure how.

“As in gone—” Neb said, “or dead?”

I slammed the door shut and slid the lock into place. “If she’s not dead yet, it won’t be long.”

“But why were you escorted back?” Daymond asked, eyeing what was probably a red mark on my cheek. I scowled and rubbed my wrists, trying to get rid of the pins-and-needles feeling the cuffs had left behind. I’d hoped that my outburst would anger her enough that she’d send me to prison with Treena. It didn’t seem like the empress to let a known enemy roam free. Something was definitely wrong here.

When I didn’t answer, Neb spoke up. “Did Treena really let a smuggler slip through?”

I pushed away a stab of irritation. “She did her job, and she did it surrounded by enemies. She’s done nothing to deserve what she’s getting.”

Semias pushed his way through the group to stand in front of me, arms folded. Someone had apparently freed him from his bonds now that Treena was gone. “She’s a red, Vance. She played you with that innocent act.”

“You know nothing about her.”

“Oh, and you do? After the disgusting looks you’ve been giving each other and your secret talks in the washroom? I bet you know everything about her. And I mean everything.”

“Shut up, Semias.”

“Seriously? You guys really thought Vance was training her?” He snickered. “Running errands together, always picking her for his partner, protecting his prize. And those early morning workouts? Yeah, I’ll give you one guess as to what exactly they were working out—”

My fist flew toward his mouth and would have smashed it in if Semias hadn’t been ready. He stepped to the side and threw a punch at my nose, trying to catch his balance. I turned my head just in time, and his hand grazed off me. With a growl, I lunged.

“Vance!” Poly yelled. “That’s enough!”

I landed on top of Semias, enraged, ready to pummel his face in. But he rotated midair and landed on his side, covering his head with an elbow. I jumped to one foot and kicked him in the ribs again and again, making him double over in pain. “Why were you supposed to kill her?” I shouted, putting all my weight behind the next kick.

“I . . . don’t . . . know!” Semias managed to say.

“Stop this, now!” Poly was behind me now, grabbing my shoulders in an iron grip. Hot anger pulsed through my veins. I slipped one foot behind his and shot an elbow to Poly’s nose. He grunted and released me.

Suddenly Neb was in my face. He positioned himself between me and Poly. Blood poured from Poly’s nose, dripping down his chin and mixing messily with the dark hair on his bare chest. There was murder in his expression.

“Vance, please,” Neb whispered. “You’re upset. Just—just go take a break. Okay?”

Jessop and Tensom dropped to their knees beside Semias, who was still moaning on the floor. The rage I’d felt at his words pulsed hot in my ears.

Poly stepped forward and grabbed my collar, his other hand clasping his nose, blood dripping through his fingers. His voice was ice-cold. “If you ever touch me again, I will kill you. Understood?”

My breath shuddered as I struggled for control. “Yes, sir.”

“Hold on,” Neb said. “What’s that?”

The room stilled. A thumping noise rang from the direction of the training room door.

Footsteps, dozens of them, banged their way down the steps.

Poly stiffened, looking at me with heavy dread. There was only one reason for the soldiers to come down here. It made sense now why the empress had sent me back.

I also understood why the commander had stationed us here. I’d suspected it for a long time and installed the deadbolt for that very purpose. This was the perfect spot for us—cool, hidden from society, and far beneath the tranquility of the Council Building.

And above all, there was no escape.

“Weapons,” Poly said sharply. “Now.”

31

The prison cell was basically a large glass box with a metal sink jutting out from the wall and a tightly-made bed in the center. A hamster wheel would have completed the ensemble nicely. There was a tiny slit in the glass near the ceiling, barely wide enough for a hand to slip through. An oxygen vent.

The cool darkness didn’t bother me, but the silence kept me on edge. I hadn’t been truly alone in a long time, and it felt wrong. I sat on the bed, surprised at how hard it was, and pulled my legs in. My mind couldn’t shake that last glimpse of Vance. I’d give anything to feel his embrace right now, to feel his fingers gently stroking my hair. Where was he now? Would I even see him again?

“Feeling sorry for yourself?” a muffled voice said.

I leapt to my feet, looking frantically around for the source of the voice. “Who’s there?”

“Over here.”

The man’s voice came from the cell across the hall, but I couldn’t see anyone. Then a flicker of movement came from the distant bed, and I realized there was someone under it. A head popped out, and he climbed out and stood. It was an older man with sagging features and peppered hair that didn’t quite cover his 652 Rating. He wore a prisoner’s uniform: a gold jumpsuit with a black stripe across the arm. By the condition of the uniform and its wearer, they’d both been living across the hall for a very long time.

“I prefer sleeping under the bed,” the man said with a smile. “It’s softer.”

When I didn’t answer, his eyes flicked to my forehead and took in my Rating. There was no reaction—no surprise, no disgust. He approached the glass.

“So what did you do? Trip a monitor? Steal a transport and go for a joyride?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He sighed. “First visitor in three years, prettiest in six, and she won’t talk about it. Figures.”

He was trying to get me to smile, but it wouldn’t work. The pain threatened to overwhelm me again. I put my head in my hands.

“It must’ve been pretty bad to end up here. This place is only for political prisoners—the ones the empress wants to keep a close eye on. Or the ones she doesn’t want the people know about.”

“Please,” I begged. “Just leave me alone.”

The man leaned against the glass, making his palms turn white. “Fine. When a lady says please, I obey.” He turned away and headed for a chair in the corner. “But,” he called over his shoulder, “whatever you did, I guarantee it’s not half as bad as my indiscretions.”

I wanted to collapse on the bed and let sleep capture my aching mind, but I knew I couldn’t sleep. I sighed. “Sorry. I’m just not in a talking mood right now. But if you are, I’ll listen.”

The man returned to the window and stood there, staring at me for an uncomfortable minute. Finally he said, “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Treena.”

“Nice to meet you, Treena. You look as if you carry the weight of the world on those shoulders.” It almost set me off again, but I bit my lip. Hard. He chuckled bitterly. “I suppose we are in prison, eh? Not a place for counting butterflies.”

A bell rang somewhere overhead, and he stepped back like a robot. There were footsteps down the hall, and a guard appeared. It was the woman who had escorted me earlier. She opened a hatch to the strange man’s cell—I hadn’t noticed the hatch before—and placed something in it, then she closed it again. It opened from the inside so the prisoner could remove it. He popped the object into his mouth and swallowed.

The guard turned to me. “Your nutrition pill is still being prepared,” she said simply, then left.

“Ooh, you really ticked off the empress,” the man said when the footsteps disappeared.

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Just do yourself a favor and don’t take the pill when it comes.”

The realization hit. “You think it’s poisoned?”

“Whenever a pill is ‘being prepared,’ the prisoner drops dead in his cell. I’ve seen it happen. It’s the cleanest way to kill someone.”

I sat on the bed, stunned. A poisoned pill again. Why would the empress have me killed so secretly when she could have ordered an execution earlier? It made no sense at all.

“How long do I have?” I asked.

“They usually do it around midnight. Easier to dispose of the bodies.”

Midnight. I had a few hours, then. “So the empress wants me dead, but she doesn’t want people to know about it.”

“Probably. You must have a very interesting story to tell, young lady.”

I gave him a sideways look. “How long have you been down here?”

“Almost twelve years,” the man said. “I wasn’t always this chatty. I suppose you could say I’ve been saving up words.”

Twelve years? The horror must have been evident in my expression because he laughed.

“They won’t kill me. Sometimes I wish they’d just get on with it, but they can’t. The empress is still in love with me.”

If I had been stunned before, now I was horrified. Was this where they put the crazy people? Or maybe his captivity had caused his insanity. Twelve years in prison could definitely make a man believe the empress was his girlfriend.

His mood quickly became somber. “I know. It sounds insane. Maybe this cell has rotted my mind. But I swear to you, the empress and I were in love once.” His expression softened. “She even nominated me the Ratings councilman.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You were her lover and Ratings councilman?”

He snickered. “Were is the right word. As soon as we stopped seeing eye to eye—which was all about her eye, apparently—she tossed me in here like a piece of refuse. Appointed some idiot to my post and forgot about our years together.” He shook his head. “It’s what I get for leaving my wife and child for the empress. It only took a few years for the fates to return the favor.”

The information whizzed through my head at a breakneck pace. “That’s quite a sad story,” I said, hardly feeling sad at all. The man really did deserve what he’d received. And yet there was something about him that felt strangely important.

“Sir,” I said slowly. “What’s your name again?”

“Jasper,” he replied.

I nearly fell off the bed, catching myself just in time. “J-J-Jasper?” I stammered.

He seemed alarmed at my sudden shock. “Have you heard of me? Do they talk about my work with the Ratings?”

He left his wife and child . . .

“Was your wife’s name Lanah?” I asked quietly.

The color drained from his face. It was all the answer I needed.

“Ametrine,” he whispered.

32

It was strange, talking to my biological father while awaiting death. He told me of my mother, how she’d been young and beautiful when they’d met and married. He’d been a top-ten graduate, just like Dresden, and he’d graduated from the Leadership Academy’s technology department.

“I helped design the first techband,” he said proudly. “Took me from the academy to councilman’s assistant in one year.” I told him about the empress’s new punishment law, and his smile faded. “She promised she’d never use punishment mode as a weapon. Should’ve known she’d break that promise, too.”

We fell into a thoughtful silence. It was ironic that I’d survived Semias’s poisoned pill only to die here, the same way, in the same prison as my biological dad. A part of me wished I could get to know him a little better, to find out more about my parents and my past.

No, you don’t, I told myself. He abandoned you.

“What do you think of the Rating system now?” I asked cautiously. “After living down here for so long, I mean.”

He gave a deep sigh. For a moment I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Then he said, “I think it’s the most sophisticated and chilling system of control known to man.”

I thought of the empress and the diamonds embedded in her forehead. I thought about Dresden’s record, about my mom’s struggle for a green Rating, and about Vance and his clan. I thought about the tower and how it felt to dangle from the top, terrified of the hard pavement eighty-two floors below.

“I knew it back then, too,” he continued. “Even as a councilman I still had my doubts. I know it’s why she threw me down here. We both knew that my ambitions were different from hers. I don’t know what’s worse—that I doubted my own nation’s government or upheld a system I didn’t believe in.”

“I’m not sure I really want to know this,” I said slowly, “but how did your relationship with the empress come about?”

I learned they’d been paired up at the academy and that Jasper had just finished a round of testing on the new techband. She was young and intelligent, one of the top graduates of her year. He skipped over much of that part, his face coloring a bit. I thought about my mother, a young newlywed in medical school then, and glared at him.

“It’s not something I’d expect you to understand,” he said, noting the look on my face. He paused, suddenly very interested in a loose string on his sleeve. “How is your mother, anyway?”

“Lanah remarried,” I said, the bitterness creeping back into my voice. “Her husband has his sights set on becoming the new Integration councilman.”

“Really. That’s incredibly ironic.”

“He’s an egotistical jerk. But she can’t have another divorce on her record without taking a huge hit on her score, so she refuses to leave him.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” he said. “She deserves so much better. I hope she can forgive me someday.”

My mind floated back to the night she’d given me his stone. She’d defended him. He was right. She deserved a different life.

I fingered my stone necklace. Its giver was right in front of me now. I could finally ask him the meaning behind the gift. But something held me back. I didn’t need to ask what his intended message had been because it didn’t matter. What mattered was the meaning I brought to it. This stone had probably started out as a rough, angled chunk of rock and been sanded and polished over time.

“Are you really sorry?” I asked.

His eyes glanced up in confusion. “Of course. I feel awful.”

“You realize that your stupidity has affected many people?” I asked, suddenly sounding a lot like my dad. Well, my stepfather.

“Yes, I know. Especially you. I’m so sorry, Ametrine.”

“If you’re truly sorry, you need to get us out of here.” My mind was forming a plan. I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

He gave me a puzzled look. “Don’t you think I would have escaped by now if I could?”

“There must be a way,” I said stubbornly. “You’re a scientist. Is there a way to break the glass?”

Jasper shook his head. “I’ve tried a hundred times. It’s coated with an unbreakable substance called LiquiPlas. It was developed by my mentor at the academy. It won’t shatter, no matter the force raised against it, and it’s completely heatproof.”

“What about the slot at the top?” I gestured to the air hole. “Wouldn’t that weaken the glass somehow?”

“Tried that, too. Stacked the bed and the chair and tried to climb up. It didn’t work, and the guards bolted the furniture to the floor after that.”

I sighed. There had to be a way or I was dead.

Dead.

A surge of excitement rushed through my veins. That’s it.

“How long after taking the pill did those prisoners die?” I asked, trying not to shudder.

“It was instant,” he said. “They starved them all day, so the pill took effect immediately.”

“Did the guard wait around until they fell to the floor and then remove them?”

I saw the flicker of realization in his eyes. “Yes. She usually waited until they collapsed, then she called for a guard to remove the body.”

“It’s worth a try,” I said.

He swallowed. “But if you fail—”

“What else can they do?” I asked bitterly.

He paused thoughtfully. “I don’t like it, but you’re right. It’s your only chance.”

It was only a few minutes before a set of footprints echoed down the hall. Jasper ran to his bed and sat on it, feigning disinterest. I forced myself to ignore the surveillance cameras placed around the corners, hoping they hadn’t been monitoring our conversation. It was the same woman, a small package in her hand. She opened the hatch and sent it through the glass. I picked it up.

“May I get a drink to wash it down?” I asked.

She gestured to the sink on the wall behind me. “Just hurry up.”

I grabbed the plastic cup by the handle and filled it with water, then pretended to put the pill into my mouth, gulping the first mouthful of water down quickly. The pill disappeared down my sleeve, just as Tali had once shown me. Thank you, Tali.

Jasper had said the poison worked immediately, but he hadn’t said how. Was I supposed to convulse, roll my eyes and froth at the mouth, or simply drop to the floor?

Option three seemed to require the least acting. I dropped the half-full cup on the floor and made my legs give, hitting the ground much harder than expected. The impact jarred my head painfully, swirling my thoughts around until I thought maybe I had taken the pill after all.

But a few seconds later a woman’s voice said, “She’s down.” Then there was a click and a squeak as a door swung open on the opposite wall.

One.

The woman walked over to me, pausing overhead.

Two.

She tapped me with her foot. I forced myself to stay still. My lungs ached for air, but I didn’t dare make a single movement.

Three.

I struck right as she started to kneel, my leg sweeping out and taking her down in one swift motion. She shrieked as she hit the ground. My other leg whacked her face, effectively putting an end to the scream as my hands reached up for a chokehold. Before my mind even realized what had happened, her head was crooked inside my elbow, her eyes pleading, her breath completely cut off. If I ever saw Vance again, I’d have to thank him for the training.

I squeezed a little harder. Her eyes widened and a squeak escaped her throat. A few more seconds and she would black out. I almost didn’t notice the slight movement from below, but Jasper yelled, “Look out!”

My leg lifted just in time to smash her moving hand and stunner to the floor. It clattered on the concrete and cracked, sliding to a stop a meter away.

The sound made the woman strain for a second, then her eyes rolled back and her body relaxed. I waited for a moment, making sure she was really unconscious, and then examined the stunner. It was cracked, but hopefully it still worked.

“Where did you learn that?” my father asked, his eyes wide.

I gave him a grim smile. “A great teacher.”

“The lock is a techband scanner,” he said. “Hurry, drag her over here.”

I stood and pulled her arm. She didn’t move. I yanked harder and almost fell over.

“You can knock her out with some crazy move, but you’re not strong enough to drag her two meters?” he asked incredulously.

“At least it’s not a big, burly guy,” I said, picking up her leg. Pulling as hard as I could on her arm and leg finally made her body budge, and a minute later I was close enough to scan her techband. It sprung the door right open. We both gave a sigh of relief.

He stepped out tentatively, a warm glow on his face. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t a moment too soon. Footsteps sounded down the hall. And voices.

“There’s two of them,” he whispered.

“Can you handle one if I take the other?” I whispered.

“Uh . . .”

“Just poke him in the eye or smash his nose or even kick him in the crotch. Just keep him from signaling anyone or we’re dead.”

He nodded and we backed into the shadows as the men trotted in.

The guard, a short, squat man in his later years, aimed his stunner, but it was too late. Remembering another trick Vance had taught me, I leaped on him from behind and forcefully clapped his ears with my cupped hands. I could almost hear the pop of his eardrums. With a howl, the man covered his ears. I grabbed the broken stunner out of my pocket and aimed it at his head, punching the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other man raise his techband to his lips and step away from Jasper, who now lay twisted on the floor. Closing the distance, I tackled the guy to the ground. He threw me off and reached for his stunner, but I punched him flat in the nose. His hands immediately cupped around his injury.

Meanwhile the shorter guard, looking a bit disoriented, had pulled his stunner out and started toward me. Blood trickled down from both his ears onto his crisp white uniform, and he eyed me with a cold, controlled gaze. I leaped at him, but he dodged out of the way. I sent a quick kick toward his crotch. He blocked it easily, then aimed the stunner at my face.

I ducked just before he fired, then leaped back and executed a perfect sweep. The guy went down like a lead weight. The man crumpled to the floor, trying to catch himself with one hand while aiming the stunner with the other. My next kick connected with his wrist and sent the stunner flying. He groaned, but he didn’t get up.

“Are you okay?” I asked Jasper, who was still on the ground.

“Just . . . can’t . . . breathe,” he gasped.

“Can you stand?” I said, watching the short guard bring his techband slowly to his lips. I ran to where the stunner had fallen, grabbed it, and aimed at his head. “Put it down.”

He obeyed, but the call was already in progress. “Reply, Captain,” a voice on the other end ordered.

“End your call,” I told him. “Now.”

He moved his arm slowly to his face, but instead of hitting the End button, he spoke. “Red alert. Prisoners have escaped—” I pulled the trigger, but his leg shot out and kicked the stunner out of my hand at the last second. I started after it but thought better of it when the man raised his techband to his lips again. I’m sorry, but you leave me no choice, I thought, and kicked at the techband with all my strength.

The screen shattered. Suddenly the guard stiffened and started to gasp. He curled into fetal position, an anguished wail escaping his lips.

Jasper had crawled along the floor, grabbed the man’s stunner, and made his way over just as the guard went limp. Jasper yanked at the techband, muttering something about “newer version.” Then he pulled back, eyeing me with a horrified look. “He’s gone.”

I stared at him, stunned. “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry—”

“What did you think would happen?”

“I just thought he’d go unconscious,” I mumbled. “That’s what happened last time.”

“Last time? You do this often?” He shook his head incredulously. “The intensity of punishment mode depends on the force transmitted to the techband, Ametrine.”

“Huh?”

“The harder you hit it, the worse the punishment.”

“Oh.” Another death. The harder I tried, the more people I hurt. Perhaps the prison truly was the best place for me. I reached over and closed the man’s sightless eyes, hoping he didn’t have children waiting for him to come home.

“The others will be here any second,” Jasper said. “This way.”

33

Jasper didn’t speak again until he had navigated us through the maze of white marble hallways. I wanted to ask him how he knew where to go after being locked up for twelve years. But the expression on his face was so determined that I clamped my mouth shut and followed.

As we came around a corner we heard footsteps. He flattened himself against a wall, motioning for me to do the same behind him. We had a working stunner now, but it wouldn’t do us much good against a group. Luckily the soldiers turned the other direction, and we continued on. After two more corners, I finally whispered, “Where are we going?”

“To get my things,” he said under his breath. “We have to hurry. They’ll discover those guards any second, and then they’ll start tracking our techbands.”

I stared at him in surprise, wondering what was so important, but I had no alternative other than to follow him down a dark flight of stairs into what looked like a storage room.

“How do you know what’s in here?” I asked, covering my mouth and nose. The dust was nearly overpowering. He flipped the light on. It was definitely a storage room—an old, disgusting one that had long been forgotten.

“This is where they put my belongings. I’m sure of it.” He started sorting through a few objects, tossing them onto the floor to get to the items near the back of the room. I just stood there. We had just escaped prison, the empress wanted me dead, and he was sorting through the storage room for his stuff? Maybe he really had gone a little loopy in his cell.

Without turning, he said, “Ametrine, help me out, would you? It’s a tin canister about ten centimeters high. It’ll be near the back.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He stopped shuffling and pulled his head out. “Unless I find that can, we won’t make it to the doors.”

“Why not? We were almost there before you pulled us in here.”

His mouth was set in a firm line. “There’s a set of band clippers with my stuff. I have to get your techband off before they trigger it.”

The blood drained from my face. “Oh.”

“I locked everything in that canister and hid it before they arrested me. Never thought I’d be using my trusty band clippers on my own daughter, though.” The last part was muffled as he shoved his head back into the shelving.

I started clawing at the boxes stacked neatly against the wall. There was a thin layer of dust everywhere, making my nose itch and forcing me to sneeze. I looked around with a critical eye, trying to forget his warning about my techband. How did he even know the tool was here? Maybe they had discarded the can after all. Or maybe they’d opened it somehow and found his tools.

I considered stunning him and dragging him down the hall myself. But then I gave a start. In the far corner there was a pile of old-fashioned wooden shelves. Real wood was too precious a resource these days to use for storage. That was a good sign—they had to be old. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

The surface was dry and brittle when I touched it, a piece tearing away in my hands. Perfect—rotting wood. I began at the top layer and looked through every box. It was all junk.

“Why aren’t you worried about your own techband?” I asked, trying to keep my mind off the danger we were in.

“Mine is different than yours,” his muffled voice floated back. “Vallorah never updated mine or hers to the newer version with punishment mode.”

So the empress doesn’t have punishment mode either. I filed that information away, heaving the last dusty box to the floor. The top two shelves of the massive unit had collapsed, dumping their contents onto the bottom shelves. I couldn’t get to the junk without lifting the shelves out of the way. I pushed upward. It was surprisingly heavy and refused to budge.

“Look at this,” I said.

He trotted over and felt the wood. “We stopped using wood shelving during my tenure,” he murmured. “Good thinking, Ametrine. On three.” He took hold of one side, and I grabbed the other. “One—

Suddenly my techband vibrated. I glanced at it in surprise, the words making me freeze.

WARNING: PUNISHMENT

MODE ACTIVATED.

34

Jasper—” I began, my voice shaking, but I didn’t get the chance to finish. One second I was standing there, my hand on the soft wood, the next I was writhing on the floor. Pain. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The world was aflame with a white-hot, smoldering heat. It seared through every vein, every organ, every inch of my insides. I could almost smell the charred flesh. Someone was screaming.

I felt hands on me, felt tugging at my techband. The pain was a part of me, overcoming my mind. I felt my sanity slipping into the darkness. Somewhere in my consciousness there was a yell and a crash, then a feeling of pressure on my wrist.

And then everything went black.

><><><><><><><

Vance was crying. His tears dripped onto my face, and sobs racked his body as he held my shoulders. I ached to comfort him, to tell him everything was all right. I wanted him to know that he wasn’t alone anymore. But my body felt wrong. I was hearing things as if I were removed from everything, like hearing a conversation through a wall.

And then the pain hit. It slammed into me like a hammer, and I wanted to curl into a ball. But my body wouldn’t move. All I could get out was a whimper.

The sniffling stopped. “Ametrine?”

It wasn’t Vance. It was Jasper. The memory came flooding back and I gasped. The storage room. Punishment mode.

Was I dead?

My eyes fluttered open, but the room was dim. My biological father let out a breath, holding me tightly to his chest. “Thank the fates.”

“Jasper?” I croaked. Even that small movement of my jaw hurt.

“I’m right here. It’s all right.”

I strained to remember, but the memory of the pain made me sink deeper into his arms. “What . . .”

“What happened? A miracle,” he said, his voice strained. “They triggered punishment mode. I tried to disable your techband without the tool, but it didn’t work. Then I caught sight of my tool container under the shelf we were about to lift.”

I tried to sit up to see, but I still couldn’t move. I caught a glimpse of the corner of a heavy wooden object on the floor next to me. The shelf. It lay on its side, its contents scattered across the floor.

He gave a grim smile, his mouth tight, understanding my glance. His eyes were red and swollen. “Adrenaline is an amazing thing.”

Jasper had saved me. He’d left us for another woman and a career, but he’d saved my life. Twice now, actually. I couldn’t sit up—even the thought made me wince—so I just studied him. Dark hair—the same color as mine. Deep brown eyes. A softness in his expression that made me warm inside. My stepfather had never looked at me this way, as if I were a treasure worth risking everything for.

I’d only seen that look in the eyes of one other person. And it wasn’t Dresden.

“Help . . . me up,” I said, my voice raspy.

He looked like he was about to argue but then sighed and stood, lifting me in his arms as if I were a child. “You’re too weak,” he grunted. “And so small. Are you sure you’re sixteen years old?”

“Where . . .” I asked, letting myself slump in his arms.

“If we can manage to get out of here, we’ll go underground. Hopefully we can find a medic.”

“Your techband,” I protested.

“I cut it off, don’t worry. They can’t track us now.” He motioned to his bare wrist. “That’ll only buy us a few more minutes, though. Once they figure it out, they’ll send patrols and check security feeds.”

“Wait. One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

Jasper wasn’t going to like this, but I had to know. And something deep inside told me there would never be another chance. “Take me . . . to the monitoring room.”

He belted out a laugh. “Right. I’m going to carry you, practically unarmed and helpless, into the highest security room in the nation, where all our enemies are frantically trying to find you so they can take your life. Not a chance.”

“Need to know . . . the truth,” I said. His gaze flickered to my forehead, and understanding dawned. He seemed to know what I wanted.

“The monitoring room is too dangerous,” he finally said. “But I know somewhere else that has back-door access to the system. We’ll have to be quick.”

><><><><><><><

My wrist felt strangely naked. I started to rub it but recoiled in pain. The flesh was a fiery red, burned to the point of blistering. I tried to push the pain aside, forcing myself to think of other things. It was hard.

Jasper had ditched his prison uniform for a spare he’d found among his belongings. The cut looked too bulky, and the color was a little faded, but it would work. He stashed our techbands under the broken pallet. Hopefully the empress was expecting us to escape, not make our way deeper into the maze of white hallways. It was strangely silent. I tried not to imagine the troops of monitors waiting for us at the exits.

Finally we came to a door. It was just like every other door we’d passed. The plaque next to the doorway read, “Maintenance.” It was locked. A sophisticated identification lock covered the top of the knob.

“That wasn’t there before,” he said.

“Just knock, then stun whoever opens the door,” I suggested. My voice was getting stronger by the minute, but my body was still extremely weak and shaky.

He cocked his head as if listening. A sound drifted through the door. Singing?

A knowing smile spread across his face. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

“You can put me down now. I’ll be fine.”

He set me down gently just around the corner. As soon as my feet touched the ground, needles of pain shot up my legs. I bit my lip to keep from crying out.

“Be right back,” he said.

I watched around the corner as he straightened and tapped lightly. We waited for a moment, ears strained for any sign of intruders. After a minute, he knocked more loudly. Still nothing.

“On lockdown, probably,” I heard him mutter. But then the door opened.

“Jasper?” a voice boomed.

His shoulders relaxed. “Kert? Is that really you?”

“You gotta be kidding me. Shoulda known you were the escaped prisoner. Who else would do it with such flair?”

“Kert, I need to get inside and look something up. I won’t leave a trace, I promise.”

The man hesitated. “I have a wife and kids now. I really don’t want to end up where you’ve been.”

“No one will even know I was here. I’ve got a kid too.” Jasper jogged over to me and started to pick me up, but I waved him away, struggling to take a step. He put a gentle hand around my waist and helped me make my way to the doorway.

“Who’s this?” the thick man in the doorway asked. “A red?”

“My daughter. They triggered punishment mode on her.”

Doubt crossed the chubby man’s expression as he realized the depth of trouble we were in. But he stepped back to let us pass. The room was large, several floors high, with a huge glass screen in the center. The screen glowed white, with blue lines outlining the floor plan of the entire building. Different sections were coded with different colors—I assumed, machinery. The room that surrounded the screen was cluttered in contrast. Between this room and the storage room, the sanitized, marble-white image I’d always had of government buildings was now completely shattered.

“I’m the only one on duty right now,” Kert said as we scanned the room. “But they’re searching for you, probably floor by floor. You don’t have much time.”

“Then we’d better hurry.” My father guided me to a chair and stood in front of the screen.

“What are you doing there, ol’ buddy?” asked Kert, concern apparent in his voice.

“Don’t worry. I’m not changing anything. I just need to check something.” His fingers flew across the screen. “Thank the fates they haven’t changed much.”

“We still use your system,” Kert said proudly.

I leaned far to the right to view the screen better. It went dark for a moment until he completed his sequence with a decisive tap. Suddenly it lit up and said, “Welcome, Jasper.”

Kert nodded in approval. “A back door. Very clever.”

“I knew it’d come in handy someday.” Jasper’s hands flew across the keys again. The screen paused for a second, then loaded several paragraphs of text. I strained to see.

Name: Ametrine Dowell

Rating: 440

Implant Level: Red

Age: 16

Mother: Lanah Dowell

Father: Konnor Dowell

“Konnor Dowell,” Jasper said with a bitter tone. “It’s like I never existed.”

After that, it listed my entire record. I half realized that my mouth was open, but I kept reading, completely fascinated. I’d always known they knew everything, but . . . they knew everything. My free-time activities, my missed questions in school, my hairstyle preferences, my khel goals at each game. It was interesting and horrifying at the same time. There was nothing to explain my Rating score, though.

Jasper gave me an approving look. “Squeaky clean. You’re right to question all this. There’s something wrong here.” He typed in something else, and the screen scrolled down. His eyes narrowed.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A handicap,” he said. “See that icon?”

“But I’m fine,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, I mean they applied a handicap to your record. That explains the low score. Even though you’re a nearly perfect citizen, it emphasizes your misdeeds and gives them more weight. We used to use handicaps for—” He stopped, suddenly self-conscious. “Well, it wasn’t right, I’ll admit it. But we would apply one or two to the individuals we knew shouldn’t advance in their Ratings.”

My eyes widened. “Shouldn’t advance?”

“Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t my idea, and none of them were contenders for the throne anyway. Just citizens who stirred up trouble and needed to stay out of the way, is all.”

Kert snorted. “Somewhat like you, I’d imagine.”

“Except that we never used more than two handicaps,” Jasper said, a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes still darting across the screen. “Any more than two and it would seem suspicious.”

“How many do I have?” I asked, still confused.

“Six,” he said.

Kert gave a strangled gasp. “Six?” we both exclaimed.

“Six.” My father’s voice was solemn. “We don’t have much time. But I have a theory.” He turned to me, his eyes serious. “Let’s see what your Rating would be without the handicaps.”

He typed in something else. The screen paused again, longer this time, and for a moment I was afraid that an alarm would go off or something. Kert leaned over my shoulder, his hot breath on my cheek.

The screen flashed. I saw it before Jasper could say anything.

Ametrine Dowell. Temporary Rating Score: 979

“Holy fates,” Kert breathed. “That’s higher than the empress.”

I didn’t realize I’d sat down again, but my legs shook uncontrollably even in the chair. 979. That was the highest score I’d ever heard of. If the calculations were correct, that put me above the highest Rated person in the entire republic.

It made me . . . the successor.

PART THREE

35

That . . . that can’t be right,” I said.

“Is that possible?” Kert asked. “I mean, no offense, but a brand-new graduate? It’s never happened before.”

“Vallorah was only eighteen when she ascended,” my father said. “It’s the numbers that matter, not the age.” He pulled up another screen. “Let me check one thing, though. Kert, can you pull up a list of the top ten Ratings right now, and then a list of the top ten over the last three years?”

Kert gave him a funny look, but he complied, and they sat back to study the screen. I scanned its contents. Names and numbers, all unfamiliar. Many of the names had scores higher than mine. “I’m not the highest. See that?”

“Just as I thought,” Jasper said. “Look.” He pointed.

“Deceased,” Kert read.

“Every person above you, Ametrine, has died in the last three years. Everyone except Vallorah.”

“Fates,” Kert breathed. “The empress has been killing off her competition.”

I looked from face to face, my vision fuzzy, trying to comprehend the situation. I wasn’t a red after all. Far from it. It made sense now why she’d been so reluctant to allow the Rating reconsideration. The last thing she wanted was for the Raters to look deeper into my score. Not before she could kill me, anyway.

“There’s got to be a way to reset this,” Jasper murmured. He stared hard at the screen, as if trying to change the numbers with his mind. “The nation needs to know that you’re the rightful ruler, and they need to find out quickly. If only I had my old system back, without the updates.”

A light on the side of the screen suddenly flashed, and the men froze.

“Uh-oh,” Kert said. “The lift just stopped at our floor.”

There was a soft buzz of vibration. I reached automatically for my techband before remembering it was gone. Kert flipped his techband screen open and angled it so we could see.

“Attention all personnel. Security alert lockdown still in place,” my father read. “Suspects: Ametrine Dowell, age sixteen. Jasper Frederick, age forty-three. Detain immediately if seen. Considered armed and dangerous.” He glanced at me. “So much for our escape.”

Heavy footsteps filled the hallway right outside the door. The soldiers had come straight here. I looked around, frantic, but the equipment lined the walls. There wasn’t a single place to hide.

Jasper pulled out the stunner I’d given him, but then his shoulders slumped. It was cracked.

I’d grabbed the wrong stunner.

The door burst open. A team of silver-clad soldiers filed in, their stunners trained on us, helmets covering their faces. We stood and threw our hands upward in surrender. Jasper stepped in front of me, protecting me from their view. Then the leading figure dropped his hand and pulled off his helmet.

36

I aimed my stunner at the first person I saw. A man, short and round, leaped up with his hands stretched to the sky. Another guy stood beside him, and a smaller figure hid behind them. A face peeked out and I exhaled in relief. Treena. She looked deathly pale and unsteady, but it was her. She was alive.

I lowered my weapon and pulled the helmet off. Her horrified expression turned into one of relief as she stumbled toward me. “Vance!”

I caught her in an embrace, then gave her companions a questioning look.

“They initiated punishment mode on her,” the graying man said. “I was able to cut the band off at the last moment.”

“And she’s walking around?” I said incredulously.

“Just a little zap,” she said with a weak smile. “How in the fates did you get away? And how did you find me?”

“The empress pretended to give me another chance. Instead, she sent a contingent down to exterminate us.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “The ventilation shaft?”

“Yeah. I took everyone who would come with me.” Once the unit had blown through the door, the fight hadn’t lasted long. Poly had ordered his team to surrender. The last thing I’d seen before escaping was a masked soldier gunning Poly down. My throat tightened.

“I can’t believe it. Why would they—” Her voice trailed off and her face paled. “Because of me, right? The empress did this because of me!”

“Don’t start. It had nothing to do with you. She’s been looking for an opportunity, and I gave it to her.”

She shook her head slowly. “You saw this coming. I thought you were just paranoid, with your special lock and the escape route.”

“If there’s one thing I learned from my father, it’s to be prepared for anything. Can you lean on me?”

“I’ll try.” She wrapped an arm around my waist and turned to face the two men still standing near a tall glass screen in the center of the room.

The older man had a strange look on his face. “The teacher?”

“Yep,” she said.

The graying man stepped closer to confront me head-on. “But that doesn’t explain how you found us, soldier.”

“A hunch, really.” I smiled down at Treena. “Our techbands have been lighting up with alerts about your escape. I knew you’d never leave without answers; we scoured the building for you, pretending to be on alert. Ross used to work here and suggested we try the maintenance room. It’s the only place besides the monitoring room where you can access personal records.”

“And I was right,” Ross said proudly. “About time you guys started listening to me.”

“I’m enjoyin’ the reunion so far. Really touching,” the other guy said, “but please get outta here. After someone stuns me already, ’cause they can’t know I helped you. This ain’t the best job in the world, but I’d like to keep it.”

“Right.” The older guy made a couple of quick keystrokes, then shut down the screen. “Thanks, friend.”

“Anytime.” They clasped hands. “Well, actually, please don’t come back. It’s bad for my tough-guy, tech-geek image, you know.”

The graying man smiled and stepped back. “Hopefully I’ll see you again soon.” He swiped the gun out of Neb’s hand before he could react and checked the setting. Then, with a practiced hand, he pulled the trigger. His friend collapsed to the ground. “May we meet again in better circumstances.” He gave the gun back to a surprised Neb. “Let’s go. But put Treena in the middle of the pack, boys. And give her a decent stunner, for fate’s sake.”

I raised an eyebrow, and Treena gave me a half smile. “My dad,” she said. “I’ll explain later.”

><><><><><><><

We didn’t have much time. Once the bodies in the bunker were identified and NORA realized we weren’t there, my group and I would be in big trouble. I had no doubt the empress would trigger our techbands as soon as she could. The only thing we had going for us was the fact that we were in the last place she’d expect—in the heart of enemy territory.

We made our way to the other end of the building, grouped in a pack of sweaty and nervous soldiers. Each hallway, each door was identical to the last. The office numbers were all that changed. I shook my head in disgust. It seemed NORA architects liked their government buildings just like their citizens.

Jasper insisted on staying near the front, mumbling something about repaying a debt. I had my arm around Treena’s waist. Despite the chalky color of her face and the way she winced with each step, she insisted on walking. At least she was alive. After maximum punishment mode, that was a miracle in itself.

“So where are we headed now?” Neb asked.

It was a good question. We’d already jammed all four lifts, which left two exits. Both led to stairwells and then to the ground floor, which was heavily monitored. I could only imagine how many soldiers were stationed there, all armed and aiming at the doors.

But we couldn’t wander inside much longer, either. With Treena and her dad in the group, our cover was blown. We had minutes left, if not seconds.

“I have an idea,” Treena said. She pulled away from me and leaned against the wall, looking like she would fall over any second. The rest of us flattened against the same wall, watching warily. We hadn’t run into any other patrols yet, but it was bound to happen soon. “They’ll be expecting us to escape underground, since that’s what we’re familiar with, or maybe to fight our way out on the ground floor.”

“What other option is there?” Daymond whispered.

“The exact opposite of what they expect,” I said, a realization dawning. “Brilliant, Treena.”

“What?” Jasper asked.

“We go up,” Treena said.

They stared at her like she’d just sprouted horns. Daymond shook his head. “That’s crazy. We might as well turn ourselves in right now.”

“There are wing suits in the choppers,” I reminded him. “We can use them to leap off the building. Their stunners won’t work well from that range, and their long-range artillery isn’t accurate enough. They’ll have to chase us by transport. With the darkness, it may buy us enough time to escape.”

The hallway was silent, the guys motionless. For a moment it seemed like time stood still. The first person to move, surprisingly, was Jasper. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” he muttered.

“I say we climb out a window,” Ross said, “and descend down the outside. They’re probably just gathered at the exits and not around the entire building.”

“That’s a huge risk,” I said, “and we don’t have the right equipment. Besides, they’ll be expecting that.”

The group was quiet again. Finally Daymond spoke up. “I say we try Treena’s plan.”

I nodded. “Everyone who agrees, show it.”

Daymond and Jasper put a fist to their chests. Ross stared at the floor. “I’d feel much better climbing down the outside.”

“It’s your choice,” Treena said. “Thank you for coming to help me. I really appreciate that.”

Ross looked at me. I shrugged. “EPIC is disbanded. I’m not your leader anymore. But if you really want to try it, use the north side. The alley has fewer lights and less room for soldiers, so you may have a chance. Just don’t jump until you hear them following us.”

“I’ll go with Ross,” Neb said, giving me a level stare. “We’ll split their attention and gunfire.”

I grasped his shoulder, both worried and relieved at the offer. “It’s been a pleasure. You are both excellent soldiers. I hope you can find a better life out there.”

“We’ll see you again soon,” Neb said, a look of fierce determination on his face.

“If you survive,” Ross said.

“Wait! Don’t go yet,” Jasper exclaimed, and we turned to him in surprise. “There’s one more thing we need to do.” He reached into his uniform’s deep pockets and pulled out his tool. It looked like a pair of scissors but had a strange vibration to it, almost like it was electric. He held it up triumphantly.

I knew what it was immediately—a techband cutter. The only way to remove a band without setting it off. I’d seen them before, but only the highest of officials were allowed to touch the things. They were extremely dangerous. If he didn’t know what he was doing, he’d set it off instead of removing it. I held my arm out. “Test it on me first.”

Jasper raised the tool, a look of intense concentration on his face. I winced internally when he sliced though the metal, but before I knew it, the techband had been cut clean off. I caught it before it fell to the ground.

“Who’s next?” Treena’s father asked.

37

Our trip to the roof was a blur. We jogged—or stumbled, in my case—up the empty stairs and swung the door open slowly. Vance peeked out first, then signaled that the roof was clear. My mind was foggy, and I was shaking so badly I could barely walk. Was it the effects of the techband, or was it something else entirely? I let myself consider what we were about to do, and the anxiety nearly overcame me. Jump. Off a building. On purpose.

My mind went back to that fateful first day as an EPIC team member. This building had seemed so stately and grand, and I’d felt so small. My biggest worry then was failing a mission that had never truly existed in the first place.

But now I knew the truth. I was the successor. The empress knew that, and she wanted me dead. If I gave up now, she would succeed.

The question was, how would I tell Vance? It wasn’t like I could say, “Thanks for your help. Oh, and by the way, I’m supposed to take the empress’s place.” I couldn’t bear the disappointment I knew I would see in his eyes. Would he be disgusted? Would he refuse to help?

Of course not. Vance wasn’t like that. Ratings didn’t matter to him, so this new revelation wouldn’t change a thing.

I’ll tell him later, I promised myself. A surge of determination overcame my nervousness, and I straightened and followed the others.

It was dark and cool outside. Two shiny choppers sat in their places, probably the same ones we’d used before. Daymond touched the first one gently, as if caressing a loved one he’d never see again. I touched his arm. “Are you okay?”

He pulled away. “I’m fine.”

I tried again. “Thanks, Daymond, for coming back for me. It means a lot.”

“The empress has to learn that she can’t just kill people off.” He pounded his chest with a fist. “Especially this person.”

Jasper pulled on the door. It slid open, unlocked. “The fates are with us. I’ll grab the packs. You guys watch that exit.” He disappeared into the chopper.

Vance looked annoyed. He opened his mouth, then shut it, cocking his head.

I heard it too—a banging noise coming from the door we’d just come through. Vance had propped it closed, but it didn’t lock from the outside.

“Fates!” Daymond cursed. “Jasper, hurry with those packs!”

“We don’t have time,” Vance said, and gave me a shove toward the door. “Get in, quick. Day, you too.”

We leaped inside, startling my father, who had made a pile of supplies on the floor. Vance jumped in behind us and slammed the door shut just in time. A shot hit the side of the chopper, making the entire thing vibrate, and then more shots. I stood as close to the center as I could without stepping on the pile of suits, trying to keep away from the sides. The deadly sound waves from a dozen stunners rocked the chopper in one continuous round. The vehicle shuddered and moaned, and I resisted the urge to cover my ears.

“Day, you remember how to fly?” Vance shouted over the noise.

Daymond glared at Vance. “Don’t even think about it. I never finished my training. I could kill us all!”

“We’re dead anyway. We have no choice.” Vance gestured to the steady flow of monitors and soldiers emerging from the building. They surrounded us.

Daymond’s eyes were wide and panicked. “I can’t—I don’t—it’s probably locked. It won’t even let us turn the engine on, much less lift off.”

“Don’t know till we try,” Vance insisted and shoved him toward the pilot seat. Daymond sat and stared at the instruments like they were poisonous.

I glanced out the window again. The black-clad figures were still coming, and the buzzing only increased. How long could the chopper withstand the attack? Could the technology even work when being blasted like this? We had bought ourselves a few more seconds, but by the barrage of fire around us, we had to assume their stunners were on fatal mode.

“Yes!” Daymond shouted in triumph, and suddenly the chopper roared to life. The engine sounded more strained than usual, but hopefully it would be enough. The chopper gave a lurch as we left the ground.

The buzzing’s intensity increased as the guards below made a last desperate attempt to ground us. The engine gave a strained whine. Daymond’s reluctance had been replaced with a focused intensity. He guided the instruments and raised us higher and higher until we were nearly out of range and the engine’s noise returned to its normal noise level. Then we started forward. With a sigh of relief, I glanced out the window. My father sat beside me and handed over a headset.

In the copilot’s seat, Vance put his on also. “We’re not out of this yet. We’ll try to land somewhere safe, but I’m assuming they’ll send jets after us, so we need to be prepared. Have you ever jumped before, Jasper?”

My father nodded. “Once, but that was from a private plane.”

“Parachute?”

“Yep.”

Vance looked troubled. “I don’t think that’s a good idea this time. Even if we drop you low, it’ll take too long to reach the ground. You’ll be an easy target.”

The chopper made a sharp turn, throwing us all to the right, and I snapped my seat belt into place. The radio on the dashboard came to life. “Chopper 502, you are ordered to land immediately. Violation of these orders will bring you under fire. Over.”

Daymond started to reply, but Vance gripped his shoulder and gave a slight shake of his head. Better not to respond at all.

“If we can’t use parachutes, what are you suggesting, Vance?” I asked. My voice sounded too high.

“We could wait until the last possible second to deploy the chute,” Jasper said. “That, combined with the darkness, might be enough.”

Vance shook his head. “It’ll be too dark to see the ground. You’d end up a pancake.”

“A pancake?” Jasper repeated.

Vance’s lips turned upward for a second, and then he was all business again. “Never mind. We’ll use wing suits.”

Jasper leaned forward. “From this height? That would be suicide.”

“How do they work?” I asked, a new wave of nervousness washing over me. The adrenaline pulsed like a drug through my veins.

“Have you ever seen a flying squirrel?” Vance asked. At my blank look, he sighed. “A wing suit has fabric between your legs and attached to your arms so you have a little control over direction and speed. It’s tricky to control, but you’ll still have a small chute to help you land.”

“Wing suits are for small jumps,” Jasper snapped. “We’d never survive a leap from this high. It’s way too dangerous.”

“I’ve done it before. Not from this high, of course, and it was hard to adjust the airflow even then. But I think it’s possible.”

“Let me get this straight,” Jasper said. “It’s too dark to see the ground, but it’s not too dark to go flying at breakneck speeds through the air in a wing suit. Above a city. With absolutely no experience and no margin for error.”

“We’ll drop you as far from city limits as we can,” Vance said. “Less chance of running into buildings. Trust me. I wouldn’t suggest this if there was any other way.”

“In that case,” Jasper said, eyeing me with a careful look that said, I hope you know what you’re doing with this guy, “you’d better give us some basics—and quick.”

Vance stood, grabbing a handle to steady himself as the chopper lurched, and then began his demonstration. I watched through a shaky haze of growing terror. He showed us how to leap out the door, arms tucked and feet together. Then he showed us how to spread our arms and legs and lean forward or backward to control airflow. Last, he demonstrated how to deploy the small landing chute on our backpacks.

Jasper rummaged through the supplies and retrieved the suits. He pulled out the smallest one, although—no surprise—it was still far too big. When I stood to put it on, my legs buckled and I nearly toppled over. My adrenaline was wearing off, leaving behind the annoying prickles that reminded me what my body had been through today. It would be awhile before it worked right again. Assuming I survived this at all.

“You okay?” Vance asked.

“Fine. Just the angle.” I sat and shoved my legs into the suit. From the look on Vance’s face, he didn’t believe me.

Once outfitted, I instinctively tried to check the time on my wrist before remembering it was gone. It had probably been ten minutes or so since boarding, but it felt like decades. I left my seat belt unbuckled and leaned back to look through the window but saw mostly blackness. The roads were barely lit since the only people who used them at night were monitors. With so many buildings outlined far beneath us, I could almost pretend it was Olympus and not the suburbs of Aiguille.

My stomach lurched at the thought, and suddenly I was five again, feeling my palms sweating, silently pleading with my father not to let go. I could almost feel his grip loosen, about to send me plummeting to the ground. Almost. The metal floor of the chopper was solid, and it brought me back to reality. I wasn’t at the top of the tower but in a helicopter. I was safe.

Except that my father—a different father—really was about to send me flying toward the ground, and my life depended on it.

“Are you okay, Ametrine?” Jasper asked. My breath came fast now, and sweat dripped down my neck. He took my hand and clasped it tightly, but I pulled away. His hands were sweaty too.

“No sign of pursuers so far,” Vance’s voice said over the feed. He sat in the copilot’s seat again. I took a deep breath and forced myself to think. If we weren’t being followed, there wouldn’t be cause to jump. Maybe they didn’t know where we were, or perhaps NORA thought we weren’t worth destroying a perfectly good chopper.

Just as I settled back in my seat, a light started flashing on the instrument panel.

Vance turned to look at us, dread filling his expression. A new wave of terror swept through my exhausted body. I couldn’t move. This was for real.

Jasper stood and unlatched the side door. As he yanked it open, the sound suddenly became deafening, and the cold wind began whipping my short hair painfully into my eyes. My father stood there for a moment, staring out, then came back to check my pack’s straps again. I wondered if he really knew how tight it should be, or if he was just reassuring himself. After a quick check of his own gear, he stood like stone, holding on to the rail as the wind whipped violently through the chopper.

I stood next to him and looked out at the deep blackness. Suddenly a hand gripped my arm. I turned. Vance had climbed back over the seat. His eyes were unreadable in the darkness, but his face held such a look of tenderness that I wanted to melt. He pulled me in for a quick hug. My body shook so badly that I could barely return his embrace. A feeling of foreboding settled on me, and I looked at him again, pushing my hair back so I could see him better. After a second, I realized what was wrong.

Vance wasn’t wearing any gear.

He wrapped his fingers in my hair and pulled my face to his. Our first kiss had been gentle and slow. This time Vance pressed his lips to mine in fierce desperation. His other hand pressed against my back, pulling my body against his, and an intense heat burned through my body.

There was only one reason he wouldn’t be wearing a pack.

I pulled away, feeling his hand untangle itself from my hair, and glanced at Daymond. He wore a pack as well.

“It’s time,” my father yelled into my ear, motioning for me to put on my helmet.

“I’m not going until you put on gear!” I shouted to Vance.

He shook his head. “Later,” he said simply and pulled the eye guard down onto my face.

“You’d better jump,” I shouted to Vance, hoping he could hear. He didn’t respond.

“Ready?” Jasper exclaimed.

“Don’t be an idiot, Vance!” I screamed above the noise. He just looked at me, a hint of sorrow in his eyes.

“Ready?” Jasper yelled again, a hint of hysteria in his voice.

I wasn’t. I tried to give Vance one last look, but my father grabbed my arm.

“Let’s go!”

38

Jasper had a firm grip on my arm, and before I knew it, a rush of air left me breathless. My lungs burned, longing for air. A blanket of darkness opened up below me. Time seemed to freeze. This was really happening. I was falling, plummeting toward the unforgiving ground, feeling it grow closer with each second. It felt like my nightmares.

Except this time it wasn’t a dream. And I couldn’t see anything.

The feeling of being utterly helpless in gravity’s clutches made me freeze in fear. I couldn’t see Jasper anymore, but there was a faint light on the ground below. I made it my anchor. With a mighty heave, I threw my arms out, fingers splayed in the wind, and kept my legs apart in what I hoped was a flying-squirrel position, but I was shooting forward as fast as downward, and the light soon disappeared behind me. So much for that.

The ground came into view not because I was close to it but because the land was darker than the sky. My father’s falling form, a faint spot of light against the drab landscape beneath us, was several yards in front of me. I leaned forward, reaching toward him, and my body sped faster until we were nearly even with each other. His helmet hid his expression, but he tried to motion something with his fingers. I spread my arms and legs out, feeling the fabric grow more taut, and tried to understand what he was trying to say. He held up three fingers, then two, then one.

Were we that close to the ground already? One hand clawed desperately at the pack above my shoulder, making me lurch sideways, but it came free when I yanked it. A whoosh of cloth behind me told me it had worked. A second later a huge force sucked me momentarily upward into the sky. It was so strong that I felt breathless for several seconds, and then I was quickly drifting downward again. It took a while for me to realize I was laughing—a hysterical, uncontrollable laugh.

As I looked over, I saw Jasper touch down first. Then I saw the ground approach—much quicker than I’d anticipated—and put my legs down just in time. I was so numb from the cold descent that my legs collapsed when they hit the ground. I lay there, shaking and laughing, feeling the fire in my veins and the dry coolness in my lungs. Jasper was lying on the ground too, his breathing heavy. It took a moment for me to free myself of the parachute, then I stumbled over to my father. He stared at the sky.

“That was incredible!” I yelled, although my voice sounded hoarse.

He nodded, still distracted.

“You all right?” I asked.

He let out a deep, shaky breath. “I think I’ll leave the death-defying drops to you and your crazy friend from now on.”

I threw my head upward, searching the night sky. The chopper’s lights were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t see any jets, but then again, they were probably designed for invisibility. I hoped Vance and Daymond wouldn’t be far behind us. There was something about Vance’s good-bye that bothered me, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky. Was it the desperation in his embrace or the hopelessness in his eyes?

Vance, you’d better jump.

“Ametrine,” Jasper said urgently. “I think we’d better head for—”

Suddenly an explosion rocked the night sky. The blast lit the clouds above like fireworks. The inferno fell like a fiery hand, tendrils of hot flame and smoke flashing brilliantly in the darkness, and then it was swallowed up in black.

I gasped, unable to rip my gaze away. My legs gave way as I sank onto the packed earth. Whatever strength had held me up seemed to seep into the ground beneath me.

“Ametrine, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that,” I snapped, still scanning for movement. If he’d jumped in time, he would be landing about now.

“There’s nothing left but chopper parts. We’ve got to go before the jet sees us, Ametrine. They probably have night vision.”

I barely heard the words. Vance had known he wouldn’t make it out. He’d probably waited until the very last second, getting Daymond out before himself. It sounded like the kind of stupid, idiotic kind of thing he would do.

Jasper grabbed my arm to pull me up. A surge of red-hot anger spread through my chest, and I leaped to my feet, giving him a hard look. “Don’t touch me!”

He recoiled. “Look, I’m sorry, but they obviously didn’t make it. It’s time to go.”

“Then go. That’s what you’re good at, right?”

He took a step backward. “I know you’re upset, but I’m just trying to help.”

“No matter what you do, it doesn’t make up for a lifetime.”

My father stared at me, his expression pained and frustrated. “I can never make up for that. But I can protect you here, now.”

The anger was already dissipating, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion I’d never experienced before. I let his reply slide and tore my gaze away to stare at the sky. There was no evidence of the explosion now. The distant stars shone more brightly than I’d ever seen before, and the air held a defiant chill. There were no dark figures in wing suits swooping in to join us. A distant hum made me pause. Definitely an aircraft. My father was probably right about the night vision—it was time to go.

“He made it out,” I said. “I’m sure he did.”

My father’s voice was strained. “It’s always possible. He seemed—seems—like a survivor.”

He started to wrap an arm around my waist, but I shook myself free. I could walk. I couldn’t think, but I could make my feet move. It gave me something to focus on. Forward. Right, then left. Avoid the tumbleweeds and rocks. Focus on survival. Get back to the city and don’t get caught.

Above all, don’t think about Vance.

><><><><><><><

Jasper decided to call in a favor from an old friend who lived just outside the city. I’d never realized how cool it could get at night, even in the desert. I found myself shivering after the first hour. I gripped my necklace for comfort. It was warm from the heat of my body. I remembered how gently Vance had cradled it in his rough hands, listening patiently to my theories about its colors and what they meant—things that probably sounded ridiculously silly to a guy who was just trying to keep himself and his family alive.

Alive. The thought made me choke, and Jasper gave me a questioning look. I just shook my head.

For an older man, Jasper was extremely alert. Twice a spotlight appeared overhead, the chopper slow and deafening, and we hid behind scraggly trees and an old, half-standing structure. We both knew that once it was light, they’d find our trail and follow on foot. Frankly, I didn’t care very much right then—whether they put me in prison or shot me, at least it meant a little rest.

We reached our destination shortly after sunrise. “Wait here,” my father said. The house had a small patch of green lawn—not shiny like the plastic ones I was used to but real. The homeowners had probably wasted their entire water allowance on it. Either that, or houses on the outskirts had more lenience about their water supply. “What is this place?”

“My good friend lives here. Or, at least, he used to. If I’m not back in ten minutes, run and find shelter.”

Sitting and waiting sounded heavenly, but I knew once I sat, I’d never get back up. I still saw the desert floor beneath my eyelids when I blinked. “Not a chance. I’m going with you.”

“Are you always this stubborn?”

“Yep.”

He sighed. “All right, but stay behind me.”

After a long trek up the front walk, Jasper knocked on the door. There was no answer.

“Are you sure this is the right house? It’s been twelve years,” I said.

“Actually, it’s been thirteen. I came to visit before I was thrown into prison. Vallorah had started acting strangely, and I came to Mills for advice.” He shook his head grimly. “Mills wasn’t married himself. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea.”

“You and the empress stayed together for a long time, considering her position,” I said, trying not to be weirded out by the turn in conversation.

“She was different then. She changed a lot in those last years—got more self-centered and power hungry. More obsessed with the Romans. She said that building an empire, making NORA the New Rome, was the key to her immortality.”

The door opened suddenly, making me jump. It was a woman, a yellow—695. She had light brown hair, which was strange enough, but her eyes were startlingly falcon-like. “Yes?”

“Are you the wife of Mills?” Jasper asked.

“He doesn’t live here,” she said and started to close the door.

My father threw his hand out and caught it. “Please, I really need to find him.”

“It’s extremely important,” I added.

“Hold on,” she said, staring at my face. “You’re that girl, aren’t you?”

“What girl?” I asked.

The woman flipped up the screen on her techband and typed something. Then she held it up so we could see. There, in full color, was my photo. It said, “Ametrine Dowell, age sixteen. Rating: 440. Extremely dangerous. Report immediately if seen.”

“Was this alert local or national?” I asked.

“Definitely national,” the woman said. “We woke up to it this morning. They’ve repeated the message every thirty minutes.”

My father cleared his throat. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said. “Sounds like we’d better get going. Any chance you’d consider forgetting about this visit?”

She stared at him, squinting hard. “You look familiar too, but not from the news alert. Who are you?”

“I’d rather not say—”

“Oh!” She clapped her hands together. “I remember. You were the Ratings councilman way back, before the empress threw you behind bars. Never thought we’d see you again.”

Panic spread across Jasper’s face. “Come on, Treena. We’re going.”

The lady’s hard expression softened just a bit. A tiny bit. “Don’t worry. We’ve made it our business to know these things. Come inside. I suppose it’s worth finding out if you’re friend or foe.”

39

Forgive me, Mills, but we’ve had a new development. Two refugees have come asking for you.” She held the small rectangular device closer to her face, even though he could probably see her fine, and lowered her voice. “One appears to be the wanted girl.”

“Are you sure?” a gnarled voice asked. I peeked over her shoulder and examined the graying man’s face on the little screen. The skin beneath his eyes sagged, but his eyes were clear and sharp. Surprisingly, he had no Rating. His forehead was as clean as a child’s. Had he managed to remove his implant, or had he evaded implantation altogether?

“She looks like her and has the 440 Rating. And her hair is dark.”

“That means nothing. Anyone can dye their hair.”

This was taking forever. I swiped the device out of her hand and glared at him. “The empress tried to kill me.”

Surprise swept over his expression, and then amusement. “Well then, you have my attention. What’s your name again?”

“Ametrine Dowell. This is my father.” I tilted the screen sideways.

If Mills was surprised before, he was dumbfounded now. “Jasper! We thought you were dead.”

“So you’re leading the rebellion now?” My father chuckled. “Do your followers know about your interesting past?”

A pause. “That’s irrelevant.”

“Whatever you say. Where are you, exactly?”

“That I can’t tell you, sorry. Protocol and all that.” Mills smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “But I’m where I can do the most good, and they won’t find me anytime soon. The question is, what are you doing in my house?”

My father quickly told his story, his eyes flitting to me when he talked about Lanah and then his years in prison. Then he switched to my Rating, and Mills sat a little straighter. “Are you telling me that this girl—this child—is the successor?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jasper said.

There was an unnatural brightness to the old man’s eyes, but his words were carefully controlled. “And she just happens to be your daughter. That sounds a little convenient, don’t you think?”

“She earned it all by herself, before I even found her.”

“No one is going to believe it. I hardly believe it myself.”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘no one’?”

“The rebellion,” Mills said matter-of-factly. “If this is true—which I doubt, to be honest—it could change everything. We’ve been waiting for something like this.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You won’t tell a soul without my permission. I’m tired of being chased by people who want me dead.”

“She already sounds like a leader,” Mills said, watching me with a tight smile. “That’s a good sign.”

My father sighed. “You have a point, Ametrine. I shouldn’t have assumed you’d want to join the rebellion. What is it you want?”

I shook my head. “Do you really want to know? Because it sounds like you have my whole life planned out for me already. Just like NORA, just like Konnor, just like everyone else I’ve ever known.”

“What are your options?” Jasper whispered. “You don’t want to be used. That’s understandable. But look at it this way—you’re getting the throne, and they’re getting a leader who can change things. Everybody wins.”

I ground my teeth in frustration. They weren’t getting it. My Rating had been the most important thing to me for so long. It had taken Vance and EPIC to pull me out and help me see life for what it was. Now that I was free, the rebellion was trying to pull me back in again—into the center, no less. “I don’t know what I want. But I know that I have no desire to become empress.”

Silence. Jasper sat back in his chair with a heavy sigh.

“Ametrine,” Mills said carefully. “The empress tried to have you killed. Do you really think you’re the only one? She’s abused her power for years, destroyed families, and taken away what people have rightfully earned. The system may have worked initially, but now it’s so corrupt it’s beyond repair. We’re not asking you to fix everything by yourself. In fact, you don’t need to do much at all. What we need is a face to unite behind, a symbol of hope to inspire those who want change.”

“You want me to become a giant target,” I said. “Everyone in the country will recognize me as a rebel.”

“Or a hero,” Mills said.

“I’m sorry if I was too pushy, Ametrine,” Jasper said. “This really is your decision, and I’ll support you no matter what. But I want you to understand what Mills is proposing here. This will be very dangerous. In addition to the entire country being on alert, you’ll be exposed to patriots wanting to sell you out. We’ll do our best to protect you, but the bigger this gets, the harder Vallorah will try to take you down.”

Haven’t you ever had a cause worth dying for? Tali’s voice echoed in my mind.

I hadn’t, but she had. And she’d paid the ultimate price for it. If I disappeared now and left the rebellion to itself, Tali’s death would mean nothing. I fingered the hair I’d cut and dyed in her honor, twisting it around my forefinger.

The empress had meddled in my life long enough. She’d taken Vance’s father and his clan, his family, and finally his life. She’d taken Tali. And she’d taken my future and wanted desperately to extinguish me as well. I was sick of running.

If you’re attacked, they think they can beat you, Vance had said. They won’t expect you to fight back.

“Okay,” I said. “But three conditions. First, we do it my way. I have an idea, but it means we’ll have to hit her hard, and soon, before she knows I’m alive. Second, I’m the one who decides my future if we win. And third,” I leaned forward, “do not talk about me when I’m sitting right here. Keep me involved and informed of every conversation or count me out. Got it?”

Jasper covered a pleased smile, but Mills frowned. “I suppose we can agree to your conditions, assuming that you really are who you say you are. We’ll have to verify that. But I’d like to know more about this plan of yours. I’ve been gathering loyal followers since you were crawling, girl, and I’m not just turning them over to you.”

“I think you mean, Your Highness,” Jasper said with a chuckle. “Ametrine, welcome to the rebellion.”

><><><><><><><

Securing a transport with the tracking device removed was a little tricky, but the next morning, I stood outside the academy doors once again. Keri, the woman who had helped us contact Mills, c, wholosed the door and climbed back into the vehicle, keeping a wary eye on me. She hadn’t approved of Mills’s decision to include me in their plans, but apparently she wasn’t high enough in the decision-making scale to express her opinion. I wasn’t sure if she was here as my bodyguard or simply my guard.

I’d acted confident in my plan before, but now I felt sick. Dresden and I knew each other so well. Even in the beginning, when it was just studying and playing khel, we couldn’t bear to be apart. And yet I stood here, staring at the building that housed his future, and wondered how well I really knew him. Was he the same tender, laughing Dresden I’d always known? Could I trust him with my secret, or would he turn me in?

That was ridiculous. Dresden was happy here, but he would never turn me in. I just had to pretend like nothing had changed—even though everything had.

It didn’t take long to find him. All I did was wait by the doors and watch for a crowd trailing a tall, confident figure. I fell in line with them, hoping the wig Keri had provided would help me blend in. It fell thick in the front, hiding my Rating without being too obvious. Luckily, no one seemed to notice me at all. Even the security girl was distracted. Very distracted. She stared at Dresden in awe as we passed.

“Professor Geldon? Yeah, he wouldn’t notice me if I slapped him in the face,” a guy beside him was saying, striding quickly to stay in step with the taller Dresden.

Dresden laughed, a familiar sound. “He only told me congratulations. I’m sure he says that to everyone. Besides, Jacque, if you slapped him, I’m sure he’d have something to say.”

The girl next to him broke into a fit of obnoxious laughter. If anyone was going to be slapped, I wanted it to be her. Forcing my hands to my sides, I used the moment to whisper. “Dresden.” He didn’t hear me at first. I tried again, touching his arm. “Dresden.”

His eyes flitted to mine, then widened. His expression was mixed. Surprise. Confusion. Then something else. Was it . . . horror?

“I wondered if you could help me with my homework,” I said, adjusting my stolen uniform self-consciously. “Do you have a second?”

“Ah, yeah. Of course.” He turned to his friends, who watched him with varying degrees of disappointment. “I’ll catch up in a minute.”

“Treena,” he began when his friends left. “You have got to stop showing up here, especially now that the entire country is looking for you! Do you realize—”

“They tried to kill me.”

He took a step back. “W—what?”

“Shh,” I said, lowering my voice. There were people everywhere, but no one was close enough to be listening. Hopefully. Dresden just stared at me as if I were a stranger. “I need your help.”

He sighed, then eased me forward until we turned the corner. “I saw the broadcast. What in the fates did you do? Fail your assignment?”

“You could say that. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“I know just the place. Follow me but keep your head down. Your Rating is a dead giveaway.”

No problem there. I kept my eyes on the shiny metal floor as he led me down the hall. A couple of turns later, we arrived at a gray door. Dresden tried the knob, then yanked hard. It clicked open to reveal a small, dark room. “A custodial closet?” I asked.

“The only place in the building that isn’t monitored,” he said, closing the door behind us. “We won’t have much time, though. Tell me everything.”

The story spilled out. I told him about Tali, my father, and my real Rating, leaving out any mention of Vance. It was hard not to think about him; it was like trying to distract myself from a gaping wound in my body. I’d been waiting so long for a moment like this with Dresden. And here I was, thinking about someone else.

It was too dark to see his reaction, but I could sense his doubt. “You, the successor? Come on. You’re a fugitive.”

“And now I know why. She’s been killing off her competition. The empress has tried three times to take me out, and if they catch me again, she’ll succeed.”

He was silent for a moment. “That’s a pretty serious claim. How do you know she’s behind the deaths?”

“When we hacked into the system and checked my score, Jasper noticed it. It’s too convenient to be a coincidence. It’s no mistake, Dresden.”

“You really are . . .”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me in the darkness.

“That’s why your Rating was so weird. The empress was just protecting her position. Of course.”

“You make it sound like a game,” I said. “She tried to have me killed.”

He sat back against the wall. “Although if she’d been smarter, the empress would’ve set your Rating lower, like in the 800s. Nobody would have noticed. I don’t understand why she’d make you a red.” He chuckled. “I just can’t believe it. I never thought you could—I mean, wow.”

That made me pause. He never thought I could what? “That’s where you come in, Dres. I need you to steal a camera for me.”

“You want me to do what?”

“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.”

“Crazy? I have a better chance of making it rain. No, not rain. Snow. In the sweltering heat of summer.”

“Dres, I know you can do it. You can figure out a way.”

He took a deep breath. “Do you realize what you’re asking?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

He was quiet for a long time. I could almost feel him wrestling with it, feel his mind weighing the risks and the benefits. Calculating. I shifted uncomfortably on the floor.

“You’re joining the rebellion, then,” he finally said. “Smugglers and the Integrants and all that. They’ll help you get the throne.”

“I don’t know about the throne part, but there are other citizens too. The empress has made a lot of people angry.”

“You can’t honestly think this is possible.”

I felt a twinge of irritation. If I said no, would he still help? Then I thought of his friends and the doting females, and I felt even worse. I was asking him for something that I couldn’t even give him in return.

I was asking for his loyalty.

“I don’t know if it’s possible,” I said honestly.

“Treena, the last couple of weeks have been hard. I feel like a different person here. Everyone knows who I am, and they watch me, you know? I feel like I can’t be myself, or they’ll discover who I really am—just a dumb kid from Olympus.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but stopped. He was right to question this. If I’d been in his position, there was no way I would have agreed to it. “Go on,” I finally said.

“But you’re the one who got me here. You helped me with my coursework, my language, even my posture.” I smiled at that. His posture had been atrocious in Level Two. “And now you’re asking for a big favor. I should be jumping at the chance to pay you back.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I’m not done,” he said quickly. “It’s just that this feels like such an impossible task, and if we fail—well, I’d be in prison at the very least. And I feel guilty for even thinking that.”

“I know.”

“But none of that should matter. Everything here seems so fake when you’re out risking your life every day so we can be together.” I felt his grip tighten on my hand as his other arm pulled me in close. I leaned against him, trying to relax, breathing in his natural scent. It was the same but different. Stiffer somehow, like he’d been using overscented soap.

“It’s fine,” I said, unsure how to respond.

“The girls here are so annoying,” he said with a chuckle. “They just want to climb the ladder. You know, use me as a rung to get somewhere else.” He stopped. “But you’re different. You cared about me even before I got my Rating.”

I nodded, feeling the guilt rise to my throat like bile. Was he testing me? Trying to figure out where I stood? Could he sense that something was different between us?

Dresden pulled his arm back and I sat up, then I felt him ease closer. He stroked my face in the darkness, his fingers leaving a hot trail of betrayal. I was trembling. He pulled me closer, entwining his fingers in my hair. “What have they done to you?” he murmured.

And then he leaned in, slowly, as he’d done a thousand times before. I nearly pulled away, but his lips brushed mine. The gentleness of his lips made my eyes burn, and a tear trickled down one cheek before I could stop it. He tightened his hold until I could barely breathe.

I’m such a traitor.

“I’m so sorry,” he said between kisses, his breath warm on my lips. “You deserve so much more.”

I betrayed you, Dresden. I fell for someone else—I don’t deserve you at all.

He pulled away, probably mistaking my reluctance as concern about our situation. The light on his techband flickered on as he checked the time. “I’ve gotta go. If this is going to work, they can’t suspect anything.”

I blinked. “Really? You’ll do it?”

“I want you, Treena. You’re more important than any of this. If it means we can be together, I’ll do it. Assuming I haven’t already lost you.”

I paused. He couldn’t know about me and Vance, could he? Pain shot through my body at the thought of Vance. I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. But he was gone, and it made no sense to reject Dresden’s help now. I pushed away my emotions and hardened my heart a little more. “Of course not. Thanks, Dres. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

He pulled me into his arms again, and I tried not to stiffen. “I think I do.”

40

Please whisper,” my father said, his own voice definitely louder than a whisper. He was speaking to a group of twenty block leaders standing uncomfortably packed together in the small showroom of a shoe store where a screen flickered in front of them. But the arguing continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

It was the second night of briefing, and Dresden’s camera had already been put to good use. We’d shown a recording of my father’s confession to a dozen groups so far. I had expected Mills to send out the information to his followers quickly, but apparently the empress’s new location law made communication much more difficult. Their solution was to show the recording to the neighborhood heads in each area and allow them to spread the word.

And since Jasper, Keri, and I were among the few who couldn’t be punished—Keri’s techband had no punishment mode, either—we were the chosen emissaries.

No, that wasn’t it. They wanted to show me off. I was their showpiece, their crowning jewel. It was just a nice convenience that I couldn’t be zapped.

Zapped. The memory the word conjured up made me cringe. Everything reminded me of Vance now. Certain faces in the crowd, a whiff of pine, a head of dark, messy hair. My mind knew that if he were alive, he’d be here; my heart refused to accept that he was gone.

Focus, Treena. I forced myself to look around, taking in the anxious faces of reds and yellows, all standing around nervously because there was nowhere to sit. The racks of shoes had been pushed to the walls, and any chairs or benches had been removed to make room for more people. It was unbearably hot. More so for me because of the protective vest I wore under my uniform.

“Just start it already,” an older man spoke up, his voice carrying above the others. He was in the middle of the pack and probably sweating horribly by now. I was in the corner by the door and could barely breathe the air was so stale.

“The time has finally come,” Jasper began. “The empress and the Council have overstepped their bounds and begun attacking their own people. And now we finally have proof. Remember, this information is absolutely classified and top secret. Everyone involved is receiving the same information.”

He nodded to me, and I hit the Start key on the glass screen. His face filled the screen and he began telling his story. Since I’d seen it several times, I let my mind wander. Dresden had looked grim when delivering the camera to our meeting place yesterday, his usual smile hidden by a deep concern. I think he knew there was no going back now. If something happened to him, it would be my fault.

The crowd was starting to react now. The recording only specified that the successor was female, not who it was—at Jasper’s insistence they’d find out later, once they had committed—so they didn’t seem to notice me. But they did keep staring at Jasper. Their faces showed cynicism at first, sometimes disdain. After the first minute, though, their reactions weren’t as pronounced. A couple of the women shook their heads. A man coughed. Finally it ended, and there wasn’t a sound.

The older man in the middle was the first to speak. “All right, we agree that the empress has to go. Everyone knows she’s a weasely little rat messing with people’s lives. But what’s the plan? The recording didn’t tell us.”

“Wait,” a woman said. “If anyone doesn’t want to be a part of this, they should leave. Right now.”

My father nodded. “Actually, that’s what I was about to say. If you stay, your participation will be expected. For obvious reasons, I’d recommend that those who would like to leave do so now.”

I expected several to leave, like in the first group, but no one did. The woman’s jaw was firmly set. Finally Jasper spoke again. “Thank you. If you could please file out of the room and make your way upstairs, Mills will explain the plan there.” He opened the door and stood aside for the crowd to file past.

I watched them carefully as the room emptied. One man, his hair slicked back to reveal a yellow Rating, held back. Finally the crowd was gone, and it was just the three of us.

“Did you have a question, sir?” my father asked, making his way over to the man. The stranger’s face darkened at his approach. My heart sank when I saw the glint of metal in the man’s hand.

“Wait!” I shouted, but it was too late. The man leaped forward, grabbing my father’s shoulder with one hand and plunging the knife deep into his stomach.

My father gasped, a horrified expression frozen on his face as he fell to the ground.

“No!” I closed the space in two steps. The man was aiming the bloody knife for a second thrust. As it fell, I redirected the knife back toward the attacker’s thigh. It sank deep. He gave a sharp intake of breath and bent over, clasping his leg. I swept his other leg, throwing him roughly to the floor, and yanked the knife out. The man’s startled yelp instantly ceased as I aimed the bloody knife at his throat. “Don’t. Move.”

His eyes were wide and full of pain, but he froze. Rage pulsed through my body, along with a strong desire to hurt him back, to tear from him what he’d torn from my father. Instead, I asked, “Why?”

His chin lifted a little. “The empress rewards loyalty.”

I glanced at the Jasper on the floor. His face was turned toward me, losing color by the second.

“Someone help!” I shouted. “Is anyone there?”

The footsteps stopped in the doorway, and there was an exclamation of surprise. Then everyone in the building swarmed us and time seemed to move in slow motion—Keri letting out a horrified gasp, and someone else checking his breathing. A group of men with grim expressions surrounding the man who had probably murdered my father, rolling him onto his stomach and locking his hands together.

A soft hand brushed my shoulder. “You can put that down now, sweetie.” I realized that I still held the weapon and that I was shaking. It clattered to the floor as I sank down.

The man examining my father frowned and stood. “He’s breathing, but it’s faint. He needs a doctor.”

“He’s a fugitive,” I said. “They’ll kill him.”

“He’s at the brink already, love,” an older lady said.

“My brother runs a red hospital out of his house,” a man spoke up. “He’ll have some blood in storage. Someone help me carry him. You, there.”

With that, my father’s slumped body disappeared down the road. Keri and a couple of men tied up the attacker and led him out. He glared at me as he left. I just avoided his gaze. What he’d done was unforgivable, but I did understand his reasoning—he’d been desperate for a higher Rating, willing to sink to anything to get it. I had been that way once, and I hated myself for it.

The next group of people waited outside the open door, shifting uncertainly and wondering what they had just gotten themselves into. I stood mechanically, ignoring the blood on my uniform, and forced myself to usher them into the viewing room. There was lots of whispering, but I didn’t care. My father’s face was frozen on the glass screen, ready to be replayed.

With a sinking feeling in my heart, I realized that all of this wouldn’t be enough. The Rating system was too powerful. Greens were too comfortable with their lives to take a chance. Yellows wanted to become greens, so they’d do whatever it took. And reds? They were too dangerous, too unreliable to be taken seriously. We were going about this all wrong.

Mills wanted a face for the people to unite behind. Well, he was about to get it.

“I want to say a few words before I play this video for you,” I said to the waiting group. They shuffled their feet and seemed ready to bolt, but they were listening. I reached into the bag I’d left in the corner and pulled out the camera, turning it on and handing it to a girl close to my age. “Just keep that on me.”

“Got it,” she said.

I turned to the camera and spoke loudly. “I know I’m young and small. You’re probably wondering why you’re listening to a teenage girl. Up until a week ago I was just like you—going about my life, following the rules, and trying to make the best of things. But something happened.”

It was quiet now, the shifting and movement completely gone. Keri had stepped back into the room and was leaning against the doorway. Good. I wanted her to hear this too.

“The Rating I earned was taken from me,” I continued. “The empress tried to have me murdered to cover it up.” There were a few gasps and whispers, but I plunged on. “We also have evidence that she has staged the deaths of multiple others she felt threatened her position. My father once called the Rating system a sophisticated and chilling method of control. I would have argued with him once.” I paused. “Now, after what I’ve experienced, I know he’s absolutely right.”

“We agree,” another said. “But what can we do about it?”

I paused. “Get rid of the Rating system.”

There was silence, then murmuring.

“So this meeting is about overthrowing the Ratings?” someone said, the skepticism in his voice heavy.

“That’s blasphemous,” a man said. A green. One of only a handful who had dared come. “I’m not surprised about the empress, but the Rating system is the foundation of our nation. The system works when the ruler follows the laws.”

“The system fosters competition,” I said. “Initially the kinder, more society-minded citizens were supposed to be rewarded. Now we’re killing each other, threatening one another, scrambling for the slightest edge over our friends and family. It just isn’t working anymore. Now, I understand your desire to protect your families. As you just saw, the Rating system is a powerful tool in the empress’s hands. Our plan is risky and dangerous. It’s probably downright crazy, actually. But if it works, your children will grow up without fear of pain and punishment in a world where a leader serves her people without using, manipulating, or murdering them. A world where everyone has an equal chance of succeeding.”

“We’ve heard all this before,” someone said. “The empress herself said such things when she was crowned, and look at her now.”

“Is this really possible?” a woman asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

The voices came fast now, and I simply listened.

“The leaders are always the same,” a balding man with a huge nose said. “They promise change, then cave to whatever the Council wants. Our situation never improves, regardless of who rules.”

“If we’re to risk our lives over this, we have to know what the outcome will be,” a younger woman said in a quiet voice.

Baldie humphed. “We all know what the outcome will be. Not a thing. These rebels will take everything and give us back nothing.”

The quiet woman spoke more loudly now. “But if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”

“True,” a tall, slender man said thoughtfully.

“And what if, by some miracle, we do succeed? Fates!” Baldie was yelling now. If the neighbors didn’t hear, it would be a miracle. “Don’t you people remember your history? Look what happened to Old America. Our life here isn’t perfect, but at least it’s better than that.”

“For you, maybe. You’re a high yellow!”

The room exploded with noise, some yelling questions and others shouting at their neighbors. I hit Play on the screen again and slipped out the door before anyone could see the emotions struggling to the surface.

A world without numbers, I thought. For a moment I listened to the voice on the recording and mourned the thought of losing the father I’d barely begun to know—and all because of the stupid Rating system. I’d caused quite a stir in there and hadn’t even known what I was about to present before I’d done it. But if someone had asked me to take it back, I wouldn’t. The empress was a huge problem, but the Rating system was what enabled her abuse of power. In that moment, a world without numbers was the closest thing to perfection I’d ever imagined. Determination flared up within, and for the first time in a very long while, I felt what Tali had described. If there was a cause worth dying for, this was it. She’d fought the system in her own, small way, but I had a chance to make a real difference. I was the only person in NORA who had the potential to change the system completely. Maybe that was her final message—choose to fight, and never give in.

“I’ll do it, Tali,” I whispered. “Better late than never.”

><><><><><><><

I couldn’t sleep that night. The smugglers had added a couple of bedrolls to the attic for us, but looking at Jasper’s empty bed was too painful. They hadn’t let me visit him last night. “He’s in surgery,” they said. “Come back tomorrow.” But the look they gave me was one of pity, and I knew. They didn’t expect him to make it.

It shouldn’t have bothered me that much. He’d thrown away his chance to participate in my life already. It wasn’t like I needed him now. For some reason it was hard to convince myself of that.

When the first rays of light finally came through the tiny round window, I sat up. Dust particles floated slowly in the sunlight, a colorless glitter of lazy specks. It reminded me of the dome at the Block in Olympus. Except that the cold white building hadn’t been filled with the song of birds. The sound was so ridiculously happy, so carefree. What did these birds eat, anyway? Surely whatever bugs they ate didn’t live in plastic grass. And yet, here they all were, defying order in their own way.

I tried not to think about the second phase of the plan that would occur tonight. My legs felt restless and cramped. I missed my early morning workouts. This was probably as good a time as any to do some training. It was what Vance would have done.

Stop it, I thought. I had to stop torturing myself with recurring thoughts of him.

It felt so good to stretch my muscles. I put my hands to the floor, breathing in deeply, forcing my brain to turn off for a while. A few stretches with my arms and I felt like a new person. In the quiet of the morning and with the approval of the birds just outside the small window, I decided to practice the kata Vance had taught me.

A sweep step to the right, with a block and a punch to my invisible assailant’s jaw. I lifted my leg in a kick to his head, then brought an elbow down into his chest to send him toward the ground. I could almost feel Vance beside me as he had been at our daily training sessions, directing my wrist to make a straight line, my skin tingling at the roughness of his fingers against mine. It was almost as if I could smell the wildness of his essence when I did this.

Stop it.

Right kick to the groin, sweep of the leg, hammer punch to the nose. I was working up a sweat now. The floor beneath my feet creaked, but I barely noticed, completely lost in the movements. It was a couple of minutes before I noticed the figure at the top of the stairs.

“Look behind you at the back kick,” a familiar voice said.

My heart leaped in my throat. I turned, and there he was, an easy smile on his face. I pushed down the thousands of emotions that hit me then, forcing myself not to run into his arms. Instead, I stepped slowly toward him. “I did look. You’re just underestimating my peripheral vision.”

“Ah. So you see invisible men, but not real ones,” Vance countered. His hair was tousled and unkempt, and his uniform was wrinkled, but he was clean-shaven.

“If I see a real man, I’ll let you know.”

He smirked, ready to retort, but my restraint finally burst. I leaped toward him and let him catch me in his arms, allowing myself to melt into his chest. As he pulled back to look at me, his smile disappeared, and he softly tucked a wayward piece of hair behind my ear. “Sounds like you’ve had a rough couple of days.”

I pulled away. “You mind telling me where you’ve been?”

He raised an eyebrow, his mouth twitching. “Why? Were you worried?”

“You idiotic piece of slimy—”

“It was a simple question,” he said, his tone light, but he watched me carefully. “Were you worried?”

I looked away, the fight draining out of me. “Of course! I thought you—you know . . .”

“Got blown up?” His words were playful, but his expression was grim.

“I saw the explosion,” I said quietly.

“Got out just in time. Daymond wouldn’t jump until I put a pack on, and he yelled something about kicking the fates out of the empress for him, then shoved me out the door. He probably tried to maneuver the chopper away from us before impact to give us more time.”

I tried to imagine Daymond, with his thick arms, shoving Vance out the door. I would have loved to see that. “Not Daymond.”

“It was his choice. He knew what he was doing.” His words were certain and sure, but his lips pulled into a frown. Daymond’s death had obviously affected him more than he wanted me to know. “Your dad survived the surgery, by the way. I checked on him on my way here. He’ll have a rough recovery, but they say he’ll probably make it.”

I let out a long breath, feeling my shoulders sag. “Thank you.”

There was a long silence neither of us wanted to break. Finally he spoke. “So. I’m gone for three days, and suddenly you’re overthrowing an empire. I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”

I shrugged. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

“I heard about your recording and the support you’ve helped gather. Mills’s followers seem to really like you. Very impressive.”

“Not really. They wanted a change, and I’m just a means to get there.”

“You sound bitter about that.”

“Vance, I thought you were dead.”

His smile faded. “It doesn’t look like you ever needed me here.”

“You went to find your family?”

His hesitation was all the answer I needed. I watched his face closely, looking for something. The soul I’d caught a glimpse of before was locked away again under those dark, unreadable eyes, but there seemed to be a crack in the wall—a tiny trickle of uncertainty. He looked away. “Yes.”

“Did you find them? Are they all right?”

He nodded. “I smuggled them out. They’re headed where no one can ever use them again.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked softly.

He didn’t answer, but we both knew. Our eyes met again, and he seemed to be looking for something in mine. The hardness of the man gave way to the boy. He looked at me with a searching, pleading expression. I felt myself falling, totally and completely—like jumping out of a chopper but without the wing suit. I’d never felt this way with Dresden.

A flash of clarity brought me back to reality. Dresden. We’d gotten back together . . . hadn’t we? He was helping me, risking everything for me. For us.

Vance watched me carefully. “It’s Bike Boy, isn’t it? He’s your contact at the academy.”

“Yeah.” It was barely a whisper.

He pulled away, letting out a deep, frustrated breath. “Is he really what you want?”

“No.” The answer slipped out before I realized it, and I took a deep breath. “He was once, but now—I don’t know. Now that you’re here, it complicates things.”

His expression darkened. “I tend to do that, complicate things.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Vance. A week ago I had it all figured out, and then I met you, and what I’ve always wanted suddenly seemed so stupid. And now they’re trying to force me back into that dream, with Dresden again, and that’s not what I want anymore.”

“What do you want?” He threw his hands in the air. “Don’t think about it—just say it. Tell me exactly what you want, because frankly, nobody else is asking.”

“I’m not—I don’t—”

“You know what I want?” He gripped my shoulders. “I want us to run away. Right now. Leave all this nonsense about attacking the palace behind, and let all those mindless citizens go on with their dreary lives. You don’t have to fight for them, Treena. Mills showed me how to get my family out, but I couldn’t leave without you.”

My mouth worked soundlessly, as if my brain and my lips were disconnected. Vance could have escaped, and yet he came back for me. He wanted me. Vance was alive, and he wanted me to leave with him. I tried to process his words, but it was all too incredible to believe.

It was as if someone held a precious jewel in front of me, one that I’d never dreamed I could actually own, and my arms were tied so I couldn’t take it. After all this, there was no way I could abandon my people now. I couldn’t let Tali’s death and Jasper’s sacrifice mean nothing, not when I had the opportunity to change things. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. The system is rigged against you—you couldn’t succeed, even with half the nation on your side. Mills only has a few hundred followers, Treena. You’re going up against the empress, the commander, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. There’s only one way this can end.” His expression was pleading now, and I felt a stab of pain somewhere between my heart and my stomach. “Please. Come with me. They’ll figure things out when we’re gone, maybe come up with a better plan that actually has a chance.”

I sighed. “I know it sounds crazy, but I have to do this. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering.” Wondering if I could do it. Wondering what happened to my mom, to Konnor and his ambitions, to Jasper in the hospital. To the people I had abandoned. “I wish you could understand. I do care about you, and I want to be with you. But I can’t run away, not yet.”

He folded his arms and nodded as if he’d expected that answer. I could almost feel him slide his protective wall back into place. When he spoke, it was the voice of a stranger. “Fair enough.” He turned and put his hand on the stair rail, but paused. “I also came to deliver a message, in case you decided to stay. It’s from my clan.”

“Your clan? You met with them?”

“The few that I could find. Most are scattered, but there are about eighty who have managed to congregate. They’ve set up a communication system using the smugglers. It took some talking, but they agreed to help you ascend. On two conditions.”

“If I let them go home,” I replied.

He nodded.

“Of course. If we succeed, they’re free to go. Not just your clan but anyone who wants to leave. What’s the second condition?”

Vance watched me for a moment, his expression hard. “That I can’t tell you. It’s a condition for me, not for you, and nothing you’d care about anyway.”

I longed to throw my arms around him, to tell him that all I wanted was him, that I would follow him anywhere. That my world had died with him when the chopper exploded. But something told me that would only make this harder. The thought of him leaving and never coming back made me scramble to say something, anything. “Don’t leave. Please.”

His expression slipped, just a little, and exposed the pain beneath, but he covered it quickly. “My window of opportunity is rapidly closing. It’s now or never.”

“Your clan needs you. I need you.”

“Believe me, no one knows better what my clan needs. I’ll think of a way to get them out, and we’ll find a better place to settle, far away from NORA’s grasp.”

A realization dawned. “You’re next in line with your dad gone, aren’t you?”

“Would have been.” The look of naked pain on his face was enough to break down my defenses and send me running into his arms. “I really do hope you win, Treena. Be careful.” He whirled and stormed downstairs.

Then it was quiet again, except for the annoying sound of birdsong in the plastic trees.

41

I stopped by the Red hospital later that day, which was basically a small house with a converted second floor. They let me in but told me to keep it quick. Jasper lay flat in bed, shirtless and pale, a sheet tucked up under his arms. His eyes were closed. I sat softly on the chair at his bedside, unsure whether to wake him. In case things went badly for me tonight, I wanted to say one last good-bye. Instead, I sat and studied the man I would have called Dad.

He still had a thick head of chestnut-brown hair, although it was graying at the edges. The skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes. This man had chosen to abandon me and my mother. We shared the same DNA, but nothing about our lives was the same. Now that I’d found him, it seemed the fates were determined to keep us apart again. Even if he lived, I probably wouldn’t survive the night. It was strange, how rational that thought was. Or maybe I was just numb at this point.

Jasper’s hand suddenly grasped mine, and I nearly jumped in surprise. His head turned a bit to look at me. “Hi, Ametrine.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

“Fantastic.” A twinkle in his eye told me that he still had his humor at least. He took a painful breath. “The protest?”

“Tonight. Mills said nighttime meant less civilian casualties. I need to get ready soon, actually. I just wanted to check on you first.” How can I lead an army by myself? Why did you have to get hurt?

“Your . . . stone.” He was looking at my necklace. I usually kept it hidden under my uniform, but the top collar of my uniform was unzipped just enough that he could see it. “She gave it—to you.”

“Shh, don’t talk,” I said, grasping the stone with my other hand. “Yes, Lanah gave it to me on my Rating Day—the day my life turned upside down.”

His face grew serious, and then he struggled to speak. “Not . . . just . . . your Rating.”

“Jasper, it’s okay. You don’t have to speak.”

He spat the words out more forcefully. “Your Rating. Not just because . . . you’re the successor.”

I paused. “What do you mean?”

He took a moment to gather his strength. When he finally spoke, it was a whisper. “Your stone. It’s ametrine.”

I didn’t understand at first. “My stone?”

“Yes.” He stared at me as if hoping I would understand.

“Wait. Lanah said you wanted me to be named Ametrine. After this stone?”

His lips curved upward in a soft smile.

“Is that because you’re named after a stone too?”

Jasper’s smile widened. And then I knew. The realization hit me like a punch to the gut. It was true—Peak’s posterity were all named after stones. Tali’s mother had been right after all. “You’re a descendent of Richard Peak.”

He let his breath out slowly and gave a slight nod. “So are . . . you.”

I sat back. It didn’t change anything, but it was a stunning realization just the same. I had accused Jasper of selfishness and abandonment, and here he was, trying to help me understand our family’s legacy. “You left us because the empress offered you power, right? Because she was young and beautiful. Or was there more to it than that?”

He just watched, as if waiting.

“There’s got to be more. Is it what she would have done to us, if you refused?” The look in my father’s eyes was something I’d never forget. It was a mixture of pain, sorrow, and relief. He didn’t have to say it. “She would’ve sought Lanah out, taken out the competition. Just like she’s doing to me now.”

“Yes.”

Of course. I thought he loved me, my mom had said. I guess I was wrong. But he had loved her, and sacrificed a lot for her. She just didn’t know it.

How long had he wanted me to understand this? How long had he beaten himself up over it? And I’d blamed him for my low Rating. It wasn’t him at all.

It was all her. The empress. The imposter. What we were doing was right. She had destroyed my family. She’d caused hundreds of deaths and separated families, all in the name of her little empire. But there was something she didn’t know. A Peak had started the Rating system, and a Peak would remove it.

“I love you, Ametrine.” His eyes glistened with unspoken emotion.

“I love you too, Dad,” I said, realizing that it was absolutely true.

42

I cursed and retreated back into the shadows. A slow-moving vehicle hummed by, and the sidewalk went bright for a moment, then dark again. The entire monitor force seemed to be patrolling tonight, complicating my grand escape. I’d be miles past the wall by now on any other night. If Mills thought his protest tonight was a secret, he was a fool.

Wishing I could stretch my legs, I arched my back and looked up. Despite the streetlights, the sky was a deep black. Not a star in sight. I wondered how many citizens had even seen the stars in their lifetime. They’d probably never felt the need to gaze upward, had never weighed their singular insignificance against the magnitude of the universe.

Treena had, on our early morning walk. She would have loved my favorite stargazing spot up Lightning Creek trail, overlooking what had once been a fertile green valley. That would never happen now.

She made her choice. It’s her loss, not mine.

When the patrol vehicle was out of sight, I turned back to my escape plan. I’d been here dozens of times, but the massive wall was still daunting. Eleven feet thick and thirty feet tall, the metal slab extended the entire length of NORA’s eastern border. During the day, it reflected the hot sun like a giant mirror. Even now, in the cool part of night, it probably radiated heat. The electricity buzzing through the metal was deafening in the silence of a sleeping city.

Citizens thought it was to keep outlanders out. It was probably the other way around.

I pulled into the shadows again, letting out a long, frustrated breath. I hadn’t planned past this point. Any citizen trying to escape over the wall would be punished with their techband. Since I didn’t have one anymore, that wasn’t an issue, but I still had to deal with the electricity. There had to be a weakness, some way to disable the current and climb over. And I had to do it soon, before my clan realized I was escaping.

Laughter echoed through the empty streets. I carefully stuck my head out from behind the corner, just enough to watch the border wall guards shuffle off, replaced by two new ones—a heavy-set man and a tall, athletic-looking woman. I squinted as they took their positions. The soft glow of the light behind them illuminated what I’d never noticed in the daylight. A door. It was nearly invisible, but the shadows revealed some kind of handhold that looked like a doorknob in the surface of the wall’s metal.

I crouched, then shuffled around the corner, ducking behind a parked vehicle just as another patrol transport came by. Its headlights illuminated much of the road, making the shadows contort and rotate, and then it turned down the next darkened street.

The female guard swatted at her partner. “Quit looking so nervous. It took me forever to convince Blare to put us together. Just act natural.”

The man beside her grunted. “Not too hard considering nobody’s even told me what’s going on.”

“Oh, quit pouting. I only know the plan because Mills needed exact coordinates for his stupid missile. I’m the only one on the force who was qualified.”

I’d started to creep closer, but at the mention of Mills, I froze midstep.

“He really has one, then? I thought he was just pretending,” the man said.

“Far as I know. Not sure if it still works, though. I guess it doesn’t matter whether it’s seventy years old or brand-new—you shoot it, and it’ll explode somewhere.”

“Hopefully not in his face.”

“Why not? We’ve already been paid.”

More laughter. Without realizing it, I had retreated back to the parked transport. A missile? Mills’s plan didn’t involve a missile, and even if it did, why would the border guards know about it?

“What I don’t understand,” her partner said, “is why he hasn’t shot it yet. What could he be waiting for? Every second, the chances are higher that he’ll be detected.”

“That’s the genius of it. Mills sent some kind of distraction, something sure to draw the empress out. Probably the whole Council, too. In one strike he’ll take out both branches of government. ‘Like fish in a barrel,’ he said.”

The man paused. “Fish in a barrel? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No idea. Must be an Integrant thing.”

I sat against the cold metal of the vehicle, anger burning through my body, hot and thick. Mills was an Integrant. Or rather, he was an outlander, and probably far outside the borders right now. That would explain why the guy refused to appear in person at meetings. How convenient that we had agreed to run his rebellion for him. All he had to do was sit back and orchestrate it all, with no risk to himself. Brilliant, actually. He’d throw the whole country into chaos by taking out the entire government at once. And its successor.

Treena.

“So when are we supposed to let him back in?” the man asked. “When the missile strikes?”

“Shh! Here comes another patrol. You don’t want to get thrown in prison tonight, believe me.”

“Hey, you’re the one who brought it up.”

I couldn’t understand the rest of what they said. My breathing came hard and fast, and rage muddled my thoughts. Treena. She thought she was saving people, making peace. Mills obviously had other plans for her and the hundreds of innocent citizens supporting her. A lot of people would die tonight.

But both sides hated me—NORA’s citizens because I was a red and an outlander, my clan because I had changed sides. I didn’t belong in either world. If I was going to escape, the chaos that would ensue tonight would be the perfect cover. I could overpower the guards in seconds and escape out the door to freedom.

Keep them safe, my father had said. His last words. Well, I’d done that, practically selling my soul to NORA for two years and then making that stupid agreement with Mills—he’d arranged for my family to be smuggled out yesterday. They were already outside the wall somewhere, waiting for me to join them and start a new life. If we went far enough east, no one would ever find us. We could survive on our own.

If I stayed, I knew what my clan would do. In a small settlement where people depended on each other so much, treason was unforgiveable. I’d be executed.

Keep them safe.

Them.

My memory was clear, the words unforgettable. Dad hadn’t said to keep my family safe. He had said to keep “them” safe. Was he referring to his people or his family? If it was the clan, I had failed miserably. Even if I hadn’t spent the past two years rounding them up, I had just talked the remainder of my clan into joining the rebellion. They would be arriving at the square any minute, completely unaware that a missile was aimed in their direction. What was left of our clan would be decimated.

Keep them safe.

I had once asked Dad what it was like to be the clan leader. He gave me a thoughtful expression, set his book down on his lap, and said, “A leader doesn’t just order people around, Vance. He gives himself to his people, sacrifices his wants for the needs of everyone. My grandfather died serving in the Old American War. When the dust died down, my father built this settlement and welcomed any who wanted to join us in peace. I’m proud to call myself a Hawking, and you’ll make an even better leader someday.”

That future had been torn from me. NORA had nearly succeeded in taking who I was, but they couldn’t alter my DNA. If Dad was here now, there was no question what he would choose.

I crept away, waiting for the sound of footsteps and shouting behind me, but the night was still. The square was over twelve miles away.

Once I turned the corner, I took off running.

43

This was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

I adjusted my sequin-lined uniform dress as we walked, chilled by the cool night air and incredibly self-conscious. Mills had insisted I look the part of the successor tonight. I felt ridiculous. He’d placed me at the head of our mob—although the 230 worried faces behind me looked more like a death march than a mob—and insisted I make myself visible to unite the people. It wasn’t going so well.

We’d started at the store, shouting “Treason” to wake up the neighbors. Now, several kilometers later, our chanting had become a bit more subdued. Even our whispers echoed sharply against the hard surfaces of the roads and buildings. Mills had said our march would impassion and ignite the people, but nobody came out as we passed. Instead, we’d grown accustomed to the sound of locks being shoved into place. We were on our own.

A twelve-year-old boy marched behind me, unable to suppress a grin. He’d bounced along the entire way so far, excited to be a part of the excitement. To the other side of me was a gray-haired woman, and it was obviously painful for her to walk. She should have been relaxing in a comfortable chair, safe at home, rather than facing an uncertain future.

I glanced behind us, eyeing the patrol vehicle that had been tailing us for two kilometers now. Not only were we breaking curfew, but we were obviously headed for the palace. Why weren’t they confronting us? That worried me even more. Mills’s brilliant plan to “peaceably protest” now felt like a death wish, and dread permeated every muscle of my body.

We came to an intersection with a blinking light. I paused, then chuckled and marched through. What was a traffic law at this point? I was breaking pretty much every law possible, and there was no going back now. My followers had cut their bands off tonight with Jasper’s tool. That alone ensured a work-camp sentence at the very least, and at the most—well, I didn’t want to think about that. I rubbed my wrist again, wondering if I would ever get used to the exposed skin.

Another patrol vehicle pulled up and flanked us on the other side, and then another. They matched our speed like shiny escorts. Adrenaline pulsed through my body, and the chanting behind me was replaced by murmuring. We were only two blocks away now. I’d ridden this way in a transport on my first day in the city, gaping and nervous at the adventure that had awaited me. It seemed ages ago.

“Everyone get ready,” I announced, although there was nothing to left to do. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves except to show that we were peaceful. That was critical, Mills had said. We were victims, not attackers. Someone waited at the square with Dresden’s camera, ready to capture our grand entrance and show the nation our struggle for justice. Everyone nodded at my words and steeled themselves, and a girl my age moved to stand beside me. She was about the same height as Tali.

Please, I thought silently. Don’t let me lead these brave people to their deaths.

When we turned into the square, I stumbled to an abrupt stop. There they were—hundreds and hundreds of soldiers and monitors. The city had gathered its forces to protect the palace, just as Mills had predicted. Every single person was armed and had their weapons aimed straight at us. I glanced around but didn’t see any camera.

“Close in behind them,” a deep voice growled from within the enemy lines. The soldiers obeyed, and soon we were completely cut off from escape.

“Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air,” a voice said, the echo from the amplifiers bouncing across the hardness of the stone square. “Now.”

“We have no weapons,” I said. My voice wobbled, and I cleared my throat. “We come in peace to protest the empress’s illegal occupation of the throne.”

A figure emerged. A dozen guards surrounded him, so it was hard to tell who it was until he stopped in front of me. It was the commander himself, looking as fresh as if it were the middle of the day.

“You are all under arrest,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the stunned silence of the group. “Those who put their weapons on the ground now will be treated less harshly than those who don’t. The rest of you—put your hands on the backs of your heads.”

Clattering sounds echoed across the square as several rebels dropped stunners on the ground and raised their arms. They had just made me a liar. I completely understood, though. If I’d owned an illegal weapon, I probably would have brought it too. Not that it would make any difference now.

“That’s what I thought,” Denoux said. He motioned his soldiers forward, and an entire contingent broke off from the main group. They immediately kicked our stunners out of the way and started securing cuffs.

“Where’s the camera?” someone whispered behind me. “They’re supposed to be broadcasting this, right?”

A quick glance at our captors told me all I needed to know. There was no broadcast, nor was there a camera. The citizens would never know what had gone on here tonight. I’d just walked everyone right into a trap.

Mills had pored over every detail of our protest. There was no way he hadn’t anticipated this. So why hadn’t he warned us or given us a backup plan? Maybe he would descend at the last second in a dramatic rescue.

I thought back to that first time I’d met Mills, when Jasper had said something about his questionable past. If he was really working for NORA and wanted to crush the rebellion, this was a great way to do it. Fates. I’d fallen right into his hands.

“We’re dead!” a woman exclaimed. “It’s all over now.”

“Mills will come through for us,” a man said confidently. “We just have to play along.”

“You’re a fool. We’re alone.”

“Who’s the fool? This was all a setup, and you walked into it same as anybody else.”

The voices rose in pitch and intensity until I couldn’t understand them anymore. A few of them decided to fight back and stormed the soldiers. They just ended up in an unconscious heap on the ground. One guy in his fifties took down three soldiers with his fists before he was clubbed. He lay motionless on his stomach, a puddle of dark liquid pooling around his head. The guard who had done it simply stepped over him to the next person.

Rough hands grabbed me from behind and yanked my arms down, and then there was the all-too-familiar feel of steel on my wrists. Luckily, there was no techband to connect it to, which meant I could still move without pain. I considered fighting back for a moment. But then something shoved me forward so hard I tripped and landed on my knees with a startled yelp.

“Wait,” Denoux said. “Bring me that one.”

The guard lifted me up by the back of the collar like an unruly kitten, then practically dragged me over to the commander, who looked puzzled for a moment. When he saw my face, recognition finally dawned. “The wanted girl. I assumed you’d be involved somehow. An interesting outfit for such a night, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t agree more, but I met his gaze. “The empress is the one breaking laws, not us. You have no right to treat us this way.”

“No right? Bringing an army to the palace gates, especially at this time of night, breaks a multitude of laws. If you had applied to plead your case with the Council at their next meeting, you may have had a chance—”

“And I would have been arrested,” I cut in, “and then silently executed. You know it’s true.”

The haughty amusement in his face was now a cold, dark glare. People probably didn’t interrupt him often. “You thought this would bring about a different outcome?” He chuckled and turned to the man on his right. “Take her to the political prison, and inform Her Majesty that the girl has been captured.”

“What about the rest of them, sir?”

“Run the food test to find out which ones are confirmed smugglers. The rest can go to the work camps.”

“Yes, sir.” The soldier put his fist over his heart and strode toward me. He gripped the back of my neck and shoved me just like the first guard had, but I managed to stay up this time.

“Commander!”

Denoux turned as a runner shoved his way through the crowd. It was one of the empress’s personal guards, a stone-faced guy with wide shoulders. He pulled up in front of Denoux. “Her Majesty orders that the girl be delivered to the gates. She wants to speak to her.”

I should have been terrified, or at least scared, but my mind was simply numb. Empty.

All our hard work and I was right back at the beginning, in the empress’s hands. Would she execute me publicly like Tali, to make a statement? Or would she lead me to the shadows and do it in secret?

The commander gave an exasperated sigh and nodded. Each soldier took an elbow and guided me through the chaos of prisoners and soldiers, monitors and gate security guards.

The gate looked like wrought iron, but I could tell by a soft buzz that it was electrified. It opened automatically when we reached it, swinging outward, and I gazed up at the palace. Such a beautiful building to be at the center of so much strife. Hundreds of lights shone on its surface, which gave off a strange orange hue.

“Should’ve known it would be you,” the empress said. It took a second to see her through the shadows, but there she was, leaning casually against the guard post. “I could sense a certain rebellion in you, a stubbornness, on that day we met. Although I never thought your treason was quite this . . . extreme.”

“Forgive me for not dying,” I spat. “I’m sure three failed murder attempts can get pretty inconvenient.”

“Higher positions require tougher choices, and that’s something you’ll never understand.”

“Because you’ll finish the job yourself?”

“Not necessarily.” She motioned for someone to join her. Two bulky guards stepped forward, supporting someone between them. The figure was incredibly skinny and shook as if barely able to stand. A gray sack covered the face and neck. The empress put one manicured hand on the person’s shoulder. “There’s something I want you to do, and this prisoner is why you’re about to cooperate.” She whipped off the sack. The prisoner blinked at the sudden light.

I felt my knees buckle as I stood there, gaping. Her body was broken and shaky, her head bald, and her face bruised almost beyond recognition. She looked exhausted, scarcely able to hold herself up. But I’d know my friend anywhere. “Tali?”

“Hi, Treen,” her hollow voice said.

This wasn’t happening. I’d watched her die that night, and then dozens of times afterward in my dreams—stumbling forward, glaring at the camera, the fire of rebellion in her eyes. There was only a spark of it now, but it was there. She could hardly hold her head up to meet my gaze.

Of course. The Raters knew everything, so they would know Taliyah was my best friend. The empress had turned down the intensity of Tali’s punishment a bit, allowed her to suffer nearly to death, then stopped punishment mode when she’d blacked out. It did explain how she’d lasted longer than her friends on the broadcast. But it didn’t explain what the point of it all was.

“You tortured her.” My voice shook with barely controlled rage.

“Insurance,” the empress said. “A backup plan. I knew she may come in handy if my assassins failed.”

I felt my eyes widen at her bluntness. She was surrounded by guards and didn’t seem to care what they overheard. Her mouth curved into a smile. “Oh yes, they know, Ametrine. They’re loyal to me. You don’t think I’m the first ruler determined to secure the throne, do you? Some reports say Emperor Ashford executed sixty-one people he deemed a threat to his position.”

My mind raced, processing every horrible word. How many people had this woman killed? I didn’t stand a chance against such brutality. I had to buy myself some time. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why make me a red and have me killed? You could have easily given me one handicap, or even two. Nobody would have suspected a thing, and I wouldn’t have been a threat.”

Her lips pursed as she considered the question. “Someone I loved once betrayed me, and it made me realize how much hurting you would hurt him.”

“My father.”

“Jasper. At first he was just a brilliant coworker with advantageous bloodlines. I knew we could be powerful together. And we were.” Her expression was strangely vulnerable, but it soon turned sour. “I thought it was real until I caught him looking at his wife’s image one day. He didn’t know I was there, but the look on his face was so gentle, so tender, that I knew what we had was a lie. All those years—gone in an instant.”

“So you threw him in prison, then tried to destroy his daughter?”

“Being empress is a tough job, Ametrine,” she snapped. “Since you’ll never experience it, I’ll enlighten you. Imagine dedicating your life to a group of people who admire you but then plot to overthrow you at the same time. With every bow, people scheme how to take your place. Your own friends and family members see you as competition.” She was so close she looked down on me now, a towering statue of disapproval. “You can’t even trust those who profess to love you. No, empress is not a title for the weak, and definitely not one for a teenage girl fresh out of Level Three school. So I’ll tell you how this goes. You will announce on a national broadcast that you lied, that any claim you had to the throne was fabricated, and then accept punishment. You will also turn over any other smugglers you’ve been hiding.”

I glanced at Tali. Her head was still down, her body tense. I knew she was hanging on every word. “You’ll kill me either way, so why would I agree to that?”

“Your little friend here. She’s a resilient one, but she’s been through a lot the past few days. It won’t take much more to break her.” The empress grabbed Tali’s hair, tipping her head back. Tali gasped.

It sent a painful ache through me down to my toes. She was alive, but barely. Tali was in this position because of me, and rescuing her was finally in my power. I’d wished for the opportunity to save her a hundred times. It seemed the fates had a very twisted sense of humor.

The empress held Tali in front of me like a prize, but it was about much more than threats. Giving up meant selling out the hundreds of people who had supported me, those who hoped for a better life and had made a stand. Hundreds of families waited silently in their homes tonight, waiting for fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters to come home. Those people believed that I could change their children’s futures. What kind of leader would I be if I gave in so easily? Was one person’s life worth the suffering of hundreds, even if it was Tali?

This was the type of decision an empress made, I realized. The worth of human life, one against hundreds, number against number. This was the very decision Vance had faced when the commander had offered him a deal—his family for his clan.

I was no better because there was no way I could turn Tali over to the empress. If it meant her safety, I’d arrest the rebels myself, one by one.

Tali’s eyes met mine, narrow and determined. Her expression seemed to say, “Don’t you dare.”

I fingered my necklace, familiar and comforting. Purple and gold, two colors in one stone. I thought of Vance, with one foot in each world and yet living in neither. My father, Jasper, protecting his family in his own way. My mother, turning away and burying her problems. There was a time to run and a time to fight.

Tali gave an imperceptible shake of her head. I could almost hear the words in my mind.

Let me fight.

I settled my gaze on the empress. My stare seemed to unnerve her, and a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes gave me my chance. I thought of Vance and the father he’d lost. I thought of Jasper and the years this woman had taken away from us. I thought of her cold new punishment law, the poison pills, the lies and manipulation. I gathered all the anger within me at her injustices, at all the pain she’d caused, and my body began to tremble with rage.

At my expression, the empress took a step backward. I leaped and hooked her leg with mine, toppling us both. The empress lay on the ground, lips parted in a silent gasp, her dress twisted in a very unladylike fashion.

The guards were only a split second behind. One aimed his stunner at me, but Tali lowered her head and barreled toward him, hitting him right in the gut. He threw his arms around her and they tumbled to the ground together, Tali biting and kicking for all she was worth. I stepped aside just as a huge blast whipped by, and the other guard who’d tried to stun me growled. I didn’t wait for him to aim again—I rolled toward the empress.

“No!” she snapped, scrambling backward to get the footing to stand, and then she winced and glanced down at her ankle. I followed Tali’s lead and knocked her back down with my head.

There was a shout from somewhere and the sound of heavy footsteps headed toward us. I didn’t have much time. Both guards aimed their stunners at me, and I rolled closer to the empress to discourage them from shooting. She took that opportunity to wrap both hands around my throat and situated herself above me on her knees.

“Look what you’ve turned me into!” she growled. “You’ve ruined everything.”

Pain crushed my windpipe, and I saw black spots flashing across the empress’s crazed expression. I had a matter of seconds left. I heard Tali grunt, and then a guard shouted something, but my mind was swimming. Think, Treena.

The empress’s techband caught my eye, silver and glittering in jewels like her uniform. If only I could get punishment mode to work.

She leaned forward, closer, and began to whisper. “You should have taken my deal. I had a much better death planned for you, but this will do. Good-bye, child.”

No. It’s still time to fight.

I gathered all the strength my weakened body contained, and with a mighty heave, bucked my hips upward. It unbalanced her enough that she broke contact. Just as she sat up, I swung my legs around and kicked. My foot connected with her forehead.

A strangled scream came from the empress as her hands shot to her head, and then she started to convulse. It took a few seconds for me to realize what I’d done. The implant. It was electronically connected to her techband. The band itself didn’t have punishment mode, but apparently her implant did.

The guards, who had been waiting uncertainly for a chance to attack, now watched in horror as the empress thrashed on the ground, writhing and kicking like a madwoman. Then she curled up on her side, let out a long, quiet breath, and was still.

I coughed, sucking air, and stared at the empress in horror. Her chest didn’t rise.

“Hands up,” the guard said with a look of fear and aimed the stunner at me. I raised my arms, too numb to fight. Tali lay on her back several meters away. I held my breath, but then she turned her head and looked at me. A tired grin spread across her battered face, and I smiled back.

It was then that the world exploded.

44

I swiped a bike and sped through the city, but I was still far away when the missile shot overhead and disappeared into the distance. The explosion rocked the ground underfoot. I could almost hear the buildings around me rattling on their foundations. The streetlights flickered and died. I swore and pedaled faster.

Before long the air was heavy with dust. If it had been daylight, the sky would probably be solid gray. A fit of coughing forced me to stop and tear part of my sleeve to use as a mask. Citizens lined the streets in their nightclothes, their faces lined with worry. They looked toward the square, as if wanting to investigate but afraid of what they would find. I tried without success to shove my way through the crowds. Finally I gave up and ditched the bike, sprinting as fast as the crowd of spectators would allow me to.

I finally rounded the corner to the square, my lungs desperate for air. Smoke and dust rained on the still mounds of what looked like thousands of bodies of both civilians and soldiers. It was all too familiar. A gray-and-black sky, an eerie silence. My stomach lurched when I saw a woman, half her body blown away, try to push herself up with a groan. The sounds of soft moaning and sobbing filled the darkness. The only color was the red-orange flames scattered amidst the black-gray sky. Fire. It was always fire.

I was too late. If I hadn’t tried to run, I could have done something.

No. If I hadn’t run, I’d be one of these dead bodies. At least now I had a chance to look for Treena. I tried to force myself forward, but my feet seemed cemented in place. There probably wasn’t much left of her. Maybe it was better not to know, not to add her to the charred bodies that haunted my dreams.

“Help me,” a teenage boy mumbled and reached out his hand. He was pinned under a chunk of concrete, a different shade of black than the rest of the carnage around us. I clasped his hand and tried to pull. It was no use. The concrete was too heavy.

I glanced around for help and noticed a group of people standing between two buildings. They seemed frozen in place.

“Hey!” I shouted to them, then tore the cloth off my face. “Come help me!”

A man stepped out, and then two women. They took notice of the injured boy and trotted over. I waved to the rest of the group, but they hesitated before following. As they emerged, the group surveyed the damage, their faces registering a range of shock and horror. Some turned and hurried away. Others sank to their knees, their fists grasping shards of glass and dusty broken pieces of metal and rock.

The man reached me, shadows from the firelight flickering across his face, and I realized who it was. Anton. The women didn’t look familiar, but a few of the others did. The remnants of my clan were here, alive. A wave of relief swept over me.

“You take that side,” I told them and motioned to the concrete slab. “On three.”

We counted and gave a mighty heave. The cement didn’t lift at first, but with enough pressure to the corner, it finally gave and fell to the side. Anton jumped out of the way as it crashed to the ground and cracked apart. The teenage boy moaned, and one of the women knelt to examine him.

“We need to help,” I told Anton. “The city won’t recover from this for a while. They probably drew in their entire monitor force, and now there’s nobody left to help the survivors. They’ll have to send in forces from other cities. So right now, we’re it.”

“Or we can run while they’re distracted,” Rutner’s son Gavis said.

“You can,” I agreed. “But you won’t, will you?”

Most of them didn’t look at me, but a couple of them shook their heads and picked their way through the debris, covering their noses and mouths with their hands. Soon the square began to wake up with shouts of “Over here!” and “Help me lift this!”

Anton stood with hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. “I thought you’d run, Hawking.”

“I almost did. But I couldn’t abandon the clan again.”

“It’ll take more than lifting some cement to convince them of that.”

“I know. But it’s a start. I need your help, Anton. Will you split the volunteers into groups? Send each group to cover a different corner of the square and work toward the middle. Move the survivors over there, by the road, so they’re ready to transport when the emergency workers arrive. I’ll be back in a minute.” I turned and began making my way through the wreckage, half-expecting Anton to try to arrest me. Instead, he stared after me in disbelief.

It was impossible to tell who was who in the darkness. Each body was covered in gray dust and dirt broken up only by the dark blood splattered everywhere. “Treena!” I shouted, my voice echoing through the heavy air. “Can you hear me?” There was nothing but the groans of the injured, and more hands reached to me as I passed.

An elderly woman sat on an overturned piece of stone, head in her hands. “They took her through the palace gates.” A fit of coughing racked her body, and she turned away.

“Thanks.” I waded through the mess and past what had once been an impenetrable stone wall. The missile had struck the southwest wing of the palace, exposing several floors, which looked like my sisters’ dollhouse. Thick black smoke billowed from the inside. The fire cast a menacing glow on the wreckage. Most of the damage was centered where the palace’s flower garden had been, and now it was a charred, smoking crater. The rebels in the square would have been safe if not for the tall buildings that had come down around them.

I stared at the palace in dismay. They took her inside, most likely. But where? Had she made it to the other end of the building before the missile hit?

Before I made it to the main doors, a pile of bodies caught my eye. Several pairs of legs, mangled and lumped together, lay heaped up against the front wall. Through the dust, I saw the navy-blue corner of a palace guard’s uniform. I rushed over and started turning over bodies. Guard. Another guard. And then there was skin and a slender leg partly covered by sequined cloth. I shoved the rest of the bodies aside, and there she was, curled up in a ball like a cat. She lay still as death, her face pale beneath the streaks of black and matted blood in her hair.

“Treena,” I said quickly. “Can you hear me?” I took her hand and discovered it was still warm and soft. I felt the side of her slim neck for a pulse. Weak, but it was there. I put my ear to her mouth and felt her breath against my cheek.

“You are the luckiest girl alive,” I muttered. I lifted her and cradled her head against my chest. She didn’t even stir. Treena was alive, but she needed immediate medical attention. She’d get it if I had to carry her across the city to the hospital myself.

“I said I’d protect you,” I told her. “I’ve never failed to deliver on a promise so many times in my life.”

My foot caught on something and I nearly tripped. Steadying Treena in my arms, I glanced downward. It was a body covered in gray debris and twisted unnaturally. The head was bald and bloody. The face was bruised, although some of the bruises were in various stages of healing, and thick dark eyelashes framed the feminine features. She looked familiar, although I couldn’t place her. The strangest thing, though, was her expression. Her lips curved upward in a peaceful smile, her eyes softly closed in death.

I made my way back through the entrance, wondering how my father had felt as he died. I had to believe he’d felt a measure of peace amidst his violent end, knowing he was protecting those he loved.

The square was filled with volunteers now. Anton had taken charge, directing groups this way and that. The area near the street was nearly full of survivors already, some sitting and others spread out across the concrete. An emergency transport pulled up, its bright lights stabbing through the gray haze. I smiled to see Integrants and NORA citizens working together, calling out to one another and checking each body for signs of life. Reds, yellows, and greens, together as equals. Today it wasn’t about the numbers or even the place we’d come from. Today, it was about people.

Maybe there was hope for us after all.

45

I was floating in the air when the chopper was hit. It burst into flame and fell past me, a burning skeleton of metal, its blades still spinning wildly. Dresden sat in the driver’s seat, his body charred, his head turned toward me as the tangled mess descended around me. Vance stood in the door, the wind whipping his messy hair. He watched me, his expression sad, and I ached to pull him close and lose myself in his arms. But before I could move, he jumped. As he fell past me, arms outstretched, I felt that something was wrong. Then I saw it. He had no wing suit or chute.

I woke up screaming.

“Shh, Ametrine, it’s all right,” a familiar voice whispered. He put a comforting hand on my arm.

My breath came fast as I took everything in. “Dad?”

“I’m here. You’re safe, but you had some bleeding on your brain. Lie back down and take it easy.”

Safe? What a strange thing to say. I was in a large, brightly lit room with white walls and bright tile floors. I racked my brain but couldn’t remember much. My dad held my arm in a firm grip. He sat in a wheelchair and pain creased his eyes, but the only emotion I saw was concern.

It started to come back. The empress. Had I really killed her? It seemed surreal now, even though I hadn’t meant to take her life. An explosion. Images flew rapidly through my mind now, and I winced. Tali’s grim smile. I pushed it all away.

“You’re up, then?” I croaked. My throat hurt like the fates.

He chuckled. “If this counts as up, then, yes. I’m more worried about you. It was a little scary there for a while.”

I took a quick inventory of my body. My muscles ached, and I could feel the sting of a hundred cuts and bruises, but I could move everything with no problem. My head hurt, though, a deep and sore ache that tinged my vision. “What was the explosion?”

Dad swallowed hard, and his grip on my arm tightened. “I’m so sorry, Ametrine. I had no idea Mills would betray us. We were the best of friends once, and I assumed we could trust him, but it seems he had another agenda in mind. He ordered you to draw out the empress, then tried to blast you all to the fates. Maybe he thought destroying the entire government and its successor would bring NORA to its knees.” His face darkened. “Except that he murdered hundreds of people in the process. He played us all for fools.”

Hundreds. All those people, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who had entrusted their lives and their futures to me. Gone in a second. If the empress hadn’t drawn me away from the group, I would have died with them. It would’ve been fitting. Instead, they were dead and I was still alive. I thought back to that awful confrontation with the empress. “Wait. What about Tali, my friend? Is she here too?”

He hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

Pain gripped my heart like a hand squeezing it. My best friend was gone once again, and this time she wasn’t coming back. I remembered the intensity of her gaze, the communication that had passed between us. The smile that said we’d done the right thing. At least she’d died on her own terms this time.

She’d definitely gone out fighting.

“Have you seen Vance?” I asked quietly. “He was supposed to back us up with his clan, but I never saw any of them.”

He sat back in surprise. “You don’t know? I guess you wouldn’t.”

“Know what?”

“The Integrants arrived late and saved dozens of lives. Vance is the one who brought you to the hospital two days ago. He wouldn’t leave your side until Dresden sent him away this morning. His entire clan has been officially extradited.”

Each piece of information felt like an anvil to the head. I put a hand to my eyes and took a deep breath. “Extradited? You mean kicked out of the country?”

“Exactly. Although I wouldn’t call say ‘kicked out,’ exactly. They got what they wanted.”

“But you said Dresden sent him away. Isn’t Dres at the academy?”

Dad’s face tightened in anger. He spoke carefully. “That’s something your stepdad and Dresden need to explain to you. They’re on their way now.”

Someone tapped on the door, firm and sharp. Dad’s anger was quickly masked, and he wheeled himself backward. “Perfect timing. Come in.”

The door opened to reveal a tired but smiling Dresden. His uniform looked freshly laundered, his hair immaculate. His grin revealed a row of too-white teeth.

“Hi, Dres.”

“Hey, Treen. You look great.”

“You look awful,” I said. He grinned wider and hurried across the room to take Dad’s place at my side. I caught a whiff of clean soap smell.

“That’s so much better,” he said, brushing his fingers against my forehead.

I recoiled from his touch. “What are you doing?”

“979,” Dresden said. “It switched over this morning, while you were still out. I can’t begin to tell you how much better you look now. It finally reflects who you are.”

I reached up to my forehead, feeling the slight impression of the implant beneath the skin. Who I am. But if I didn’t know that, how could the Raters? How could a computer network know who I was, even? What kind of girl would blindly obey the laws, then organize a rebellion against the palace? Which girl was it that kissed Dresden, then turned around and kissed Vance? I lived in two different worlds, with two different guys, and now I didn’t know where I was anymore. “I don’t want to be Rated, Dres.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I’m serious. I don’t want to be a green or a red or a walking number. I just want people to look at me and see me.” Like Vance did. Like the Integrants did. “And I want others to have the same right.”

“Unfortunately,” Konnor said from the doorway, “the Standards don’t allow for exceptions, even at the top. Especially there.” He wore the uniform of a councilman, deep silver with six stripes on the arm. His nose was bandaged in heavy white gauze and tape, his face littered with red cuts.

“You were at the square,” I said.

“Of course. I had just been appointed to the Council. We were celebrating my appointment when you pulled your little stunt.” His eyes darkened, and I felt a chill. “None of us suffered more than a broken bone. Once the bomb hit, however, the guards took us into hiding for our safety.”

I stared at him. A flicker of doubt crossed his expression, but he hid it quickly behind a composed smile. He was lying. He had known I was in danger, and he’d chosen to hide.

“So I’m empress, then?” I asked. “Because I have some serious changes to make, and there’s no time to lose.”

The room went silent. Dad, who still sat in his wheelchair, could have bored a hole in my stepfather with his accusing gaze. Konnor and Dresden exchanged looks, and I could tell they were debating who should speak next. Dresden cleared his throat and stepped closer to me, taking my hand. “Treen, your dad—I mean, your stepdad—signed away your right to the throne.”

“What?” I jerked my hand away.

“You were in a coma,” Konnor said. “We didn’t know if you’d ever wake up, and the nation needed a leader. And we all know that politics aren’t your thing anyway.”

I stared at Konnor, dumbfounded. It was as if he were dangling me over the edge of the tower all over again. No, more like he’d shoved me off. My stomach rushed upward, and I tasted bile.

“Mr. Dowell did what was best for you, your family, and the country,” Dresden continued, only half talking to me now. “He convinced the Council to appoint me in your place, Treen. I’m honored that he would choose me.”

“Your boyfriend is number four, technically,” Konnor said, “but the other two ahead of him are on the verge of retirement anyway. It didn’t take much for the Council to approve. He’s an announcer and a social icon, so everyone is familiar with him already. He’s young enough to learn. And he has the Council to guide him in the right direction, of course.”

There wasn’t enough air in the entire room. It was as if the weight of their words pushed down on my chest, heavy and foreboding.

“This way,” Dresden said, “you can move into the palace with me when it’s finished. The smoke and fire damage was too bad to salvage much, so I’m making it bigger and fancier than ever before. Our union will strengthen the throne, Treena. We’ll be the most powerful couple NORA’s ever seen.”

I searched Dresden’s face. He eyed my Rating again, his smile too controlled. Would he ever look into my eyes again without seeing my number? Could we ever be like before as long as my Rating was higher than his?

I knew the answer. I’d known it for a long time now. Being with Dresden, even in a palace, would be like living in a dark, damp prison after I’d experienced flying.

Lanah stepped into the room and gave me a soft smile. When Konnor frowned at her entrance, her gaze shifted to the floor. He’d probably told her to wait outside until he sent for her. They wouldn’t want her in the room while they broke the news to me, of course. Jasper glanced from her to Konnor, and then back again, his expression closed.

“Say something, Treena,” Dresden said. He was all confidence in front of my parents, but I knew he wouldn’t leave until the biggest threat to his sovereignty was quashed. If I challenged Dresden’s authority, it would be me against NORA. I couldn’t do that again. I didn’t want to do it again.

“You’re exactly what the citizens would expect,” I finally said.

Dresden’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “I’m glad you feel that way. I’ll let you rest now. They’re converting a section of the Council Building to an apartment, so I’m going to oversee the preparations. That’s where we’ll live until the palace is rebuilt.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Then there’s the war council, and a million other things to do today.”

“Wait. War council?”

“Of course.” Dresden shrugged. “After that attack on the palace? You didn’t think we’d let that slide, did you? As of today, Integrants are considered the enemy. Any of them caught inside our borders will be shot. The empress shouldn’t have allowed them to set foot here in the first place.”

“But—but it wasn’t the Integrants who attacked!”

“To the people it was, Treen. It’s easier to peg something like this on a group than an individual. That way, if you never find that one person, someone still pays the price. I’m just doing what my people demand. As of today, we’re at war with those who live outside our borders, since it’s clear now that we can’t coexist.” He lifted my hand to his lips and gave it a peck, as if we’d been discussing or haircuts or shoe brands. “Get better soon.”

“Take care, Treena,” Konnor said with a smirk as he turned to follow Dresden. He’d never called me by my nickname before. Maybe he felt he could be nice now that he’d taken everything possible from me.

“Be alert,” Dresden said quietly to someone just outside the door. “And ask your boss why her techband hasn’t arrived yet. There’s no excuse for this kind of delay.” His footsteps disappeared down the hall.

A guard. Of course. Dresden had probably insisted on that, since it wouldn’t do to lose his greatest claim to power. He’d keep me rigidly within reach yet far enough away that he got the glory and made the decisions. He’d never agree to change the system that had gotten him there. He probably hadn’t even stolen the camera, I realized bitterly. He’d probably hired someone to take the risk for him, knowing all the while that he could step in as the hero when the time was right.

“Love you, sweetheart,” Lanah said, and then her gaze fell on Jasper. Her eyes went wide in surprise. He sat rigidly in his wheelchair, looking very much like a guilty child. The blood drained from her face, and she staggered out the door. Jasper stared at the empty doorway.

“She wasn’t expecting to see you,” I said.

“Obviously.”

“I want to be alone now.”

He sighed and turned his attention back to me. “I’m sorry about the way this turned out. It’s not the way I wanted it either. After all we’ve done, all the sacrifices we’ve made—well, let me just say that I hope you can forgive me someday. I used you every bit as much as Mills did, and I had no right. For what it’s worth, you would have made a fantastic empress.”

“Thanks, but please go. I need some time.”

He hesitated, then wheeled himself out. “She’s sleeping now,” he said to the guard. “Make sure she’s not disturbed.” The door closed.

I forced myself to sit up, and the headache returned full force. Sleep was the last thing I wanted right now. A neatly folded uniform sat on the side table. I unfolded it, noting the silver bands on both arms. What rank that was, I had no idea.

A strange weight toppled out onto the sheet. Curious, I dropped the uniform and felt around. My fingers closed on a cold, round object. My stone. The silver thread was gone, but I’d know it anywhere. Part purple, part gold. Tiny specks from within reflected against the light. Purple for NORA, but gold for something else. Someone else.

Suddenly I knew exactly who had placed it here and why.

I dressed quickly. The door wasn’t an option. I put the stone in my pocket and lifted the window open slowly. Warm outside air brushed my hair aside, and the window made a tiny squeak. I watched the door, but the guard didn’t rush in. Taking a deep breath, I put my head out the window and looked downward. My room was seven or eight stories up, and the evening shadows now darkened the empty street below. To my right, only two meters away, was a fire escape. I wanted to laugh with relief.

Placing one leg over the windowsill, I eased myself out and sat on the edge. The city spread out before me like a blanket of buildings, all painted a soft orange by the afternoon sunlight. It was nearly the same sight I’d seen at the top of the tower all those years ago. Fortunately, I was a very different person now.

There was only one place to go now. It would be a difficult and dangerous journey, but it was where I belonged.

“I’m coming, Vance,” I said, and took a leap toward the brightness of the sun.

46

I met my captors just past the wall.

Supposedly my mom and sisters were waiting at the largest of the potential settlement locations, a hidden meadow near Millennium Peak, with a creek and dark, rich soil for crops. It meant food and water, but if they thought they were safe there, they’d be disappointed. I knew better than anyone how easily NORA could find us if they ever decided to. And I wasn’t entirely convinced they wouldn’t. Either way, it was time to fulfill the second part of my bargain.

Anton had weaseled his way into the role of enforcer again. It was as if the missile attack had never happened. He sat casually on a rock, surrounded by ten thugs. They had thick facial hair, most caked with years’ worth of dirt and grime. The men stood as I approached, their backs loaded heavily with travel gear. A couple of them shot murderous looks in my direction.

“You actually came,” Anton said.

I shrugged. “Where would I go?”

“Back to your girlfriend. Or did you dump her because she lost the throne? Well, you’re here, so put your arms up.”

I resisted the urge to punch him in the nose and raised my hands. Four of the men aimed their stunners at my chest.

Anton stepped forward and cuffed my hands in front of me. Since I had no techband, these were simple chain cuffs, thin but sufficiently sturdy. It wouldn’t take long to get out of them. If necessary.

“His rights,” one of the men muttered. “Ain’t we supposed to arrest him proper-like?”

Another man spat, leaving a trickle of wetness on his gray beard. “Nah, he knows plenty about that. He’s arrested hundreds of innocent people, my wife and son among them.”

“Vance Hawking has no rights,” Anton announced, his voice cold. “He’s a traitor and a spy, and he can’t be trusted, no matter what he pretends. He’ll answer for his crimes as soon as we get back.” He yanked on my bonds, making me stumble. I’d been wrong about the cuffs. They didn’t use an electric punishment, but they’d been sharpened on the inside so that the metal bit into my wrists whenever I pulled against them. I took a reluctant step forward, and Anton grinned. “See? Good little pup. Maybe we’ll make something decent out of you yet.”

The group turned to leave, and I allowed myself one last look at the border wall, the sunlight reflecting almost painfully off its metal surface. A few concrete and steel buildings peered over it, and the sound of bicycle traffic hummed from the other side. If it weren’t for Anton’s group, I would have enjoyed the solitude of nine days’ travel before seeing another person. It seemed my last days of freedom had been taken from me, along with everything else that mattered.

I pushed away the thought that followed. Treena had her boyfriend, her Rating, and everything she’d ever wanted. My family was safe, my clan was gathering again, and they’d choose a new leader to protect them and decide my fate. Soon everything would be as it should.

“Your girlfriend was a pretty one,” Anton said. “If she wasn’t already taken, I might take a crack at her myself.” He yanked sharply on the chain. The metal bit into my wrists and I stumbled to my knees, ignoring the cold laughter of my escorts. With a growl, I jumped quickly to my feet and straightened to face Anton. His eyes widened slightly. After a moment he swallowed hard and looked away, keeping the chain slack this time. “All right, then. Time to go.”

The men shuffled away, giving me plenty of space to walk in the center. I had nine days of travel to plan my defense, to explain why I’d sacrificed their families for my own. Nine days of Anton’s comments and traveling and forcing Treena out of my head for good. Nine days of climbing ever higher, watching the trees close in and wondering whether I faced mercy or justice. I would kneel for now.

But whatever my fate, they would not see me kneel long.

I was a Hawking.

The End

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Call me strange, but I always enjoy reading the Acknowledgments section of books. It’s amazing many people are involved in the birth of a good story. Now that I’m on the other side of the page, I’d be ungrateful not to shine the spotlight on the amazing friends, family, and professionals who helped Numbers Game see the light.

I had many victims—er, volunteers—who stepped forward to beta read over the three years (and six drafts) it took to get this book finished. I’d like to thank Ashlei King, Geneen Jacobson, Sally Johnson, Melanie Auman, Randy Roberts (of YouTube fame), Kristina Roberts, the ever-encouraging Brad and Gayle Myler, and Scott and Lisa McDougle, who refused to let me set it away for long.

It’s an honor to be a member of two critique groups, and it’s an even greater honor that they tolerated my pleas for readings (sometimes multiple times) and yet still like me. At least, they haven’t kicked me out yet. These wonderful professionals and friends include Adrienne Monson, Karyn Patterson, Ruth Craddock, Mary King, Karen Pellett, Rachelle Monson, Jen Greyson, Kara Bosshardt, and the talented Roxy Haynie, whose beautiful writing style I will always covet. I’d also like to thank the lovely Cindy Hogan, whose expert advice will always be cherished, as well as Cindy Anderson and Susan Tietjen. Special thanks to Angela Woiwode, who gave me no less than fifteen manuscript pages of advice at one point. (It took a year and several tissue boxes, but I finally finished her revisions and it was a much stronger story. Thanks, Angela!)

I’m also grateful for my fabulous cover designer, Clarissa Yeo of Yocla Designs, and for the chapter graphics by my talented cousin, Corey Egbert. A big thank-you to Cindy C. Bennett for her beautiful formatting and her patience with my tricky ideas and timeline, as well as to Eschler Editing. Heidi Brockbank and Sabine Berlin tore the story apart and showed me how to put it back together, and I’m so glad they did. And finally, thanks to my Facebook pals, iWriteNetwork, Author’s Think Tank, and Master Koda for being my sounding board on cover designs, formatters and a dozen other things. We live in an amazing age where help is just seconds away, and at the very least, it’s good to know I’m not alone.

And finally, a giant hug to my family members for their unwavering support and love, and especially to my husband and children, who took Mac n’ Cheese, hundreds of “Just a minute” replies, and endless hours of post-dinner Netflix in stride. You are everything to me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REBECCA RODE is an award-winning author, journalist, and mother of four. She is the author of the inspirational book, How to Have Peace When You’re Falling to Pieces, and writes for Deseret News, KSL.com, FamilyShare, and Provo Daily Herald. However, her true love is writing for teenagers. She enjoys traveling, reading, and martial arts, and she has a ridiculous addiction to chocolate-banana shakes. Learn more at

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Swarmers

by

R.V. Doon

Evaney

Evaney Harwood’s first hint of doom came when the ground rumbled.

Her friends climbed the last hill while she returned to the Land Rover for migraine tablets. Everyone was pumped, believing they were nearing the cave. She didn’t want a headache to spoil Winn Eastman’s joy when he found it. Evaney glanced at her sparkling engagement ring and grinned. Winn’s proposal at the Autumn Inn last night surprised her. For the first time in her life, sheer happiness kept her awake.

The land shook again. She heard whispering. “Guys?” she called out.

Maybe not whispers. Evaney knelt and touched the earth. Impossible. The ground pulsed as if she stood over buried machinery or something electrical. She jerked her hand back and stood. Static electricity ran up to her wrist. Crazy. She massaged her arm until it faded.

Evaney studied the surroundings. Sunset intensified the gorgeous fall colors in rural northeast Alabama. She turned in a circle, scanning the valley and woods. Shadows made her jumpy and her muscles tensed for action. Blood thumped in her ears. The cool air carried a faint sulfurous odor, like burning hair. She shivered. A danger alarm from childhood buzzed in her head. Kooky or not, she had to warn them. Honk the horn?

The wind swirled and carried Jax’s shout, followed by group laughter. Their distant voices sounded excited and her hyped-up state eased. She laughed, feeling embarrassed. They were all seniors at Duke University—cutting classes, true, but here for a common good.

Evaney swallowed more CloudMist, a local bottled mineral water. She had dawdled long enough. Evaney jogged across a carpet of red and gold maple leaves to the base of the hill. Halfway up the incline the land rippled, and she lost her footing. She skidded on her bottom down to the base. Back in the woods, a tree toppled. The thud rattled her.

Anxious, she gazed up at the brow expecting to see worried friends peering back, but no one came. “Winn!” she yelled, brushing dirt from her pants. She knew this cave meant a second chance for Winn’s dying sister. Were they injured?

“A fool’s errand.” Grand Nessy’s grating voice popped into her mind. “It will be dark soon.”

Evaney bit her lip. She never thought of her grandmother and it spooked her. “Winn!”

The sudden quiet jarred her. Leafless trees once crowded with noisy, migrating birds were bare, no insects buzzed around her head, and human voices were silent. Her mouth went dry, and her extremities chilled. “Jax!” Evaney shouted. “Dave!” No one answered.

She strained to listen for life signs, any sounds other than her own. Vibrations from the ground ran up her legs. Her body hairs rose and she broke out in goosebumps. She stamped her feet and wondered if they had stumbled upon a military or research site. Were the land rumbles a security deterrent? The urge to duck and hide overwhelmed her. I can’t go up there.

“Winn!” Panic surfed through her veins as minutes ticked away.

Winn knew her grandmother had abused her. Evaney wanted to die when he asked to see the scars. He kissed them, making her cry. She didn’t tell him plastic surgery had minimized the worst ones.

The ground swarms, because that’s what they were, settled into a continuous tremor. She checked her cell phone—no signal. Evaney took a deep breath and forced herself to join her friends. She had climbed halfway up, struggling in loose dirt, when Jordan’s high-pitched screams rang out.

Heart thumping, she debated returning to the Land Rover and waiting for them. Her inner child wanted to hunker in safety until the land stilled. No, Evaney clenched her teeth and jabbed her manicured nails into the dirt and climbed. She never had friends until college. Despite the loose, rocky soil and self doubts, she made it to the crest. The top was flat for about thirty feet and then it angled down in sharp drops.

“Evaney!” Winn shouted.

His voice sounded muffled. She ran downhill, skidding, and jumping over fissures and cracks. She slid another ten feet in loose dirt. “I’m here!”

Winn’s Tag watchband reflected the waning sunlight from a small hole, but the rest of his body hung down in a cavern. Both hands gripped his ice ax and a slinger leash dangled from the spike. The ground felt unstable as she moved to him. As she watched, he tried to slip his wrist into the slinger. “They’re attacking us!”

“Who?”

He grunted with effort. “Rocks are unsteady.”

“I’ve got a rope.” Evaney pulled it from her backpack and inched across the cracked surface. How did they get underground?

Winn screamed. Her heart fluttered and she froze. The land ripples lasted longer this time.

“Help, Ev!” he cried out.

Crack!

Evaney dropped the rope and dived for a scrawny pine tree near the ice ax. She got one hand snug around its trunk before the ground fractured beneath her. Sections crashed into the cave. “Winn?”

The P90X workouts had strengthened her arm muscles. Her upper chest rested on a slanted ledge, and her legs flailed into a dark pit not far from Winn. Taking a deep breath, she pulled up enough to grip the tree with both hands. She grunted and prepared to heave up her lower body.

Winn grabbed her leg. Her hands slipped as the sapling tipped over. Its roots held, but both her arms were fully extended under his added weight. He took his weight off. “Rope?”

“Lost it!”

Winn grunted and then Kaylee screamed, “They’re coming!”

“Climb, Kaylee,” Winn yelled.

“How far is the drop?” Evaney shouted.

He yelled back. “Pull! Pull us up!” He grabbed her legs.

Kaylee shrieked, “They’re biting me!”

What?

Evaney gritted her teeth as pain stabbed her hands. She ignored muffled screams and growling, bear-like sounds. Sweat popped out on her forehead and trickled into her eyes. No matter what she tried, she didn’t budge. “I can’t!”

Kaylee screamed nonstop.

Winn babbled, “We lost Dave. Help me reach slinger.”

The pain became unbearable when either Winn or Kaylee began to twist. Evaney shouted, “You’re hurting me!”

“Vermin always survives, don’t you?” Grand Nessy whispered.

Kaylee’s moans faded and then the pressure eased.

Evaney grunted with relief. “Kaylee?”

“She bled out. Pull up now or we’re next!”

Her body shook. She had nothing left.

“Help me!” His body jerked. “It’s jumping. Toss me the ax.”

Rock scraped underneath her chin from his sudden tug. She slid further. Her muscles burned and cramped. Evaney groaned and held tight. Something slapped her ankle. “I can’t let go!”

“He’s biting me!” Winn sounded terrified. “Please, Ev!”

She clung to the sapling.

“Hiding again, Vermin?” Grand Nessy asked.

Evaney didn’t want the last thing she ever heard to be Grand Nessy’s long-dead, nasty voice. “Winn, I love you!”

Her words gave him hope, or he found new strength. Winn began to climb using her body for support and his feet for leverage. He grabbed her shirt, and fabric cut into her skin. The tree loosened and dirt rolled into her face. She slid back another inch.

Winn howled. His fingers gripped her belt. Something clawed her leg and then her boot slipped off. Her foot ached, no, it bit into her foot. A burning mass shot up her leg before her ankle twisted. She yelped and one hand let go.

Winn saved her life. He found traction and pushed her butt up until both hands grasped the sapling. Her torso inched up the incline. More violent rumbles shook rocks loose.

Evaney screamed as Winn grabbed hold again. His boots kicked against the rock wall trying to find a toehold. She hung on as the tree roots loosened. This was it.

As poison from the ankle bite reacted with adrenalin in her veins, she burned from the inside out. A primitive and familiar instinct took control. She lost her love, her humanity, her pledge to never hurt another. She kicked Winn’s head to break his death grip.

His fingers raked her body, trying to dodge her foot. “Don’t panic.”

Evaney stomped his head. “I can’t die underground!”

“Ev!”

Frantic, she kicked him without pause. Winn fell, screaming, “Ev!”

As soon as his weight lifted, grief overcame her. “I’m sorry,” she shouted as wild animals fought over first bite. Growls and snarls made her peek at them. A glimpse. She blinked in shock. Fright rippled through her body.

Rocks cut into her flesh as she frantically inched herself up the ledge. She jabbed fingertips into any void to pull to safety. The ice ax gave support for her uninjured foot. The pack below broke into a fight. She couldn’t let herself cry. Tears revealed weakness. “Winn?”

One howled.

Evaney refused to look again, refused to confirm they were real, and understood she had been crippled for a reason. She crawled away, dragging her bleeding foot.

Her skin burned and itched, and her throat tightened, forcing her to wheeze. She began to hallucinate about packs of—what were they? Evaney slid headfirst down the hill and sharp rocks cut into exposed skin. Bruised fingers couldn’t slow her descent, and her injured foot slammed into a large rock. She rolled. Pain blinded her and then red and green stars danced in her vision.

Evaney came to a stop on her belly and puked. She turned on her side. A huge gold moon climbed in the darkening sky. Fear of being eaten alive kept her heart twittering in her chest. She rubbed her engagement ring. “Don’t think about Winn,” she said to herself. “Keep moving.”

She crawled across unstable ground. The Land Rover gleamed radioactive white under the moonlight. She grinned and allowed herself to believe she might escape. Behind her came running sounds, and chills bubbled up her spine. No, she couldn’t be eaten alive, not after surviving Grand Nessy.

Evaney ignored the pain and scrambled over the last ten feet. She bit her lip and pulled herself up on one foot. She swayed and her vision darkened. The beast in her, the same one that kicked Winn, forced her to hop to the door and get inside the vehicle. Panting, she yanked on the sun visor and the keys fell into her lap. She cranked the engine and hot air blasted her face.

One rabid monster ran straight into the driver’s door. Evaney screamed. Another one tried to scramble up the back. Both pounded and pushed until the Land Rover began to rock.

Evaney glanced at him and cringed. Man, monster, it. She willed herself not to move and to blend into the seat. It smelled her fear and licked the window glass.

She punched the gas pedal and swerved back on the narrow country road. Her final hint of doom was the pinpoint gleam of a red laser light before a projectile shattered both windshields. She jerked the steering wheel to the right. Evaney’s last thought before the Land Rover crashed off the mountainside was freedom. For the first time in her life, she felt free of Grand Nessy. Totally free.

Wilbur

Five years later.

“Insanity begins with a hum!”

Thunder ricocheted overhead and vibrated the windows. Wilbur Jenkins jerked his head up from spell-checking his American poets essay. Was that Mary Stinson, the night nurse, shouting in the hall?

“Help me! Please help me!” Mary screamed, pounding on his door. “I woke her.”

“It’s a storm, not the apocalypse,” Wilbur muttered, saving his work and closing his laptop. He checked the time, 1:00 a.m., before opening his bedroom door. Mary had run back to the east wing of the Bridgeport, Connecticut mansion where Evaney Harwood, their comatose patient, resided. People don’t wake from five-year comas, but Mary was competent and reserved, so he figured something drastic happened.

Could it be true? Miss Harwood woke during a wild October storm after lightning split the two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree near her sickroom? Same as Frankenstein got juiced?

Grinning now, Wilbur decided to stay in his pajamas and tugged on a robe before checking on Mary. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed behind the curtains as he left his bedroom. He yawned and crossed the long hallway connecting the west staff wing to the sick ward.

Wilbur broke into a jog, and a wave of rustling sounds followed him from the ceiling. It sounded as if rats scurried to keep pace. He glanced up and his bladder signaled distension. Chill bumps tripped up his spine. When strange sounds occurred, spooky events followed at Harwood House. He sprinted to Evaney’s sterile white room and crashed through the double doors.

Before his mother died in a crack house, Wilbur nursed her through withdrawal pains, fights with her dealer, and self mutilations. He’d never seen anyone on the verge of a psychotic killing spree. Mary’s nostrils flared and her body trembled with nervous energy. She clutched a Bible in her left hand and a blade over her head with the right. Her chilling expression resembled a death mask he’d noticed in Smithsonian magazine.

She screamed, “The Hum destroys!”

The straight razor caught light like a weak camera flash before its descent. He lunged forward, caught her wrist, and blocked the cold-blooded strike into Evaney Harwood’s exposed neck. Mary cursed him and kicked him in his junk. Pain and nausea bent him over, and he released his grip on her arm. Groaning, he blocked another strike from the straight razor. After that, subduing Mary was harder than catching smoke. He dwarfed her in size and strength, but she scratched, clawed, and teeth-snapped with the vigor of the possessed.

“Let her drink your blood!” Mary shrieked.

He underestimated the older woman’s uncanny strength, and he freaked when she hacked into her own wrist. Arterial blood spray splattered Evaney’s face and smeared his vision. A warm mist settled on his skin, and the sticky blood felt creepy as it soaked into his pores. His hands slipped off Mary’s crimson-slick arms when he spat out the salty taste. Next thing he knew, Mary slashed her other wrist. The room turned cranberry red.

“Get out of my head!”

“Let me help you. Stop fighting.” Wilbur knocked the razor from her hand and grabbed Mary in a bear hug.

Mary shook so hard he thought she was having a seizure. Between grunts she panted. Evaney’s loud lip smacking broke the tension.

In the two years of his live-in employment, Miss Harwood never made a sound. He glanced over at her. Her white-spotted tongue licked the blood droplets around her mouth. The sight chilled him. One side of his brain tried to rationalize her behavior as a reflex. The other side visualized vampires and zombies. Even crazy Mary calmed. They witnessed Evaney Harwood re-awaken as if she had been in suspended animation instead of a coma.

“Watch out, evil is contagious,” Mary said before her legs sagged.

Wilbur eased her to the floor with her back against the wall. She needed tourniquets to stop the hemorrhaging. He ripped towels apart with ease due to the adrenalin pumping through his blood. He tied pressure bandages to both wrists and held Mary’s hands over her head to slow blood loss. Wilbur wished he hadn’t left his cell phone in his room. The landline was fifteen feet away on the wall.

Evaney grunted, and her body slapped down on the black and white marble floor. Rattled, Wilbur dropped Mary’s arms and turned.

Somehow, Evaney had pulled herself over the metal side rails and fell to the floor. Like an animal tracking scent, she grunted and snuffled until her nose found pools of Mary’s blood. She lapped the congealing fluid into her mouth. Her low, throaty growls of dining pleasure sent his heart into convulsions.

Wilbur screamed, flinging his back flat against the wall beside Mary. His heart slammed against his ribs as if it wanted to breach. Every superstitious belief he’d ever listened to echoed in his head. He crossed himself even though he wasn’t Catholic.

Mary’s blood seeped around her right wrist dressing and droplets oozed to the floor. Evaney responded to the bloody drips as though they were dinner bells. Wilbur rubbed his eyes. He suspected he was hallucinating from a combination of energy drinks and sugar high consumed while pulling an all-nighter for midterms. His mind couldn’t accept what his eyes saw…Miss Harwood slithering across the floor with her head up and hunting for blood. She latched on to Mary’s wrist. The night nurse fainted and slumped over on her right side.

Wilbur bolted out so fast he tripped over a rolling blood pressure monitor and skidded across the slick, bloody floor. Terrified, he scrambled up and raced down the wide staircase. When good sense returned midway, he grabbed the banister and stopped. Panting and sobbing, he prayed for forgiveness at leaving Mary defenseless. Worse, he couldn’t go back.

Evaney climbed out of bed.

Mary needs help.

She might die.

Couldn’t be real…couldn’t be.

He flubbed his frantic recitation of The Lord’s Prayer. He got stuck on the words Deliver us from evil. Slowly his panting subsided, and he gathered his courage in one deep breath. Wilbur ran back to save Mary. He found Evaney curled around Mary’s plump body. She sucked on Mary’s left wrist with a gusto that put newborns to shame. The eerie sucking noises caused his stomach to roll with nausea.

Wilbur dropped beside the pair and jabbed his finger into Evaney’s eye. She released Mary’s wrist, but raised her head and hissed at him. And then, his mind either disconnected or played a trick on him. He wasn’t sure which. He felt warm and relaxed, like he did after sex. His mind couldn’t focus on Mary’s pale and weakened condition. He helped Miss Harwood rest after her exertion.

He picked Evaney up and put her in bed. She fell back into the usual position. Instead of checking Mary’s pulse or helping her, he called 911. Hands shaking, he wet washcloths and cleaned Mary’s blood from Evaney’s face and mouth. He changed her gown and the top linens. Last, he rinsed out the washcloths. He figured he was having an out-of-body experience. It seemed as if he hovered over his body watching himself cover up what she did.

Wilbur couldn’t explain his actions. He didn’t understand how he could touch Evaney Harwood after what he’d seen, yet he did. This must be shock. His mind forgot details like people do after horrible accidents.

He reinforced Mary’s wrist bandages, and her charcoal eyes fluttered open. She whispered, “The Hum speaks to you. Better answer it.”

The low buzzing sound he’d been hearing on and off for weeks suddenly raised several decibels. Frightened, he left Mary alone with Evaney to wake the house staff before the paramedics arrived.

Rett

The house shook.

Rett Franklin jerked up from sleep as thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. Every muscle tensed waiting for the emergency storm signal. Cloudland attracted tornadoes as trees did lightning. He checked the time. Midnight. He sat up and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt. Heart thumping, he waited for the final seconds to count down. Emergency sirens remained silent. He fell back on the bed and wiped sweat from his brow.

He couldn’t tolerate living in Cloudland, Alabama much longer. Rett stumbled into the bathroom to splash his face. He couldn’t shake a sense of doom. Jerking up the bathroom window, he listened for the emergency siren. All quiet.

Rett looked in the bathroom mirror and behind his haggard face saw his empty bed. He had fallen in love with Cloudland at the same time he fell in love with a local girl, Jenna Delaney.

Cloudland sat tucked on the western brow of Lookout Mountain. The quaint town was perfectly situated between protected state and national parks linked in the Forever Wild campaign. The landscape varied between low-lying hills, sweeping, wide valleys, and rugged mountainsides. Compared to hot, dry Texas, Cloudland was paradise. He got hired by the Cloudland Power Company, married Jenna, and they had four kids—well, now three. In the last ten years, Cloudland’s size had tripled. Young families moved in.

More shakes.

He checked his watch and ignored his irregular heartbeats. Rett reopened the window and thunder rang in his ears while he waited for the countdown. Again, no emergency alarm squealed. He locked the window. If another shake came, he planned to move the kids to the hallway. Jenna could stay on the sofa dreaming of her affair with Michael Thomas, the local florist, for all he cared. Rett punched the mirror, cracking it.

Bad luck.

He didn’t find out three minor fault lines intersected underneath Cloudland until after he married. Locals called the chronic shakes “swarms.” To his surprise, they never showed up on the USGS maps. Residents, old and new, accepted the swarms like people on the coast accepted the threat of hurricanes. Then, last week a power crew saw a yellow gas erupt from the ground. Luckily, a hard wind dissipated the gas in the opposite direction. The crew fled and notified management. Power company officials looked up gas emissions from earthquakes and discovered the killer hydrogen sulfate. People were worried and had started asking questions.

Flameion, the biggest employer in Cloudland and a pharmaceutical company, hired a team of geologists to take readings. The swarms surprised them. They left monitoring equipment but found no signs of hydrogen sulfate emissions. No one died, but Rett refused to raise his kids over a hellhole belching death. If weird gas came up from underground again, the town might not be so lucky. His kids came first. Overhead the storm raged, but the swarms ceased.

Rett almost went to check on Jenna, but stopped himself. He couldn’t face the lying woman she’d become. Jenna was gorgeous, with thick, chocolate-brown hair and spring-green eyes in a heart-shaped face. He fell for her looks and grew to love her heart. How could he hold the family together without her? Rett hoped—no, prayed—she would end the affair before he did something stupid.

Dream on, sucker.

Since Kimmy, their youngest daughter, died in August from an allergic reaction, he had lost his heart and his soul. He couldn’t get over Jenna’s callous behavior. The day after the funeral she went for a spa treatment and returned with a sprayed-on tan. He couldn’t go on like this. He pulled off his tee-shirt as tree limbs scratched against the window. Rett unzipped his jeans, hoping to sleep.

“Daddy!”

Eddie Jean?

A heart-freezing scream followed. He grabbed his lucky bat signed by Hank Aaron and hightailed it down the hall to sixteen-year-old Eddie Jean’s room. He kicked in the locked door. Hefting the bat, he rushed inside and stopped.

His mind couldn’t connect with what his eyes saw. Lightning highlighted a gruesome scene.

Blood everywhere. On the bed, the walls, and, God help him, on the ceiling. Swarm Sickness popped into his head. Some people went crazy during longer swarms, and local doctors called their symptoms “Acute Swarm Sickness.”

“Get off her!”

Jenna rose from Eddie Jean’s bed and growled at him. Her lovely face looked feral and bloodstained when he hit the light. She’s stark naked. Rett blinked, shocked. Jenna was on all fours, acting like a dog. Her arms were covered with bites. Eddie Jean jerked her left leg. Jenna had tied it down with a belt. Everything switched into slow motion.

She snarled at me.

Eddie Jean’s hands dripped blood. He couldn’t club Jenna. Could he?

Jenna sensed his hesitation. She licked her bloody mouth and cackled. The hairs on his body bristled. She resembled a wild thing flushed from the woods. God help us.

Eddie Jean lunged half off the bed. Jenna sank her teeth into Eddie Jean’s calf.

“Daddy!”

No father could ignore those words. Adrenalin pumping, he grabbed Jenna by the hair. It took all his strength to yank her off their daughter. He slung her to the floor. She crashed against a dresser, and Eddie Jean’s soccer ball bounced across the room. Jenna got to her feet, weaving her curvaceous body back and forth like a cobra. She snapped her bloody teeth.

He reacted as his old man had taught him. Rett thrust the bat into her gut bayonet style, and then whacked the side of her head. Jenna dropped to the floor, panting.

“Daddy’s here.” Rett lifted Eddie Jean back on the bed and worked on the knot, wishing he had a knife. He freed her leg.

Jenna got up and launched herself, landing on the bed and sliding to the other side. Eddie Jean squealed and dropped to the floor. Jenna leaned over to rake her claws at Eddie Jean’s face.

Pulse pounding, Rett grabbed her foot. He pulled Jenna back and heaved her across the bed and to the floor. Her fingernails scratched the hardwood floor for traction. She charged. Rett used his body, her speed, and the bat to take her legs out from under her. He stabbed the bat into her gut again. She belched and collapsed.

Rett grabbed a purse from the dresser. He flipped Jenna over and pressed his knee into her back. He used the long shoulder strap to tie her hands behind her in the same quick motion used to subdue calves on the ranch. Then he shook off a pillowcase and tied her legs. He wiped his slick hands on the bed linens. Jenna’s body burned with fever.

“Use a towel to put pressure on the bleeding,” Rett called to Eddie Jean. “Hear me!”

Her answering sobs nearly tore his heart in half.

“Help Eddie Jean!” the twins howled in unison from the hallway.

“Boys, don’t come in here. Stay back!”

Jenna tried to bite his leg. He moved. She wiggled, snorted, and snapped her teeth as if being driven mad by blood scent. Sweat drenched her body and his hands slipped. He recalled a recent case where police had shot a naked woman biting people at a jazz festival. She had taken LSD. Ended up she had a medical condition called “excited delirium.” Reported symptoms included aggression, high temperature, sweating, and taking off clothing.

Jenna tried to bite him.

He slugged her. Rett wrapped her slippery body in the bed quilt and carried her to their bedroom. He tied her in his mother’s rocking chair with a sheet.

“Did you look in Kimmy’s coffin?” Jenna’s voice sounded slurred.

Panting, Rett ignored his sudden chest pain. Jenna knew how to wound with words. Tears rolled from his eyes. He wiped them away and went back to tend Eddie Jean.

“Kimmy’s grown. Want to see her?”

Her words struck like a wave pulling him under and stealing his air. Rett went to his office and grabbed duct tape. He taped Jenna’s mouth shut. He couldn’t bear more snide comments about Kimmy. Maybe Jenna had taken drugs—she could be experiencing excited delirium—but he couldn’t take her hatred anymore.

One piece of tape wasn’t enough. He put three across her lying mouth. Hands shaking, he made sure she could breathe. He spent more time securing Jenna to the chair with his belts.

Satisfied, he went to his daughter. Eddie Jean had wrapped a towel around each hand. A washcloth was folded across her leg and secured by a gold scarf. The twins sat beside her, hugging her from both sides.

At first he couldn’t speak. “The bleeding stopped?” He squatted to take a look. She jerked her hands away.

He kissed the boys. “Get dressed. We’re taking your sister to the hospital.”

“Let’s go, Tim,” Tommy ordered, standing.

Eddie Jean waited until the boys left before she said, “Daddy, we don’t need a hospital. I self-heal, remember?”

Rett couldn’t look at her—an exact replica of Jenna, except taller. “Two weeks ago a spelunker caught rabies from a bat bite. I’m not taking any chances with you.”

“Oh, Daddy.” His girl held her arms out to him, and he lifted her. “Granddad explained it to you. I can’t get sick. Momma needs the hospital, not me.”

Quitman Delaney had explained how a few people grew up in Cloudland with extraordinary skills and intellect. Quitman claimed the swarms changed DNA in certain people. He had added, “Eddie Jean’s got more kick than the rest of us, she heals with her hands.”

Rett had laughed.

The old man had grinned and slashed Rett’s forearm with a knife. He told Eddie Jean to heal the laceration. Eddie Jean got upset with her grandfather’s demonstration, but she healed him. Rainbow-like colors formed under her skin. No, Rett couldn’t dispute a miracle occurred, but he didn’t understand it.

He put her on the bed. “This is different. You’re hurt.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Rett looked up at the ceiling. “Your mother is insane?”

Eddie Jean’s chin quivered. “I don’t know.”

“She bit herself and then you. It’s rabies, or she took something that made her act wild.”

Eddie Jean’s eyes widened. She went into the bathroom to wash her hands.

Rett decided he’d let Eddie Jean down. His marital problems, his grief after losing Kimmy, and his failure to confront Michael Thomas for wife poaching, combined to render him spineless. He needed to man up. Rett walked into her bathroom. “I need to see what she did.”

Eddie Jean shook her head. Her necklaces circled her neck like a jewelry bib. She only took them off during soccer season. Eddie Jean made and sold her designer necklaces in downtown Cloudland and on the internet. Her sales boosted her college fund. He was proud of her creative talent. “Let me see.”

Eddie Jean was five-nine to his five-eleven. He didn’t have to stoop. Rett held out a clean towel and she put her hands on it. His breath caught at the damage after healing began. Eddie Jean’s hands had been shredded, and her fingers were discolored from deep bites. He stared at proof his wife had abandoned the natural instinct of protecting her young. Tears dribbled from his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I can take pain, betrayal, and disappointment. I can’t take your mother acting like a rabid dog.”

“Daddy, you’re my rock.”

Her hushed words meant everything. “Did she ask you for healing?”

Eddie Jean shook her head. “When I came home from school, I found her drinking salt water in the kitchen. She said an infestation was inside her. It told her to bring Kimmy home.”

Rett grew up on military bases and learned to take his knocks. He wanted his kids to be rooted to their family, their home, and their community. Jenna’s behavior was destroying their family. He had to act. “Did you try to cure her?”

“She’s rotten inside, and I can’t heal her. She woke me up when she tied my leg. After she bit me, she licked my blood. I’ve never been so scared.”

Family was his breath and he lived to make them happy. This conflict might break him. Rett brushed hair from his daughter’s pale face. “How can you take the pain, honey?”

“I’m your daughter.”

Rett hugged her. “I’ll take her to the emergency room.” The power went out.

“I guess we’ll all go,” Eddie Jean said.

Rett looked at her hands again. Almost healed.

Louis

Chills swept up Doctor Louis Janzen’s body.

The sensation had nothing to do with the thunderstorm passing overhead. He stared with awe and trepidation at the white ice chest delivered to his lab on UVA’s campus. Louis worried his research might fail. He couldn’t convince himself his actions bordered on dementia, but it was a close call. His hopes for an Alzheimer’s cure depended on what he discovered, if anything, on the brain in the ice chest. Emotions clouded his decisions, leaving him exhausted and weak.

When his head began to swim, he sat on a stool and leaned over the counter top. He smelled the diluted bleach used to clean the work surfaces. Sweat beaded his forehead. He shut his eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass. Louis wiped the sweat away with a tissue. He’d almost fainted. He hadn’t visualized the brain yet, much less cut slivers to mount on slides. This had never happened to him. Had he lost his edge? Worry consumed him like a fever.

A clinical investigator had to remain aloof to collect research data trusted by peers. Gathering data without emotion was a researcher’s goal. After a colleague’s suicide, Louis decided to give up the researcher’s “cold shroud.” He missed his friend’s symptoms, and they shared an office suite. How did he not notice?

Louis visualized the cold shroud as a mental lab coat that shielded him from his emotions so he could concentrate on science. Over time he realized it was one thing to wear the shroud when performing a painful procedure, but another to stay detached every day. He became addicted to being disconnected and withdrew from social activities. His secretary, Cindy Van Zant, accused him of becoming a lab hermit.

Surprised, Louis kicked the cold shroud habit. But without wearing the mental shield he experienced disgust. More than one clinical research study he participated in had high, adverse side effects. His patients suffered; he suffered.

As he retreated from patient care, Louis began to question his life’s work. Sometimes he missed the cold shroud. With it on he didn’t have to admit to ethical conflicts. Now, he doubted his decision not to advise UVA colleagues of his plans. He worried they might object to his testing on a long-dead relative’s brain for a microbial infection. He couldn’t bear their censure, so he kept mum.

Janzen, drop the pity party. Get on with it.

Louis learned over drinks at a neurology conference in Hawaii that his great-grandfather’s brain had been preserved by a leading neurologist in 1908. Yale University claimed the brain as property, along with clinical records and glass plate negatives. A Yale colleague had discovered the name Louis Edmund Janzen from Boston on the museum’s specimen log. The news came on the same day Louis considered withdrawing from the quixotic race to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.

AL, as his family called the hated disease, had struck Louis’s father, a well-known researcher and two older brothers, and recently symptoms had targeted him. He forgot long-time colleague names and directions to common campus buildings. As with his brothers, age thirty-nine became his jump into the first AL symptoms. Louis wanted to withdraw to the country and immerse himself in nature. Instead, he cut his teaching schedule. After learning about his great-grandfather’s preserved brain, and the discovery they shared the same name, Louis enjoyed renewed hope. He returned to the lab.

The medical museum’s curator told him his ancestor’s specimen jar had never leaked. Few of the four hundred brains remained in mint condition like the Janzen brain. Yale turned over his relative’s clinical photos printed from glass plate negatives, a yellowed medical chart, and a brain incarcerated for over a century in a bell-shaped jar.

The cure might be inside a brain lobe.

Maybe the disembodied voice in his mind was an early dementia sign or stress. He didn’t know which. The accepted rule in medical circles: Doctors shouldn’t treat family members. Louis meant to dissect his relative’s brain because time was slipping away from the cursed Janzen family. He and his brothers might not escape, but his nephews and nieces had a chance for a normal lifespan as long as scientists chased the cure. Recent failures, his included, had created a hole in new funding.

He needed to find a spark. Someone had to break the vicious AL cycle—the cared for or the caregiver. He needed to follow his instincts even if cutting his grandpop’s brain felt indecent and made him ill. Louis lifted his head and his vision remained clear. He took deep breaths and visualized what he wanted to accomplish.

A neurologist and researcher like me stole his brain to study.

His inner conflict stemmed from the omitted family consent for brain removal. Doctors stole the brain, stored it inside a jar in a dingy hospital basement, and forgot about it. His researcher side applauded them, and his human side despised their arrogance.

The Janzen family never knew he had been buried missing an organ. It didn’t make Louis feel any less outraged because the same thing happened to Albert Einstein’s brain at Princeton. He understood why the neurologist took it. Like Louis, he searched for answers, and answers led to cures, and cures led to less suffering. As a family member, doctors swiping body parts for science left a putrid taste in his mouth.

Louis stood. He moved to the sink and splashed cool water on his face. He wiped it dry on a rough paper towel and ran wet fingers through his short dark hair. Louis turned off the faucet and went back to the ice chest.

Now, I’m going to experiment on my grandpop’s brain.

He’d already prepared the lab. He buttoned his lab coat and put on gloves and a respirator to avoid noxious fumes. He opened the ice chest and gently removed the wax-sealed jar. The shriveled brain’s color reminded him of pale mushrooms as it floated in a formaldehyde bath. He turned on a lamp to examine it closer. He noted where previous slivers had been taken from various brain segments. Overcome by another rush of emotions, he removed the respirator and waited for his eyes to dry.

Hands shaking, he opened the manila envelope from the box. Black and white photos slid out. Louis pushed his pity aside and studied them. His relative had bowed to allow the photographer to take pictures of bizarre vein-like structures growing out of his scalp. The root-like growths were engorged and tangled, others were thin and short. Between the roots grew a clear membrane, like fly wings, and studded within he saw thin filaments. His stomach cramped at the grotesque sight.

Louis stared at the hideous growths—sprung from a brain tumor, according to the chart. His grandpop didn’t survive the surgery. The surgeon had released the brain from the root tangles and gelatinous growths by removing a chunk. Evidently, the malignancy grew as a bean vine from the brain’s posterior lobe.

The curator claimed the autopsy record and lab reports on the brain biopsy were missing. He confirmed his relative reported early onset dementia symptoms. The confusion had interrupted his law practice years before the growth protruded from his head. AL history confirmed.

A lump grew in Louis’s throat at the uncanny resemblance they shared. Dark blue eye shape and thick, dark brows matched. Long patrician nose and flat ears with lobes, but his ancestor had smooth, pale skin while his own resembled a pock-marked landscape. Grandpop was tall and skinny as well. Louis didn’t resemble his parents or siblings. Just this one man.

The old man had respected and trusted his doctor enough to let him photograph his rare condition. Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded the doctor stealing his brain. Louis knew any requests to keep the whole brain or a part would have been denied. Back then such requests were considered ghoulish. Still, it rankled that his brain might have fallen like others did. Brains freed from shattered jars ended up tossed into the trash or flushed in toilets.

Get on with it.

His grandpop’s expression held a mixture of defiance and vulnerability. “Forgive me,” he said before sliding the pictures back in the envelope.

He polished the lens on his glasses, re-gloved, and put on the respirator and safety glasses. Louis turned on the video camera to record his experiment. He’d been fired from the CDC two years ago. For two years there, he led the task force to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease after the gene had been identified. The cure proved to be elusive.

His family history forced Louis to consider the obvious. He’d been overheard at an international symposium telling a colleague he’d found disturbing similarities between Alzheimer’s and autism. He suspected an exotic microbe turned on the AL gene. The same microbe wreaked havoc in autistics by releasing a protein or enzyme creating their symptoms as well. The reporter knew sounding pet theories off colleagues was common practice and not meant to be released as news. He reported it anyway. Back in Atlanta, the parents of autistic kids called for his head. Their kids didn’t have bugs in their brains. The CDC dumped him.

Louis scraped the wax from the lid and removed his great-grandfather’s brain. He eased the fragile brain to a sterile cutting tray. He weighed it and described his impressions for the camera. As he worked, he remembered a funny thing happened after being fired. Friends rallied around him. First, an old mentor brought him back to UVA and told him to stay on track. Louis began his best work once freed from the cutthroat rivalry between peers.

Four other university researchers across the country contacted him. They agreed with the microbe theory for AL, but were afraid to support him publicly. The five formed a secret group. They called themselves the Cognoscenti—those in the know—or COGS for short. The COGS followed a fringe theory on the side. They shared secret microbial research and gave each other tips to shave budget dollars to fund their work.

Louis mounted and labeled several brain slices. He put the samples in an automatic stainer and waited for the results. He drummed his fingers on the desk, paced back and forth, and wore himself out as the machine flicked through its stages. His head ached before the drying stage ended. When the machine gave an automatic beep, he lifted them out.

He loaded the first slide. Nothing. On the second slide he studied a bizarre reaction to the staining agent. The specimen had turned lime green. When he studied it under the microscope, his heart performed a slow somersault.

Louis jerked his head back and blinked his eyes. Impossible.

He took a deep breath and flexed his cramped shoulders. He squinted back into the lens. The microbe remained because the stain had de-cloaked it.

He concentrated on his work. He sliced, mounted, and stained brain pieces. In the end, he found two. He couldn’t deny the rush pulsing through his veins along with frequent adrenalin boluses. Louis faced the camera and shouted, “Eureka!”

***

The COGS discussed his findings over Skype. Despite the late hour his colleagues beamed excitement. Like him, one had worked late in the lab. The others wore pajamas because Louis never waited to share his good research news. Much of their side research took place after hours. The group had agreed to locate older preserved brains for the new tests, but Louis had the first discovery.

John Wahl, from Columbia University, asked, “Is the effect related to the tumor?”

“Unknown,” Louis said, rubbing his temples. “My mother sent me a box containing my dad’s earlier work. He did advanced research on the immune system on so-called super healers. I haven’t had time to review his findings. Maybe I can glean tips from him.”

“Wish I was a super healer,” Stan Jenkins grumbled. “Can’t shake this snotty cold.”

“Well,” Eric Richards from Seattle said, “let’s assume it’s microbial. And over the years it remained preserved without contamination. Is it possible the microbe excreted a byproduct into the formaldehyde and it caused the stain reaction?”

“Or,” Wahl said and snapped his fingers, “did formaldehyde have different additives back then? We know the specimen jar is a rare combination of glass and lead to keep the inside from turning cloudy.”

“Good ideas. I’ll take formaldehyde samples from the jar and shoot them out to you in the morning. Try it on your specimens,” Louis said. “It’s risky, but why not be aggressive? Meanwhile, I’ll ask a few microbiologists to check out our new friend. I know a chemist who will assay the formaldehyde. The problem is the fluid is a biohazard.”

Wahl quipped, “Anything that exits the human body is a biohazard.”

“Babies aren’t biohazards,” Wilma Collins, the lone female, pointed out.

The others laughed.

Wilma added, “I’ve got a degree in microbiology, and I don’t recognize it. I’m certain it wouldn’t be visible without the reaction. I agree to hit this hard. I think you struck gold, Louis.”

They signed off. Louis sent several cropped photos of the microbe to colleagues over university email and asked for species identification. He cleaned his lab and plotted the COGS’ next move. He reached to turn out the lights when his cell rang.

“Doctor Janzen, please explain how you procured our patented microbe,” a woman said.

“What?” He compared his watch to the wall clock—two in the morning. He sent the digital photos less than a half-hour ago. “Who are you?”

“Doctor Ava Allen. I expected a call before you shared information you don’t own. My company, Flameion, holds the microbe’s patent.”

“Are you a GMO subsidiary?” He tried not to laugh out loud.

“Funny. Our permission is required and it’s not cheap.”

“Really? Would you identify genus for me?”

“Sorry, no. I’ll fly into Charlottesville and confiscate our property if you don’t mind.”

Confiscate. The idea burned him because he found the microbe in his relative’s head. “Better bring your lawyers and solid proof it’s yours. I’m not in the game for profit. I have no problem with stirring up patent issues.”

“So be it.” She disconnected.

Louis sat to think. He had to find a safe hiding place for Grandpop’s brain.

Wilbur

Wilbur watched a police patrol car, a red ambulance, and a fire truck pull into the driveway. He had removed his blood-soaked robe and slippers, but Wilbur still felt contaminated. He repeated his story until it didn’t make sense.

The boyish-looking detective interrupted his nervous spill. “The housekeeper said we could talk in the library. Lead the way.”

Wilbur pulled the burgundy lap blanket a medic placed around his shoulders tighter and went downstairs to the wood-paneled library. It was quiet, and a fire took the chill out of the massive room. Two cozy lamps cast a low-light welcome. Exhausted, Wilbur sat on a cane-backed chair, and the detective sat on a teal-blue sofa. The opulent room distracted the lawman from further questions. His gaze darted between Wilbur and the stunning Monet over the fireplace. The painting glowed. Its dramatic colors had a way of changing the light in the room. Gazing at it soothed Wilbur’s troubled thoughts—usually.

“So, Miss Stinson shouted ‘insanity begins with a hum?’” the detective asked, and then giggled. He removed a small notebook from his jacket. “What did she mean?”

The detective’s laugh annoyed him. Wilbur wanted to describe how the Hum sounded but couldn’t. He didn’t relish hearing giggles while trying to explain a sound that defied description. In his heart, he believed the Hum delivered a warning—like a beacon glimpsed during a storm. Or the Hum was meant to keep animals safe from a looming disaster. A few unlucky humans tuned in to the noise and were driven insane. End of story. He had to avoid sounding crazy while the police searched for answers. As Grandmother Pearl always said, Don’t go courting trouble, Burr.

But he had to answer questions.

“Blood in my eyes, my mouth,” Wilbur said, sucking in both lips not sure whether to tell the full story. “Understand Mary screamed out wild phrases. I can’t even remember them.”

A big lie.

“A word?” an uniformed policeman said from the doorway.

“We’re getting slammed tonight,” the detective explained. “I’ll be right back.”

Wilbur took a deep breath, glad for the break. Most police officers had left after the ambulance departed with Mary’s body. Crime scene technicians remained in the sick ward gathering evidence. Estate lawyers called the police chief and demanded an investigation into Miss Harwood’s near murder.

Cookie Hope, the Jamaican housekeeper, set a silver tray on the coffee table. She’d loaded the tray with two cups and spoons, a plate of hot, buttered biscuits, and a coffee carafe. The comforting aromas helped ground Wilbur’s conflicted emotions. “Careful what you say, Burr,” she chided in her melodic voice. “And next time, don’t throw a bloody book or dirty linens on the dumbwaiter. It’s kept clean because we send food on it.”

Huh?

“I warmed a damp towel for you to wash your face and hands.” She lifted the silver plate cover, exposing the folded cloth. Cookie patted his shoulder and returned to the kitchen.

He lifted the warm towel and pressed his face into it. The moist heat comforted, like the soothing hot packs Grandmother Pearl had applied to his boyhood aches and strains. He had to hold his job and work family together. If the estate lawyers sent Evaney to a nursing home over the incident, five people, including him, would be homeless.

Wilbur had rubbed his face raw while wishing he had showered before the emergency crews arrived. Mary’s blood had dried into scabs on his exposed skin. No matter how much he wiped, he couldn’t clean up his lie or his guilt for not picking up on Mary’s quiet despair. Why hadn’t he noticed her sudden religious fervor or the withdrawal from friendly gossip?

The detective returned and sat. “Doctor Hatcher said Miss Harwood doesn’t need to be checked out at the hospital. She’s fine. Doc called you a hero.”

Heroes don’t react with fear or run away.

“Between us”—the detective leaned closer after glancing behind him—“locals believe the estate is haunted. Some people say she deserves what happened to her.”

“Miss Harwood deserves to be in a coma?” Wilbur asked.

He shrugged. “I heard she went on a spontaneous trip with five friends, all Duke University seniors, and she’s the lone survivor. The others are presumed dead—their bodies have never been found, and no one knows why they left school or what happened to them.”

Shaken, Wilbur asked, “Is she a suspect?”

“She’s never been questioned or cleared. Some have insinuated she killed them and hid their bodies, but no evidence exists to support that theory. Every October the missing students’ families rile up reporters, plan a candlelight memorial service, or hire a PI to search for answers, but their investigations always end up the same.”

Until now, Wilbur thought untreated meningitis put her in the coma. In fact, Doc Hatcher told him so in the employment interview. He hated lies, and then the liar’s flush swept up his neck and scalded his ears because he had lied to the police. “Ends how, detective?”

“Dead end.” He leaned over to pour two cups of coffee straight. The detective slid one towards Wilbur. “How did blood get on the banister and stairs?”

Bile crawled up his throat. He had to fight the urge to heave it up and swallowed the putrid mess back into his stomach. He couldn’t leave gaps in the story for everyone’s sake.

“Left my phone charging on my desk. When I picked up the room phone the first time, it didn’t work—the storm, I guess. Mary needed help, so I started to run downstairs but caught myself midway. If the land line didn’t work upstairs, it wouldn’t work downstairs either. I went back to assist Mary. The room phone worked the second time.”

The Hum became a grating buzzsaw in his ears. His teeth clenched.

“What sent Mrs. Stinson off? Her employee medical history doesn’t list depression or mental illness, but she pasted Bible pages on her bedroom walls like wallpaper. She hot glued non-religious protection charms on her door and windows. What scared her?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never been inside her room.”

He jotted a note. “When you got to Miss Harwood’s room, Mary held the straight razor in her hand?”

Nodding, Wilbur rubbed his eyes. He hated lying and leaving gaps. It wasn’t like the detective would believe him if he told the whole truth.

“Ever hear any weird sounds?”

“No.” Unless you count the attic sounds at night. The noise reminded him of summer cicadas raising a ruckus down at the lake. But he thought no one else heard them until tonight. If he’d shared, maybe Mary wouldn’t have lost her mind.

“During the melee, Miss Harwood woke?”

“Her eyes opened for a second.”

“Mrs. Stinson flipped out over her eye movement?”

“Yes.” He couldn’t stop the bubbles floating up his spine, nor the shivers as he remembered Evaney slithering across the floor to feast on Mary. He bit down so hard, Wilbur feared he’d cracked a tooth.

“Drink coffee, man. You’re shaking.” The detective giggled again, grating on Wilbur’s nerves.

Wilbur reached for his cup and gulped the warm liquid.

The detective removed a phone from his jacket pocket and read a text.

“I never expected Miss Evaney to open her eyes. Freaked me out, I’m ’shamed to say.”

The detective said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins. Mrs. Stinson died. She lost more blood than the paramedics estimated.”

That can’t be.

The detective closed his notebook. “Heroes like you deserve a reward. If you remember more details”—he handed Wilbur a card—“call me.” He left.

“I’m no hero,” Wilbur called after him. He muttered, “Heroes don’t lie or run scared. Or let a good nurse die.”

In the silence, the Hum buzzed like a saw cutting through a tree trunk. Noise called his name. He dropped his head and covered his ears. Unlike Mary, he wouldn’t answer. Grandmother Pearl always said, Evil likes to be admired. Ignore it.

How?

The Hum deafened. His jaws ached and his ears throbbed. He raised his head to stare at the colorful Monet and willed his mind to find peace.

Eddie Jean

There was no school on Wednesday due to the power blackout after the storm. On Thursday, Eddie Jean drifted from trigonometry to English class. She hated Thursdays.

Her mother recovered, but was held overnight for observation. The doctors never found out what caused her fever, and they weren’t told about the biting and blood sucking. Eddie Jean had stayed home with the boys under the supervision of a neighbor. She and the twins had a great time until their parents returned. When the lights popped on, she made their Halloween costumes and promised to take them trick-or-treating.

Today being Thursday, her mother woke in a happy mood. She hummed songs while making breakfast. In contrast, her dad woke early and would come home late from work. This was their Thursday routine. Eddie Jean suspected the twins hated Thursdays as much as she did.

In the crowded hallway, she towered over most students and couldn’t hide from their stares. Their resentment made her muscles tense. Students were angry at her after tweets from the varsity quarterback. Scot Thomas asked football fans and boosters to give Delaneys payback. Even half Delaneys were guilty. As she passed, kids quit talking and someone dogged her heels, trying to trip her.

One boy yelled, “Friggin’ Delaney.”

Heat scorched her face, and she wanted to bolt as others snickered.

“Got swarm spirit?”

Someone shoved her. When she turned around, the other kids hid their faces or laughed. One boy with eraser-sized zits glared back with narrowed eyes. She resumed walking.

The Delaney side of her family provided continuous teen gossip. Her two older cousins were responsible for two wide receivers getting tossed from the Friday night lineup for breaking team rules. The evidence of their violations posted on Facebook. Over just one weekend Delaney girls ended Cloudland High School’s chances of a state championship title. This wasn’t a good week to be a Delaney.

She tried to stay above the scandals, but today her hands itched after healing. Her family was crumbling apart, and she couldn’t heal the breach. Eddie Jean went online and studied rabies. There were similarities to the symptoms and how her mother behaved. She wished her healing identified disease diagnosis.

The crowd parted and a senior soccer girl approached. Eddie Jean had been promoted from JV to varsity team. She knew the rest of her high school life depended on the next three seconds.

The popular girl grinned and punched fists with Eddie Jean as they passed. She said the team greeting to Eddie Jean. “Eleven hearts.”

“One team,” she quickly responded.

Her shoulders straightened under the weight of her backpack. People could tweet all the hate they wanted, but soccer girls stuck together. With two words the senior bestowed favored status back on her. The crowd left her alone.

She walked on with the assurance of belonging. She sensed the other four gifted students using telepathy as easy as voice. Telep was weird, like having a third ear. Hers kicked in during puberty, and it scared her at first. Five kids in Cloudland shared super intellect, super athletic abilities, and super self-healing, and they chatted in her head. She had an extra kick they didn’t. She could heal people by just laying on hands.

They should’ve been a close-knit group, but weren’t. The others wanted her to hide the healing gift and called her a holy roller when she refused. They ordered her to follow their rules. When she didn’t, they blocked her out. In the beginning, she freaked at being shunned. She hated being odd girl out, but followed her heart.

“EJ!” Scot Thomas, the varsity quarterback, shouted from behind her.

What now?

“Wait up.” Scot’s voice cut through student conversations and locker doors being slammed. He was the leader of the super-gifted kids. They called themselves XOs, for extraordinary. Unlike her, XOs kept their gifts under the radar to grow up semi-normal.

Eddie Jean stopped in a hallway junction. Other kids turned to gawk. As a winning quarterback, football dominated Scot’s life. College scouts had followed his career since freshman year. She wondered if Scot thought he was cheating whenever he threw a touchdown pass. Being XO provided a boost over other players. She agonized each time she drove the ball on the soccer field to score. Her usual moral tortures would resume soon.

Her breath caught as Scot drew closer. He looked so hot in his black and gold football jacket. Other players flanked him, but she noticed only Scot.

She tried not to stare. Most girls in the corridor focused on him. At six-four he towered over his teammates and the other students. His sandy blond hair curled around his neck and below his football helmet. She loved the color of his eyes, a startling Curacao blue. She wore a necklace in the same shade.

Flirty girls called out, “Hey, Scot” or “Are you over Tayla?”

He broke up with the cheerleader?

Heat flooded into her face and her body twitched as he neared. Twitching happened with Scot, and only when he drew close. She didn’t know why. “Hi.”

He pulled her down the side corridor and into a storage room full of drama production sets. Kids followed them, expecting something to happen, but Scot slammed the door. The stale air smelled like dried paint and vinegar. Seconds passed before the fluorescent light held steady. Her breathing rate increased.

“Tweets are warning Tayla you’re alone with me,” she said, slapping his hand.

He reacted by throwing up his hands. “So what? Sorry, I’m keyed up.”

“Tayla’s test strip positive?”

He reddened. Pregnancy rumors had swirled around Scot and the head cheerleader after a test kit fell out of her school locker. Tayla missed school the next week.

“We broke up weeks ago. She’s out with the flu.”

“Sorry.” Eddie Jean tugged on her silver crucifix. “Who dreamed up the payback tweet?”

His gazed flitted over her body and rested on her knees.

Eddie Jean tugged her uniform skirt lower and stepped back against an old fan.

He loosened up his shoulders as he talked. “Tayla thought she was being funny. Sorry.”

“Sorry? People are mad.”

“Tayla knows I hate Delaneys. You know why.”

Yes, she did. Her mother and his father were involved in the Thursday afternoon affair. In progress, right now. They hooked up because of her and she would never forgive herself. The past humiliations she suffered from their affair paled next to her mother doing a slow fall into the crazy. This morning…she stopped herself from thinking about the strange crackling sounds coming from her mother’s body. They sounded like crunching dead leaves.

“Don’t you hate my father?” Scot asked.

As a rule, she never spent more than one minute around Scot. Time approached three minutes. “No. I’ve done nothing to the football team. Open the door.”

He leaned against it, staring down at her until sun-bleached hair fell over his eyes. “I need your help. Bill Franco is sick,” he said. “He’s in a Fort Payne hospital.”

Eddie Jean gasped. “I’m sorry, what’s wrong with him?”

Scot shrugged. “Numbness started in his legs and it’s spreading. Soon he won’t be able to breathe. He’s in intensive care.”

“Why isn’t he in Cloudland Memorial?”

“His mom works there.”

“Why are you asking someone you hate to help your best friend?”

He frowned and folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t, you remind me of.” He cleared his throat. “I’m offering you a chance to rejoin the XOs.”

She would like nothing better. “What do I have to do?”

“Cut class with me. Heal Bill.”

She pushed long hair behind her shoulders. “I’d be kicked off the soccer team.”

His eyes glared and she looked at his feet.

“Imagine being paralyzed inch by inch and waiting to stop breathing,” he said in a low voice. “They can’t sedate him.”

She licked her lips. Did he understand how much playing soccer meant to her? Or that one soccer girl’s support had just defused the crowd’s anger?

“Coach will bench me. It’s worth it to help, Bill.”

She raised her head. “Winning quarterbacks don’t get benched.”

He shrugged. “Can’t win without him. Way better to help a friend.”

“Go help him.” She didn’t appreciate the way he dumped his hopes on her.

“I can’t believe you’re balking.”

“Bill’s not a saint, you know. He steals.”

“Your lunch?” His eyes mocked her.

“My iPod, my school books, and my varsity jacket.”

Scot’s laugh sounded strained. “School kid pranks. He’s scared, EJ. Do I have to beg?”

His words stung because she wanted to help. Healers never passed infections to sick people on purpose. She could be infected by the same bug as her mother. “I can’t. My granddad sold my horse after I healed a camper’s snake bite. I’m scared he’ll do even worse.”

“Like ground you?” he asked with a sneer. His phone vibrated but he didn’t answer. “You’ve known Bill your whole life. Are you saying no because his family are atheists?”

“What?” She dropped her backpack to the sticky linoleum floor. “Don’t drag my faith in the mud. It’s not that simple.”

“Is to me.”

Heat flushed her face. She couldn’t heal without her faith. People without God switched paths the moment adversity struck. They bartered with God. Those lost souls didn’t understand true faith and never would. If she couldn’t heal Bill then her faith was phony, and if she did—well, they called it a scientific fluke or said the meds worked.

“And you call yourself a Christian,” Scot pointed out.

Exasperated, she blew long bangs out of her eyes with one loud puff. “Stop.”

He turned and punched a hole in the wall.

Eddie Jean flinched. “You hate Christians?”

He stared at his fist. “No, you blamed Bill for what I did. He didn’t steal from you, I did. Sorry for treating you like a crap bucket, but your mom makes mine cry.”

Shocked, Eddie Jean kicked the wall. “My mother bit me and strange sounds come from her body. I’m scared she’s infected me.”

Scot shook his head. “You’re so emo. XOs don’t get sick, so you can’t infect him.”

“Even with rabies?”

He cleared his throat. “Jenna couldn’t have rabies and recover overnight. Let’s go.”

She twirled a lock of dark brown hair into a knot. “I might get Bill’s hopes up and then crush them if I fail. I’ve never healed anyone outside of Cloudland.”

“At least we tried.”

She searched for more excuses. “Hospitals stink and they’re creepy.”

“So? People don’t go there to rest.”

She licked her lips. “Just saying.”

“I thought you liked showing off your skills?”

“Thought you liked hiding yours? What’s changed?”

He reached for his phone and fumbled it. “Bill’s a good guy. You heal your mom?”

Tears floated in her eyes as she looked away from him. “No. She has an infestation. Said they’re telling her to do things. There’s something inside her, other people too, but I don’t affect them. When I told her I couldn’t help, she bit me, thinking my blood would heal her.”

“God has limits.”

“No, I have limits.”

He looked surprised. “Bummer. You have doubts. Your faith might not be strong enough, your healing might not work outside Cloudland, and your mother might be infected with something too big for you to fix.”

“Yeah.” Eddie Jean hated when her chin quivered. She brushed a hand under it but the trembling worsened. “My granddad said he’d punish me if I ever healed another person. He thinks abilities can get burned up if used too soon. What if he finds out?”

Scot dropped both hands on her shoulders. “I promise nothing will happen. Trust me.”

She stared into his eyes as the twitch rate doubled. People came before soccer. Right? Spring without soccer was like Christmas without gifts. Ever since Scot pulled her out of the river before she drowned, she looked up to him, even when he acted like a jerk. She told her mother about Scot’s heroics. Together they baked him a chocolate thank-you cake. Scot’s mother wasn’t home and the rest became history—Jenna Franklin and Michael Thomas became an item. Scot’s family suffered from the affair as much as hers.

“I do trust you, Scot.”

He hugged her. Scot smelled like sunshine and breath mints. The twitching stopped.

Someone knocked on the door and they jumped.

“EJ, you’re the first one, the first XO to rebel against the rules. Wish it had been me.” He picked up her backpack and checked his watch.

The tardy bell rang. The dull buzz mingled with the noisy overhead light bulb.

He cleared his throat. “It’s time to bounce.”

“Weren’t you in town when my little sister died?” Why did I ask?

Scot coughed and then said, “Yeah.”

“We were told she died from an allergic reaction. Swelling closed her airway. True?”

Seconds ticked past before he answered. “Yeah. We might live in one of the ten healthiest towns in the country, but people still die.”

Tangled emotions blinded her. She had grown used to the earth rumbles and land ripples. Her granddad, a bio-chemist, told her the swarms vibrated at a specific pitch and changed her DNA, but not Kimmy’s genes.

“She’s the first vaccine death in town,” Scot added.

Vaccine? “No, Kimmy had an allergic reaction to something she ate.”

Scot’s eyes widened. “Jenna told my dad she had a vaccine reaction.”

“Momma lied?”

“That’s news?” Scot’s expression mocked her. He shook his head. “Your family is famous for its lies.”

She didn’t reply.

He reddened. “I didn’t mean you were a liar.”

“You’ll say anything to get me to heal Bill.”

“True.”

Her face stung like he’d slapped her. “Even the part about me rejoining the XOs?”

“No, we need you, but you’re so difficult.” He frowned and shook his head. “Look, we don’t share your religious beliefs. Understand?”

She nodded. “After I heal Bill, I have to check my granddad’s cave. I can’t get what mother said out of my head. Will you go with me?”

He shook his head. “No, Kim didn’t have rabies. That story about Quitman keeping rabid people in a cave on his property is an urban legend. Can we go now?”

You don’t know Granddad as I do.

Eddie Jean followed Scot out the side exit door, around the band room, and into the student parking lot. They waited for the security guard in his golf cart to leave and cruise the teachers’ parking area on the other side of campus.

A swarm vibrated beneath their feet and for a second the land moved like in 3D movies. She had to look at her feet to stay steady. For the first time, a swarm gave her a spinal throb. The rush felt like she stood over a powerful engine. The throbbing vibrations sharpened her senses. She could tell Scot felt it too.

Slippery wax oozed from both ears and pooled in her outer concha. Ear pain eased as the goop seeped out. She checked inside her sweater pocket for a pack of tissues to clean up the ear discharge. The Hum used to sound soft as wind chimes catching a breeze. Now, the Hum clanged as loud church bells. “The Hum’s pitch went higher.”

“No kidding?” He grabbed a tissue from her and cleaned his ears. “Let’s roll, soccer girl.”

She followed him from around the building and across open ground. They ducked behind vehicles to dodge being seen from classroom windows. Scot unlocked the Jeep doors and then, as if using his key lock killed them, starlings dropped dead mid-flight over the school. Birds pelted the parking lot like litter from heaven.

Splat-splat-splat.

Eddie Jean searched the sky for an answer.

One bird collided into her backpack on Scot’s shoulder. A larger one landed on the hood of his Jeep. The bird fluttered its wings a few seconds and then stilled.

Eddie Jean stared at the dying birds in horror. “What’s happening?”

Wilbur

Grandmother Pearl said his need to help others came as a gift from God. Wilbur Jenkins wasn’t convinced. He stared at the Bible in the center of his bed. Its pages were zippered inside protective covers. Wilbur remembered it now. Mary had held the straight razor in one hand and the Bible in the other. She dropped it in their scuffle. No way had Mary tossed it on the dumbwaiter. That left the other live-in staff or Evaney Harwood. Even as Wilbur thought her name he shied away from thinking bad of her.

Worse, he didn’t mention Mary’s Bible to the detective. Another piece of evidence he had forgotten or lied about while questioned. He wasn’t sure which. Wilbur felt bad for not returning the Bible to Mary’s family. He couldn’t help wondering, even though he didn’t want to mull it over like he did when choosing words for poems, if answers to her odd behavior were inside. He swiveled his desk chair and pondered his choices.

“I’m a poet, not a detective,” he said into the empty room. Maybe he circled on the verge of insanity. He had never felt so isolated.

The Hum kept him awake at night along with other strange sounds—noises he never noticed before Mary’s death. Sleep deprivation caused him to lose the ability to separate facts from fiction, but he could still process truth with his eyes. Evaney’s waxy, pale skin had pinked up, her fingers fluttered on empty air as if she were playing an invisible piano, and her extremities straightened, popped, and flexed.

Wilbur couldn’t put his finger on his own outward symptoms, but he lacked concentration and his memory was failing. Worse, he couldn’t focus to compose verse. Losing his words nearly killed him. No way had Mary’s tragic death affected him like a disease. Something else had intervened. When he couldn’t recall Grandmother Pearl’s face, he was forced to take action. He’d lost his way the moment he lied.

As Grandmother Pearl always said, Truth matters.

A gleaming silver cross hung from the tip of the Bible’s zipper. Mary had been a Bible thumper and read scriptures daily. Sunshine reflected off the cross, casting sunspots on the bedspread as he ripped the detective’s card into shreds. His fingers itched to unzip the Good Book and look for clues. But liars shouldn’t read Bibles unless they meant to reform. Wilbur needed to get some answers first.

A brief knock and then Lee Gaines, the live-in nursing assistant, slipped inside. She wore pink scrubs with matching lipstick. Lee shut the door with a suggestive grin on her lips. Wilbur’s heartbeat skidded to a dead stop. She pushed her right hip out at a sharp angle and curled her hand into a fist at her hourglass waist. Heat flowed through his body and rendered him mute.

Wilbur didn’t care if staff caught visiting between bedrooms were fired. Lee was hypnotic, sexy, and cranky. Her face portrayed a beguiling mixture of tough and naïve—like a cross between Whoopi and Beyonce. He never knew which side would show up for work.

“Suck your tongue back inside your flytrap.”

Whoopi. Wilbur obeyed.

“Burr, what is going on? First Mary dies from blood loss, you’ve got her Bible that never left her hands, and now Miss Harwood’s eyes track me like a gator stalks small animals.”

He cleared his throat. “Wish I knew. Cookie thought I threw Mary’s blood-stained Bible on the dumbwaiter, but I didn’t. Did you?”

Lee shifted position, and her hips swayed as she curled both hands into fists on her hips. “Say again?”

“I need to find out who put her Bible on the dumbwaiter.”

“Why? You’re not Five-0.”

“Who?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “What’s in the Good Book?”

He shrugged. If Lee heard the Hum, she would understand why he hesitated to investigate. “Listen, you ever hear nonstop music, noise, or humming sounds?”

“It’s church-like quiet here. On my off days I party to stay sane.”

“Heard that.”

Lee walked over to the Bible and unzipped it. She flipped through the pages as if hunting for dollars. One square of folded paper dropped out. Lee picked it up, cutting her big doe eyes at him. She unfolded it and then squeezed it into a ball. “Blank.”

She tossed it into a trashcan. Wilbur exhaled, not realizing he had been holding his breath. “Thanks.”

“Never guessed you’d be superstitious. It’s no book of spells.”

“Have a seat on the bed.”

“In your dreams,” she fired back. She sat and crossed her legs.

He couldn’t help thinking how his hands would fit perfectly around her tiny waist. To stop his growing arousal, Wilbur said, “I need your help. Mary’s death is…is...”

“Freaky-deaky?”

“Word.” He nodded in agreement. “I can’t let go of what happened. Things don’t jive in hindsight. I’d like to check the inconsistencies, but I’d need a lifeline—you know, someone to watch my back while I investigate.”

She frowned. “Guard you?”

“No, steer me clear of trouble and reel me back if I get in over my head. The truth is always hard to find.”

She batted her eyelashes and a devilish smile erupted across her lips. It was the smile in his dreams right before she reached for…

“Hey,” she said, snapping her fingers, “you high?”

“Are you busy Saturday night?”

“I’ve got a date but Veena’s free.”

Veena worked as a housemaid and “shy” didn’t begin to describe her. He shook his head. “Forget I asked.” Wilbur walked over to the trashcan and removed the paper.

“Put it back!” Lee squinted at him. “Trust is a two-way street.”

He read Mary’s note.

Wilbur—Whatever you do, don’t stay here. Leave now!

Lee snatched the paper and threw it back in the trashcan. “Mary was end-times crazy. I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.”

He stared back and said, “Why did you lie about the note?”

“You need a lifeline,” she said, pointing her finger at him. “Don’t confuse me by asking for a date right after asking me to do something important. Now get this, we won’t be rolling in the deep together, understand me?”

Disappointment cooled him off. “Yeah, but you’ll be my lifeline?”

“Let me think on it,” Lee said, sounding bored. “By the way, you’re fifteen minutes late for your shift.”

Startled, Wilbur pushed his chair into the desk. He had to change.

Lee got the message and slipped out, leaving a faint trace of spicy perfume in her wake.

Wilbur changed into scrubs. Mary’s warning came too late, but he appreciated it all the same.

He went down the gleaming marble hallway and into Evaney Harwood’s sick wing. Before Mary died the sick room never smelled gross. After Mary’s death, the room smelled like an unplugged refrigerator in a heat wave. Open windows, burning scents, and bringing in fresh flowers didn’t cut the foul odor.

The room smelled dank, like the decaying scent inhaled after digging up a dead animal. To mask the putrid scent of decomposition, he’d smeared scented deodorant across his upper lip. Tomorrow he’d buy Vicks VapoRub.

***

Wilbur sat with Evaney Harwood on the portico porch waiting for Doc’s visit. She had never reacted to outside noises before Mary died. Now, Evaney followed birdsong by tilting her head and moving her eyes. He used the MP3 player to drown out the annoying Hum buzz and watched her come back to life.

Doc Hatcher tapped his shoulder. “How is Miss Harwood, Burr?”

Wilbur pulled the earbuds from his ears, letting his book fall to the floor. He knew what Doc Hatcher had asked, even if he didn’t hear him. Hatcher’s first name was Dockman, so everyone called the doctor Doc. Doc’s visit questions were the same and in exact order every Thursday—his official house-call day.

“She’s good, sir, daydreaming about ol’ times.” Wilbur hated the quiz routine Doc followed, but he played the game. Wilbur pretended Evaney didn’t wake up to drink blood, and her health wasn’t improving. If Doc didn’t want to acknowledge her recovery, Wilbur wouldn’t say a word.

“Ol’ times?” Doc grumbled. “She’s twenty-seven.”

Chastised, Wilbur leaned over to pick up his book. Everyone knew her age—why point it out? The elderly doctor had never learned smooth beside manners. Why rich folk tolerated his rude ass, Wilbur couldn’t understand. Who cared if he once played football for Dartmouth?

“Whatcha reading? True crime?”

“Shakespeare.”

“Thought the Bard was dead to young people,” Doc said. “Which book?”

“The Tempest.”

Doc gave his trademark tight-lipped smile and opened the top buttons on Miss Evaney’s blouse. The older man pressed the bell of his black stethoscope against her chest to listen to her heart. “Sounds good,” Doc said, removing the earplugs.

He wrapped the stethoscope around his neck and buttoned the pink blouse. He pointed up to the squeaky Hunter fan spinning overhead and said, “Spray some WD40 after you put her to bed. Don’t hurry though, let her enjoy the beautiful afternoon. Look at those gorgeous mums. Pretty, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

Doc rubbed his hands like they itched and then added, “I know the frequent police interviews intruded on your classes and study time. Thank you for your patience.”

“My profs understood.” Wilbur admired the way Doc skirted the real issue—Mary’s missing blood volume. Mary had blood drawn a week before she died for her annual physical. Normal test results were reported. Pushed by Mary’s family, the detective kept trying to account for her sudden blood loss and found no answers. According to crime scene photos, she should have had plenty of blood left to stay alive.

More than once, Wilbur picked up his phone to confess his cleaning spree but never did. He was afraid the detective would name him a person of interest. His life would be upended. Still, he couldn’t shake the guilt. Telling the truth, writing the truth, and living the truth were his creed. Now, he was a liar and it didn’t sit right with him—his poetic heart had vanished, just like Mary’s blood.

Doc cracked his malformed knuckles. “As a reward for saving Miss Evaney’s life, the estate has decided to pay your college expenses, including accumulated student loans, plus give you a raise. I’m letting the rest of the help go tomorrow.”

Shocked, Wilbur said, “You can’t fire them for what Mary did. Cookie’s been here for over thirteen years. She’s the glue holding this place together.”

“Hiring and firing is my call. Mary’s family gave interviews to a local reporter. Mary told her sisters that Miss Harwood is possessed and the estate is haunted. We’ll need you to talk to the reporter, Jennifer Bone, this afternoon if you please.”

Wilbur shook his head. “Can’t do it, Doc. Mary had soul.”

“Mary Stinson was soused when she died. Her sisters claim low blood volume skewed the blood alcohol level. Unfortunately, their claim may be true. Your personal observations would rectify their lies. The estate can’t allow the missing college student’s story to resurface. It draws kooks.”

Overhead, noisy ducks flew past on their way south. “Missing students? The rumors are true?”

“Forget them,” Doc said. “Give the interview and I won’t fire the rest. Agreed?”

Wilbur nodded. He considered the live-in staff as his adopted family. “Sure, as long as you give them a good raise as well.”

They glared at each other.

“Son, they’ve gotten lazy.”

“Not true, sir. What if the reporter mentions the missing students?”

Doc sighed. “Don’t respond and don’t agree to take her on an attic tour. One of the sisters claimed Mary described weird noises coming from there and begged the reporter to investigate. What the hell? Did she mean rodents?”

He’d go anywhere for truth except the attic. Wilbur shrugged.

“Better be a good interview if I have to pay more,” Doc said. “Make sure you tie up her questions with a neat little bow. In other words, make me happy.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wilbur wiped the idea of searching the attic from his mind just like he erased the impulse of inviting the detective for a sleepover to listen for odd noises. Grandmother Pearl always warned, Don’t cozy up to the law. Now, he’d have to work this big lie into his life map. The map kept him goal-focused on becoming a success, as Grandmother Pearl wanted. If composing words like music continued to elude him, he would end up a total failure. He wasn’t prepared to let a comatose woman steal his words. He had to strike back.

Doc leaned over to check Miss Evaney’s eyes with a penlight. He shaded them with his arthritic fingers and observed how her pupils reacted to light then dark.

Wilbur thought Doc had the ugliest hands he had ever seen on a healer. Sports injuries, he guessed. The older man repeated his exam three times like he didn’t believe the first result. Her eyes began reacting to light soon after she gulped Mary’s blood.

“No changes in her physical, poor thing. Say, Burr, Mary’s sister suggested you lied to keep your job. Did you fib to protect Miss Harwood? Tell me the truth.”

Wilbur decided to test him. “She’s moving.”

Doc cackled. “Not a chance. Watch this.” He lifted Miss Evaney’s right leg to see if she resisted. Her thin extremities had shriveled up and tried to twist into contractions. Wilbur helped prevent deformities by performing range of motion exercises. He also fitted various devices on her limbs to maintain proper alignment. Not once had she ever resisted. Today, Evaney Harwood held her leg up for several seconds.

How could Doc not see improvement?

Surprise flitted over the old man’s face, and he ignored the results of his own test.

Wilbur wondered if Doc needed to be her concierge doctor as much as the live-in help needed their jobs.

“I’m glad she’s outside for fresh air. Cookie can have her room aired out.”

And line it with salt. “Yes, sir.”

“Anything odd been happening?”

You mean rustling noises like bats roosting in the attic, Evaney’s joints popping in and out, or an entire flock of birds falling dead from the sky on estate grounds? “No, sir.” Doc asked for the truth and then charted lies. The nurses wouldn’t cross him. That’s why non-live-in staff kept resigning. They were too scared.

Doc cracked his knuckles again and asked, “She’s not too heavy?”

“No, sir. She’s light as pillows.” His hand touched the key to Grandmother Pearl’s Saturn pinned inside his scrub top. If things flipped out of control again, he’d drive away.

“Good. Good.” Doc warmed up his hands by rubbing them together. “I’ve hired a new nurse for nights. Please make her feel welcome and show her around.”

“Yes, sir.”

The doc grinned. He slapped Wilbur’s shoulder like athletes do after a great catch. “Oh, her blood is low again. I’ll need another pint from you. Today good?”

Enough was enough. “Last time I got dizzy. I have another paper due.”

Doc frowned. “Son, you’re the lone male with O negative. The women bleed monthly and give me more crap than an enema. You want to keep them here, fine, but when Miss Harwood needs a transfusion you roll up your sleeve. Clear?”

“How many units did Mary donate?”

“We pay two hundred dollars for each unit. She never complained, nor have you.”

“I thought I was a volunteer. When did it become mandatory?”

“Why do you think you get free healthcare and feast in splendor?”

Wilbur swallowed. “I’ll be ready after lunch.”

“Good. Now, what’s this about worms in her stool?”

Evaney broke wind, sounding as a dying engine. Even with a diaper on the smell reeked.

“Guess you can see ’em for yourself, Doc,” Wilbur said, picking up his phone to call Lee. “They scare the hell outta me.”

Louis

A call from campus police woke Louis Janzen at six in the morning. That woman on the phone had been true to her word. In less than thirty-two hours, she’d arrived with lawyers and her own security team. They demanded immediate access to his lab and to him.

“Tell her I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Make them wait outside.”

He hung up and called Cindy Van Zant, his loyal secretary. She sounded wide awake, and in the background he heard her daughters yelling for attention. A single mother, Cindy lived with her parents, and commuted an hour each way. “Sorry to bother you, Cin. They’ve already arrived. Everything ready?”

Louis felt a trace of guilt at the way he used his secretary. To compensate, he made sure she was the highest paid in the Neurology Department. Cindy had agreed to clean his lab, so they wouldn’t find his microbe work or his relative’s brain.

“Hang on a sec.” He heard her ask the children to be quiet.

Cindy had taken one look at the microbe and said, “Gross.” She’d wrinkled her nose and added, “Ickies aren’t in your head, Louis.”

“You’re sure?” he had asked.

“You couldn’t be as sweet as you are with icks lodged in your gray matter.”

Her comment made him smile on the insides, but he didn’t react. He left her to do the rest.

Cindy came back on the line. “Sorry, Louis. Man, they’re serious, aren’t they? They won’t find anything. I even cleaned up your computer and passworded it. Oh, I cleared all your appointments, so your day is free. You gave me Thursday off in exchange for my lab rescue, remember?”

“I did? Oh, well, thanks for clearing my schedule. What did you find out about Flameion?”

“They’re a secretive corporation with their hands in every pie from drugs to vaccines and monitoring equipment. But they don’t advertise. They’ve done their best work on immune system research and treatments. Main office is in Atlanta, not far from CDC. Couldn’t find any negatives, but I’ll keep checking on Friday.”

“You think of everything. I’m sorry I pulled you from sleep and disrupted your home life. I called to get the details of everything you’ve done. Enjoy your down time.”

A long silence stretched out and his stomach got a strange, twisty feeling he hated.

“You were sleepy when I called to update you. Don’t worry, the lab is clean.”

He bit his lip. AL was a serious ball-buster, slowly emasculating him by making him forgetful before his time. More than once he woke from steamy dreams with Cindy in the starring role, but that was his secret. “What would I do without you?”

A warm, sweet laugh erupted from her. “I’d like a promotion. Bye.”

Louis rolled out of bed, grateful his condo was close to campus. He sipped on Boost to avoid low blood sugar migraines. He had two research labs, one on campus and the other behind a nearby hospital. Somehow, Flameion knew he did his microbe work on campus, close to his home.

Parking spaces were open near the building entrance. He spotted Flameion’s team right away. The men were huddled up like buzzards on a carcass with one woman in their crew. She was a vision in a sea of dark-suited men. The petite blonde wore a neon pink neck scarf, leather skirt, and knee boots. She didn’t dress in the unitary business style he associated with the big pharmaceutical companies. He couldn’t take his eyes off her as he climbed out of the Volvo.

Louis grinned and called out, “Welcome to Charlottesville.”

Two campus police officers looked relieved to see him.

She came down the steps to greet him. “Louis?”

Her smile blinded and he nodded. He expected her to shake his hand, but instead she embraced him and planted a kiss on his cheek. Stunned, his mind burned through every possible memory and came up short.

Her mega-watt smile faded. “Oh, Christ. You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I can’t recall anyone’s name before I’ve had coffee,” he lied smoothly, hoping he would remember hers. “I could brew a pot in my office.”

Her starlet smile returned and she nodded. “Sounds good. We should talk first.”

He memorized details: good figure, great legs in killer knee boots, no wedding band, Carolina-blue eyes, and bow-shaped raspberry lips. But what is her name?

They walked up the steps together and a campus police officer unlocked the public doors. He smiled his thanks, and saw her motion the others following behind to wait. One officer accompanied them inside and turned on the interior hall lights.

She surprised Louis by taking his arm while waiting for the elevator. It arrived and took them to the fourth floor. Louis opened the door to his office suite and offered to take her jacket. Smiling, she slipped it off, and then the pink scarf. He noted the lacy white blouse and black leather pencil skirt hugging her slim hips. He hung both their jackets. Grinning like a fool, he went into the break room and started coffee. Who is she? The blonde made small talk until he finished.

They sat on the brown sofa in the general office while the coffee dripped.

She reached over and rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand.

Delicious shivers bubbled up his spine.

“We met at the AHA meeting in Orlando two years ago, smoked awful cigars, and got tipsy at the free bar. Later we danced until after midnight.”

I danced?

Nerves felt like firecrackers popping off. He decided to be honest. “I have the AL gene, and I’m having minor problems with my memory, mostly forgetting names and places.”

“I suspected something personal drove your relentless search for a cure. You were a machine and you even had an entourage. I’ve heard a few universities discriminated against professors with the Alzheimer’s gene. True?”

Louis felt the heat flush drain from his neck before he answered. “Not UVA. They’ve been decent to me considering my reputation as a wart.”

Her eyes sparkled before she laughed—it had a husky and intimate sound. “My name is Ava, Ava Allen.”

“Doctor Ava Allen?”

“Of course,” she said, and released a clip holding her hair in a French twist. Her hair spilled down her back in a mass of loose curls, reminding him of honeysuckle flowers. Ava took his breath away. Strangely, his head began to beat like his heart, and he smelled a heaven-sweet scent. He wished he’d chased her as hard as he went after a cure for AL. Louis chose his career over wife and family. It was his biggest regret.

Ava, Ava, Ava. He’d never forget her name again.

“Sorry, the clip hurt and gave me a headache.”

Tongue-tied, he didn’t answer.

She loosened his tie. “Always wondered why you didn’t come up to my room like you promised.”

Blindsided, Louis said, “I guess a colleague sidetracked me. My loss.”

“I cried.”

Her hesitant smile wounded him, and his thoughts shifted into a narcotized pace. What the hell happened? How could he not remember this angel? “I’m sorry I acted like a jerk.”

Ava slid closer until her thigh pressed against his. “I understand. We, dedicated researchers like you and me, have to turn off emotions and desires to get our work done. It’s a characteristic of driven people.”

“You’re not like me. You’re natural, like a skein of clouds in a tranquil sky.”

She grinned. “You’re such a flirt.”

He didn’t know what to say, but he couldn’t deny she had turned him on in an instant. How crazy was that given the bizarre circumstances of their meeting?

Her leg grew warm against his, and her perfume replaced the coffee scent in the room. She smelled like an exotic blending of orange citrus and narcissus. A scent he associated with sex—hot, thrilling sex. He remembered her and then his throat dried. Louis stood.

She stroked his hand. “You’ve changed, Louie.”

He had shared a lot with her, if she knew his family nickname. I’m going to get laid. The certainty excited him. How long had it been?

Her hand moved over his like a lover’s would. He was uncomfortable with having sex in his office, but his reluctance faded for the joy of being turned on. Sex wasn’t anything he intended to turn down—ever. Even if the sex took place in his office on the couch he shared in a suite with three other colleagues and two secretaries. Once AL had him fully in its vise grips his sexcapades would be ousted from his memories.

God, he was horny.

He chuckled and sat. “I expected to be tackled and arrested for violating property rights.”

“And here I am seducing you.” Her breath was sweet like fresh strawberries, or did the scent come from her lip gloss? Her hand dropped on his thigh and inched its way north. Don’t stop. His mind screamed in static approval as sex hormones saturated his blood. Please don’t stop.

Her hand lingered on his upper thigh. “As I’m sure you remember from earlier experiences at being close to discovering a cure, there isn’t much time for life’s little necessities, is there? I’ve been feeling deprived, very deprived. ”

His heartbeat sprinted. He knew he should brush her hand off his leg, but then his muscles went limp—except for one fine erection. Ava, Ava, Ava.

Her voice softened. “I’m certain you’ve hidden all traces of your discovery, so I’ve decided to enjoy myself on the company’s dime.” She smiled before leaning over to wash his lips with her tongue. Her kiss promised more.

Louis loved the way her lips curled first when she smiled and then the pleasure reached her pale blue eyes, making them sparkle. “You’re gorgeous.”

Her pale hands fumbled with his belt and unzipped his pants. Nimble fingers tugged on his pants until they slid down his legs. She straddled his lap and gazed into his eyes. Louis surprised himself when he ripped open her blouse. White buttons rolled to the floor. He released her bra and stared at her erect nipples. He licked them until she moaned.

Ava’s eyes closed and she whispered, “Maybe we should take care of business first.”

Is she kidding?

She freed his junk from bulging underwear. Her fingers grabbed hold—condom tight.

“Shoot.” He could barely speak while pushing up her tight skirt. His hands slid up her smooth inner thighs like they were greased.

“Come with me…and tour our lab,” she said, and then leaned over to probe his mouth with her sleek tongue. Seconds later, she added, “Examine my firm’s work and consider joining us as a consultant. I promise my lab will blow your mind.”

Caution lights clouded his vision, but what should he do? Her hand began to move up and down in a slow, familiar rhythm. Louis gasped. His pulse escalated in tandem with her hand.

“We can fly out today and be back before dinner. Private research has gone way past that supported by taxpayers. You owe it to yourself to examine the progress we’ve begun.”

His breath caught. To level the playing field, he slipped his finger inside her.

Ava threw back her head and moaned.

He jerked her thong down. “What if your lab doesn’t interest me?”

“I’ll fly you home and start the legal process.” Ava’s voice sounded strained.

He shifted his position and lifted her up with his hands. His penis slid inside her, and sudden heat flushed him. They both groaned. An Orlando memory came out of the haze in his head. She had gone down on him at the crowded bar surrounded by their colleagues and no one noticed. A fantasy first for him. Then she pulled him down the hallway into a tiny alcove. They had sex and returned to the party before it broke up at midnight.

“You’re coming with me, aren’t you?” she asked, panting.

“Oh yeah—no, I have responsibilities here.”

She bit his shoulder as her body picked up tempo.

He shut his eyes, enjoying the building pleasure.

Ava pushed her breasts into his face. “Your father spent a sabbatical year with Flameion. Get to know him by studying his research.”

He almost lost his erection, but Ava knew how to react. “Louis, come with me.” Her voice faded into a groan. Ava concentrated on her own pleasure from then on, and Louis obliged. She arched her back and screamed his name.

Louis rolled her over into the cushions. He brought her back to orgasm and then enjoyed his. He’d always found his best clarity after sweaty sex. But this time, unlike Orlando, he didn’t take off to mull over his thoughts—this time he hung around for the after sex cuddle. He kissed her and said, “Tell me about my dad.”

Ava clung to him and said, “You sound like you don’t know him.”

“He’s been lost in the Alzheimer’s maze for over fifteen years.”

“How sad.” Ava kissed his cheek and sat up. She shared enough about his father to make Louis eager to go to Atlanta.

“Did my dad know about the microbe?”

“He isolated it.”

He sat up. No way. Now he had to go to Atlanta. Louis never felt close to his father, even though he had tried his entire life to emulate him.

Ava took out her cell phone and made a call to the pilot in the company plane.

They dressed each other, and a limo took them to the airfield where the company charter waited. Ava ordered the others to remain in Charlottesville until they returned.

He and she boarded the jet and snoozed in each other’s arms.

A young flight attendant woke them and handed them warm, damp towels for their faces and bottles of CloudMist mineral water.

“Welcome to Cloudland, Alabama,” the attendant said. “You’ll never want to leave.”

Eddie Jean

Rainbow-hued sunlight filtered through the tree canopy, dotting the asphalt below with pastel orbs. Eddie Jean’s anxiety had faded. She was enchanted by the colorful display after a mile of dead birds getting crunched under their wheels. Nature provided beauty and balance that man needed to learn. The annual abscission of fall leaves concealed the extent of the avian kill zone—but clearly the effect centered over Cloudland. From her peripheral vision, she glimpsed two does followed by an albino fawn, racing to the woodland ahead. The trio broke from cover at a curve in the county road connecting Cloudland to Mentone.

Scot was texting while driving.

“Deer!” She shut her eyes, hoping there would be no more deaths today.

Scot swerved and finished his text.

She caught the fawn’s tail flick before they vanished into the shadowed, craggy landscape. “Did you see the albino fawn?”

Scot grinned back exposing Chiclet-white teeth. “Too bad you didn’t shoot it.”

“What?”

“With your camera phone, soccer girl.”

She laughed. Enhanced vision allowed her to see fragile etchings on rocks, veins on leaves as they floated down on the Jeep, and road signs in the distance. Eddie Jean could even tell at a glance what trees thrived and which were dying by the colors of their bark. No doubt the same was true with Scot.

“You nervous?”

She licked her lips. “I’ve never helped someone in front of medical people, much less a whole team of them.”

He glanced at her and shook his head.

His smug expression irritated her. “You wouldn’t be nervous if SEC head coaches came to see you play Friday night?”

“Maybe a little, but I wouldn’t be licking the skin off my lips.”

She brushed bangs from her eyes. It was a bad habit. “We’ll never get in the ICU during school hours.”

He shrugged.

She changed the subject. “The Hum is reaching its zenith.”

He slowed for a stop sign and turned on his blinker. “Can’t control nature.”

“What if the Hum is an ancient warning? A sound people used to recognize and take action? My scalp won’t stop tingling.”

He raised his eyebrows at her before braking and turning left.

Exasperated, she tried to explain. “You know, like the way elephants sensed the tsunami in Thailand and headed for higher ground. Haven’t you ever wondered why animals have superior senses and humans don’t?”

“No. Man’s eardrums have changed and our nostrils have narrowed because we don’t have to warm arctic air. It’s called evolution.”

He was being a wise butt. Her ears might be ringing, but the urge to run to the highest elevations was unnerving and unrelenting. “People should get to higher ground.”

“Or what happens? We live between mountains. To go higher, we’d have to climb to the peak of the Appalachians.”

A premonition loomed whenever she smelled axle grease and roses. Eddie Jean closed her eyes and relaxed in the seat. She stood on a mountain, looking in the distance, and saw an area surrounded by a lasso of violet-colored energy bands. When she glanced at a map in her hand, she read the Grand Canyon. The premonition faded, leaving her drained and sleepy.

“Hey!” He snapped his fingers under her nose. “Still with me?”

She slapped his hand away. “I think the Hum is an emergency signal. The pitch and frequency have picked up since it first surfaced. I have to warn people.”

He checked his speed and slowed. “Hang on. You’re not making any sense. Weird things happen in Cloudland. You can’t announce hunches to the world. Not smart.”

He didn’t get her reason. Since cutting class kicked her off the soccer team, she planned on making her decision worth the agony. She would warn people. “You have a one-track mind.”

“And you don’t? Focus on one task at a time. Like, is there anything odd that happens after you’ve healed a person?”

She wanted to discuss the Hum further but asked, “Like what?”

“Do you pass out? Or speak in tongues?”

She laughed at his stab at humor. “Two things. Bill has to stand, even if he’s being held up by others. Afterward, I’m dehydrated and need fluids.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” he said, and slammed on the brakes.

“I carry a water bottle in my backpack. I never know when I’ll help someone.”

He punched the gas pedal. “You say ‘helping’ not ‘healing?’”

She grabbed her hair at the nape to keep from getting more tangles. “People accept help without questions.”

“A matter of trust?”

Didn’t every decision boil down to trust? Trust was precious and had to be nurtured, or one day it would vanish forever. Least, that’s how she saw things. “Local adults don’t trust me, but kids do.”

“Two words—Quitman Delaney.”

Scot tensed up like he expected an argument or denial, but she would be the last person to defend her granddad.

“Good thing you’re half Delaney,” he said, followed by a lazy grin.

“My talent comes from the Delaney side.”

His jollity faded.

Eddie Jean glimpsed the hospital looming in the distance like a white city perched on the mountain’s edge. Sunlight struck the cathedral peaks in such a way that the building blinded. Locals called it the palace. To her, hospitals may look breathtaking on the outside or even be rundown, but the same anguish occurred on the insides. How could they not be haunted?

Eddie Jean’s phone buzzed. She pulled the cell out and read the text from her father: “Boys to afterschool care. You?”

She texted back. “Gym workout.” She hated lying to him.

Rett sent: “No go home without me.”

She sent: “OK.”

“Who texted?” Scot asked.

“My dad. He doesn’t want me to go home until he calls.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s affair afternoon.”

Eddie Jean winced. Scot may not have had feelings about the situation between their parents, but she did. “Maybe if you asked him to attend your practices and games he’d stop.”

“He’d rather get his toes licked or his…”

She covered her ears to push the mental images out.

Scot pulled into the fenced employee parking lot and found an empty spot on the first row. He shoved the gear shift into park and turned off the engine.

He hit her with telepathy so fast, her head throbbed. {Wise up, our families are breaking up}

Eddie Jean dropped her hands to her lap and looked at him. “Don’t beam your angry thoughts into my head. Telep gives me a headache and makes my nose numb. Don’t get your hopes up for Bill playing Friday night. Recovery involves rest.”

“Telep? Why can’t you call it telepathy?”

She shrugged.

He sent a text message and then yanked open the center console. “I’m not stupid, EJ. If Bill suits up, we’ll get a psychological advantage even if he sits on the bench.” He removed an expired hospital badge with a clip attached. “Bill’s mother is a nurse here. She helped us get weekend jobs last summer. During lunch breaks, we’d pass the football in the basement hallway.”

“Does everything revolve around football?”

“Pretty much.”

She leaned over and pulled up her knee socks. She’d never understood the other teen XOs. Why pretend you’re not smart when you are? Not using her talents seemed like a waste to her.

“Don’t stop to read the directory.” He clipped the plastic badge to his collar. “Just follow me and don’t act lost.”

“Lead the way.” Eddie Jean removed her water bottle from the backpack and followed him across the parking lot, down a lopsided sidewalk, and into a basement door near a time clock.

There were no security guards or employees lurking as they walked into the building. The hall had angled mirrors near the ceiling in the corners, and Scot spotted two employees heading their way. He hurried to open the door to a room labeled Transport Storage. They stepped inside, closing the door behind them. She saw one empty stretcher in the corner.

“Great.” Scot grinned and slapped his hands together. He mimed passing her a football.

She crossed her arms on her chest. Jocks.

He went over to a closet and slipped on a long white lab coat over his school uniform and buttoned up. Scot clipped his expired badge from the lab coat’s chest pocket and motioned her closer. “Isn’t the meat stretcher cool? Visitors freak out over corpses on elevators with the living. Now, corpses travel on the bottom shelf and no one notices.”

Eddie Jean wrinkled her nose. “Who cleans the bottom shelf?”

“Stretchers are cleaned daily with disinfectants. Ready to roll?”

She staggered backward. “What?”

“It’s the only way to get you there without being seen. Bill’s ICU is on the top floor.”

“Eeew. No way.”

He held up his hands. “You got a better idea? Or should I pull the fire alarm?”

She licked her lips.

He walked back to a closet and removed two sheets and a pillow without a pillowcase. He laid them on the lower metal surface. “You’re lying on a sheet with your head on a pillow. Better?”

“I hate you. You wouldn’t ask Tayla to ride like a corpse.”

He brushed hair from his eyes and said, “It’s brilliant.”

She stepped backward, shaking her head.

“If Bill can’t breathe, they’re not going to let us visit. Morgue stretcher grants access.”

“No.”

“Once Bill’s on the ventilator your job gets harder.”

Feeling spooked, she decided to cooperate. She handed him the water bottle, and he slid it into his lab coat pocket. He helped her get on the lower metal shelf while keeping her skirt tucked tight around her legs. Scot covered the stretcher top with a long sheet that blocked her from view. Seconds later, he pushed her out the door and to the back elevator. She heard staff talking about the lunch menu. Something disgusting threatened to drop from the metal shelf above her face. She averted her eyes, trying not to gag.

“What’s wrong, Bixie?” a woman asked.

“Tinnitus, and my patients are acting weird. You hear a hum?”

The elevator dinged its arrival.

Scot rolled the stretcher on and a man asked for a floor number. Scot said, “ICU on eight.”

The elevator crawled upward, stopping for long periods while people got on or off. Employees greeted each other at each stop. Scot started asking, “What floor?”

She guessed he punched the floor buttons for them. Eddie Jean dropped into the quiet place in her mind and tuned out sounds and people. She needed to be ready to heal as soon as they arrived. Scot sensed her mood and quit talking.

He pushed the stretcher over the door bump and down a long, smooth hallway. Televisions blared as they passed rooms and annoying room lights buzzed. The hallway stank, triggering a stomach roll. Bowel movement odors, ammonia-scented urine, and balsam-type disinfectants mingled into something gross. She tried holding her breath. Instead, panic followed.

Person after person asked where they were headed. The meat stretcher drew attention. Smooth linoleum floors transitioned into a rougher surface before she heard electronic doors open. Scot moved fast, turning the stretcher so quickly that her arm nearly dropped on the floor.

“Hey, we didn’t call for transport,” a woman said.

Scot jerked the stretcher to a stop and lifted the blanket. “Get out.”

Eddie Jean grabbed his hand, and he pulled her out. She stood and shivered.

The suffering crushed her. Misery saturated the air. Bill was in bad shape, but others were worse. She couldn’t breathe. Maybe this drowning sensation was why her granddad told her never to go to a hospital. The urge to help all, the sickest first, sent her reeling in panic. She couldn’t treat so many. Her vision narrowed, and she turned to bolt before she fainted.

Scot grabbed her arm. “Take a deep breath. I need you.”

His words steadied her. “I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can. Focus. You’re not alone.”

“Quitman Delaney, please call the operator,” a woman said over the intercom.

“Granddad’s coming.”

“No, he’s not,” Scot answered. “EJ, calm down. This isn’t Cloudland Memorial.”

“What the…I’m calling security,” a woman wearing maroon scrubs shouted.

Eddie Jean stared at Scot. Her pulse raced, and she felt dizzy. The urge to run away was as strong as the need to take a breath. “I’m sorry, I can’t heal Bill first. Triage doesn’t work by whim, sickest first.”

“Stop,” Scot ordered, smoothing long hair behind her shoulder. “You don’t know the other patients.” He put his hands on her arms. “Look at me, slow your breathing. Breathe with me.”

Shaking, she did as he asked. Her vision cleared but the twitching increased. His eyes resembled blue flames. Breathing in tandem with him calmed her.

“You don’t have to prove anything,” Scot said in a low voice. “Your gift means you have choice. You don’t have to follow doctor rules. Please, there isn’t much time.”

Eddie Jean nodded. Scot calmed her in a weird way. Maybe it was because he was the defacto XO leader, or maybe because he saved her from drowning, and maybe they had an undiscovered healing connection. Or maybe she liked him? The thought shocked. How could she think so after what their parents were doing?

He smiled at her and she shivered, but in a good way. Her girlfriends would gag if she ever confided her feelings for him. She tried to pull back when he took her hand, but he held on.

Scot led her into Bill’s room.

Wilbur

Wilbur felt trapped in a crock pot of pressure, and the Bridgeport news reporter knew it. She gloated at him over black glasses perched midway down her nose. The reporter had suggested they talk in the formal French garden behind the estate. She had been hitting him with insider information ever since, and he did his best to answer. An employee had been feeding her house secrets, but whom?

“Like I said, Ms. Bone, I never saw Mary drinking. I smelled liquor when I tried to take the razor from her. She had booze breath.”

“Mary had diabetes. If high, her breath would smell like alcohol.”

“Mary didn’t take meds for diabetes. She ate meals, same as us. Mary tested her sugars monthly and logged her blood pressure daily in a spiral notebook. It’s still in the room.”

“Doctor Hatcher had it bagged into evidence.” Her lips pulled to the right when she grinned at him, making it seem like a grimace instead. He hadn’t noticed her lips drawing upward on one side when they started the interview. A stroke symptom, he thought.

He asked, “You feeling all right, Ms. Bone?”

“Fabu. Now, answer my question. Do you and the others donate blood to Miss Harwood?”

Yeah lady, I’ve even got a Band-Aid in the crook of my elbow to prove it. “Truth is, I’m a blood donor, but the nurses hang the blood. You’ll have to ask them where it comes from.”

The reporter peered over her glasses after scanning her notes. “Seven percent of body weight is blood. According to my calculations, Mary had ten pints. See where I’m going, Wilbur? Mary Stinson had around four liters of missing blood. Missing! Where did it go? Her family thinks because she had O negative blood, Doc Hatcher forced Mary to donate. When she slit her wrists, she died because the donations left her in a dehydrated state. What blood type are you?”

He leaned back in his chair and ignored the tightening in his chest. Lies kept getting thicker and thicker, but he couldn’t tell the truth now. Doc would fire everyone.

“Don’t know.”

“Come on, Mr. Jenkins. Knowing your blood type is as common as knowing your blood pressure or cholesterol numbers.”

“Ma’am, with respect, I’m twenty-two years old, and I don’t know my numbers other than my height and weight.”

The reporter reached for her water glass and spilled the contents. Wilbur picked up her notebook to keep it dry and, without exchanging a word, they switched tables. When he glanced up, the older woman frowned at him.

“There are no weird house sounds, no call to duty blood donations, and no mystery involving her illness?” she asked.

He sighed. “The mansion is old, turn-of-the-century ancient, and yeah, it makes sounds, especially during bad storms. We spent six hours on generator power that night. But listen, if you want to tell me how Miss Harwood came to be in a coma, I’m listening.”

The reporter picked up the water pitcher and poured another glass. “You’re direct. I like you, Wilbur. You were sweet to Mary’s family and respectful when you described her last moments. I know they appreciated having her Bible, too. Now, convince me you don’t know how Miss Harwood came to be in a coma.”

Pressure eased back, and he swallowed a relieved burp. “I thought she had a brain infection like meningitis. But when I gave the detective my statement, he mentioned the missing Duke students. Doc doesn’t like house help asking questions. What do you know?”

“So,” the reporter said, buttoning her coat against the chill, “you’re interviewing me?”

He smiled and turned up his hands. “I’ve answered your questions.”

“True.” She turned off the tape recorder and flipped over her notepad to a clean sheet. “Evaney Harwood was a senior at Duke University. After fall break, she and five other students left school to hike in northern Alabama. No one knows why—except they enjoyed going on adventures.”

Wilbur stretched out his legs. “Go on.”

“Evaney Harwood was the lone occupant in another student’s Land Rover when it crashed. Head trauma put her in a coma. The other students were never seen again. What happened to them is trapped in her head.” She finished writing and tore off the paper. “The students’ names and their hometowns. I’ve played with their story and tried to find a new angle. Nada. Call me if you find new facts.” She put her card on the paper and pushed them across the table. “Thanks for being a good sport.”

They shook hands and Wilbur glanced at the names: Winn Eastman—Boston, Jax Dunway—San Diego, Dave Collins—Houston, Kaylee Goldstein—Manhattan, and Jordan Sweeney—Philadelphia. He planned to Google them.

Wilbur cut greenhouse flowers for the reporter to take home and escorted her back to her car. He jogged to the hidden garden where Lee waited with Evaney Harwood in a wheelchair. Despite the cooler temps, they protected her from sunlight. Shade corners were built around the estate.

“You’re late,” Lee said. “I’ve got a date tonight. What did J-Bone toss you? Her stories win awards.”

Hurt that Lee made plans without him, he didn’t answer. Wilbur scanned their patient and tucked in a blanket. He’d hoped to discuss the interview with Lee and maybe guess who leaked information. His eyes lingered on Evaney. Her posture looked natural and comfortable, and her pasty skin tone had flushed cotton-candy pink. “With whom?” The question flew out.

“I’m not sharing my personal life in front of her,” Lee said. “I swear she’s been diggin’ into my head. I’ve heard a scraping sound in my ears the whole time you were gone.”

He winced at her tone. Did he see a tear on Evaney’s cheek?

“Miss Evaney, you with us?” Wilbur peered into her open eyes and ignored Lee. He dabbed a tissue on her tears. Was she dreaming or had dirt blown into her eye? She had the prettiest eyes, warm brown like spring honey, and gracefully arched eyebrows. Even the beauty mark on her left jaw resembled a small heart. As sick as she was, her facial skin remained clear, but she had body scars, plenty of them.

Don’t forget, she slithers across the floor too.

“You act like her lover, not her orderly,” Lee pointed out.

He stepped back from the wheelchair, shocked. “What?”

“Just describing what I see.”

He was fussing over Evaney and acting like an old fool. His mind betrayed him over and over in her presence. He did things without thinking, like a mindless zombie. His actions made him shiver inside, remembering the first time. “Would you go up in the attic and bring her school trunk down?”

“Me? Carry that big thing downstairs?” Her tone rebuked him.

“Run on then,” he said, wishing Lee took better care of her nails. Cardinal-red nail polish was chipped on both hands. He hated the way the effect made her seem untidy.

Lee’s face scrunched into a scowl. She jammed fists into her coat pockets and strutted off on her tippy toes. Wilbur couldn’t take his gaze off her fine backside. He sat in the warm chair she vacated and decided to go in the attic. The thought made his throat constrict and a long-forgotten word popped into his head.

Yellowbelly.

What drudged up his childhood misery? Could Evaney be perturbed at him like he with Lee? He cleared his throat.

“I’m obsessed with your story,” he said. “Hope it doesn’t kill me.”

Ever since Evaney woke up, he became fixated on puncturing his fingertip to see if she’d respond to his blood like a dinner gong. He realized he had a sick fascination with blood drinking and forced himself to stop. Besides, she received his O-neg blood donation earlier.

Still, if he forgot to pin his car keys to his shirt, he panicked, like a demented man. Plus, he had become secretive. His entire being wanted him to resign, but he wasn’t a quitter like his mother. He stayed on to sift out the truth because it mattered to him. Poets used words to make connections, and without connections verse lost power. He had to take his power back or never make another connection or create another poem.

Wilbur heard someone cough and turned his head. He’d seen the new nurse, Rose Carson, sitting in the garden earlier and talking to a spinning pendulum. He had read about dowsers using pendulums and odd jewelry, but never expected an RN to use one. Pendulums weren’t scientific. Watching her and the flying pendulum made it easy to believe in ghosts, except there weren’t any ghosts at Harwood House, just a ghoul.

“You’re pretty good with her,” Rose said. “Most men your size are clumsy or heavy-handed. You’ve got the healing touch, you know?”

He liked that she didn’t ask why his big-ass self wasn’t off playing football. Sports were fine, but he enjoyed exercising his mind more. “Thank you. You’ve started a day early.”

“I decided to catch up on her past medical history and meet my co-workers. Doc said the records were in the attic and gave me permission to read them. I found two trunks. One contained her school records. Cookie said you might want to read them.”

Impressed, Wilbur asked, “How did you get the trunks down?”

“There’s a winch. I attached the hooks like a patient lift device and lowered them. I’m reading the records in the hideous purple guest room.”

“You’re talking about the first medical charts after the car accident?” he asked.

Rose nodded. “They’re copies, but whole. I took the job because Doc didn’t try to hide her health history. My gut instincts urged me to decline.”

Wilbur whistled. “My grandmother honored her gut instincts.”

“Usually I do. I kept asking myself, why are they paying double hospital salaries and still have openings? The same day I accepted the job, Mary died.”

Wilbur winced and the Hum inched up higher. “See any rodents in the attic?”

“Nope, it looked tidy.”

He studied her closer. Rose was long and lean without a single curve to her body. “Lanky” was the adjective he’d choose to describe her. She kept her auburn-dyed hair short and tidy, but her feet impressed him. They looked like flippers.

“You know how Mary died?” he asked.

“Yeah. Pretty tough on you, I’ll bet.” Rose followed his gaze. “Size thirteen and I have to special order or else wear shoes from the men’s department. Any jokes about clown feet and I’ll demo one on your hiney.”

Wilbur chuckled. He liked a little sass now and then from co-workers. They sat.

She offered him a smoke, but he shook his head as she lit hers. The estate wanted the grounds kept non-smoking like the mansion, but half the help smoked. It wasn’t like family or lawyers ran around and enforced the rules.

Wilbur admired Rose’s hands, ivory white with long, graceful fingers and short nails buffed to a natural pink shine. An unusual look for a smoker. Unlike most women her age, she didn’t have any brown age spots to mar the effect. He had noticed Rose brought nail brushes with her and placed them at the sinks. A few nurses wore those fake nails and the crud got under them faster than ants on sugar. He didn’t even want to think about baby worms taking refugee under their fake nails.

“Would you like me to call you Wilbur or Burr?”

“Burr.” Rose was all right and Southern born. Maybe Miamians didn’t consider themselves Southern. Maybe they called themselves islanders or tropicals. “My grandmother nicked me that one because I stuck so close to her after my mother dumped me on her. Mom came back during my sophomore year in high school and took me to Detroit. She died a month before I graduated.”

Rose exhaled and said, “Well, your grandmother did a good job raising you. You’re kind and decent to Miss Harwood. Makes me think you’re that way with everyone.”

“Thank you. Why leave sun and surf for this hot time?”

“Grandkids.” She grinned, and then began swinging her crossed leg back and forth. “All three girls have autism. I came up to give my daughter a rest spell, and her husband ups and dumps her. Think he watched for the best opportunity. Said he couldn’t live another minute in the chaos. We decided Daisy, she’s a lawyer, stays home with the kids. I’ll help her on off days.”

“He left her without support?” Wilbur asked.

“He pays their bills and lives on their yacht. Kids need extras for psychologists, speech therapists, behavioral therapists, occupational therapists, vitamin and mineral supplements—the list is endless and expensive.”

“Hard to believe yacht owners are hard up,” Wilbur said.

Rose took a drag. “One of his clients paid him with the boat. He fixed it up and hoped to flip it for big money. Then the sailing bug bit him. Autistic kids and sailboats don’t mix.”

Wilbur nodded. If someone asked him, which they wouldn’t, but if someone did, he would point out the many problems inside the head, changing people’s brains. Autism, ADHD, ADD, Alzheimer’s, depression, all kinds of facial tics; it was like a war being fought in the brain and no one started a draft to end it. “Did anything unusual pop out of her chart?”

Rose stared off into the distance like she hadn’t heard.

Wilbur admired the fall garden. The colorful mums were damaged after the storm. Light snow fell last night but melted on the ground. Ice remained on the gigantic water feature’s statues. In the center, mischievous cherubs spouting water out of every orifice, including their little metal peckers, pretended to shoot cupid arrows. Beyond the large pond and garden, a serene lake awaited exploration. Wilbur liked to walk around the lake path while he composed poetry. It hurt to remember how easy words came to him before Mary died. He looked away, blinking.

“It’s a big estate,” Rose mumbled.

“Sure is.” Multi-hued teals and geese covered the lake, taking a rest before resuming flight south. The geese rapped back and forth like they were calling out holiday greetings while birds in trees chattered like a crowd waiting for a concert. Recent walks hadn’t cleared his head of the pervasive fear that something unnatural had taken over Evaney’s body. The same fear tried to suck him in like it did Mary. Life was draining out of him—next he would stop reading.

“I reached my own conclusions and it scared me,” Rose admitted.

He sat straighter. “Care to share?”

“Doc keeps our patient’s worms, he calls them wigglers, in a private collection. Man has them in a fish aquarium on his desk. The aquarium sat at eye level during my interview. I kid you not, he’d reach in with bamboo skewers and lift them out of the sand. I swear a few had teeth! The whole time he interviewed me they slid around, throwing up little clouds of dirt. He grossed me out when he dropped clotted blood from a red-top tube into the aquarium. The worms got all excited like pets do at feeding time. He claimed he sent samples to the CDC years ago and never heard back. Doc talked to them like beloved pets and had even named them—Mars, Brutus, and Hector. He spooked me, Wilbur. Will I regret hiring on here?”

“Nah.” He tried to sound casual, but felt repulsed. When Lee changed Evaney’s diaper during Doc’s last visit, the old man took one look at her steaming, worm-infested stool and upchucked on the floor. He had reacted like it was his first time to spot them, but according to Rose he nurtured and named them. Lee was pissed because she had to clean up after him too. Wilbur didn’t do poo, pee, or puke. He lifted, carried, and turned. In hindsight, he wondered if Doc pretended sickness to be alone with Evaney.

Lee had gone to get a mop and bucket, and he left to ask Miss Cookie to make tea to settle Doc’s stomach. How much time had he been left alone with her? The sudden anger he felt toward the older man made Wilbur uncomfortable.

Rose sucked in a deep breath and her belly contracted. “Doctor Hatcher hired me ’cause I’m not religious. I thought I should put it out front and center. I keep my spiritual beliefs private, and I hope no one holds it against me.”

He had been raised in the arms of religion, but not the nutty kind. Over the years, he had learned the shrewdness of Grandmother Pearl’s “wissams” as she called them. His favorite was: Words don’t connect human beings, but hands do.

“Miss Harwood was an atheist,” Wilbur said. “We’re forbidden to pray around her. Some people think that’s why she suffers now.”

Rose cleared her throat. “I guessed as much.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Her diagnosis,” Rose said and took another drag. “She’s got the Alzheimer gene but not the disease. Doc said acute porphyria has complicated her case.”

“Porphyria?”

“Interferes with the body making red blood cells.”

“What about meningitis?”

“Hospital records are clear—blunt force trauma to the head. No brain infections noted or porphyria. Doc Hatcher added the porphyria as a recent diagnosis. It’s why her skin is sensitive to sunlight.”

“She requires blood transfusions due to porphyria?”

Rose hesitated and said, “Guess so.”

“I can’t stop thinking about the missing Duke students. You read about them?”

“Answers have been in the attic the whole time you’ve worked here. Why didn’t you read her charts?” Rose flipped ash to the ground.

How could he admit the attic scared him? “I needed my job. Cookie told me nosy people get fired.”

Rose looked amused. “Cookie rules this place with an iron hand.”

He nodded. “How could Miss Harwood hike and camp out with her sensitive skin?”

“Porphyria symptoms popped up after the accident.”

“She caught the disease from a person?”

Rose sighed, taking another drag. “Porphyria is inherited, but her blood, urine, and stool tests came back negative. Doc called them weak positive, but specialists said tests were negative.”

“What are you saying?” he asked softly.

“She had a bite on her right leg. Wound never healed until she got blood transfusions.”

Wilbur reached over to check Evaney’s blanket to hide his shock. “Doc lied about her condition?”

Rose shivered and stubbed out her cigarette on the stone walkway. “I’ve said too much. Doc must think I’m stupid, or he doesn’t care if I know. I’ll drop Miss Harwood’s school notebooks in your door slot. She was an English lit major.”

“Rose, is he lying?”

“He is. The question is: why?” She picked up the cigarette butt and walked back to the estate.

“Don’t restart the job hunt,” he called after her. “We need you.”

Evaney’s fingers began to strum the air.

He rolled her back to the ward. Afterward, Wilbur found his door slot filled with spiral notebooks decorated with Duke Blue Devil stickers. He planned to read every page.

Eddie Jean

Scot shut the glass door, cutting off the nurses trying to stop them. He made a football passing gesture to Bill. Bill’s mottled lips spread into a faint smile as Scot stepped over to the bedside. Bill grasped Scot’s hand like a life preserver.

“Thanks, buddy.” Bill’s voice sounded hoarse.

Eddie Jean managed to control her panic and stared down at Bill Franco. His dark eyes were voids, wider than normal and empty of expression like a nazar. His chest and stomach heaved from the work of breathing. His condition scared her. Bill would be the sickest person she had ever tried to heal. Was her faith strong enough?

“Scot,” Bill’s parents said in tandem, standing from their chairs. His father said, “You kids can’t be here. We’re waiting for the anesthesiologist to put in a breathing tube.”

A guy hunched over a ventilator, glanced up, and then resumed his equipment check.

“Eddie Jean can heal Bill, Mr. Franco,” Scot said. “Will you let her try?”

A woman in white scrubs burst into the room. “Kids, it’s not visiting hours, and you’re not family. You must leave. Now!”

Bill’s mother, with eyes ringed soot-black, tugged on Scot’s arm. “She can’t heal him. Now, please go back to school!”

“Mom,” Bill said, gasping. He reached for Eddie Jean’s hand. “She.” He coughed and sucked in air. “Makes miracles happen.”

Eddie Jean squeezed Bill’s hand. It was sweaty and ice cold. His nail beds were as pale as soda crackers.

Pity creased his mother’s face. “Son, the doctor will be here soon. She can stay until then.”

Another nurse entered carrying a clipboard. She began jotting down numbers on a spreadsheet. “You’re upsetting my patient. Please go.”

“Quitman thinks she can heal, Mrs. Franco. Let her try,” Scot begged.

Scot wouldn’t look at her after the granddad comment. “He’ll be able to suit up for the game. Right, EJ?”

“I hope I can heal him.”

“Okay, let’s go, young lady,” the older nurse said, taking Eddie Jean’s arm.

Bill’s mother added, “Scot, Bill is out of sports until next year.”

Eddie Jean resisted the nurse and didn’t move. She held her mental focus for Bill’s sake. Hope washed over Bill’s father’s face, and she believed he would act.

Mr. Franco stepped in front of his wife and said, “You’re risking team suspension, Scot. Now, that doesn’t help Bill. But thank you for caring. Both of you.”

Scot removed the nurse’s hand from Eddie Jean’s arm. “We’re both risking suspension. That should tell you how much I believe in Eddie Jean helping Bill.”

His words gave her courage. “It’s not up to your parents,” Eddie Jean said to Bill. “Do you want me to help you?”

Bill nodded, and then caught his father’s eye. “Please.” The effort of speaking one word made his lip color fade from beige to blue-gray.

Scot said, “He’s got to be vertical.”

Bill’s father hesitated and then took off his belt. He leaned over and dropped the side rail. “Get the door, Scot.”

“Bill’s lungs might collapse any minute,” his mother said, rounding the foot of the bed like a protective guard dog. “It’s unfair for you to make such a promise.”

Scot turned around and pushed both nurses out. He closed the door on their objections.

The respiratory technician finished plugging in vent cables and stood. He looked like a beefed-up weightlifter. Veins on his arms stood out like snakes.

“Do something,” Bill’s mother yelled at him.

“I’m the Jesus freak who believes in prayer, remember? Besides, I’m not passing up a chance to witness a miracle. Can I help?” he asked Eddie Jean.

Bill’s mother put her hands over her face and sobbed, “He’s my only child.”

“Yes,” Eddie Jean said, feeling confident. “Help him stand.” The technician pulled Bill into a sitting position while his father secured the belt around Bill’s waist. Alarms shrilled, but the respiratory technician reached over and silenced them.

“Is his oxygen line long enough for him to stand by the bed?” Eddie Jean asked.

“Yeah.”

A call for security went over the overhead hospital paging system.

Eddie Jean looked at Bill’s father. “Stand him up.”

“He could crash,” his mother shrieked.

“Would you use your machine to block the door?” Eddie Jean asked the technician. He didn’t hesitate to do it, which freed Scot from the door.

“Better hurry,” the respiratory tech advised, and locked the wheels. They lifted Bill. His face blanched and his eyes crossed.

“Pressure just dropped,” the tech said as he moved to hold up Bill.

His legs hung down, but Bill couldn’t stand. His father and the tech moved behind him and used the belt and their legs to steady him. Scot stood in front of Bill. He placed Bill’s arms over his own shoulders and put his hands at Bill’s waist to support him. Eddie Jean squeezed into the tight space between them. Bill’s perspiration smelled musty and his breath putrid from mouth breathing. Her body began to twitch. Scot’s body heat made her temperature rise faster. That’s interesting.

Bill groaned.

She put one hand over Bill’s heart and the other on his damp forehead and clicked the spark. That’s how she thought of it—like flicking a Bic lighter, but in her mind.

Eddie Jean believed the mental flick turned on a special pathway in her brain. Her imagination enlarged as she concentrated on helping someone. She envisioned dark spots swimming through Bill’s blood and getting caught in his organs and traveling up his nerve paths to his brain. Icy colors popped underneath her skin, and she knew the others could see them. The colors swirled, creating frosty goosebump sensations along her nervous system, making a hidden place in the center of her brain whir.

“What’s happening to her face?” Bill’s mother asked.

“She’s hotter than a furnace,” his father said, grunting.

“He’s turning blue,” Bill’s mother yelled, “and he’s freezing.”

“Oh, dear God, look at her arms!” Bill’s father said.

Deeper focus made her color spirals darken into rich, jeweled tones, like the inside of a kaleidoscope before simmering down into softer hues, like the insides of an oyster shell. Eddie Jean felt weaker than she’d ever experienced, and not as cold as she should be. Maybe it was because Bill’s body mass was greater than hers.

“Something’s happening,” Bill whispered. “I feel leg cramps.”

Eddie Jean focused on dropping her temperature.

Scot stiffened and groaned.

In the next instant, Scot’s body became a heat conductor. An additional arc of energy pulsed through her. It gave her the extra push to reach the healing peak or chilling point, she wasn’t sure which to call it, but she felt frozen, encased tomblike in ice. In this icy moment, the healing transfer reached its crest.

“Warm,” Bill said. “Feels good.”

“He’s bearing his own weight,” the technician said in an excited voice.

The heavy coldness saturated her bones and made her eyelids droop. Bill’s virus needed heat to thrive.

Bill’s father yelled, “Look at the monitors!”

“Amen,” the technician said.

Bill’s mother pressed a palm against her forehead and spoke, but Eddie Jean ignored her. Her mind took flight, sailing straight up into blinding, milky light only she could fathom. Seconds passed and she opened her eyes.

“Ah,” Bill croaked, breathing easier but hanging tight to Eddie Jean.

Bill’s mother wiped her tears and mumbled, “I can’t believe it.”

As the vivid colors cooled under her skin, she melted and warmed up until her blood burned like lava. She focused on healing not hurting, life and not death, and ice and not heat to cool the virus making Bill sick. Her hands felt like they were sunk in goo.

Bill’s sharp intake of breath was followed by a low laugh.

She dropped her hands, spent. Pale concentric circle patterns would scar her skin for hours afterward as the colors faded. The wheals made her look like a pale giraffe.

A smile tugged on Bill’s chapped lips. He took a deep breath and yanked off his oxygen line. A moment later he walked under his own power to the glass door. Bill clasped both hands like a boxer after winning a fight at the mute audience standing behind the glass.

By now, Eddie Jean supported Scot’s weight. He had wrapped his arms around her and pressed his weight on her back.

Bill returned to the bed and sat.

The technician went to his machine and removed it from blocking the room door.

“Scot?” Eddie Jean asked. His legs trembled. She managed to turn and face him. He hadn’t cooled off as fast as she did.

The others watched Bill breathe normally.

Scot mumbled, “Don’t feel so good.”

She grabbed his lab coat with both hands and managed to keep him from smacking the floor. Eddie Jean lowered him down.

“What’s wrong?” Bill asked.

Eddie Jean squatted down beside Scot. His eyes were open, but she understood. “We both need water.” She reached into his lab coat pocket and removed her water bottle, lifted his head, and put it to his lips. He gulped the fluid as people crowded into the room. A nurse with an orange stethoscope around her neck stooped to take Scot’s pulse.

“EJ? What’s wrong with Scot?” Bill asked.

“He’s dehydrated.”

Bill’s father handed Eddie Jean a cup of water. Scot had guzzled the water bottle dry and sat up, back against a wall. He snatched the Styrofoam cup and drank it too. “More,” he begged.

Bill’s mother passed Eddie Jean a water pitcher. “Drink some, honey.”

Eddie Jean gulped half. “We both need more.”

“Lots more,” Scot added, and reached for the plastic pitcher.

“What happened?” a man asked, walking in.

The technician said, “A miracle, doc.”

“Bill walked,” his mother said, taking her husband’s hand.

“For crying out loud, get the kids off the floor,” the doctor said, stepping around them to check his patient.

Helping hands lifted them. A nurse led them around the oval nurses’ station and back into a break room with a mustard-colored couch, two round tables surrounded by chairs, and a large sink. They took turns gulping tepid water from the tap.

“Could’ve warned me,” Scot said between slurps.

She glanced over at him and grinned before splashing her face.

“Excuse me, I’m with security. You two, follow me,” a man in a brown uniform said. “Now.”

They kept drinking. The guard waited until they stopped and then he repeated his order. They followed him from the ICU. A small group of people begged her to heal their sick relatives. So much for not being noticed. The guard ushered them to the quiet sanctuary of a waiting back elevator. She saw Scot read a text and then squint at it again.

The guard inserted a key into the control panel and the elevator door closed. It dropped fast without stopping for passengers. “We’re escorting you out to the parking lot. Go back to school.”

“Stop on the second floor. Quitman Delaney is waiting for her,” Scot told him. “She’s his granddaughter.”

“Sure.”

Eddie Jean’s happy smile faded. She stared at Scot until red circles swallowed his cheeks. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Her premonitions didn’t reveal his betrayal. Tears welled in her eyes, and she looked away from him. She had forgotten that Scot hated her.

“Q promised to break up our parents,” Scot said. “Mom threatened to leave town.”

“He’s going to punish me.”

“Suck it up.”

His cold words squeezed her happy heart flat. She faced the elevator doors. Wasn’t he the one who said “trust me?” Times like this tempted her to embrace the coldness of her intellect, but she didn’t want to stumble through life avoiding her feelings or her conflicts. Still, his callous words hurt. She wanted to scream and kick him, but didn’t.

When the elevator door opened, Quitman Delaney glared back at her.

“Sir,” the security guard said, respectfully.

Her granddad’s eyes resembled twin olive-green flares underneath a jutting forehead. Dramatic black eyebrows had reminded her of bat wings since early childhood. They fluttered and moved like they were about to take flight. Strangers remembered the fanatical glower from his eyes more than his thin-slitted shark-gill lips. Few people noticed the rumpled silicate-colored lab coat with the VIP badge embroidered over the breast pocket in red, stamping him as being on the board of directors. Quitman Delaney lurched forward a step and his rough hand tightened around her throat. A necklace pierced her skin under his hand.

“Hey dude, wait a…” Scot said.

Granddad pulled her out and the elevator doors closed behind them.

Louis

Louis and Ava lingered over brunch in the private jet terminal. At first he had been miffed they landed in Alabama instead of Atlanta. Ava had explained the lab was in Cloudland, but the corporate offices were in Atlanta. Over soup and sandwiches he lapped up stories of Ava’s childhood in Seattle. Only child of doting working-class parents, and they had spoiled her. Louis pushed back from the table satiated, and wanted to know more about his father’s work. She had been coy with specifics.

A young waitress stood nearby, ready to jump and remove unwanted dishes. She obeyed Ava’s pinkie movements and collected the soiled dishes and cups.

“Flameion hired me right after residency,” Ava said.

“Really?”

She laughed at his surprise. “Louis, I had over a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt. It seemed prudent to let Flameion pay it off. Five years of servitude seemed like a good deal at the time, plus I have no regrets. A tour of the lab sold me. From the beginning, my income has dwarfed yours. And yes, I know your salary. Flameion does its research.”

He was appalled at the intrusion into his privacy. “But you have to live in Alabama.”

She laughed. “Touché. The trick is to forget you’re in ’Bama. Wait till you meet the real Cloudland. A researcher’s paradise.”

A man came into the hangar and waited inside the exit door. Ava stood and retrieved her jacket and briefcase from an empty chair. “Our ride.” She answered her phone and walked out the exit door.

Louis dropped a tip on the table and hurried after her. He got into the immaculate limo and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Birmingham is a research power, but Cloudland? Never heard of it. My father could be a snob about where he worked, or so I thought until today.” The car pulled out onto a narrow road. From what he could see, Cloudland was a remote, rural haven.

She scanned a text. “Your dad loved it here during his tenure. There are four handwritten letters from him requesting to stay on longer. He saw something he liked.”

No way. He’d know that, wouldn’t he?

Ava watched his face like an actor waiting for a cue. “All before my time. Your father’s immunological work was brilliant. Like I said, Cloudland is unique and mysterious in all the right ways. We’re located northeast of Birmingham and south of Huntsville, and we’re near the Georgia border. Town isn’t on maps either, so we don’t see many tourists.”

“How does a town stay off a map?”

Ava shrugged.

Louis searched his memory, but he couldn’t remember his father being absent from Boston for a year. But he did recall a story. “The three Army brothers. My father’s mentor noticed as a young doctor in World War II three fast healers in his surgery. He even cut the brothers with clean and dirty instruments to measure their healing responses. I saw the graphs he charted and compared to a control group. Infections in the other men forced him to stop. Dad was fascinated by their story and their immune systems. He called them super-healers. They hailed from Cloudland?”

“Yes. Ballsy to do research in a war zone, don’t you think? If the brothers hadn’t demanded to be put in the same unit, doctors wouldn’t have noticed them. Military physicians studied them for years and claimed they discharged them in 1948, but their families never saw them again. The shady event ended any chances, besides those of Flameion, to get a second shot at observing other unique Cloudland residents.”

“’48? The war ended in ’45, didn’t it? I could be wrong. What happened to them?” Louis gazed out the window, hoping he’d contained his shock about his father.

Ava sent a quick text. “It doesn’t matter what happened to the brothers. Quitman Delaney, Flameion’s head of R&D, convinced the corporation to build a hospital in town. It’s a state-of-the-art facility, and in return the hospital labs funnel us specimens, blood, and live patients to examine. In exchange, scientists like me can’t live in Cloudland. Most of the locals work at the facility, but they never see the R&D teams. We have private suites on site, our shopping is done for us, or we use the internet. We’re instructed to keep a low profile.” She lowered her voice. “You know why, right?”

“A new disease?” he joked, clueless.

“Exactly,” she answered. “I’d hoped you would send me a note after receiving your father’s papers on the topic. Guess you were too busy or you’re just rude. I had to sign company waivers to release them. Your father studied Swarm disease, but he never saw a live case.” Ava’s face changed into a glimpse of her reserved, scientific persona. “Thankfully, Swarm is rare. But you’ll get a chance today to observe a recent case and follow up on your father’s assumptions if you want.”

“Really?” Louis asked.

She didn’t crack a smile. “Swarm disease is Flameion’s secret for now.”

Feeling drained from his body. Was she deliberately trying to confuse him? “Lots of changes at UVA—a reorganization taking place. I didn’t get a chance to study Dad’s records. I’ve never heard of Swarm disease. Will that be a handicap?”

Her normal breathing became stridor-like. She stared at him, unable to believe what he said. “I thought you sent me an underground message when you put the microbe on the internet. Testing our response, so I thought. How else could you have discovered it?” Her eyes narrowed as she studied him.

He pointed to his forehead.

Ava kicked the seat across from them. “Great! Just great.” Her annoyance revealed an unpleasant side of her character. “You’ll have to sign a confidentiality agreement about Swarm.”

Like hell I will.

Louis waited a few beats, noting her toes were pointed down as she awaited his reply. Her stridor worsened. “Of course Ava, but I must return home tonight. I’m required to lobby for departmental funds. That said, what links have you observed between the microbe and this Swarm disease?”

Her toes popped back up, and she reached over and tangled her fingers in his like couples do. Her reaction came across as fake, yet he didn’t pull away.

“Our plane leaves at five,” Ava said. “As for the connection, it’s not easy to establish. We hope you’ll become a catalyst, like your father.”

In one day? He laughed. It had been a while since anyone thought he might find answers. “I don’t understand why a new disease is kept secret. Makes me think it’s a joke.”

“Was the microbe a hoax?” Her soft voice had hardened.

Coldness radiated from her expression like an air conditioner. She had roller-coasted through various emotions since they landed, and her behavior confused him. Even her bow-shaped lips thinned into a red check mark, making her appear angry.

He said, “Absolutely not. I found it inside my grandpop’s brain. He died over a hundred years ago.”

The limo glided to a stop, and the chauffeur jumped out to open the door. Ava pivoted and swung her legs out and then turned back to say, “Your grandpop, as you call him, an amateur archeologist in his youth, came to this area searching for Native American relics and pottery from the Mississippian culture. He did find quite a few treasures, as I recall. So, your family has a connection to Cloudland. Prepare yourself for a real lab experience.”

Louis climbed out. The lab jutted into the backside of a mountain.

Ava completed a quick call on her cell before turning back to him. “Awesome, isn’t it? As I told you earlier, Flameion-Cloudland is not public knowledge. I have a secretary waiting with our standard non-disclosure agreement inside the door.”

He had heard whispers of facilities like these, and he had no intention of getting involved with one. “Ava, I have no interest in any lab associated with the military or funded by their subsidiaries.”

“No problem,” she said and opened the door.

“Wait.”

She turned back, eyebrows lifted into an elegant arch. Sunlight struck her eyes, reminding him of the blue hydrangeas his mother planted in the shade garden.

“Who funds the company?” he asked.

“Private donors. They’re all hoping for longer lives through our research. Ready?”

He nodded, disquieted. His first glimpse of the inside before the secretary interrupted was more than enough to make him eager to see more. The place screamed investment monies. No cost cutting here. He signed several forms without reading them. The facility air was cold and contained a hint of limonene. Even the lighting seemed clear and natural.

Ava grinned and led the way to decontamination. “Like an underground city, isn’t it? I’m guessing you’ll want to miss your return flight.”

“I must get back to UVA tonight.”

She ignored him and pointed to a door marked “Male.”

The male changing rooms were swanky: plasma television, personal computers, plus an assistant ready to help him undress and follow procedure. Louis stepped into a refreshing shower and dried in the next room under comfortable blowers. The last room held personal care products, clean scrubs, a lab coat, and other essentials. Crocs and socks were provided for his feet. Last, a somber assistant pushed his hair into a cap and tied it.

Strangely, Louis felt he was being prepped for surgery. The idea sent chill bumps clawing up his spine. He decided his presence in Cloudland was living proof of the power of sex. Not a soul in Virginia knew his exact location.

Eddie Jean

Eddie Jean’s bladder almost let go and her right leg jerked back and forth. Rage radiated off Quitman Delaney in heat waves. Plus, he smelled like the old wino that turned his empty bottles into elegant candelabras and sold them on the corner of Rally and Gunn Streets.

“I’m tired,” he said, “of you fighting me.”

She couldn’t answer with his fingers digging into her throat. “Truth.” Eddie Jean could barely utter the word.

He released his chokehold, but his face remained clenched in a snarl.

Eddie Jean leaned against the wall and tried to swallow spit without choking.

Eyes smoldering like a madman, he hovered over her with a raised fist. His thread-sized lips blanched a pallid color as he prepared to strike. A diamond cross centered on a stainless steel band gleamed on his ring finger. It offended her that he wore the Christian symbol, but he acted like a fiend. Snot ran from her nose as she glared back, refusing to duck and cower.

Women laughed as they walked fast up the hallway, heels clicking in tandem, to catch the elevator. They were giggling and sharing private jokes about someone named Beau.

Granddad lowered his fist and exhaled. Quickly, a calm expression spread over his face. It was scary the way he could change in an instant. Older Delaney relatives whispered Quitman could induce stroke or freeze heartbeats. He couldn’t, but acted as if he could.

The women arrived as a bell rang and the elevator doors opened. Apologizing for the interruption, they stepped inside and the doors closed.

“What do you want?” Eddie Jean clenched her fists until fingernails dug into her palms.

“To train you.”

“I don’t want to be like you.”

“You already are.”

Time to be assertive. “Stop hurting me, Granddad. It doesn’t work.”

“Shall I bring the twins to my lab?”

His pitiless words seared. “I can’t stand to breathe the same air as you!”

He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s better, lass. I’ve held Cloudland together almost my entire life. Before that my grandfather did the same. But instead of getting another boy to carry on the legacy, I have you. Freedom’s up, I’ve made a mistake.”

She couldn’t believe her ears and her hands relaxed.

He sighed and waved a long arm out. “I’ve searched for a treatment for so long.” His voice faded a beat. “I’ve rushed things. I prematurely inoculated volunteers in March.” He shrugged. “My treatment made a bad disease worse.”

Eddie Jean licked her lips, unsure how to respond. “What disease?”

He frowned. “I need your help, lass.”

She had never expected to hear those words in her lifetime. Overhead the operator paged a doctor to a phone, and she heard crowd laughter as a full elevator passed without stopping on their floor. “My help?”

“You’ve got the Delaney gloss in spades. You’re strong. The nurse manager called the hospital administrator out of our meeting. She reported two teenagers snuck into her unit and healed a kid with Guillain-Barré syndrome. Scot bragged he could convince you to try. Kid has you eating out of his hand, doesn’t he?”

Heat scorched her cheeks. “I owed him a favor.”

“Jenna called me out of the same meeting. She thinks Michael Thomas is sick with a disease I call Swarm disease. I have to get back to help her. Come with?”

“Swarm disease? I thought it was a joke pulled out every Halloween to scare kids. Is he dizzy or did a swarm cause him to fall?”

“Yes, dizziness due to the swarms is called Swarm Sickness. I’m talking about Swarm disease. It’s brand new.”

“Oh, but you made a vaccine for it?”

His fingers dug into her shoulders. “What have you heard about Swarm disease? Tell me!”

“Nothing. Kids swap urban legends about wild people living rabid in the woods.”

He released her with a sneer etched on his face. “People talk too much, but it’s worse than rabies, lass. Much worse. My vaccine failed.”

His words refused to sink in. “What are you saying?” Panic boiled up her spine, making her flinch. “Momma bit Mr. Thomas?”

“Guess so. I suspect the vaccine I gave your mother produced a carrier state. She has a form of Swarm disease easily passed from bites or scratches.”

She heard rumbling in her ears. Then she snapped out of the daze and punched his chest. “You tested a rabies vaccine on my mother!”

His eyebrows fluttered up and down.

“You sent her home to expose the rest of us? You sick—”

He grabbed her arm. “Quiet!”

Her body went slack as his touch anesthetized her. Dead for any purpose other than grieving. Tears flooded her eyes. He injected rabies virus into my mother, and Scot’s father is sick.

“I don’t have time to explain, lass. Either you want to use your healing to help people or you don’t. Well?”

She jerked her arm back and rubbed it. “You speak in riddles and expect me to understand. I help people I can heal, and I can’t heal Momma. I’ve tried and failed.”

Rage turned his features blood-orange in color. “Your mother’s immune system short-circuited. Afterward, she passed Swarm disease to Kimmy. I didn’t suspect anything odd until then. I swear it!”

Her vision narrowed and the light in the hallway darkened. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear him speak. Kimmy died of rabies? Her legs began to wobble, and he slapped her.

A group of nurses in lilac-colored scrubs walked past them and most scurried inside the nearby GI lab. One stopped and stared. She pointed a finger and shouted, “I saw you slap her, and I’m calling the police.” The other nurses pulled her behind the door and closed it.

“It’s always the nurses causing me grief,” he muttered and shook her. “Get a grip, lass. You’ve never pushed your healing like you did today. You’ve expanded your range. Maybe you can help your mother now. Don’t you want to try?”

Eddie Jean licked her lips and burst into tears.

Quitman stroked her hair. “Now lass, I should’ve been more careful, but Kimmy is dead. Why does it matter how she died?”

Eddie Jean tried to pull away but he held tight. He said, “There is so much I can teach you if you’ll let me.”

A man in suit and tie came around the corner carrying a briefcase. Spying Quitman, he grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern. “I’ve never seen you outside of Cloudland Memorial, Doctor Delaney. Are you here for the administrator’s meeting?”

Granddad glared at him without answering. The man retreated around the corner.

Eddie Jean pushed away from her grandfather, trying not to feel the knife-like pain stabbing into her heart. “It matters how Kimmy died because you experimented and killed her!”

On the wall over his head was a white-faced clock with a thick black hour hand. She could hear the ticking sound as the red second hand scored passing time. Jenna’s affair afternoon had concluded early due to rabies. Surely he didn’t expect her to go where they—no, she should go back to school. Eddie Jean already knew her healing wouldn’t work on Jenna. “I don’t want to see them together.”

He grasped her by the shoulders and shook. “Did you hear a word I’ve said?”

“Yes! You killed Kimmy!” Her body ached with pain. She wrapped her arms in front of her chest for comfort and bowed her head.

He leaned in and his stench smelled like cat urine—strong and acrid. “At least I’m trying to correct my error. Not very Christian of you to turn your back on your mother, is it?”

She couldn’t…no, she wouldn’t allow herself to see her mother with another man. He asked too much because prayers could never wipe that image from her mind. “Shouldn’t you take a specialist with you?”

“If you come with me, I’ll explain Swarm disease to you, how it happens, and why I’m fighting to save Cloudland from a non-curable disease.”

“Tell me here, right now.”

Sneering, he turned his back on her and stalked to the stairwell door. He yanked it open. She could hear his steps descending before the door closed with a click.

Trembling fingers sought the crucifix under the layers of her necklaces. Her father had given it to her on Confirmation day. It had been his mother’s Confirmation necklace. Her paternal grandmother, Jeanette Franklin, had died in a tornado when her daddy was a toddler. She ran from a shelter to save two kids left behind in the rush to safety at the supermarket. She got them to shelter and turned back when she heard another cry for help. They found her body five miles away in a field ablaze with sunflowers.

Eddie Jean had always liked that part of the sad story. She wanted to help people like her grandmother Franklin. She ran down the stairs after Quitman and caught up to him outside the hospital.

Eddie Jean

In the parking lot, Granddad ended his phone call and smirked at her.

Her change of heart didn’t surprise him.

He unlocked the doors to his red truck and said, “From this moment on, you’re my apprentice.”

“I don’t want to experiment on people. I want to help them feel better.”

He rolled his eyes. “What I’ll tell you is known to very few people in town, in the country, or in the world. We have to trust each other.”

“You lied to us about how Kimmy died, and you made mother lie. I don’t trust you, Granddad.”

He climbed inside and slammed the door. The driver’s side window rolled down. “Your mother is responsible for her own lying, plus she never fulfills her promises.”

“What promises?”

“Get in,” he said, and cranked the engine.

Eddie Jean hesitated. She didn’t want to be his apprentice, but she wanted to help her mother and Scot’s father if she could. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew anything he taught her would stunt her ability to heal. Healing involved feelings, and he didn’t have any left. Granddad had information about a new disease, and she needed to understand what went wrong.

The window rolled up.

Eddie Jean went around the back of the truck and opened the passenger door. She climbed in and buckled the seatbelt. The interior smelled like fresh rosemary, and he’d crammed the back seat with duffel bags and tools. “Did you make Swarm disease by vaccine error?” she asked as they exited the parking lot.

He grunted and stopped to wave at someone walking to their car. She searched for Scot’s Jeep, but he had left. Loneliness swept over her. She was back to doing her own thing without the XOs for company. She almost opened telep to ask for help, but resisted the urge.

They pulled into traffic. “I suspect half our family sprang from the Mounds Indians along the Black Warrior River, and they migrated to Cloudland.”

“They were outcasts?” she asked.

He shot her a sideways glance. “Don’t know, I’m not that old. Somewhere along the line they mingled with European invaders.”

She tried not to smile.

“We owned all of Cloudland, Mentone, and fields right here in Fort Payne. I tell you this so you understand we have a familial obligation to land stewardship. By my time, we were richer and we kept Cloudland. The best parcel—except for one thing.”

“The land swarms.” Eddie Jean fiddled with the radio for a country music station.

“Righto, the stories I’ve told you as a child were meant to erase any fears the ground swarms caused. I believe the swarms created us, and enhanced us with what my mother called the gloss. I go to families with other children like you and me. I offer to teach them about what’s happened, and I explain why the gloss must be kept secret. I call it a gift so the parents will think it’s a godly one.”

“Mine is.” She turned up the volume on a favorite song.

“Nonsense.” He frowned at her. “Religion is your father’s bad influence.”

She sighed. Catholicism grounded her and kept her out of his control. He couldn’t force her to act against her beliefs. “Has a family defied you?”

“More than once, but I put them in line. I’m not nice about it, either. We can’t have a whole town put at risk by one or two people. Even your dad agreed with me.”

“The only time in his life.”

Granddad nodded. “Only a very few founding families, know about the swarms’ dark side. They’re paid a stipend to stay quiet. I’ve made sure they’re safe.”

“Safe from what? Why is it hard to tell the truth?”

“Once you know the truth, you’ll work beside me from then on. Agreed?”

“No, Granddad.” She ignored his sharp gasp. “You lured me to the hospital because you need me, or think you do. So don’t try to act like you’re giving me a choice. Tell me if you want my help or remain silent. I’ll know in seconds if I can help them.”

He sped up and tailgated a dark van. Pressing down on his horn, he cursed until the driver swerved off the road to let them pass. “Your mother should’ve raised you to respect me!” He coughed. “Cloudland’s secret is every once in a while, during a period of heavy swarms a yellow mist erupts from the ground on my fenced off land. Usually the mist comes in the fall, but not always. If you inhale it, you’ll get Swarm disease, a form of human rabies not seen anywhere else on earth.”

Eddie Jean turned off Carrie Underwood and watched her granddad run a red light. Goosebumps peppered her arms and spine. She expected him to laugh and retract, but he didn’t. “The mist carries a virus for rabies that doesn’t come from an animal?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s viral?” she asked.

“Righto, I think it’s an ancient virus the swarms bring up, or the swarms mutate a common virus like it’s tweaked our DNA.”

“You’ve studied the blood or the mist?”

“Too scared to collect a mist sample. Delaneys have studied Swarm disease for over a century. Once we kept our loved ones alive in a cave, hoping they would recover. We learned there is no cure and they don’t die. Over time we learned to shoot the ‘Swarmers’ in the right eye, which severs all brain connections. Their bites and scratches are infectious.”

“You’re serious? Swarmers? Are they like zombies or too sick to move?”

“I hate the word ‘zombies,’ lass. Swarmers are faster and cunning. I’m not trying to scare you. I want you to love Cloudland as much as I do. The town has a serious fault, but I’m working on getting rid of the threat.”

“Fault?”

“Swarmers exist to infect. Your ancestors, many of them, caught the disease because they reacted with love and concern. Swarmers can’t be trusted, and they have to be put down fast. My land is fenced and secured by armed guards. Law-abiding people stay away, others take risks and sometimes they get a surprise.”

Eddie Jean swallowed. “Does Daddy know?”

Granddad broke into laugher. “Hell no! I can’t get him to pick up a gun. He won’t even stop Michael Thomas from banging—”

“Stop!” Eddie Jean yelled, covering her ears. “Daddy loves her and so do I.” Her mother hadn’t always been heartless. Her hand reached for the door handle. She had to escape.

Granddad said, “I’ve locked the doors. We have to come to an agreement. You can’t walk around knowing about Cloudland’s dark side if you’re not on my team. Clear?”

Tears rolled out of her eyes, and she heard him mutter about crybabies.

“The mist came so rarely people were born and died without seeing the infected. In the last five years, mist eruptions have increased. Last year scared me, so I pushed the vaccine schedule forward too fast. I made things worse. Now, I need your help to correct my mistakes.”

“What happened to the other vaccinated people?”

“They’re dead.” He passed another car.

Her heart somersaulted in her chest. “I don’t understand.”

“Your mother survived and the other six died. The others broke into symptoms within hours. I kept them alive hoping the vaccine would kick in. What I observed scared the hell out of me.”

“How much time did you have before you created the bad vaccine?”

“Used to be, we had a two-week leeway before someone who inhaled the mist developed Swarm disease symptoms. Family would take them to the hospital. I’d be alerted by a specific reaction in their blood work plus their symptoms. Normally, skin rashes and boils come first along with excessive thirst. I managed to contain secondary infections for years.”

“The time frame hasn’t ever changed?” she asked.

“Last year we dropped from two weeks to eight hours with original Swarm.”

Eddie Jean reached over and turned up the heat. Her body shook from shivers. “Where did you keep them alive?”

“Flameion. The main lab is just what it appears to be, but there is a secret section known only by a few. There’s a corridor connecting the hospital to my clinic in the back side lab. It’s known as the R& D side, but there we study Swarm. The public side is the making and packaging of pharmaceuticals. Specialized Flameion doctors and scientists have seen Swarm disease, and we’re working on the treatment. They’ve patented the virus.”

“Wait, you’ve made drugs based on Swarmers’ blood?”

He grinned. “Righto, an entire line of immune enhancers. Flameion didn’t build a hospital in Cloudland because we needed one. In exchange for giving us jobs, I gave them access to Swarmers’ blood. Problem is, like with my vaccine, the virus in their drugs has reactivated.”

“You mean...?” She couldn’t finish her thoughts and she watched black and white cows grazing as they drove past.

“I haven’t notified them of the danger yet. I have no idea what’s activated the virus, I just know it’s a problem. A biggo problem.”

“The Hum reactivated it,” Eddie Jean answered. “People will get sick like Momma?”

“The Hum? You mean the jarring sound in my head?”

She nodded.

“The cause no longer matters once disease carriers are produced. The virus has mutated into something new and unknown. Use your head, lass. If the thousands of people on Flameion’s drugs get sick, they’ll infect family.”

Her logic followed his statements to unspoken conclusions. Nausea welled. “Pull over,” she beat on the window. “I’m going to hurl.”

He pulled off the road. She leapt out and threw up until she dry heaved. He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and gave her bottled water. “Stay hydrated, lass. Every Delaney called to duty to control Swarm disease reacted the same. The horror passes and you’ll move into action. Any action is better than letting them nuke our town or worse turn you kids with the gloss into experiments. Our XO blood is special, and I suspect your blood is extra special. Reason I haven’t tested you is because I don’t want to butt heads with your dad. I also don’t want Flameion near your blood.”

“Because Daddy would take me and the twins away?”

“Righto.” He waved a white Honda away when the driver pulled to the side of the road to offer help.

She rinsed out her mouth and drank water. Shaking, she pulled the blanket around her. Anger had washed over her as some truths surfaced. Part of her wanted to remain silent, but she had to confront him. “You sent Momma home knowing she’s a carrier to infect my daddy and my brothers, didn’t you?”

He reacted like she slapped him. Granddad threw his hands up in the air and laughed. “I forgot how smart you are. To deny it would make you angry, and to acknowledge it will make you hate me. I’m responsible for rushing the vaccine trial. I thought she infected Kimmy while her body fought off the virus. Afterward, her blood tests were clear, and I believed the vaccine worked. I suspected a carrier state too late. In hindsight, I should’ve put Jenna down or monitored her longer. Feel whatever you wish, but get back in the truck.”

“Put her down? You mean kill her?” Her mouth went dry.

“Righto. She can’t be cured and she infects.”

“Why would she risk exposing us?”

He sighed. “I gave her placebo shots and told her she couldn’t infect anyone else.”

“You’ve kept her in the dark,” she shrieked, “for your precious experiments. I hate you!”

“Get in the truck!”

“No! You’re sick.” She stumbled to the road. Her brothers’ school was less than a mile away. She could jog to it in mere minutes and protect them from Granddad.

“If Jenna infected Michael Thomas today, then all of you were exposed this morning. The best way to help your brothers is to heal Michael Thomas.”

She winced. Sometimes Granddad was right, but she couldn’t trust him. If the twins were getting sick, they needed her now, before symptoms. Eddie Jean jogged faster.

“What will you say to Scot when he asks if you tried to heal his father?” he yelled.

She stopped and wiped tears with the blanket. Could he read her mind? No, he wanted her to think he could. According to friends, she didn’t hide her feelings very well.

He walked closer. “Scot didn’t question anything when he dived in to free your foot from the tree limbs. If he had, you’d be dead. He left his baby sister on the bank unsupervised to save you. She could’ve fallen in, but he saved you. He did CPR right in the water, remember? I, for one, will tell him you refused to help his father.” He walked back to the truck.

Tears scalded her cheeks, and her eyes searched the sky for an answer. In the end, she decided Scot gave her a second chance at living, and she couldn’t deny the same chance to his father. Afterward, she’d go to her brothers because Granddad gave her the creeps.

She dropped the blanket and walked to the truck and got in. “Is there anything else I should know about Swarm disease?”

“Lass, I hope I’m wrong, but I fear it’s gone airborne.”

Louis

Louis joined Ava in the common room. “Wow.”

She had changed into kelly-green scrubs and he relaxed. Her polite smile didn’t affect her eyes. He could see her putting on the researcher’s cold shroud and a part of him mourned.

“First stop is Microbiology,” she said, opening a door. “We don’t have time to ease you into our current work, so keep an open mind.”

“I like to dive right in,” Louis said with a wink.

She ignored him and headed down a long corridor. Ava stopped beside a door and waited for him. Louis stopped to peer through cracks in the blinds at the massive laboratory. They went into the lab, and Ava introduced him to a colleague waiting beside a microscope.

Doctor Susan Cho was short, less than five feet tall. She had an icy handshake and the palest skin he’d ever seen. “Welcome to Cloudland, Doctor Janzen. Meet Swarm disease.” She gestured to a stool. He sat down and adjusted the microscope magnification. He stared at the cells, readjusted the scope, and stared again.

He looked up at them. “I’m speechless.”

Susan said, “The virus blew me away, too. It’s been kept under the radar and hasn’t spread out of city limits. Swarm provided the basis for our immunological serums. Our products have been helpful in cancer treatments recently approved by the FDA. But lately, several local residents have had unusual blood work. We’re worried.”

“How so?” Louis asked.

Susan removed another slide from a rack and put it in his microscope. “Notice the white blood cells?”

He examined it. Something bizarre had occurred, not quite normal and not yet Swarm-like.

“How is Swarm passed?” he asked.

Susan looked at Ava.

Ava said, “The infectious agent comes up from underground tectonic plate movements and the unlucky resident inhales it. We’ve never been able to get a mist sample. No one can predict the eruptions.”

“You mean like earthquakes?”

“No.” Susan shook her head. “Locals call them swarms. They can be felt under bare feet. Sometimes the sensations sting, other times they feel like vibrations. They’re little quakes that shake us around without causing damage. The disease was named after the swarms.”

Louis could hardly speak. “A toxic gas is emitted? Why haven’t residents been evacuated?”

Ava gave a light laugh. “They take care of the rare infections internally. In other words, Cloudland’s disease is specific to Cloudland city limits. There are local myths, but the disease has never spread beyond the town.”

He couldn’t believe his ears but stayed cool. “I see. This resident,” he said, pointing at the slide, “lives inside city limits?”

He watched Susan rub her hands down her hips like she was drying them off. “That’s why I’m worried. She lives outside city limits.”

“Slightly outside,” Ava added.

“I see. Are there any secondary infections?”

“No,” Susan said. “After the gas is inhaled, the unlucky soul undergoes immediate skin reactions similar to an allergic response. Their saliva fills with the microbe—we call it the Sylph virus. Their bites become infectious in a few hours.”

Bites? Louis listened but didn’t comprehend. He waited for clarification. News stories now and then reported on people taking designer drugs and eating human flesh in a blind rage, but this? Could the Sylph virus have already escaped the population through a carrier?

Ava stared up at the ceiling when she answered. “The best analogy is end-stage rabies, but Swarm takes over in hours.”

Susan nodded in agreement.

“Recovery percentages?” Louis reloaded the Swarm slide and stared at it again.

“Zero,” Ava said.

He looked up. “No treatment or cure?”

Susan scratched under her hair cap. “A few months ago we thought we’d found a treatment, but it enhanced their symptoms. The new blood work is troublesome.”

“When did you collect this sample?” Louis asked.

“A month ago, but we couldn’t follow up because the person moved.”

“She could be on vacation,” Ava said. “We’re not sure.”

Louis tried to sound blasé but failed. “Small sample size can’t be trusted.”

The women laughed. Their voices sounded hollow.

“You lost control when the patient left town. Tell me you’ve got DNA.”

Ava shook her head. “Sorry Louis, no clearance.”

Susan met his eyes. He realized her nervousness was an act to hide her fear. Louis wasn’t sure, but she also looked cornered. What the hell? He didn’t break eye contact, hoping Susan would blurt out more information.

Susan said, “Ever meet Doctor Porter Peterson?”

Louis frowned. “He sounds familiar.”

“Susan,” Ava said in a scolding tone. “Quitman has to vet guests. Maybe afterward.”

Ava dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Quitman’s quirk is he has to look people in the eyes before letting them peer down our rabbit hole.”

A phone rang and Susan walked away to answer. She didn’t speak except to say, “Yes, sir.” She came back to the microscope table looking red-faced and flustered.

Louis cocked his head, thinking. Why did the name Porter Peterson seem important? Porter Peterson...Port Peterson...Port Pete. The name bounced around in his gray matter. A niggle of information teased him, but he just couldn’t access it yet. Swarm fascination and fatigue blocked his thoughts.

Louis rubbed his forehead. He hated losing his thoughts around peers.

Susan said to Ava, “Quitman’s bringing his relatives in for observation.”

“How many?” Ava asked, sounding curt.

“He said to expect two or three patients.”

Louis noticed that Susan sucked in her lower lip and then frowned. His stomach began to ache with a familiar feeling of a new discovery. “What? For Swarm disease?”

Ava ignored him and spoke to Susan. “Be sure to take samples first thing.”

“He’s with his granddaughter.”

“So?” Ava asked. “Did he say she had symptoms?”

“He didn’t have to spell it out, Ava. I’ve worked with him for months. I didn’t sign up for this. Eddie Jean’s a teenager.”

Louis noted Susan’s left eyelid twitched. Ava, on the other hand, became animated. Her eyes gleamed and her skin flushed. Ava’s reaction reminded him of her expression during sex.

“Did she get exposed in school?” Louis asked.

Ava clasped her hands against her chest and ignored him again. “I smell a Nobel in our future, Susan.”

“You said Swarm disease was rare,” Louis said.

Ava sighed. “I may have misled you. There is more than one Swarm case here for observation, but all are in advanced stages. We’ve had a recent breakout. Don’t worry, it’s contained.”

Louis stared at her. How hideous could Swarm be? She acted like it was an impetigo outbreak. “How hopeful are you for a cure?”

“Not very,” Susan answered first.

Ava scowled, but she didn’t contradict Susan.

“Q’s granddaughter might harbor answers in her blood,” Ava pointed out. “She can lay her hands on people and heal them.” She burst into disbelieving laughter.

“I’m drawing the line, Ava. Other staff will follow.” Susan’s voice sounded firm.

“I doubt it.”

Ava’s words chilled him. “You experiment on children?” he asked.

Ava’s eyes bulged at his accusation.

Susan said, “Usually, very sick ones. Eddie Jean is different. She does heal people.”

“Doctor Cho,” Ava said in a shrill tone, “there’s no scientific proof.” Ava’s phone rang. She whispered, “Bet it’s Quitman,” and darted out the lab door.

Louis glanced back at the slide. He remembered the COGS had invited Doctor Porter Peterson to weigh in on their fringe microbe study. He was an older man with bushy cotton eyebrows that bunched together like a fuzzy eye mustache. Peterson had authored several papers on a nascent discipline called microbiomics. It turned out microbiomics was the study of human microbes in and on the human body and their relationship to diseases.

He recalled Peterson’s three recommendations if and when they ever took their findings public: One, 90% of DNA is microbial and not human. He said non-medical people were shocked to learn humans are basically super organisms made up of thousands of tiny microbes, and some have never been identified. Two, every human body has persistent individual differences in microbial ecology and it’s established in early life. Three, after the success of cracking DNA, the National Institutes of Health funded a new project called HMP at a cost of $115 million. The Human Microbe Project’s purpose: to identify, analyze, and catalog the hundreds of microflora in and on the human body. While funded by taxpayers, the results were kept secret. Doctor Peterson concluded by saying, “You’re not fringe researchers. I’d say you’re cutting edge surfers.”

Louis said to Susan, “Doctor Peterson shared with me his paper linking tic disorders in children to strep infections. The idea of a microbe at the heart of Alzheimer’s disease fascinated me. Peterson’s paper gave me the courage to search for a brain microbe in Alzheimer’s patients. I found an unusual microbe in a one-hundred-year-old brain last night, and in less than twelve hours I’m in Cloudland.”

Susan nodded. “Ava’s been tracking you.”

Tracking me? Another sick feeling fluttered in his gut. “Why?”

“You’re a leading, published researcher on Alzheimer’s disease and the only well-known one with the gene. Then, there’s your long family history, plus your father worked here.”

“You mean my family’s long tunnel of sorrow? People think Janzens are cursed, and who can blame them?”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

Louis waved his hand smiling. “I know. Will I see Doctor Peterson on the tour?”

“No, we lost him to Swarm last week.”

Louis couldn’t speak. “I didn’t know.”

“No one does, not even his family.”

Eddie Jean

They made the drive from Fort Payne to Cloudland in a record-setting eight minutes.

Granddad parked his red Silverado behind two azalea bushes. Eddie Jean stared at the manicured lawn of her family home and wondered why he didn’t park in the driveway.

“Any chance the virus will deactivate on its own?” she asked

He cut his eyes at her. “You dense? Your mother is a carrier for what I’ve named Swarm 2. It’s more virulent than the original.”

Shaking from chills, she asked, “And me? She bit me Tuesday night.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

Tears threatened. “What about my brothers or daddy?”

He shrugged. “Time will tell.” He climbed out and took off his lab coat.

Eddie Jean sniffed and tried to stay calm. “If the Hum activated the carrier state, maybe it will deactivate when it passes.”

He scratched his head. “Don’t hang on to hope, lass. There’s no cure for your mother.”

“I think the Hum is an old signal, a warning.”

His eyebrows fluttered around. “Warning of what?”

Her teeth chattered. “Catastrophe.”

“Well, that’s exactly what Swarm 2 will become if I don’t stamp it out.”

“It’s that bad?”

He nodded.

For the first time, she noticed his fatigue. It looked like he had smeared eye black under his eyes, like athletes do to cut glare. “Why do you think the other vaccine volunteers died and Momma didn’t?”

He climbed out. “Your touch from healing her aches and pains, or she carries a recessive gene for XO. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have used a live virus.”

“Live?” Her voice sounded squeaky. “I thought vaccines used a dead virus.”

“I erred when I believed a weakened virus would allow the body to make antibodies. I never anticipated the Sylph virus would have a stealth mode.”

“Your research methods…” She bit her lip, unable to finish.

He punched the steering wheel. “I’m doing the best I can! Swarm cases are tripling, and I can’t keep up! I gave your mother a treatment to keep her safe. I wanted to do the same with your brothers, but your father would never allow it. Should’ve done it behind his back.”

She couldn’t believe her ears. “Why? We’re your family.”

“Desperate times require risky decisions.” He pulled a travel bag from the back seat.

He didn’t have feelings. She saw the next-door neighbor peep out from behind curtains. A line of cars would exit the neighborhood once the neighbors figured out a contagious disease lurked inside the Franklin home.

“Sometimes it feels like we don’t live in America.”

“Well, you can leave,” he said, snapping out the words.

“Thanks. I’d love to.” It felt good to say the words, and she lifted her chin.

“You look like your father when you do that. Stubborn as a—”

“If he ever finds out you injected a live virus.”

“He’ll what? You should’ve called me when your mother attacked.”

“Granddad, you’re not a medical doctor. We took her to the emergency room.”

His mouth dropped open. “I wasn’t notified.”

“Daddy drove her to Huntsville. He didn’t want gossip.”

His hands balled into fists. “Do you know what he’s done! Oh, never mind! If you had called me, Michael Thomas wouldn’t be a Swarmer. His death is on you.”

His cruel words punched and her stomach cramped. She leaned over and rocked to lessen the pain. “Can we take them to a hospital in Birmingham or even the Mayo Clinic for tests?”

He kicked off his shoes. “One look at someone with Swarm disease or even their blood, and Cloudland residents would never be free again. We’d be hunted down and caged for research study. Some might want to weaponize our curse. Understand?”

“But Swarm occurs naturally, like rabies.”

“Swarm 2 isn’t natural, lass. Told you, your mother incubated a viral mutation. Look away while I change.”

“You’re stripping in the front yard?”

“Yup.”

“Are we doing this alone?” she asked.

“No, lass. My men are on the way.” A few minutes later, he said, “All done.”

She turned. He wore a protective neoprene uniform and boots. He checked his phone and then leaned over to tie the boots.

He pulled a small case from under the driver’s seat and withdrew some tools. He slid them into leg pockets. Last, he pulled a rifle out of the backseat. Granddad checked to make sure it was loaded and noticed her expression. “Insurance.”

She gulped. “Don’t you think it’s time to ask for outside help?”

The ground rippled and the truck moved side to side. Granddad grabbed the door to steady his feet. “Lass, I’ve lost control, but I’m trying to save Cloudland.”

“I’m talking about saving people, not a place.”

“Then save some,” he said, and pointed at the front door.

Eddie Jean climbed out. Long ago, she quit counting ground swarms, but today was a record setter. She stared at her modern brick home, with its high windows to capture natural light, and tried to memorize every detail. Home could be quarantined.

Violet and yellow pansies lined their sidewalk from the street to the front steps. Her gaze lingered on the bright Halloween wreath on the door and then to the storm-damaged homemade goblins hanging from a small dogwood tree. A swirling breeze lifted the soggy and tangled goblins dangling from fishing line. They spun around and the bells inside their plastic bodies jingled. She remembered making them with her mother and Kimmy two years ago at the kitchen table. A lump rose in her throat.

“Keeping secrets has rotted Cloudland from the inside out,” she said.

He pushed her forward. “Pretending God has anything to do with your healing gloss made you stupid. You were born to heal Swarm disease. You’re nature’s answer to it.”

Her mother stumbled out the front door half-clothed, with rumpled bed-head hair, covered in dried blood. Eddie Jean relived the horror of fighting her off and the excruciating pain of her bites as she staggered down the sidewalk. The turquoise necklace she made Jenna for Mother’s Day hung around her blotched neck. Tears flooded Eddie Jean’s eyes.

Jenna stopped. “What’s she doing here?”

“Helping me.”

Jenna bit her fingernails. She didn’t notice her unbuttoned blouse exposed her bare breasts. Beige sweat pants were on backward, and her feet were bare. Eddie Jean untied her school sweater from her waist to drape around her mother’s shoulders. A strange sensation exploded from her chest. Her heart leaked all her love and compassion out in painful spurts.

Granddad jerked her backward and ripped the sweater from her hands. “Don’t ever approach anybody with blue-shaded lips or icteric eyes, Eddie Jean. Where’s your common sense? Those are the first signs of infection.” He tossed heavy work gloves to Jenna. “Where is he?”

Her mother pulled on gloves and didn’t look at Eddie Jean. “I locked him in the boy’s bedroom. We were in there when I bit him. I tried to stop, but…” She dropped her eyes to the ground and hung her head.

Eddie Jean turned her back.

“How long before he had symptoms?” Granddad asked.

“He choked like Kimmy, and I thought he’d died. Then his skin and face—”

“How much time was he down?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes? Then the other things happened.”

He grabbed Eddie Jean’s arm and spun her around. “Never turn your back on someone with suspected Swarm, even if it’s your mother.”

She bit her lip and nodded.

Her granddad pulled on gloves and then protective goggles. He tied Jenna’s arms behind her back with a plastic flex cuff. Last, he removed a full-face helmet from the truck and snapped it over her head so she couldn’t bite. Behind them a black truck pulled in and went down the driveway to the back door. “Jenna, wait in the truck.”

“You can’t put Michael down!” Jenna’s voice sounded hollow behind the helmet, and then she flicked her tongue like a serpent and licked the clear part of the face plate.

Eddie Jean gagged and covered her mouth.

“He has to be examined,” Granddad said.

Defiance drained from her mother’s posture. Jenna stumbled down the sidewalk and to the back of the house without looking back. How could she not look back at me?

Two men clad in dark protective clothes joined them. One carried a rifle, and Eddie Jean watched him drop a dart with a red plume into the chamber. The men had on oxygen helmets and carried compact green tanks at the small of their backs.

“Why are y’all wearing oxygen?” she asked.

“We’re not healers, lass.”

“You’re XO.”

“I can’t take chances. I’m Cloudland’s sole defense.”

Eddie Jean didn’t recognize either man. Both were young, in their late twenties, and fit. Each wore a buzz cut and dark shades. Granddad went in the front door, the men followed him, and Eddie Jean brought up the rear.

Magnificent red roses in a blue and white Spode vase sat on the dinner table. The room smelled heavenly as they passed by family pictures in the bookcase. Scot’s father must have brought flowers for Jenna. Her mother’s affair made her think the happy memories in the picture frames were fakes, like the pictures found in store-bought frames. Tears ran down her cheeks. Home was filled with good memories, and she didn’t want to forget them. Eddie Jean loved how the rooms were filled with nooks and crannies, sunny window seats, and a heaven-made mountain view from the back deck.

Banging and kicking sounds erupted, followed by weird snuffling noises.

Eddie Jean tried to process what was happening, but her brain got stuck on her mother and Michael Thomas having sex in the twin’s bedroom. Probably on her bed, too. The affair had been going on for three years. It had never crossed her mind her mother’s affair took place every Thursday afternoon inside their home. The urge to puke almost made her run out the door.

“He’s almost broken out,” one man shouted. They advanced like trained policemen. She heard a low growling sound, deeper than any dog.

Eddie Jean heard pounding noises and saw white door splinters fall to the floor, followed by a hairy arm covered by softball-sized blisters. A rotting flesh odor diffused down the hallway. She put her hand over her nose.

The second man glanced back at her and said, “Stay back. Body fluids are contagious.”

Licking her lips, she nodded. A third man walked past her and tossed something bloody to her granddad.

“Michael,” Granddad yelled. “Michael Thomas!”

Snorting followed. Granddad removed a bloody dead rabbit from brown butcher paper and flung it into the room. She heard Scot’s dad scurrying across the oak floors. The man with the dart gun fired.

Eddie Jean heard a high-pitched yelp and a crashing noise. The man reloaded and shot him again. While the shooter inserted a third dart, a shorter man stepped forward with a monitoring device. “Movement,” he said in a muffled voice.

Another shot exploded.

A few anxious seconds later someone said, “He’s down.”

The men knocked out the splintered door with equipment a fourth man carried in. All of the men entered the room. Eddie Jean hesitated. She had never seen a case of Swarm disease and didn’t want her first case to be Scot’s father. Curiosity won out. She passed her room, decorated in lavender and green. The last five feet to the boy’s room felt like a mile. She peeped inside.

Their room was painted light yellow, with colorful air balloons floating among puffy white clouds on the ceiling. Michael Thomas had fallen on the sailboat blanket from Teddy’s bed. Two men rolled Scot’s father off the bed and onto the floor on his back.

She recognized familiar blond hair, but his facial color was a hideous purple bruise. Frothy, yellow-green fluid, like melting lime Popsicles, drained from his pustules, blisters, and large boils. The stench could not be endured but no one opened a window. Mr. Thomas’s eyes were open. His left eyeball had disappeared, while the blue iris in the right one dissolved before she could blink. Black goop seeped from his eyes and resembled smeared mascara. Eddie Jean gagged and ran into a wall trying to leave.

Granddad followed her and guided her back beside Scot’s father. “You have to get closer to heal, right?” She inched in, resisting the urge to bolt. “Breathe through your mouth, lass. His eyes are dissolving.”

“Shouldn’t she be wearing protection?” one man asked.

Granddad didn’t answer and squeezed her wrist. “Meet Swarm 2. If he’d gotten out, he’d bite a lot of neighbors before they wised up. The new version makes Swarmers move faster, but the more blood and flesh they gorge on the more grotesque they grow and slow down. Swarmers exist to infect. Remember that.”

Eddie Jean gasped as the truth sank in. Scot had lost his father and didn’t even know. He would never forgive that her mother was responsible. She processed the new knowledge down to its logical conclusion and gasped.

Granddad read her mind. “Yeah, Jenna will have to be put down.”

Her heart beat in a spasm and her vision blurred. Her head spun and then stilled.

Granddad jerked her down on her knees closer to Michael Thomas’s drugged and foul-smelling body. Snores interrupted his breaths. “Healers get close to our patients, don’t we?”

The men scrambled backward. “Careful, dude.”

Her stomach rolled like she was seasick. She turned her head away.

“Smell him. Deep breath.”

Terrorized by the sight, the stink, the room, Eddie Jean struggled to break free. “No, I can’t. Let me go!”

“She’s just a kid, sir,” a man pleaded from the hallway.

“I said smell him,” Granddad ordered, and pinched her arm.

Eddie Jean did, and her stomach went into dry-heave convulsions. Panting, she tried to get off her knees, but he wouldn’t let her stand.

“Be still and watch how I take samples.”

“I’m going to be sick.” A sour mass rocketed up her throat, and she swallowed it down. The foul taste spread in her mouth.

“Go ahead. Let it out.”

Her stomach soured and calmed and bubbled and churned, but the bile stayed down. Sweat dribbled down her neck.

Granddad withdrew a device from his pocket, popped a blister, and scooped up droplets of the frothy lime-green discharge with the spoon side. Eddie Jean began to shake with cold. One man with a spider tattoo on his neck extended a plastic cup with the lid off for Granddad to pour the icky fluid in. He popped several large blisters to collect the fluid. Without warning, Granddad tossed the stinky spume into her face.

The secretions splashed her eyes and some went up her nose. Choking, she yelled, “It burns!” Eddie Jean jabbed her elbow into her grandfather’s chest.

He grunted and wrestled her down to the floor. One of his helpers held her feet and another held her shoulders down. Granddad dropped his knee into her gut.

Blinded by the green acid, she yelled, “Stop! Oh, God. Please stop!” Her elbow brushed against Scot’s dad.

“Give me,” Granddad said, and motioned for more. A third man stooped over and retrieved more fluids. She heard someone barfing in the corner.

“Little more,” he said, and dribbled more onto her face. Goop was burning holes in her face! Stacking pain made her strong enough to sit up, but they shoved her back down. When she opened her mouth to scream, he poured more in and held her mouth closed. Ichor fizzed and burned as it slid down. Forced to swallow, she scrunched her eyes tight and tried to roll face down.

Her fear rocked out in telep and this time she let it fly out.

{Help me}

“She’s strong as a man,” the one at her feet grunted.

“What’s happening to her skin, boss?”

Granddad said, “She’s having an allergic response. Load him and call in the clean-up crew. Let’er go!” Granddad jumped back and stood.

Eddie Jean threw up. Her stomach convulsed in agony.

“Lass, I know you weren’t planning on helping me save the town, so I’ve drafted you to my team. Your blood will make antibodies and deliver a cure to the world, I hope. If you live through this test, I’ll put you down if you ever disobey me again.”

Rett

Rett Franklin was losing his self control.

His temper bobbed, he misconnected electrical wires, and maybe he had even lost his mind. Power crews had been on overtime to restore electricity to town, and time crept as he worked. What were the odds his last day in Cloudland would end on a Thursday? Thursdays were his bastard days. Joe Vickers, his partner, bore the weekly brunt of his bitterness and bad attitude in silence until today.

“Dude, I can’t take your malarkey another second,” Joe said. “You’re not the only person with problems, you know? How about a break? I’m making errors I haven’t made in years.”

Rett sighed. “Sorry, man. I’ll miss this view and the pine scent in the air when I leave Cloudland. Ranching in East Texas is on flat, dry land. I’ve bought four first-class tickets to Dallas from Atlanta. Today’s my last day.”

Joe was older with a red bulb nose, stumpy legs, and a freakishly long torso. He took off his safety helmet and ran his fingers through coarse hair. “What the hell, Franklin? No notice? Is this the way you say goodbye after sixteen years?”

They were both in the bucket twenty-five feet in the air, making line repairs. Rett said, “Can’t be helped. Look, Joe, could you give me directions to Quitman’s big cave?”

Joe put his helmet on and snapped. “Dude, you got a death wish?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Look in a mirror!”

“Hey, I’m asking for directions, not your PIN number.”

“You got no right to drag me into your personal problems. Quitman hates you.”

Rett shouted, “Screw Quitman Delaney, screw Jenna Franklin, and screw Joe Vickers. Where is Quitman’s damn cave!”

“I like you breathing, pardner.” Joe hit the button to lower the bucket even though they weren’t finished. When it reached the dock, Joe got out. He hit the button to send Rett back to complete the hook-up.

Rett cursed Joe. He threw his safety helmet at him and kicked the bucket. After his tantrum, he wiped his nose and focused on line repair.

Back on the ground an hour later, Joe shared a cup of coffee from his thermos. “We’re done. We’ll go to Thirsty’s after clocking out. I’ll set you straight and give you a friendly send-off.”

Rett nodded. He couldn’t leave without checking the cave. Jenna had slung more torments about Kimmy being alive this morning. His skin crawled at the thought. A father couldn’t leave his little girl’s grave behind unless he was sure she rested in peace. “You do know the location of his cave, don’t you?”

Joe sighed. “Yup.”

An hour later, Rett followed Joe to the bar. The shorter days meant twilight had fallen by the time they parked. Thirsty’s was a flat, ugly building crowded between a bakery and a thrift store. The main attraction inside was the curved bar—a masterpiece. A working man’s saloon, Thirsty’s didn’t welcome white-collar types or ties. Wine wasn’t served to keep them away. Sports talk radio ran live daily and then nonstop on replay.

A giant Jack-o’-lantern sat on the bar. Rett had forgotten it was Halloween night. Men clapped and offered to buy them beers. People loved the power company after being cut off from their electronic toys. Rett’s agitation faded. He grinned as he listened to an Auburn fan calling in on the radio to diss the Tide’s last win. Patrons jeered. Alabama was on a winning streak—again.

Joe leaned over and asked the bartender if the Hut was available.

“All yours.” The Bear’s Hut provided privacy in a Crimson Tide sports-themed room.

“Two Mick drafts,” Joe ordered.

Rett shook hands with a few men he knew until he spied the bastard that hit on Jenna last month. He didn’t live in Cloudland, and his presence galled Rett every time he saw him. Just the sight of his crooked nose, the one Rett broke, made him angry.

He glared at the wife-poacher, hoping he’d take the hint. One of them had to leave. Tight-lipped, crook nose slid off his stool, threw a bill down, and left. Rett turned to watch his retreat right out the door. Good riddance.

The bartender pushed draft in two frosty mugs and a door key across the polished wood. “Your money’s no good today, fellas. Thanks for saving our ice.”

They tromped down the hall and unlocked the door. Rett smelled lemon-scented furniture polish. Swank, high-back leather chairs surrounded a scarred pine table. Paneled walls held Alabama Crimson Tide sports pictures from Bear Bryant’s coaching days to Nick Saban’s reign.

Joe said, “Too bad you can’t make Michael Thomas disappear with a look. How come he’s still walking around with a pretty face?”

He’d told Joe about Jenna’s affair to keep him from doing something stupid. Three months ago, he’d begun polishing his father’s pistol collection. Rett hated guns, but kept the weapons locked in the garage because he couldn’t sell them. He’d found himself thinking about the guns as Thursdays rolled around. He cleared his throat. “His son saved Eddie Jean from drowning. I owe his kid.”

Joe laughed. “Well, that beats all. Thought you were following Quitman’s orders.”

“Quitman doesn’t give me orders. Sorry for bitching you out, Joe. Jenna’s won the war.”

Joe nodded and swallowed beer. “I expect crazy talk from a Delaney, not a Franklin. What’s Jenna done now?”

Rett winced and sipped a cold hit of beer. “During the storm, Jenna attacked Eddie Jean. Bit her hands and her leg like a rabid dog.”

Joe paled, or maybe it was the low light. “Bit her?”

“She lapped up Eddie Jean’s blood.”

“Any other symptoms?”

“Biting and drinking blood isn’t enough?”

“Heard that.” Joe shook his head. “Docs didn’t hospitalize her?”

“I threw her in the shower to cool her down before we went. She told them someone spiked her drink. They tested her blood, kept her overnight, and sent her home.”

“Lord, you think Jenna’s got the same crazy gene as her mother?”

“She growled at me.”

Joe burped. “The wife needs a mental check-up, don’t you think?”

“Sure I do, but she won’t go. Look, I’ve had time to think about odd things. If Eddie Jean’s ability is a good effect from the swarms, there must be a flip side, right? Like yin and yang.”

“Circling back to the cave, aren’t you? Why?” Joe sounded unhappy.

“Jenna told me Kimmy is alive and kept in a dark place. Quitman’s cave came to mind.”

Joe gulped half his beer. “You’re losing it, pardner. Think over what you said.”

Rett nodded. “I’m not loco. I feel like I’ve awakened from a deep sleep. There’s an old rumor Quitman kept a man with rabies in his cave. You’ve heard the story, right?”

Joe didn’t answer.

“Thought we were friends.”

Joe sighed. “True story. A soldier came home from the war. He went into the woods to live and caught rabies. Quitman and his brothers were out hunting, and they found him in the cave when he growled at them. My pappy told me Quitman sealed him in and kept notes on his condition until the fella died.”

“What?”

“He’s been cruel longer than I’ve been alive,” Joe said.

“Wasn’t Quitman a bit young to be hunting during the war?”

Joe wiped his chin. “He’s not Eddie Jean’s grandfather. He’s her great-grandfather.”

Rett laughed and slapped a hand down on the table. “Have you seen the old man out rock climbing, hiking, and what not? He’s mid-sixties if he’s a day.”

Joe repeated. “He’s over a hundred. My pappy gave me the scoop on the Delaneys and Cloudland’s secrets. Made me swear never to tell another soul, and I haven’t. Vickers have lived in Cloudland as long as the Delaneys.”

He slammed his mug on the table. “Why keep his age secret? Lots of people must know.”

“Few know the truth and, like me, they say nothing.”

Rett frowned. “Rabies is a painful death. How could he watch and not help?”

Joe shrugged. “I said Quitman wasn’t human, didn’t I? The longer he lives, the less he feels. Cloudland is Delaneyland. Quitman has been mayor six times, and he owns the town.”

“He’s not a king, Joe.”

“He’s close. Cloudland’s growth exploded under his guidance. He brought in high-paying jobs, a hospital, and kept our view and lifestyle. Quitman ain’t loved, but he’s respected. You got balls for thinkin’ you can take his grandkids without permission.”

Rett sat up straighter. “He knows?”

Joe cleared his throat. “Quitman called me. He knows about the plane tickets.”

Emotions twisted Rett into knots. He kicked the vacant chair beside him and it flipped over on its side. “They’re my kids, not his. You’re spying on me?”

Joe reddened. “Yeah, since Kimmy died. He said you were taking her loss hard. I should’ve told him no, but the man scares me. Pappy said he had gloss. Gloss gives him long life and sharp intelligence. He looks and moves at half his age. Eddie Jean’s gloss is healing, and Michael Thomas’s boy has gloss too. I could pick them out once Pappy showed me how.”

Rett dialed back his anger. “They stand out in a crowd.”

“The ones with gloss belong to the Delaneys. Always have, always will.”

“Not Eddie Jean.”

“There aren’t many with special skills, but the ones who have it have all been trained by Quitman. He instructs them and later pulls them into local businesses. Quitman built Cloudland.”

“People build a town, not one man.” Rett sensed he had to convince Joe to help him find Quitman’s cave. Friend or not, Quitman’s call had unnerved Joe. “I’d have to be blind not to notice Quitman’s land is recently patrolled by hired guns. Why all the hoopla over a cave?”

Joe wiped sweat from his forehead with a napkin. “No biggie, Rett. Area has sink holes. When the college kids went missing, he got security serious. His land has many caves and they flood. With swarms increasing, his land is dangerous. No one with a brain goes there.”

Rett ignored the last comment. “Least you didn’t give me the yellow mist crap like Jenna does when she’s drunk. She said a mist spews up from time to time after heavy swarms. If people breathe the mist, they become rabid. Did Jenna leak a family secret, Joe?”

Joe choked on beer and Rett pounded his back. “Where’s the cave, Joe?”

“Sorry, can’t go contrary to my better judgment. Your mind is crooked.”

“Crooked, huh?” Rett yanked Joe from his chair and shook him.

“Take it easy, dude.”

Rett shoved Joe in the chest, and he staggered into the wall. Football pictures crashed to the floor and glass cracked. “Stop being Quitman’s man! Why does the cave scare you?”

Joe grunted and said, “You think you’re the first? People asking about his cave go missing. If hell exists, Quitman’s cave is the entry point. I’m tryin’ to help you, pardner.”

“Then help me get in and avoid his guards.”

“Damn you, Franklin.” Joe covered his face with his hands. He took deep breaths before he made up his mind. “Tell me why! A cave is a hole in the ground.”

He owed Joe. “Eddie Jean and the boys were with me on a trip to Nashville when Kimmy died. By the time we arrived home, the funeral arrangements were made. When I asked to look in the coffin, Jenna fainted.”

“Crap,” Joe said. “You don’t think you buried her?”

Rett shrugged. “It eats at me, Joe. I didn’t take the last look or plan her services. I have whole days when I believe she’s still alive, understand? Kimmy’s death left a hole in my heart, and Jenna pours acid in. Seeing the cave empty will bring me peace of mind.”

Joe took deep breaths before he nodded. “You’ll have to go armed, agreed?”

“If you say so.”

“I do. If you get caught by Quitman’s guards your boys will be raised by him. If you can stomach that idea, I’ll show you his cave on my map.”

Rett finished his beer. “You’re saying Quitman will make me disappear?”

Joe wouldn’t look him in the eye, but he nodded.

Rett swallowed, not sure whether to believe him. Joe struggled with the words, so the warning had to be true. “You’re a good friend, Joe.”

“Like hell I am.”

They shook hands and walked to Joe’s truck. Joe pulled a map and penlight from the glove compartment. He climbed into the passenger seat, and Joe spread out the map.

“Red-circled areas are Quitman’s land. Hunters avoid it because his guards confiscate weapons. Men have been detained for hours. They get in your face and scream about safety, lawsuits, and other crap. Works, too. Quitman’s money buys power.”

Rett asked, “You support the way he runs Cloudland?”

“I do, but he has no right to make you stay.”

“Thanks.”

Joe pointed to a road. “Your best bet is County Road Eight. Road is rough. Find mile marker six and go about fifty feet past and pull off on the right side. Climb the fence.”

“How high is it?”

“Five feet. Place is crawling with motion detectors and cameras. Swarms knock them offline, so guards walk the perimeter.”

“Okay. Show me the cave.”

Joe stabbed the map with a fingertip. “Hill is there. Climb the north side. It’s steep but the back side is a caved in mess. Go straight down—by the way, the climb is suicidal at night.”

“Just my luck,” Rett said, trying to joke.

“Once you’re down, follow a northeast compass heading about a hundred feet. Entrance is covered by kudzu.”

“One way in?”

Joe nodded. “Unless the swarms opened a new entry.”

Rett studied the map.

“Dude, I don’t get it. His cave is like a black hole swallowing people and ruining lives. Why risk getting shot and provoking Quitman?”

“He made Kimmy’s funeral arrangements and my life hasn’t been the same since. If he wants a showdown, he’ll get one.”

“Map’s yours,” Joe said. “Rifle’s locked in a case. You know how to use one?”

Rett nodded and sucked in his lower lip. “I won’t need it.”

Joe gasped and dropped his head. “You promised to go armed! Rett, you really have no idea. I shouldn’t say this, but don’t ask me any questions or interrupt. Listen up, Rett, and listen well. Load the rifle before you climb the fence and take the extra ammo with you. You see anything wild, feral, or not quite human running straight at you, shoot it in the right eye. Got it? Right eye.”

Rett saw fear on Joe’s face and heard it in his voice. He nodded.

Joe sighed. “Quitman has a knack for showing up when least expected. You draw on Quitman Delaney, son, you better make the shot count. You won’t get a second.”

Wilbur

Wilbur spent the evening scanning Evaney’s student essays. She wrote a lot about her personal life. He thought his early childhood stunk, but hers had been far worse. A few passages summed up her nightmare. “I dreamed about the vacation places on the fading windshield stickers on our RV every time Grand Nessy beat my grandpa: Overlook Mountain, Grand Canyon, Magic Mountain, Disney World, and Mammoth Cave. Velma Lou, my mother, would go into a trance and get a faraway look in her eyes, but she was safe; beautiful people are always safe. Watching Grandpa Vern bleeding and shattered broke my heart. I loved the old man even if he couldn’t protect me.”

Or this. “Grand Nessy called me Vermin because I was ugly. She used to say, ‘If ya got run over I wouldn’t even mop ya off the road.’ Grandpa Vern would sign like the deaf do—No, you’re my rainbow. Even after Grand Nessy beat me I had to read Byron’s She Walks in Beauty to my starry-eyed pageant mother, but I didn’t mind because the words took my mind off the terrible pain.”

Closing her notebook, Wilbur had to admit Evaney Harwood became filthy rich the hard way. Her mother married them into old money after the grandparents died in a fire. When her mother and stepfather died in a taxi accident in Spain, Evaney inherited a fortune. The money never sat well with her, according to her journal. At Duke she fell in love for the first time. His name was Winn Harmon, a finance major from Boston.

Evaney had described Winn as debonair and charming, with the same air about him as JFK. He also learned Winn Harmon had proposed to Evaney hours before their disappearance. He gave her an emerald and diamond engagement ring. The story of her engagement was the last words she ever recorded. She left the notebook under her pillow at the Autumn Inn.

On cushions in front of a fireplace Harmon had quoted Byron’s She Walks in Beauty to Evaney, unaware of the poem’s prior history between Evaney and her mother. Evaney wrote how she put her hand over his heart as he recited the words to her, and afterward the Byron poem belonged to her and Winn.

Wilbur had reread the section on their engagement several times. He liked the connections Evaney used in her words. How her hand began to throb with the same tempo as Harmon’s heartbeat, and then her entire body vibrated in sync with his voice. Her words left a strong impression of Evaney as a vivacious college student. Shame what happened to her—to them.

He prepared for sleep and then realized he had forgotten to Google her friends. Goosebumps speckled his skin. How could his mind turn foggy and be content after getting sidetracked?

He got up from his desk chair and readied to go downstairs for supper. Ignoring a sudden urge to gorge on Halloween sweets, he sat back down and typed in the Duke students’ names. Confusion muddled his mind. Wilbur gritted his teeth and tried to force his fingers to obey, but it was useless. There could be only one answer for his symptoms.

Somehow, Evaney Harwood had cut him off from his own mind, scrambled his vision, and induced hunger. He knew it was her, yet if he ever told anyone, well, that would make him crazy, wouldn’t it? Could he lose his ability to reason, like Mary?

Wilbur cracked his knuckles. He couldn’t let that happen, but how could he fight what couldn’t be seen? Evaney Harwood had entered his head like an uninvited hypnotist and controlled him. He sensed her—no, he felt her presence. Twice he had looked over his shoulder expecting to see her. Ticked, he shut down the computer.

Mary had shouted, “Get out of my head.” Wilbur understood now. The last private place in the entire world was inside your own head. Evaney was messing with him. Something ached in his head, like a cramp. Freaked, he grabbed the desk, waiting for a stroke or a vein to burst. What the hell? His breathing roughened and his mind cleared. He leaned back on his chair.

A sane person would get in the car and drive away, but then she would invade another co-worker’s mind. He had to end the nightmare and free his thoughts. Could he fight her?

Wilbur didn’t know. He wasn’t a warrior that reveled in getting sweaty or beating his chest. Logic and the power of words worked for him. Poets found inspiration in the boring: a vase of dried flowers, cat hairs on a sofa, even dirty laundry. If Evaney kept him cut off from his thought trails, he would never write another poem. He couldn’t let her get away with stealing his words. Battle on. He sent the mental message to her. He clenched his fists and envisioned the two words being shot out of a cannon.

Grandmother Pearl always said, Prayers without deep emotions behind them are empty thoughts. He figured it worked equally well for threats and warnings.

Shivers…hundreds of shivers ran up and down his skin, making him jumpy. Did she just answer him? The word for the creepy sensation was horripilation. It meant the bristling of body hairs. Poor Mary never stood a chance. Reading the Bible would not have given her peace or assistance. To give Evaney a taste of her own treatment, he planned to become a vegetarian and drink more beer. Evaney had mentioned an allergy to hops in one of her notebooks. He’d make his blood a toxic irritant to spite her for invading his mind.

Get out of my head! “Game on,” he added out loud for good measure.

Wilbur realized eerie sensations had overwhelmed him since Mary’s death, along with fragmented memories of things that never happened. The disconnection had to be part of her plan to isolate him and keep him from investigating what happened in Cloudland. Maybe finding out the truth behind her coma would boot her out of his head forever. In a war of the minds, he intended to win his back.

Veena knocked on his door and said, “Supper’s ready.”

“I’ll be right down.” Wilbur got up. He needed nourishment after giving blood. He went downstairs and straight to the library. The Monet, as always, looked good under any condition. Wilbur flipped on the museum-type lighting. Why wouldn’t Doc chart the truth of her physical improvements? Did he lie for the money or did she fog his mind too? Maybe Doc became POM, prisoner of mind, before him and Mary. The idea staggered him. If true, he was no better than Doc. He lied to keep a roof over his head and to hold his little house family together.

He let the Monet soothe him. No matter how bad he felt, staring at the painting always improved his mood. The light at the center of the landscape gave him the impression of a window opening up, like an escape hatch into another dimension.

“We’re waiting supper on you,” Lee snapped from the doorway. She glanced at the painting. “What do you see? Naked girls?”

“Truth,” he answered, and walked past her.

Louis

Louis woke with a jerk. Where am I? He sat up and tried to get his bearings. A black leather sofa cradled him and a fleece blanket kept him warm. He saw a note scribbled on yellow legal paper and read it. Louis scrunched it in a ball, embarrassed. Ava left him for a few minutes and when she returned he had fallen asleep. She decided to let him have his siesta. He felt drugged, foggy, and old.

He followed the scent of fresh-brewed coffee and staggered into the break room. One of the lab technicians he’d met earlier said, “I planned to wake you with a fresh cup, Doctor Janzen. Doctor Allen is in a staff meeting, but she’ll join you shortly.”

He grunted and declined coffee. “What time is it?”

“Half past five.”

Louis couldn’t believe it. “P.M.?”

He nodded. “Do I need to stay?”

“No.” Louis knew he sounded curt and didn’t care. Damn AL for kicking him in Cloudland. Sometimes his energy evaporated and left him feeling elderly. The tech left him alone.

Louis went to the sink and splashed his face. Halloween decorations in the break room caught his eye. He’d forgotten the date. People came in to take candy from a skeleton wearing a grass skirt and a Bluetooth headset. A full candy bowl had been wedged inside the ribcage. Louis didn’t want his presence to spoil their fun, so he decided to stretch his legs. The long corridor had emergency exit lights running along the edges like in airplanes. He wished his lab at UVA contained the same high-tech toys. Louis peeked into windows, amazed at the size of the workforce.

Ava joined him. “Louis, I apologize for the delay. I took a conference call, and when I came back you were conked out. Are you ill?”

“Late night. Sorry to be abrupt, but I need to get back to UVA, remember?” He hoped he sounded calm.

“I didn’t want to disturb you. The plane left to pick up another consultant but will return within the hour to take you home. I promise the pilot will punch it on the way home. You’ll arrive in Charlottesville around nine. I have a surprise to show you.”

Louis felt off kilter. Acting cranky wouldn’t be productive. “Lead the way.” He smiled.

Ava ushered him along like they were late for an appointment. There was no doubt the work going on in Cloudland was superior to his university lab—all university labs, in fact. Peterson’s fate concerned him once he remembered again. He had to get her talking.

Ava pointed out unique gizmos and gadgets like a real estate agent. At some point he tired of the “shock and awe” treatment. He began to comment less and less, and as a result she moved even faster. Her current spiel emphasized her Alzheimer’s work. He planned to draw her back to Swarm disease. He wasn’t leaving until she gave him an accounting of what happened to Doctor Peterson. Ava checked her watch and stopped outside a door that blended into the wall.

“Doctor Cho said your work on a treatment for Alzheimer’s has been rigorous and outstanding,” he said.

Ava looked pleased. “I discussed my work in Orlando. I failed to impress you.”

He laughed. “Seriously? We were at a bar.”

She flushed. “You dismissed me, Louis. Said I practiced in la-la land.”

Her tone was disquieting because the hurt lingered. “Ava, I thought I held the AL cure in my hands. People took bites out of my ass and tried to latch on to my work. Being rude helped me fend them off. I’m impressed you’ve kept moving forward.”

She rubbed her right shoulder. “Thank you. I’d been working on XB-11 eighteen hours a day and neglecting my social life. I valued your opinion, and when you blew me off I lost it,” she said, and tapped her forehead. “I cried for days in my room instead of going to conference activities. When I got back, I vowed to prove you wrong.”

His memories opened. “You injected this drug into the brain, correct?”

Her eyes lit up. “You do remember.”

“A bit, but you can understand even desperate people are afraid to have experimental drugs injected into their heads? It brings to mind the archaic procedure of inserting an ice pick into the brain through the eye socket and jabbing it around to cure mental illness. Most people would decline. Obviously some won’t, but the FDA will never greenlight a drug like yours for open market use. Did you try other delivery routes?”

“I established the correct route,” she said in a sneering tone. “I found six free thinkers over the last two years. The data revealed best results in people with the Alzheimer’s gene and less than fifty years of age. Actually, the results were amazing.”

All charlatans make wild claims. Details impressed Louis. “The FDA approved XB-11 injections in a limited population?”

She shook her head.

Appalled, he tried not to show it. She had experimented on live people without authorization and without a tested drug supported by years of scientific scrutiny. It was hard to stomach for a straight shooter like him. Louis lightened up his tone and fought to keep disapproval at bay. “If the FDA discovers you’ve cut corners, every piece of data Flameion ever produced will be questioned. You’ll lose your license at the very least.”

A defiant look swept across her face. “In your opinion.”

“Correct. Weren’t the side effects worse than having early AL?”

“Yes,” she said, and turned her back to him. “We resolved the major issues.”

“This bears repeating,” he said, pulling her around to face him. “Why not tweak the formula a bit longer to get an IV treatment? You could mainline with large-scale trials.”

Ava brushed his hand off her arm. “A mind is a terrible thing to let shrivel. People with the gene know what lurks ahead. How can someone as brilliant as you, for instance, allow yourself to drift voluntarily into oblivion and adult diapers?”

She had a point. Watching early onset AL invade his older brothers had been beyond depressing. “I’m an optimist at heart. Losing one clear day on a bet an untested drug will reverse dementia is obscene. You should’ve brought XB-11 to market using the tested and accepted routes.”

“Wait another decade?” Venom dripped from her voice.

“I devoted my life to a cure, so I know what it takes. You’re ruining your shot at success with shoddy practice. I have to call it the way I see it. Sorry.”

Ava trembled with rage and pulled a tissue from her pocket. “You’re entitled to your opinion and choices.” She blew her nose.

Louis cursed himself for speaking the truth as he did in Orlando. “You’re right, I’m terrified I’ll lose control over my body and my memories. I’m mind-numbingly scared of what’s coming, but you know what, I’m even more frightened of the AL fog overtaking me while I’m in my researcher’s persona. I’d be frozen in time without use of my feelings.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, and leaned in to access a retinal scanner on the wall. A violet light scanned Ava’s eyes. “We have to freeze our feelings because they get in the way.”

The door clicked open.

“No, Ava. Clinical detachment is about being objective and factually accurate. The key is to be morally strong in the confines of the scientific process but still remain sensitive. There’s no need to jettison your feelings, as we’re led to believe.”

“We have to be dispassionate in our analysis.”

“That means unbiased and impartial or fair and objective,” he said.

“Semantics.” Her hand sliced through the air.

He lowered his voice. “Turn those feelings off too often and for too long, and you’ll forget to plug back in. Take it from me, I know.”

“I see why you never found the cure,” she said, hand on the invisible door. “You let your conscience rule. I work better without the conflicts of volatile emotions.”

He kissed her cheek. “I haven’t been very nice to you. Why bring me to Oz?”

Her cold shroud evaporated, and she allowed him back into her good graces by kissing his cheek. “I have a Nobel in my sights. Laugh if you want. If you sign off on my data, XB-11 would get fast-tracked with the FDA. You’re a well-known researcher and the most widely published on Alzheimer’s.”

He felt scammed. “I won’t back a drug that’s subverted the normal process. It’s dangerous. I’ll be happy to read over your results and offer feedback, but I won’t write an article for a journal about your treatment. Sorry.”

She massaged her temples. “Thank you, for your honesty. Now, I’m dying to show you our brain-mapping equipment. It’s mind-blowing technology. I thought of you the moment I first used it to treat a patient.”

“I’m flattered.” He decided charm worked best on her. For Peterson’s sake, he tried to befriend her. “I hope you scheduled private time for us later?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Of course, Louie.” She smiled before walking through the door. Ava looked over her shoulder and added, “This machine can view and map microscopic details of a patient’s brain without radiation exposure or side effects. It makes PET scans obsolete. I had one warmed up in case you wanted to test drive it.”

She led him into a round room with a dome overhead, like an astronomy lab. A heavy smell floated over the pleasant limonene scent and the odor reminded him of soiled sheets. A chill swept up his back. Two dental-type chairs with large computer screens for viewing drew his attention. He hesitated. The layout looked menacing to him, but he didn’t want to offend her.

“You look like you’re going to vomit,” Ava said, looking amused.

“I hate going to the dentist,” he lied.

Ava laughed and walked over to the first table. Her hand caressed the leather like it was fine silk. She noticed his expression and said in a bright voice, “Here, watch me.” She removed her sterile surgical cap and pearl earrings. She handed the earrings to him. “The first time I gazed at the inside of my brain I freaked.” She sat and moved the table to fit her comfort zone. “I worried I’d spot disease.”

“I understand.”

She tapped buttons. An upside-down bucket-looking apparatus moved downward, and she pushed her head inside. The bucket reached past nose level. Some type of helmet, or an old-fashioned ladies’ hair dryer?

“I’ve started the screening, Louie.”

Her voice sounded hollow. A few seconds later her brain lit up in Fantasia-like colors on the viewing screen. With her right hand Ava could magnify views that astounded him.

He walked closer, mouth agape. “This is a fantastic diagnostic tool,” he said, and tried not to sound awestruck. “How can you see the brain behind the bucket?”

“An inner screen. Flameion will bring the equipment to market soon. Of course, our consultants will get one gratis.”

“Sweetening the bribe?”

Ava laughed.

He loved the way her voice sounded, like a familiar snip of music.

“I’m supposed to bowl you over without you noticing, Louie. We need your experience, plus you bring a personal dynamic to the table as well. Quitman invented the brain map to use in Swarm disease treatment.”

“I wondered about the connection between Swarm and AL.”

“Quitman allowed me to follow my path as long as I supported his. He’s a robot.”

“Man must be brilliant.”

“Quitman is a stellar researcher, but he’s also callous, temperamental, and driven. Oh, he reminds me of the old you.”

Louis winced. Had he really been such a louse?

“Would you like to drive through my brain?” Ava asked. She motioned to the keypad. “I won’t feel a thing.”

Louis took a deep breath and stepped up to zoom in and out. The technology dated what he used every day as an antique. UVA hospital neurologists would jump to have access to such equipment. His tenure would be secured.

“What’s wrong?” Ava asked.

Louis looked away from the screen, appalled at how his first thoughts went to securing his financial future instead of helping others. “Nothing. I’m fighting off the green monster. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

She laughed and he tuned her out. Awed, he watched her neurons firing because the device captured the heat signature and then used enhanced colors to track the energy wave.

Ava brushed his hand away in order to demonstrate more incredible features to him. Ten minutes later she said, “Hit print. The machine prints a baseline map. Amazing details. I thought you might want to take one home.” She tapped another key and the helmet rose off her head. “I keep copies of all my tests.” Ava sat up, grinning. “It’ll take about ten minutes before it prints. Questions?”

Louis felt silly about his earlier qualms. Flameion had resources he should consider since he wasn’t getting any younger, but he didn’t want to be a sellout and endorse unethical treatments.

She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got time if you want to jump on.”

Louis hesitated, he couldn’t help it. Something in her manner disturbed him.

Ava stood and shrugged. “I never realized you were so, so timid. You’re the exact opposite of your father.”

Timid? He handed the earrings back to her. “Don’t blame me if I make you late for a meeting,” Louis said, removing his sterile cap. “Stampeding elephants couldn’t pull me away before I’ve seen every detail inside my head.”

Ava laughed and stepped out of his way.

Rett

Rett blew rocks from the back tires leaving Thirsty’s Bar.

Hatred for Quitman Delaney swirled around his head like a breeze. After he checked the cave, he’d tell Jenna he was leaving her.

Seeing kids in goofy Halloween costumes put the brakes on his temper. He should be taking the boys out trick-or-treating and not chasing ghosts. Instead, they were in extended daycare every Thursday because Jenna forgot to pick them up from school. He’d been assured a Halloween party had been scheduled. Rett stopped for young goblins running across the road and wished his kids were out trick-or-treating. Rett punched the steering wheel and shouted, “Damn you, Jenna!”

When he cleared town, Rett picked up speed. His hands bled sweat, his ears throbbed, and his heart ached for what he might find. Small caves littered Quitman’s land, so he had to be careful and avoid injury. He decided not to think about Joe’s last warning. He guessed the never-ending swarms made everyone in town a little batty.

Rett chose to reject his old man’s military lifestyle for small-town serenity. His peaceful existence would end if he found his daughter in Quitman’s cave or if Quitman tried to stop him from leaving with the kids. Rett took deep breaths and tried to keep his cool. Could he be experiencing Swarm Sickness?

At least the plane tickets gave him comfort. He had a plan: check the cave, go home and pack up the kids, and then drive to Atlanta to catch the 6:15 a.m. flight with a clear conscience. If he found his little girl living in a zombie-like state, he’d bring Quitman to justice, Texas style.

He hit the bright lights so he wouldn’t miss the next turn. Not another vehicle in sight. Pot holes, weeds down the center lane, and chewed road edges greeted him on the old county road. He endured the body beating and turned on music.

Rett kept the bright lights on until he spotted the six-mile marker and then canned them. He didn’t want Quitman’s men to see him coming and prepare. The common route to the Delaney backlands existed further down around the curve with an eastern approach. This old road hadn’t been used by people, except for hunters or summer hikers, for years. After the storm, he didn’t want to chance getting stuck in the mud. Rett parked on the road and relieved his aching bladder.

He re-checked the map and put an emergency reflector sign thirty feet behind his vehicle. Rett stuffed extra cartridges into his fleece jacket. It had been years since he fired a rifle. Extra ammo couldn’t hurt. He checked to make sure he had a compass, flashlight, and rifle before shutting the door. Rett left the SUV unlocked in case he needed to make a fast exit from Quitman’s goons.

A tree had fallen onto the fence fifteen feet away. Surprised Quitman hadn’t installed a chain-link fence, Rett slung the rifle over his shoulder and climbed over. The boards felt loose and made him wonder if Joe had given him the right location. He suspected the electronic surveillance system went down with the tree.

Overhead, the stars reminded him of a sea of birthday candles. Cold wind spiraled through the trees and leaves fluttered to the ground. He gazed up at the ivory moon and crossed himself. Courage could be a fickle emotion in the dark.

As his old man had taught him, he checked the rifle round before walking forward. Forty feet past the fence, Rett stepped on a small backpack. He squatted down and unzipped it—damp and stuffed with snacks like trail mix and gummy bears. He stood and listened for sounds. Nothing, other than insect drone and owl hoots.

He wouldn’t put it past teenagers from surrounding towns to come looking for the Cloudland monsters on Halloween. Monster hunting would be hard for teenage boys to resist. He was relieved the only vehicle in sight belonged to him. Besides, wouldn’t kids out to scare one another stay away from private land?

Rett stumbled in his work boots over slippery rocks in a soggy field. Poor drainage. Twenty feet later, the flashlight battery dimmed. He stuffed it in a jacket pocket to save once he found the cave. He pulled out the compass and checked his position. There were several hills, and he had to choose the right one. Yep. The big hill lined up with Joe’s map.

Using the stars and compass brought back memories of camping out with his old man. He’d taught Rett survival skills, like trapping, skinning, and making a fire. Every lesson had stuck. He resumed walking and swarms rumbled beneath his feet. Swarms shook him pretty hard, but he didn’t turn back. Tonight he had a mission.

Rett paused to check his compass and then knelt down to retie loose laces. He had arrived at the hill. Rett walked a grid pattern, searching for irregular ground and sink holes in case he had to retreat in a hurry. Satisfied, he climbed the hill.

Twice he stumbled and other times a minor swarm made him slide and lose ground. He had forgotten fall kicked off the active swarm season. For the first time, he realized swarms were more violent on Quitman’s property. The rest of the town experienced lighter trembles.

Years ago, Quitman had stood before the town council and swore he had sealed his cave. Two years later, six college students stumbled across the cave entrance during heavy swarm activity and flooding. Five students disappeared and were never seen again. Quitman brought in several engineers to advise on how to keep the cave closed. They suggested concrete.

Rett hoped to find a concrete wall. To check out the hill’s backside, he’d have to climb to the top, cross it, and slide down the other side. Five feet from the crest, Rett thought he heard shouts. He dug in and pushed for the peak. Rett stood under the moon but heard nothing from the top but the wind. He decided the nonstop buzzing in his ears had created static noise.

Rett waited until he caught his breath before starting down the backside. Ten feet from the top, the earth rippled like a wave. Rett searched for deep weeds to hang onto, but the sod beneath his feet gave way. One moment he reached for a large rock, the next he cart-wheeled through the air. Landing on his side, the momentum flipped him, and he rolled head over heels down the hillside, covered in goldenrod. He cracked his forehead on a shallow rock at the bottom. He rolled over on his back, gazed up at the electric sky, and had an epiphany.

Grief had nearly done him in. He had little chance to grieve for Kimmy because Eddie Jean needed help. The poor kid had been inconsolable. Her grief had left him feeling gutted. It had been up to him to make Eddie Jean eat, sleep, and dress. When he wasn’t cajoling her, he helped the twins cope. Not much time left for a heartbroken father to mourn.

Rett glanced up at the stars and cried for Kimmy. She loved the stars. He cried for her too-short life, for the lost dreams she would never fulfill, and because he missed their nightly walks around the neighborhood holding hands. He cried all the hurt out under the moon’s silent watch. Emptied of pent-up pain, Rett wiped his face and checked for injuries.

Breaking his dang neck on a pointless mission wouldn’t bring her home. Wincing, his fingers explored the tender bump on his forehead. Time to move. As his mind cleared, he suspected the dull buzz in his ears combined with Jenna’s bizarre behavior had made him go a little nutty today. Kimmy was dead and he needed to deal with it.

Rett stood, swaying. Every bone and muscle made their presence known to him. Feeling lucky he could walk, Rett searched for the rifle and picked it up. He brushed it clean and almost fired it up at the sky, in a resignation salute, before leaving town. He cocked his head. A scream? No. Two screams?

He looked up the hill and climbed fast, as the old man had taught him. At the top he felt woozy, but didn’t stop to rest. He went over the side and skidded the last twenty feet on his ass. More shouts. Rett slung the rifle over his shoulder and jogged to the sound.

“Daddy!” a girl shouted.

Adrenalin flooded Rett’s body and he ran faster.

“Run, Anna!” a man yelled.

The girl shouted again but the wind blocked her words.

Rett stepped up his pace to render help when he heard a loud whistle shriek. He froze, heart thumping against his chest like it wanted to break out. Joe’s warning echoed in his head. Joe was country but not a fool.

“Daddy!”

The girl was close, and Rett responded as any father would.

“Run honey, run!” a man screamed.

The man’s voice scared Rett. He almost knocked the blond girl over as he ran from the woods. To his shock, he saw two younger girls playing with colorful neon-light sticks on a blanket.

The oldest girl backed up, eyes wide, and fell down at his feet. She opened her mouth to scream and made a hiccup.

He felt the cold wind on his face. Rett had an obligation to get the kids to safety and then return to help the adults. He yanked the girl to her feet. “Land is shaking. I’m taking you girls to shelter! You hear me?”

Her eyes grew wider and she nodded. A whistle gave one last blast and stopped. Leaves fluttered down on their heads.

Rett picked up the other kids, holding one under each arm. “Follow me! You hear me?”

He didn’t wait for her answer. Rett jogged away. The little girls shrieked, “Anna!” One kept screaming while the other fell silent. Rett didn’t look back. He didn’t need a compass now, he knew the way back to the road.

Seconds later, Anna caught up with him. “Wait! We didn’t come in this way.”

“Don’t stop,” he said. “Not till we reach the fence.”

Once or twice she stumbled. She caught back up. “Earthquake?”

Gunshots fired. She turned to look back and tripped.

“Get up,” he shouted. “Move it!” The girl jumped to her feet.

More shots came from behind them. Quitman’s men, he supposed.

He acted like a drill sergeant. “Keep up, Anna. Run hard, run hard, run to the fence.”

“Wait, mister!” she shouted, stopping. “Our parents.”

Rett dropped the other two and whirled around. “Your dad told you to run! Do it!”

He picked the two girls up and sprinted.

“What if they’re hurt?” she cried out, stumbling behind him.

Rett ran faster, praying she followed. He saw his SUV.

More shouting, followed by two more shots. How many people were on Quitman’s land?

He felt the wind shift prior to seeing the effect on the trees. They reached the fence. Rett turned and handed one child to the panting girl, climbed over the fence, and shoved a child inside the SUV. Mapping out the best route to take in his head, he jumped back on the fence and leapt right over to the ground.

Anna said, “I hear running. Maybe Mom or Dad.”

Fear galvanized him. Rett tore the younger girl from her arms and picked Anna up. He slung her over the fence. She landed in the mud on her bottom.

He grabbed the last cowering child and climbed over. Rett opened the door and put her in. No time for niceties like seatbelts. Sobbing, Anna tried to karate kick and claw him. He lifted her, heaved her inside, and slammed the door. He evaluated the sounds—right on top of them.

Rett readied his flashlight. He wanted to see who chased them. The brilliant moon lit up the field and the wind carried a foul odor. His nose itched and his stomach cramped. What the hell?

He heard the person running in full stride right for them. No slowing down, no calling out, just running sounds. “Hold up!” Rett shouted and took aim.

“No!” the girl shouted from inside the SUV. She leaned on the horn.

Crack! He hit the fence like a bull. The wood bowed but held. Rett jerked his head up and stared into its face. His mind went numb. A wild man? He beamed the flashlight on him and his stomach flip-flopped. No longer a man, something else, and not nature-made.

It began trying to push its way through the fence, growling. Rett hoped it didn’t notice the tree lying over broken fence. He...It ripped off the loose top plank. Where did its strength come from? In the distance, more running sounds. How many?

He had kids to protect. Years of hunting and target practice with his old man and uncle came back in a flash. Before the thing could growl or rip off another plank, Rett blew its right eye out—well, the shiny black cavity where an eyeball used to be. The thing dropped and excreted a burnt sugar odor. Another ran across the soggy field. Rett had the impression the things followed sound and scent.

He didn’t intend to wait around for the pack or Quitman’s henchmen. Rett shoved Anna across the seat. He cranked the engine and stomped the gas. The second monster, because that’s what they looked like, plowed into the fence and broke through. The younger girls sobbed, and Rett wanted to cry with them.

“What’s attacking us?” Anna asked, looking back. He turned on his headlights.

His heart fluttered in his chest, his throat had clenched in a spasm, and cold made him numb. He had to talk to Joe, but he couldn’t answer the kid until he turned on the heat.

“Animal with rabies,” Rett said, hoping she believed him.

He noticed Anna had the shakes as well. The other two kids pressed against their sister like puppies trying to get warm. “Everybody okay? I didn’t mean to hurt y’all.”

One asked, “Mommy?”

Rett shook his head. “I dunno. I’ll take y’all to the sheriff. Who was with your parents?”

“Aunt Barb and Uncle Jeff and their three friends. They decided to take pictures of the night sky for their blog.”

“They left you?” he asked.

“I’m twelve,” Anna answered in a soft voice.

He couldn’t tell those kids their parents were fools. Rett reached to turn on the radio and noticed a tremor in his hand. “Did you girls forget it’s Halloween?”

“We don’t celebrate Halloween. It’s about a night when demons walk the earth.”

Rett nodded. “Amen to that.”

Louis

Ever since he removed the microbe from Grandpop’s brain, Louis wondered if he was infected with the same micro-organism. Doctor Peterson had confirmed microbes could follow a genetic pattern generation after generation on the Skype interview with the COGS. Louis sat on Ava’s chair, but she said, “Not while it’s still processing my brain map.”

She turned on the other chair. “Three minutes to warm up. Relax.”

Louis sat on the seat with feet on the floor and pretended to be excited. If he had a microbe in his head like his Grandpop, he would be forced to take drastic measures for his end-of-life planning. Could he face that? He kicked off his shoes and stretched out.

Ava adjusted the viewing screen and keypad. She hit a button and the chair back rose to a comfortable height. “Just right,” he told her. Louis listened as she reminded him how to use the different keys.

She pointed to a green button. “When it lights up, you’re ready to rock. Make sure you’re comfortable and be still. You’ll find the helmet will contour to your height and big head.”

Louis laughed and forced his back and neck muscles to relax.

“I’m going to duck into the hallway and make sure Quitman hasn’t arrived.”

“Okay.” Louis studied the keypad a few more seconds and then closed his eyes.

Ava muted the lights. He felt a tad anxious. What if the brain mapping caused the microbe to react and would he feel it?

His fingers gripped the end of an armrest and the table titled backward into a flat position. The leather seating molded to his body. His eyes jerked open. He hadn’t noticed the chair doing the same with Ava. The keypad adjusted, so he wasn’t alarmed. He probably hit a wrong button as he was prone to do.

Louis stretched his arms out on the armrest. He was so comfortable it would be easy to snooze if he wasn’t careful. A few seconds later the light popped on. Before he could lift his fingers to the keyboard, he heard a snapping sound and restraints tightened around his wrists and ankles. Then a big one shot across his chest and another over his thighs.

He sucked in his next breath and lifted his head. Seeing his extremities tied down sent Louis into a reactive panic. Restrained against his will was his chief childhood nightmare. He succumbed to a momentary madness. Louis screamed and struggled to free himself from the prison chair. “Ava!” He gave in to the looming terror and yanked against the restraints.

He fought to exhaustion. “Ava!” Fear made him urinate. The warmth felt obscene. The machine made loud noises and his bowels loosened. Shame washed over him when he pooped his pants. “Ava! Get back in here!”

Louis howled, shocking himself. He forced control over his panic even though he had never felt so alone and neglected. His muscles ached and became flaccid. Sweat made him shiver. Terror sent his heart racing in tachycardiac bursts. His fright turned him into a quivering lump of skin and bones as powerlessness swept over him. He made bleating sounds as he took normal breaths. This was his secret fear, the one that terrorized him during full moons. Being restrained and experimented on against his will.

“For God’s sake Ava, come back!” Panting, he tried to slip his thumb underneath the strap. A policeman once told him a prisoner slipped out of handcuffs by breaking his thumb. Louis tried and failed. Impossible.

The chair tilted upright. He looked up and the helmet came down and adjusted to his head. His brain appeared on an inner screen. Shaking took over his body as waves of terror chills swept up his spine. Despite his fear, he couldn’t help noticing his brain revealed classic early atrophy signs. He jerked against the straps.

“Stop this,” he pleaded, “right now.”

“I’m sorry, Louis,” Ava spoke from a speaker in the helmet. “I’ve given my youth to this drug. I didn’t drag you out here to read my paper or to hire you as a consultant. I plotted to inject you with XB-11 before you disappeared into dementia. Among neurologists, you’re famous. If I cure you, then XB gets fast-tracked.”

A sick, syrupy sensation passed over him. “Listen to what you’re saying,” he said. “You don’t have my consent.”

“Yes, I do. You should read documents you sign in the future. Even Susan Cho thinks you’re here as a volunteer subject.”

Sweat rolled from his forehead into his eyes. He had been suckered. No one had ever duped him or reduced him to a lump of spineless fear before Ava. She was the maestro of power and seduction. “You hate me?”

“You dismissed me in Orlando like a whore. You stood on stage and with your birthright of arrogance proclaimed the Alzheimer’s cure at hand—in your hands. No way could the daughter of a security guard and secretary steal your limelight. Worse than your pious conceit was your pathetic determination to follow outmoded rules during an epidemic of brain abnormalities. You could’ve changed the face of brain research and proposed a new vision, a cure agenda. Instead, you contracted delusions of grandeur.”

Louis felt naked, exposed. “You’ve confused arrogance for dedication.” He wondered if his colleagues thought the same. Louis Janzen, a victim of his own fiction?

Ave laughed and asked, “Did I?”

“I followed a time-honored scientific process designed to promote patient safety. It exposed the flaw in my drug. Release me.”

“Flaw? It showed no statistical benefit. A placebo in all but name.”

He’d been humbled by failure. The data forced Louis to retract his bold proclamation about a cure. But he never gave up hope, never. “The point is by following the established path my drug was found to have no benefit, and it killed no one.”

“It killed hope.”

True, he had nasty letters to prove it. Louis sighed. “I understand that far better than you.”

“The process is too long and non-clinicians make too many decisions.”

“You’re insane. The system works.”

“Says the man afraid of risks and who soiled his pants. You never once questioned why I’d have sex with you both times with little encouragement. You’re not hot, but you are gullible and predictable.”

Louis almost begged, but stopped himself.

“We’re mapping your dying brain. Then I’ll inject XB, which I’ve renamed Avalonium for public use. We’ll remap in a month. Once you see the improvement, feel invigorated and able to concentrate again, you’ll become an XB convert. A talking head for XB, much like the other bozos on TV hocking stock options.”

Anger flooded through him and the heat helped him to fight. She must have brought Peterson into the lab in the same manner. “Did you do this to Doctor Peterson?”

“My field is Alzheimer’s disease. Peterson’s conflict was with Quitman Delaney. Q has a penchant for getting rid of troublemakers. Guess I caught the itch from him. Like you, Peterson pretended to go along so he could leave and out us to the authorities. Swarm disease scared him. Louis, your acting sucks.”

Bitch.

“Ah, from the way your brain is lighting up you’re putting two and two together.”

“If I live, you’ll never be sure you can control me.”

Ava laughed. “I’ll take my chances. The treatment won’t leave a scar and in a few short days the drug will exit your body. I predict you’ll be begging me to give XB to your brothers. You can start the family you’ve always wanted. Your name will be forever linked to the cure as the first test patient. Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed? Your name associated with the Alzheimer’s cure?”

Was he really such a fool? “Go to hell.”

“This brain map—the before and after—will prove I have the cure.”

“Bitch.”

“You didn’t call me names when you were nailing me.”

He heard a few musical tones and then Ava said, “There’s your little hitchhiker, Louis. A sound vibration from the helmet destroys its camouflage. You did the same in your lab, except with a chemical. Notice how well it’s situated? Almost like it was born there? It’s a parasite and it’s widespread throughout the country.”

His soiled clothes burned his ass, but he asked, “Yeah, how? What source?”

“This town is a safe deposit box for ancient bugs and germs. Quitman bottled mineral water from a local spring to fund his research. The parasite and another virus from the mist were discovered in CloudMist bottled water in May. You drank some on the plane, remember?”

“How is contaminated water sold to the public?”

“The microbe’s cloak failed and the testing process found them. I gave you the water to feed your microbe.”

“Thanks.”

Ava sounded amused as she continued. “Your father had the water shipped to Boston because he thought the mineral water was responsible for the good health found in local residents. Quitman believes a chemical imbalance in brain chemistry is critical to the microbe’s survival. Its by-products eat away at the brain like Swarm disease, except Swarm happens much faster. I believe it’s responsible for the pandemic of neurological problems we’ve been facing. Q’s granddaughter, the so-called faith healer, calls them Anchorons. Religious babble. Nothing like seeing a live bug inside your brain, is there? Look, it’s moving. Wait, you have more than one.”

Louis hated her voice—clear and void of emotional entanglements. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the Anchorons. He liked the word. “Ava, go no further. You’re behaving like a petulant child. Don’t you have colleagues to consult for ethical guidance?”

She laughed, sounding thrilled. “Petulant child? And here I thought you would call me certifiable.”

He felt sick to his stomach.

“I’ll inject XB right through your hair. You’re going to feel a damp gel-like substance. It’s disinfecting your scalp and hair follicles.”

A not-unpleasant cleansing followed. “Anesthesia?”

“None.”

He gasped, shocked. “You’ll torture me?”

“The brain doesn’t feel pain. I advise you to hold still. It’s your hippocampus, after all.”

He heard a beeping sound, followed by a burning inside his head. Louis screamed and couldn’t stop.

“All done. You’ll feel a sting in your wrist for sedation. See you soon.”

Eddie Jean

Eddie Jean woke thinking she was underwater with her foot caught in a submerged tree limb, drowning. She kicked hard to break free. Sunlight blinded as she stretched her face to the surface. Well, maybe it wasn’t sunlight. As her mind calmed and her eyes cleared, Eddie Jean realized she lay underneath warming lights. She raised her head and discovered she wore a hospital gown. Soaps and disinfectants saturated the humid air. Eddie Jean guessed they hosed her down and called it a bath.

She tried to sit up, but something held her back. A restraining strap released. She sat on the side of the bed dangling her legs and stared past the intense lights at the overhead bridge. The lab had a viewing theater, like older hospitals have over operating rooms. She saw Quitman Delaney arguing with the ice queen, Doctor Allen. His angry face looked crimson, but the blond-haired doctor looked serene. After what he had done, she could no longer call him “Granddad.” “Q” would do instead.

Q leaned over to use the intercom. “Well, lass, you knocked out the virus, but no recognizable antibodies turned up in your blood. It would take time we don’t have to synthesize enough to make another vaccine. Meanwhile, the virus has gone airborne as I feared. I promised to teach you things. I’ve found B17, a compound found in fruit seeds and banned by the government, prevents a cellular reaction in microbes from Cloudland. Let me beam the details to you.” His telep came in and filled her head with tests and experiments. He wanted her to comment and show interest.

She ignored him. Lifting up her arm, she examined it. No blisters or boils, but her skin was dotted with angry red splotches. The Hum’s pitch had changed. More powerful now, like amplified whale song. It sounded pretty. She had no doubts the Hum was a long-forgotten warning system. Her instincts told her the Hum would end soon.

“We gave you IV fluids. How do you feel?” Quitman asked.

The ice queen spoke and the intercom carried their conversation. “Her blood has changed and she could turn soon. Increase her security.”

He snapped back, “Ava, don’t cross the line again. This is my lab. Eddie Jean isn’t infected. Her blood is reacting to her core temperature changes. Better you watch your own—”

They began to scream at each other and the words sounded jumbled.

“Get your little project under control.” Doctor Allen turned and left.

Eddie Jean dropped to her feet. Her legs wobbled and then she pitched face-first to the ceramic flooring, but her hands caught her torso. She lowered and crawled across the room until a glass wall stopped her. The opaque room divider meant she couldn’t see in.

Her teeth chattered. A woman in a white suit and wearing a containment mask rushed in and covered her with a blanket. Eddie Jean glimpsed sad, almond-shaped eyes before the woman darted back to a protective alcove and climbed up to a monitoring pod.

She pulled the heavy blanket around her body and searched for an exit. The glass contained flaws. She didn’t have the strength to break it—yet.

What was he looking at?

“Shouldn’t you say goodbye to your mother, lass?”

Eddie Jean looked behind her and saw her frantic mother beating on glass across the room. Her mouth gaped open, and she screamed words Eddie Jean couldn’t hear. Even as she watched, the room lights grew brighter. Then another sound, accompanied by loud pounding, caught her attention, but it came from a different area outside her room. A whiff of the sickly-sweet odor from the twins’ bedroom fouled the air.

People infected with Swarm were close. Eddie Jean vomited on the floor. Her stomach continued to clench and release long after it emptied. She wiped her face on the blanket and tried to choke back the dry heaves.

Eddie Jean crawled to her mother. Jenna slid down into a knot watching her. When she reached the glass, her mother mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

She was so beautiful and she used to be fun. Jenna had followed her into the mud to play, climbed up trees, and helped build a tree house, and she even rode horses with her. Eddie Jean knew her mother didn’t like riding horses. She rode because her daughters loved horses. She had forgotten the things her mother did right and remembered the hurtful ones.

“I’m throwing in the towel, lass. There’s no cure for Swarm 2, and it’s spreading like flu. One day you’re going to be asked to heal someone’s relative kept hidden in the basement. Know this—the change they go through warps their minds and there is no getting them back. Understand? You might grow strong enough to heal their bodies, but you can’t heal their minds. They’re perverted, and they’ve lost all humanity. You need to understand why they have to be put down and not healed.”

“No! Don’t, Granddad, please don’t.” Eddie Jean stood, wobbling.

A grinding noise followed. Jenna’s eyes widened and she waved her arms to attract Q’s notice. Her mother’s breath fogged the glass, obscuring her face as she begged him for mercy. After repeated pleas, she gave up and pressed her forehead into the glass. Her glazed eyes focused on Eddie Jean. She pressed her palm against the glass, and Eddie Jean did the same.

She wanted to close her eyes, but eye contact was their sole link. “I love you,” Eddie Jean shouted over and over. The back wall in her mother’s section rose. Eddie Jean cut her eyes to the side and then cried out in disbelief.

Her little sister, Kimmy, was the first one in the room. Because she was short the wall didn’t distract her as she walked underneath. Eddie Jean shrank back, panting.

Jenna motioned for her to close her eyes, but Eddie Jean couldn’t. Kimmy’s dark gray face, infected with pock holes, dripped antifreeze-colored pus. She had greasy hair with missing patches. Eddie Jean couldn’t stop shaking. Her heart tumbled and fluttered, making her feel faint. She sank to her knees.

Kimmy was naked, and so were the others crawling under the wall. Fuzzy, dark body hair grew on the adult’s torsos. The thing that used to be sweet Kimmy ran straight at Jenna and leapt. Her mother’s back was against the glass. She kicked and tried to push Kim back. Twice Jenna kicked her feet into Kimmy’s torso and knocked her backward. Kim would get up and charge again. Jenna slid down the glass to the floor.

Tears clouded Eddie Jean’s vision. Her kid sister bit into their mother’s scalp and into her arm, and then she looked up like she sensed Eddie Jean. She quit biting and walked to the partition. She put her hands up high, leaning her face into the glass surface like kids peer into mirrors. Her face was hideous and her eye sockets had filled with dried blobs of a tar-like substance. Eddie Jean watched her little sister licking the blood around her lips like she used to do with milk mustaches.

Trembling, Eddie Jean let the blanket fall and stood. She stared back at her sister who rocked back and forth for comfort. The horror of what Kimmy had endured engulfed Eddie Jean like a shroud. She couldn’t breathe. Granddad raised the wall all the way. More infected adults rushed in and fell on Jenna, slamming her body against the thick glass. Her last scream snuck past the glass and her right arm drummed against the wall as they swarmed.

Eddie Jean stayed focused on Kimmy—the half-rotten corpse. She remembered teaching her how to ride a bike, make pancakes, and how to braid hair. Her little sister stared right at her, nostrils flaring. Kimmy turned and wriggled her way into the group on Jenna. There was one point when Jenna’s flailing hand looked like she waved goodbye.

That was the last thing Eddie Jean remembered as the floor slapped her body.

The short nurse in white returned. She stroked Eddie Jean’s hair and rubbed the space in between her shoulders like parents do. Eddie Jean bolted upright, but a curtained partition separated her room on both sides. The nurse offered her water. Eddie Jean shook her head, slumped back down, and curled up on her side. The pictures in her mind were on replay. Soon Q would do the same to her father and brothers because they might be carriers too. She closed her eyes to pray.

“Please Eddie Jean, we need your help,” the nurse said, placing a tray on the table.

She said, “Amen,” and looked up. The nurse removed her protective mask. “I’ve sterilized your necklaces. They’re beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Eddie Jean said, and reached first for her silver crucifix to put on.

“You’re not infected. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop what happened to your mother. She was too dangerous to release. She incubated a lethal version of Swarm 2. It’s airborne now.”

Eddie Jean swallowed as Scot’s father popped into her head. “What about my father and brothers?”

“Are fine unless she bit or scratched them.”

“You’re sure?”

“Airborne transmission is immediate. At first her immune system fought off the infection. Once her immune system failed, the virus mutated. A person in the same room with her would be infected fast. ”

“Could my father or brothers be carriers?” Eddie Jean asked.

“My guess is no. Quitman suspects being around you has been protective for them.”

“How?”

“If they get a bruise, you heal it?”

She nodded. “Thank God.”

The nurse said, “When you heal it changes their blood for days, but Quitman decided not to take any more chances. He’s ordered them to be brought here.”

“Can you warn them?”

“You can. Like I said, I need your help.”

“How?” Eddie Jean sat up.

“I’m Doctor Susan Cho, a microbiologist. Your grandfather and Doctor Allen are in a meeting. He’s discovered she sold his Swarm supplements to a rival corporation. Ava lured a famous Alzheimer’s researcher here, and she injected experimental medicine into his head based on the Sylph virus.”

“The patented one?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s the virus responsible for Swarm disease. It’s the first virus I’ve ever seen that turns lethal based on the season. Doctor Allen used a mirror image, chemically, to add Sylph to her drug.”

“You mean like sugar is to aspartame?”

“Sort of. Doctor Janzen is dying, Eddie Jean. He’s not showing Swarm symptoms. Frankly, I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

“Maybe he has the original version of Swarm disease?”

Doctor Cho frowned. “No, It’s more like his Alzheimer gene protected him from Swarm. I’ll smuggle him out, so he can expose your grandfather to the authorities. I stole Ava’s phone, so you can warn your father. Deal?”

“Yes.”

Susan handed it to her. “Be quick and make sure he doesn’t come here.”

Eddie Jean punched in the phone number while Susan climbed up to the computer system.

Wilbur

“Dessert,” Veena sang out after she returned from greeting trick-or-treaters at the end of the driveway with Lee and Cookie. They had dressed as witches and made kids bob for apples from a black cauldron. The women returned in a good mood.

Wilbur got up from the desk where he studied, and Rose came downstairs to join them.

Cookie cut the orange cake, and Veena poured coffee. Everyone sat at a massive dining table under a huge chandelier and ate holiday cake. Wilbur avoided staining the tablecloth with his dainty mug of coffee. The cloth was jade green, with vivid red and pink roses in needlepoint. The house staff dined on fine china and good silver. According to Miss Cookie, it was a crime not to use it. Cookie made the ritzy mansion feel like their home.

Rose asked Wilbur, “You have class Friday?”

He yawned. “Uh-huh.”

“You study all the time,” Rose said.

“What else is he going to do?” Lee butted in. “No girlfriends, no partying, and no fun.”

“Let him get a degree and watch the ladies fall all over him,” Rose said.

Lee frowned at Rose and then sipped her coffee with her pinky cocked up.

Wilbur loved Lee’s little idiosyncrasies. Like the way she sucked in her cheeks while reading, or how she sang off key in falsetto, and the way she tapped the poison symbol ring on her left hand whenever she felt vulnerable.

“Hope you’re right, Rose,” he said. “Some nights I could use a lifeline.”

Lee coughed into her fist.

Miss Cookie smiled. She had stumbled across his x-rated poetry about Lee’s luscious mouth. Cookie thought he should give the poems to Lee, and Wilbur was glad he never did. His phone rang and he answered.

“Mr. Jenkins? J-Bone told me about your interview.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m Bev Cain. The estate hired my husband as a PI to look into what happened in Alabama. He’s missing too. If you’re looking for answers, maybe I can help.”

“Why didn’t you tell J-Bone?”

She laughed. “To believe, one would have to spend time with Miss Harwood. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

She gave directions. “It’s now or never. I’m leaving in the morning for a warmer climate.”

Wilbur didn’t hesitate. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

“Going somewhere?” Lee asked.

“Meeting a new friend.”

Wilbur left the table, collected his laptop, and went to the Saturn. How could so many people go missing? Grandmother Pearl had always said, Let Alabama be the very last place you visit. She was born there in a town called Mentone. He wondered how far Cloudland was from her birthplace. Grandmother Pearl also said, Can’t go wrong following your heart, Burr.

“Wait up,” Lee called out from the porch.

He walked back to her.

“Why so icy?” She came down the steps and met him halfway.

“I asked for a lifeline and you’re a ghost.”

Her eyes flashed and she pushed both hands into his chest. “You’re just jealous because I’m going to a party. I can’t spend every minute in Hell House like you. But I’ve got your back. Hunchback put the Bible on the dumbwaiter. House staff denied it.” She whirled around and sailed back inside.

Grinning, he walked to his car. The further he got from Harwood House, the clearer his thoughts became. On the drive, he tried to reason out why the Duke students began their reckless journey. Guess he would add Duke University’s response to his growing research list. In his mind, the student’s disappearance begged for answers.

Twenty minutes later, he parked and found Mrs. Cain waiting on her front porch. Bev Cain was in her sixties, petite, with short, salon-styled gray hair. She wore dark slacks, a red cardigan sweater, and black cat-eye reading glasses hung from a gemstone necklace.

“Bev Cain?” Wilbur asked.

“Wilbur Jenkins?” She stood and shook his hand. “Please come inside.”

Wilbur followed her. He noticed she moved like her knees hurt. The room had a traditional style with a baby grand piano taking center stage. Family photos cluttered the piano top and packed suitcases were against the far wall. She sank into a floral chair. He sat next to her on a lemon-yellow sofa. Wilbur liked the warm blue and yellow color scheme. He smelled vanilla and Bengay ointment.

“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Jenkins?”

“No, thank you, and please call me Wilbur.” He noticed the stiffness in her spine relaxed at the same time as his did. “Mrs. Cain, I should tell you I’m just a college student. I work for Evaney Harwood as her live-in orderly. I’m poking my nose into the mystery surrounding her injury in Alabama and her missing friends. If I’m not what you expected, ask me to leave.”

She smiled and crossed her legs at the ankles. “Anyone ever mention your honesty exudes in front of you like perfume?”

Perfume? “No.”

“I trusted you on first sight. You have a rare gift.”

He smiled, feeling flattered. “Thank you.”

“Is Miss Harwood moving at all?”

He caught his breath before answering. “A little bit, but it’s sporadic. Her doctor doesn’t find it abnormal and claims she’s still in a coma.”

“Do you have feelings for her?”

Heat scalded his face. “I do feel connected to her, but not romantically.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been reading her school notebooks and essays. I didn’t ask permission first.”

She smiled. “Mitch would’ve snooped too. What things do you like about her?”

Wilbur didn’t blame the widow for checking him out. “Her honesty, and she loved poetry as much as I do.”

“Mitch said she survived because life made her tough. Evaney fought hard to escape.”

“Why leave her friends behind?”

“Mitch thought they were injured. The area is wild and prone to flooding caves. Her accident ended any chances for a rescue.”

“How did Mr. Cain go missing?”

“He went to Cloudland for answers. J-Bone is my friend. She told me you had ‘road trip’ written all over your face when she left.”

He shifted position. “True.”

She shook her head. “It’s why I called you. Don’t go there.”

“Why didn’t the estate ask the FBI to look into your husband’s death?”

She laughed. “Son, the estate and the Feds knows more than what they’ve claimed. I sued to bring the information out. It’s still hidden. A friend in a federal agency sent this to me.” She passed him a small sheath of papers.

“There are four towns across the country with record numbers of missing people, but no one does anything about it,” she added. “Cloudland is one.”

“Towns and not cities?” he asked, and scanned the pages. “Why aren’t they famous like the Bermuda Triangle?”

She nodded. “I have no idea. They should be famous.”

“Why hush it up?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Ever hear the government admit they’ve lost control?”

He shook his head.

“People hear plenty about investigations, but most results are never made public. Mitch said the government studies phenomena and keeps its secrets.”

He pored over the details in the papers. “This implies several government agencies have investigated missing people.”

“Yes, the documents aren’t public. I lost the case, but I used those papers to force a settlement. A big one. My children and grandchildren are safe, far away from those towns and from Evaney Harwood. If you investigate further, don’t set foot in Cloudland!”

“I might have to.”

She clasped her hands in her lap, staring at him. “You’re already hooked on finding the answers, just like my Mitch.”

I’ve been sucked in, all right. Wilbur nodded. “I don’t have a choice.”

A frown flitted across her face like a shadow, and her brow furrowed in thought. Wilbur remained silent, waiting for her to decide what to tell him.

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “There is nothing to be gained in going to Cloudland.” Her dark eyes implored him not to ask more questions.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

“Fair enough. Mitch discovered the six students had found a diary or journal in a trunk at a Duke library. Alumni donation, I think. Famous alums’ papers get catalogued fast, while lesser stars’ archives are stored in basements. The Diggers, the name the students gave themselves, didn’t mind liberating such finds and going out in search of past history or lost relics. Mitch suggested they were addicted to the thrill, but I don’t know.”

“College students are like that.”

She sighed. “Be careful you don’t become reckless like them. Mitch found medical records. They revealed Miss Harwood became contagious with an unidentified infection. At one point blisters covered her skin and then it sloughed off. Her skinless condition was painful, like burns. Several nurses got sick, and hospital patients did too. Mitch documented several unusual deaths but couldn’t always get their medical records. The estate paid to fumigate the hospital wing, and later the hospital board destroyed it.”

Wilbur couldn’t blink. He froze at the word “contagious.” Was that how Evaney Harwood got into his head? She infected him—all of them?

“Mitch didn’t want to infect me or the grandchildren, so he slept out over the garage. He arranged for a team to sterilize it after he left.”

“We’re vaccinated against meningitis.”

She shook her head. “They couldn’t identify the cause. The hospital sent a specimen to the CDC, and they sent a team to study her. Mitch couldn’t get access to CDC records even when using Freedom of Information routes. At some point in time, she tested clear.”

Wilbur swallowed as his heart raced. “We, the nurses and other staff, haven’t been told she could be contagious. We do take blood and body fluid precautions.”

“Has anyone fallen sick?”

He shrugged. “There’s a turnover despite the perks and pay. I haven’t heard from past employees.”

“I’m not surprised. The symptoms present like seasonal flu. Some staff recovered, but three died of rabies before it became known.”

“Did CDC check the water or other sources?” he asked.

“Everything.”

“Rabies is rare.” Wilbur shuddered at the thought. He didn’t even know rabies symptoms like he did flu.

Mrs. Cain read his mind. “Early rabies symptoms are similar to flu until the second stage, which is serious. Mitch believed her infection became active once a year in the fall. I’ve proved him right.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her back as she went to a wall cabinet and bookcase. His breathing felt labored. Maybe he was allergic to the Bengay odor.

She extracted a thick manila envelope and slid out a poster board from behind the massive cabinet. He noticed her hands shook as she sat. Mrs. Cain had tiny, child-like hands. She tried to hide burn scars, which covered skin from fingers to elbows.

“Wilbur, I’m scared to give you his papers. It feels like I’m keeping an old curse alive. You have no idea how many times I nearly burned this material. People who read about Evaney Harwood and try to solve what happened to her get sucked down a black hole. Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “If I’m infected, I want answers.”

“More than five college students are dead, son. Be careful.”

He nodded.

Sighing, she passed the poster to him. “It’s a death board. After reading Mitch’s papers, I hired PIs to find people who died from odd infections in the hospital. The numbers are staggering, aren’t they?”

Wilbur stared in horror at the death links snaking off patient names, their families, and hospital staff. All became symptomatic from September to December. “Why is one name listed from a missing student’s family member?”

She smiled. “Good catch. Yes, I thought a map from beginning to end would paint an unforgettable picture. One student’s father snuck into her hospital room. He was anxious for news. The poor man never considered she might be contagious.”

“Your map is sick. Did you show this to police?”

“My investigator broke HIPPA laws, the medical chart privacy act, to get information. I’d be slammed, maybe even sued. I had to take the estate to court just to get the money they owed my husband. They beat me and drained our retirement dry. After I got those papers, they settled. I signed a confidentiality agreement.”

“You’re telling me.”

She rubbed her right knee. “In the hearing, Doctor Hatcher claimed he monitored her for infection. He swore there were no positive tests. An RN just died, my trust is breached.”

“Doc said Mary had mental illness. She fasted to cure herself and it killed her.”

“He lies. Ask the other live-in help for their medical history. Look for something you share.”

He laughed happy to lighten the mood. “Like our blood type?”

She cocked her head, staring at him. “What?”

His ears ached, and he felt sick to his stomach. “We all have O negative blood.”

Her face paled. “Really?”

“Wait...I think so, but I’m not certain.”

A smile softened her face. “My Mitch would like that you’re a fact checker.”

“Does Doc Hatcher know about your suspicions or this chart?”

Her little hands fanned her face. “He’s in on the cover-up, dear. I’ve speculated since Miss Harwood survived, the people she came in contact with in later cycles would catch a milder infection. Some become carriers, some shake it off, and others get sick and die. Carriers, as you know, infect but aren’t sick.”

Pain slammed his chest in needle-like sensations. He sat back against the soft cushion, closing his eyes. This changed everything. Now, it was more than a mystery to solve. He might be incubating killer germs. Or maybe O negative blood protects me.

He remembered a student poem in class last semester, an ode to Typhoid Mary written by a nurse. Typhoid Mary, a healthy disease carrier, infected a lot of people that died. Even when the health department explained the situation in stark terms, she kept hiring on as a cook, spreading more typhoid fever, until they locked her away for life.

“I don’t understand. Why invite me inside your home if you suspect I’m contagious?”

A clock chimed 10 p.m. “I almost didn’t. Someone has to stop the deaths. I’ve isolated myself from my grandchildren to keep them safe. I can tell you never suspected infection, so does she scare you?”

He wiped his mouth with his hand and nodded. “She’s waking up.”

One tiny scarred hand flew to her throat. “Oh my, that can’t be good. I thought her brainwaves were nonexistent.”

“Why is it a bad sign?”

“Weird things happen in Cloudland.”

“Tell me,” Wilbur said.

She ticked off the reasons. “Some people cry tears of blood, the long list of the missing, and not a single resident has ever donated an organ for transplant.”

He noticed tears flooded her eyes. Wilbur asked, “How does a carrier infect?”

Mrs. Cain swiped at her eyes and replied, “A cough, a touch, a kiss—who knows?”

“I could infect you, other students, or my professors?” Wilbur remembered one girl he had dated last year who almost died from a brain infection. His chest pain worsened and sweat beaded his forehead. I have to quit going to class. The idea hurt. He dreamed of teaching poetry at UConn.

“I should’ve required Public Health to monitor her for life in my settlement. I regret I didn’t. Ever since I heard about Mary Stinson, I decided to get involved if the opportunity knocked. And here you are. In my opinion, Doctor Hatcher will have a lot to answer for one day.”

“I’ll send specimens off to another lab. We need answers.”

“No! It’s October. You could contaminate the whole lab.” Her body trembled.

Startled by her fear and his lack of understanding, he said, “Thanks for warning me, but how else can I show proof she’s contagious?”

She clasped her tiny hands in prayer. “Mitch said truth is easier to suppress than express when the public welfare is at stake. He’s still missing.”

It would be hard to go against the estate, but like Mrs. Cain he had to take action. He had become a man he didn’t recognize—secretive like his mother before she used drugs to kill the voices in her head. Or was it a Hum in her head?

Wilbur Jenkins held out his hand.

Tears rolled down Mrs. Cain’s apple cheeks, but she handed him the envelope and the poster. “God bless you, Wilbur. Stay safe.”

Rett

Rett drove Anna and her sisters to the sheriff’s headquarters. Shock had deflated all three girls. He couldn’t come to terms with what he saw, nor what he did. His hands stopped shaking seconds before he pulled into the sub-station. The younger girls had fallen asleep, but Anna looked worried. She had glanced back at the road, hoping to see her family van following them. Rett didn’t think her family would ever be reunited.

“Thank you,” Anna said when he parked. “You saved us.”

“You’re welcome.” He carried the girls inside and let Anna tell the deputies her story. Sheriff Ford stepped out of his office and beckoned to Rett. Once he sat in the indicated chair, the sheriff went behind his desk and sat. He sipped coffee and squinted at Rett. “Thanks for helping the Martin girls. What were you doing on Quitman’s property?”

The question stunned Rett, considering the missing people and wild-acting things running around in the woods. “Eddie Jean believes her grandfather turned her horse out to pasture and didn’t sell him. To stop her from checking after school, I went after work.”

The sheriff clearly didn’t believe him, but didn’t say so. “What did you see? The kid said a wild man attacked, and you shot him.”

Rett took a deep breath and nodded. “He wasn’t a hermit, sheriff. He didn’t have eyeballs, but tracked us. Man’s face looked dark like death, and distorted—like he’d gone feral. He had boils on his skin and he stank to high heaven. He ripped off fence planks and growled at me. I heard more coming, so I shot the first one before he could break through. The second one did.”

Sheriff Ford jumped out of his chair, spilling coffee across the desk. “One escaped?”

“Last look in the side mirror showed three on the road.”

“Stay here until I get back,” the sheriff ordered. He went out and shouted to deputies and the whole building emptied in less than two minutes. Rett stepped out and saw the white-faced girls sitting in a room with a female social worker. He heard emergency sirens and saw the flashing lights. Rett waved to Anna before he went out the door. He had no intention of hanging around until Quitman arrived.

Rett exited the empty parking lot and felt he’d done his duty to Anna and her sisters. Now, he needed his family. He had to see and hug each one. Rett checked his watch. Less than twenty minutes before the daycare closed. He tried to call Jenna and then Eddie Jean.

Neither one answered. His gut twisted, but he stayed focused on what he could control.

In the ten minutes between leaving the girls and picking up the boys, Rett decided the sheriff hadn’t reacted to his description because he’d seen one in the flesh. He never batted an eye until Rett mentioned three escaped. The insight chilled him. He realized he’d been right. If Eddie Jean represented the good side to the swarms, the man he killed represented the bad. Both the bad and the good were shielded from public view. Rett regretted he’d tried to hide Eddie Jean’s ability to heal. She had a true gift—a miracle, to be exact.

He arrived five minutes before closing time. The boys ran into his open arms. Rett dropped to his knees to hug them and received their affectionate greetings with gratitude. He’d killed a person. He didn’t even know his name, but the thing had been human once. He bordered on shock and his emotions threatened to spill into mush. His boys pulled him back into normal.

He paid in cash and hurried them onto their booster seats. The boys took turns sharing their news, kid things, like Teddy’s purple-colored spaceship and Tommy’s perfect cartwheel. They talked nonstop about their costumes, the decorations, and the candy in the white plastic trash bag. After ten minutes, they quieted down.

Rett tried to call Eddie Jean again. No answer.

He pressed on the gas pedal and arrived home in record time. Tonight, the law chased monsters instead of speeders. Rett stopped at the curb in front and stared while his stomach performed flip-flops. Orange tape surrounded his home like a TV crime scene. No one had called him, and the sheriff didn’t mention it either. Had everyone in town flipped out?

Their dark house looked sinister in the shadows. His heart skipped so fast he couldn’t breathe. Little white floaters cruised through his vision or were they tears? Rett pulled out his phone to make sure the text from Eddie Jean sent at 3:00 p.m. was real.

“At Shana’s house. Call me from home.”

He read her message out loud like a heartfelt prayer. At least his daughter was safe. Rett stared again at the reassuring words and put his phone back in his pocket. He opened the driver’s door, saw the boys had fallen asleep, and left the door ajar. He staggered up the sidewalk, hoping they were playing a Halloween joke on him. Rett could use a laugh about now. Decorating the house like a crime scene could be a fun Halloween trick.

Dead quiet.

He sneezed and noted a bleach scent lingered on the porch and sidewalk. A padlock kept the door shut, and he knew without checking the same went for the back door. What had happened in his home? He stared at the orange tape, horrified because he didn’t know what it meant. Yellow meant crime scene, but what about orange? Dread made his bones too heavy to move. He dropped down on his knees in the grass beside his wife’s colorful pansies and rocked back and forth. His mind wouldn’t render a conclusion for him to act upon. But colored tape indicates a crime, right? His innards clenched, giving him unspeakable abdominal pain.

Could Jenna have turned into one? Was it rabies? In a flash, Rett recognized similarities between Jenna and the male. He pulled out his phone and texted Joe Vickers a warning. “Cyclops running free. Warn friends and leave town!” Rett hoped Joe understood.

He texted Eddie Jean and told her he would pick her up. Quitman? No, he couldn’t call him.

Rett despised the way Quitman tried to run his relatives’ lives, and those of the townspeople as well. If Quitman had a heart his rules would be easier to tolerate, but he acted like an abandoned cur concerned with his own day-to-day survival. He had lost the ability to love family, friends, and church; hell, Quitman hated pets, babies, and football, too. As far as Rett knew, Quitman loved no one. Not since Sylvie, his wife, passed right after he and Jenna married.

Rett tried to think. He felt duped and betrayed. The emergency signal noise in his head had ratcheted up, and his ears filled with stinky crud. If those things got into town, they could infect others. Time to leave Cloudland. He needed to sink his feet into dry Texas dust to get grounded. At least at the ranch a snake was a snake and not a relative.

Rett stood and realized he heard no neighborhood sounds like dogs barking or doors slamming, or night joggers. The whole street looked dark and deserted. Spooked, he headed back to his SUV. He opened the driver’s door. His boys yawned and smiled at him.

“We’ve got a problem, boys.”

“Momma?” Tommy asked.

The noise in his head sounded like a storm alert buzzer. But he’d have to be deaf to miss the fear in Tommy’s one word. He extracted two aspirin tablets from the console box and dry-swallowed them.

“No, your mother isn’t home.”

“Where’s Eddie Jean?” Teddy asked.

“Sick?” Tommy added in a low voice.

“You ever see your sister sick?”

Tommy nodded and said, “With cramps.”

Rett laughed. “Yeah, I forgot. Hey, bet our girls are out shopping the Halloween sales. Who wants to take my dime?” Rett didn’t count that as a lie. He didn’t want them to worry.

“I will for a dollar.” Teddy piped up.

He noticed them punch fists, as Eddie Jean taught them. They knew he had lied to them. Six-year-olds were trying to humor him. Rett slapped at a bug around his face and climbed into the SUV, feeling stiff and sore. His phone rang, but he didn’t recognize the caller—Ava Allen. “Hello?”

“Daddy?”

“Eddie Jean?” He put her on speaker so the boys could listen.

“Honey, where are you? You can’t come home.”

“I know.”

Pain cramped his stomach again and he clicked off the speaker.

“What happened?” he asked, taking the phone outside the SUV.

“Momma and I have a new form of rabies. Granddad has sent men after you and the boys. She didn’t bite or scratch y’all, so I don’t think you’re infected. Granddad said no one has recovered from this disease. Take the boys away, Daddy. Now!”

“No, baby. I can’t…I won’t…leave you.”

“Save my brothers!”

Rett couldn’t answer. He closed his eyes. “Your mother attacked you again?”

“No.”

Rett didn’t like the tone in her voice. “I saw a wild-looking man tonight on Quitman’s land. He looked like a monster and tried to bite me. I shot him. Are you saying he had rabies same as your mother and—”

“Yes, Daddy. Leave town! Goons with guns are tracking you.”

His vision clouded. No father could leave his sick daughter. “Baby, don’t ask me to leave you. I’m—no, we’re coming to get you because we love you. Screw Quitman.”

“No! There isn’t a cure or vaccine. No one recovers from Swarm disease. Don’t let the boys see me like this, or they’ll never be able to sleep again. Save my brothers, please Daddy.”

Rett couldn’t focus because his little girl was sobbing. “You’re a healer honey, you can’t get infected.”

“Momma contracted something new, and it’s airborne. Swarm disease means death. You’ve seen the result. All Franklins can’t die here, Daddy. I love you and the twins.”

Rett yelled. “Eddie Jean! I’m coming for you. You hear me!”

The line went dead.

Rett ran to the SUV. He dropped the keys and punched the steering wheel with bare hands and screamed, “I can’t leave you.”

The twins howled. Their cries shocked Rett long enough to notice men watched them from the shadows across the street. Others crept up like police commando teams, and he noticed two trucks blocked the exits out of his street. He saw the orange red ash from the drivers’ cigarettes in the darkness.

Anger blinded him as he reached for his keys and cranked the engine. He’d get the boys to Texas and return for his daughter. Sick or not, he would be by her side.

“Hang on, boys,” he shouted, jerking the SUV into four-wheel drive. He slammed over the curb and into the neighbor’s backyard to reach an unguarded street. They had to travel a couple hundred feet through dense woodland to reach another exit. First, he had to go off road into a field the neighborhood kids played in. Parents checked the field for dangers and kept the brush trimmed. He plowed over bicycles and outdoor furniture before reaching the peak of a hill and tipping over the steep side.

The boys screamed.

The downward plunge exhilarated Rett. They mowed over saplings and sideswiped over-sized azalea bushes. Rett’s eyes strained to read the terrain beyond his lights. Branches gouged and scraped against the sides as the SUV jumped side to side. He heard popping sounds, which Rett hoped were rocks under his tires and not bullets.

He hit the bright lights to pick up the boards neighborhood children placed over muck, so they could ride their bikes across without getting stuck. He heard one board crack beneath them. One tire caught in the mud, holding them back. He kept the vehicle moving forward as the tire spun. The wheel found traction and the mud spat them out on the other side.

“Go right,” Teddy yelled. “No trees.”

Rett turned right. A Jeep with specialized night lights hit them from behind and helped illuminate their way. He saw the faint path to follow.

“Don’t hit our fort,” Tommy screamed.

“Sorry, son.” Rett hammered the makeshift building without braking. Wood splinters sprayed into the air and landed on his roof, sounding like hail. He shifted gears and headed up a narrow path to another backyard. He gunned the engine, and they bounced over holes and dead branches. At times the rear end skidded side to side as they inched up the ravine. The last backyard was fenced, but a path went up the side and out to the road.

When they slammed back onto asphalt, the boys cheered.

No way would he stop on the road to Atlanta except for flats. Checking the rearview mirror and making quick turns down old roads kept him from worrying about Eddie Jean. He floored the gas pedal. He couldn’t shake the nonstop words in his head.

No one has ever recovered from Swarm disease.

Louis

Louis’s inner brain boiled in an acid vat and he was blind.

No shadows, no colors, no vision, period. He lost speech but his hearing was fine. The room was silent, no monitors buzzed alerts, no muted whispers came from medical staff, and no phones rang. He had expected his agony to be short, but death didn’t claim him. His nerves still signaled pain to his brain even if he couldn’t move or communicate his misery. Locked in—my mind is aware but my body won’t function. Torture. Despite the hot rush of fear sluicing through his veins he refused to beg God for death. He wanted to live now more than ever.

Dying would make life far too easy for Ava. He could hear her telling another concerned researcher, We lost Louis to Swarm. No, he chose to fight this living hell to spite her. Maybe Swarm disease wasn’t real. Maybe it was code for murder in Cloudland. He focused on remembering his name.

The air in the room changed. Icy air became warmer, like a tropical breeze, as it wafted in. He thought he smelled beach shampoo, the herbal type with jasmine and coconut scent. He heard a releasing sound, he thought, and someone sniffed? Maybe I’m hallucinating. Earlier he thought Susan Cho had tried to help him, but she vanished.

A hand, a damp but warm one, touched his cheek and then his forehead. The touch held the warmth of the sun. Now he understood the term “therapeutic touch.” Both Ava and Susan had icy hands. Who was it? Pain stopped wherever the hand rested. He sensed a person lean over and gaze down at his face. Warm water, or tears, dripped on his cheek.

A girlish voice whispered, “Sorry, I slobbered on you.” She sniffed. “I’m Eddie Jean Franklin. Do you want my help?”

Where had he heard her name? There was something sweet about her confession and the way she used her fingers to wipe his face. In any case, she wasn’t Ava and yes, he wanted help. He couldn’t speak or move. I’m Louie. My brain is on fire.

“I’m sorry Doctor Allen hurt you. I’ll heal you until told to stop,” she said with a voice choked with emotions.

Louis felt so grateful for not being alone. He craved human touch. Ava left him to suffer and die in silence, and the isolation hurt worse than her drug.

“Don’t be afraid,” the girl said.

Soft thumbs pushed into his eyes—not hard, but firm. It felt like his eyes were being iced, but no pain. He felt warm, even languid, yet his eyes were like chips of dry ice boring into his brain. She removed her thumbs and at first he couldn’t open his lids. When his eyes opened, he could see! At first he saw blurred shadows, and then details sharpened.

He’d been moved from the dome room and its slick dental office chair. They cleaned him up and put him on a hospital stretcher in a room with muted lights. The girl stood behind him. Her hands explored his scalp like she was reading his fortune from the bulges and hollows. His innermost fears subsided as she worked on his brain.

“One more time,” she said, her voice softer now. He felt her hands trembling as she put one over the injection area and the other on the opposite side. Glacier cold, radiated downward, and then a warming heat like a hot water bottle followed. He gasped and his body relaxed. Something fluttered in his head, and she jerked her hands away. He felt wrapped up in a warm blanket and barely noticed. Louis sighed.

She stepped into his visual field. A young beauty with long, dark hair and eyes that turned lavender against the blue scrub top. She had to be the faith healer Ava had scoffed at. Louis blinked. A water-vapor halo floated around her head. As he stared, it began to fade. But it wasn’t the strange-looking halo or the many strands of multi-colored necklaces she wore holding his attention. Despite the miracle in her hands, the girl looked scared.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded. He tried to speak several times until his raspy voice answered. “Yes.”

“Yesterday, I couldn’t heal unless the person stood. Guess I’m stronger now.”

Louis stretched out his hand to her and she took it. He pulled her hands to his face. She cupped his cheeks as he wished until he spoke. “How did you heal me?” His clear speech surprised him, and he blinked from sudden tears.

“Let me work on your spine.” She helped him roll over and the cold and the heat went up and down his back. He loved the gentle way she returned him to his back while supporting his neck. This girl had removed his pain, restored his vision, and made his body function. He had no right to grill her, but he had to do so. Louis had spent a lifetime in study and searching for a cure. He should have been looking for her. Maybe she was a trick or mirage to prove him psychotic so no one would believe him when he pressed charges. No one except for Cindy Van Zant.

She smiled at him. “My healing comes from my faith. My faith, not yours.”

“Did Doctor Allen teach you this trick?”

Eddie Jean didn’t answer and released his hand, and then the restraints. Louis struggled into a sitting position. She helped him stabilize until the dizziness passed.

“No tricks. I asked God for this ability. I didn’t earn it through study or apprenticeship.”

“A gift from God?” He knew his voice sound incredulous because she flinched. Louis flexed his arms and kicked his legs, thrilling to the sensation of blood circulation. He wasn’t a religious man, but he refused to deny his own miracle. Too bad faith healers had a reputation as charlatans preying on the gullible. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Ready to stand?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“You have to hurry.” She licked her lips. “You’re in greater danger the longer you stay.”

Louis noticed bizarre skin colors on her arms and reached out to touch a swirl pattern. Her skin was sauna-steam hot. “Is this genetic?”

She forced him to his feet. Kid was stronger than she looked.

“It’s okay not to believe in what I do, but don’t ignore my warning.” She reached under the table and brought up a box with clean clothes inside. “Doctor Cho said she borrowed clothing for you, but the belt and shoes belonged to you. Please get dressed.”

He had a genetic condition with the AL gene and her skin problem had to be genetic. Did they lure genetic freaks here to test and experiment on? “For all I know, Ava gave me an injection, so you could show up and pretend to heal me. Why were you crying?”

Her lips quivered and then her chin. “You’re wrong about me, but right about the genetic experiments. Doctor Cho asked me to help you because Doctor Allen left you to die.”

Her words stung because they were true. The kid looked as miserable as he felt minutes ago, but he didn’t have a single ounce of trust left in his body. He wanted answers.

The kid tucked hair behind her ears. “My mother infected my little sister with Swarm disease. Until today I thought Kimmy died from an allergic reaction.”

“What?” Louis felt like a bully. No wonder she had been crying.

“I think of Cloudland as purgatory or I’d totally freak,” Eddie Jean said.

Louis frowned unsure how to respond. “I’m an atheist.”

Her eyes scanned his face. “Science and faith don’t contradict. I hate to say it, but established religions have carved out niches of differences to define separateness. Belief isn’t supposed to be divisive.”

Heat scorched his neck and burned his ears. “Truth is in science.”

“Truth is in people. I heal, and I have a weird version of telepathy. I think all humans used to have it back when we lived by our instincts. Now, telepathy has returned to some of us.” Her chin quivered. “Only, telep gives me migraines.”

Louis grinned. “A healer with migraines?”

“I know. Sick, isn’t it?”

“Did you call the police to help me?” He folded his arms across his chest and wondered what happened to the microbes in his head.

“Sorry, I called my dad to warn him. I hope he takes my little brothers far from here.”

“Your father won’t leave you.”

She smiled, a sad one, and reached over and touched his scalp. A flutter occurred under every spot she touched, and he felt the healing warmth.

“Please, stop.” Louis grabbed his head.

“Sorry. You have three Anchorons in your head. Most people have one. Every time one moves you say a prayer to make it go away.”

Shocked, he clasped his hands. “How do you—”

“I wish I could heal or remove them.” Her soft words rang with sincerity. “They have a shield against my healing.”

Louis took a deep breath and pulled the scrub top off and a tee-shirt on. “You call the microbe Anchorons. Why?”

She brushed bangs from her eyes. “They’re hitchhikers, and they’ve anchored down for the ride. They reminded me of the archons in the Gnostic writings. The Greek archai, which means primordial, first, predecessor in time.”

“They scare you?”

Her eyes widened and then she nodded. “They’re here to change us by taking over.”

“Like biblical demons?”

“They’re parasites. They excrete a substance and in time it changes our behavior.” She stopped and focused on his forehead. “Doctor Peterson’s talk suggested as much, didn’t it?”

He had been thinking of what Peterson had told the COGS. “You read my mind?”

She frowned and then nodded. “You’re in my telep. It comes across faint, like you’re up in the stands and I’m down on the soccer field. This is a new experience for me. Maybe the poison she gave you reacted with the substance secreted by the Anchorons. Your telep got activated.”

“If I could read your thoughts, I might believe,” he said. “You lost me at Gnostic writings.”

“It’s about an invasion of our ancestors’ minds.”

He had no idea what she meant. “You’re suggesting the microbe is our early ancestor?”

“Or invader. It’s not rational on the surface, but I believe so.”

“Is there any way to get rid of them?” he asked.

She dropped her eyes and shook her head. “You don’t have to give in, assert your wishes. They need you.”

“They’re intelligent?” He slipped into a white polo shirt.

“Yes.”

There were cases of microbes controlling insect brains. It was hard to accept a human could be hijacked, but he couldn’t dispute the possibility either. “I have the Alzheimer gene. Caused by the Anchorons?”

“Yes, they manipulate DNA chemically and turn genes on and off, searching for their ideal environment. I think they know a jump in evolution is about to happen, and they’re hitchhiking. I don’t know why.”

“Peachy.”

“The Hum excites the Anchorons. It’s why you can feel them now and not before. The important thing to do, Doctor Janzen, is to survive the Hum.”

“Survive the Hum?” He cocked his head, hearing harsh music in the background. “Where does the sound originate?”

“God.”

Back to religion. “Turn around,” he said before standing and dropping his scrub pants. “An evolutionary jump isn’t believable, sorry.” He leaned back against the table. She might have saved his life, but he was a trained scientist and doctor.

“Doctor Janzen, evolution takes place in nature, not in labs. We’re seeing hybrid mammals in the Arctic. New specimens of plants, reptiles, and animals have been identified all over the world. It’s not survival of the fittest, but survival of the flexible.”

“What about Swarm disease? Where does it fit in?” Louis asked.

“I don’t know everything.” She licked her lips. “Swarm is Cloudland’s curse. Wait here for Doctor Cho.” She turned to climb a ladder he hadn’t noticed.

“Wait,” he said. Before he could apologize he heard a series of clicks and other noises. She walked over to the glass and yanked back the curtain. The other room remained shrouded in darkness. He could hear Eddie Jean breathing, deeper and quicker.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She took a step backward. “Swarmers are loose.”

Her tone moved Louis. She was a kid after all. He walked to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “What got loose?”

“Swarmers. They’re hungry.”

Her fear was palpable and infectious. He swallowed. “How do you know?”

“Granddad tried to infect me with their virus, hoping I’d make antibodies. Afterward, I knew things about them.”

He gripped her shoulders, torn between worry and a possible setup to make him look like a nutball psychotic. “Swarm disease is real?”

She blew bangs out of her eyes. “This complex exists to study them. The drug Doctor Allen gave you is based on the Swarm virus.”

“What? Did I make antibodies?”

“I don’t know.”

Susan Cho slid down the rails like a fireman from the overhead pod ladder, wearing street clothes and a red backpack. “Put on your shoes, Louis.” Her voice flicked like a whip.

Someone crashed into the glass. Louis jumped. Neon-white orbs gleamed in the dark, staring back. Another smack on the glass. The shadow was taller. Louis cried out and staggered backward as he got his first glimpse of Swarmers. He couldn’t believe his eyes and rubbed them with his fists. When he looked again, they moved up and down the glass, trying to follow a scent. Their eyes glowed milky white and their nares flared bright red.

“The white eyes came from the new strain,” Susan said to Eddie Jean. “We exposed your mother to an original pod, and they either died or mutated to the new version. White eyes let us know they’re airborne contagious.”

Eddie Jean said, “White eyes don’t make evolutionary sense. Can they see?”

Doctor Cho shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Eddie Jean stepped up beside him. “The short one is my sister, and the one beside her is my mother.”

Susan Cho said, “They’re sticking together as well, as if they know they’re relatives. Bonding is new.”

Louis felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Eddie Jean’s eyes gleamed from unshed tears. He rubbed her shoulder. “I’m sorry for being a jerk, Eddie Jean.”

“It’s okay.” She looked at Susan. “Doctor Allen released them.”

“What?” Susan’s fingers covered her lips. “Why would she?”

“Distraction.”

Louis shoved bare feet into brown Ecco shoes and bucked his belt. He noticed they stared at each other in horror. Susan ran to the wall and pressed unseen buttons. A panel slid out with a computer attached. She flicked through pages. “You’re right. They’re at the east exit, and someone locked the west side out for good.”

He went over to study Swarm disease up close. A bigger one crashed into the glass, knocking the smaller ones to the side. Susan glanced over her shoulder and whispered, “That’s Peterson.”

Louis staggered closer to stare at the scientist. He didn’t recognize the funny and polite older man in the feral face. That could’ve been me.

“A blood tube shattered in the centrifuge,” Susan explained, leaving the computer and pulling a revolver from her backpack. “He opened it without using the viral scanner first because he was tired. Peterson and five others inhaled the virus. I was on break.”

“They’re working as a team,” Eddie Jean pointed out.

“Your grandfather’s vaccine changed everything. He’ll activate the burn protocol.”

“Burn protocol?” Louis repeated.

Susan handed Eddie Jean the backpack. “Once the burn protocol goes online the doors won’t open. I’m counting on you to get Louis on the plane. Q might not have the balls to burn his baby down. I’ll make sure he does.” She turned to Louis and said, “Here are my car keys, a red and white Mini Cooper.” She gave him the pistol. “No safety. Can you run?”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Louis said, watching Susan go back to the computer. Her fingers flew over the key board.

“My password overrides most codes because I’m Quitman’s assistant. I’ll follow you on the monitors and open safe exits. Drop the hammer on this place. Promise me, Louis.”

He grabbed Susan’s shoulder. “If it’s airborne, aren’t we already infected?”

“No, just the one pod was exposed. The lab has a firewall of separate air systems. Quitman made certain of it. It will take twenty-four hours for them to fail. Safe rooms will last for days.”

“There has to be a better way,” Louis said.

“I know Q’s codes,” Eddie Jean said. “He shared them in telep.”

“We all go or none do,” Louis said as Susan turned.

“You’re sure?” Susan asked Eddie Jean.

The kid nodded.

Susan said, “Notify the pilot to take us back to Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Eddie Jean watched her mother and sister pound on the glass.

“Wait, time out,” Louis yelled, holding up his hands like a referee.

Susan grabbed the backpack and tucked the pistol into her waistband in back. She flew up the ladder and said, “Eddie Jean can’t be infected, plus she has other skills we don’t have. Me, I want to live and bring this place down.”

Eddie Jean took Susan’s place on the computer. “Good luck.”

“Thanks for everything,” Susan said softly.

Louis asked, “How do you get out, Eddie Jean?”

Eddie Jean smiled at him. “Air vents.”

“Why don’t we all take the air vents?” he asked.

“They can’t take our combined weight,” Susan answered.

Peterson crashed against the glass. Louis didn’t want the same fate as Peterson. He wanted his freedom and to bring Ava to justice. He kissed Eddie Jean’s cheek and then climbed. Peterson redoubled his efforts and slammed harder into the wall.

“I can’t leave the kid,” Louis protested halfway. “I’ll go with her.”

“Have a little faith in me,” Eddie Jean said, glancing up at him. “Fifteen seconds.”

Louis nodded and finished the climb to the pod.

“Door opens in five, four, three, two, run!” Eddie Jean yelled.

Louis sprinted after Susan Cho.

Louis

Heart pounding, Louis wiped sweat from his face on his sleeve. Their escape from the Flameion lab had progressed without incident until they approached the last door. Eddie Jean hadn’t unlocked it yet. Behind them were screams, and ahead he heard sucking noises.

Swarmers were feeding on a living person. He never expected to hear such sounds and suspected he would be haunted for life. The snap of ripped flesh, the growling and lip smacking, and the grunts of pain scared the hell out of him. Louis kept his fingernails clenched into his fists to keep himself calm. For the first time, he understood the courage early man displayed when they hunted saber-toothed tigers with a spear.

Squatting in their tiny alcove where they were trapped, Louis fought his rising panic. Swarmers crowded into another corridor about thirty feet from the exit door. He guessed Eddie Jean had to decide if he and Susan were worth releasing a few creatures on her neighbors. Susan was on the verge of freaking out. She didn’t take her eyes off lights above the doors. He looked down and noticed her crossed fingers.

The sickly-sweet smell of burnt sugar made him lightheaded. A bright UV light exploded from overhead. The infected howled. He heard them stampede in their direction, and then water overhead erupted from the ceiling sprayers. He smelled astringent in the water. The Swarmers reversed direction. Swarmers disliked water, Louis guessed.

Susan yanked him to his feet. “Get ready. Run through the water!”

When the exit door opened, it squealed like metal bending in a car accident. Susan jumped out and fired two shots at one Swarmer. It had turned and charged despite the lights and water. Louis could see its skin smoking as it ran at them, growling. Louis slipped in the soapy mixture and fell to his knees. Water blinded him.

“Get out!” Susan ran past and outside.

Panting with fear, Louis tried to regain his footing as the creature neared. The human-like beast moved fast but slipped and went down, veering sideways. Its claws swept out, but Louis jumped to the side. Susan fired. He heard the bullets thud into its flesh.

Louis skidded outside with the Swarmer close. He locked eyes with Susan.

She stood in the firing stance and shouted at him.

Louis dove for the ground. Bullets rushed over his head, and the steel door snapped down on the Swarmer’s legs. He dug his fingers into the dry asphalt and pushed with his legs. Behind him the beast thrashed and grunted. Another shot rang out.

He ran another twenty feet before stopping. Louis didn’t want to get closer. He forced himself to walk back to Susan. She remained in firing position with the gun extended. The infected man’s brains had splattered on the door. A black ooze pooled like blood around the body. Louis forced himself closer. “That was close.”

Shaking, she didn’t reply.

Louis checked their rear. Not a soul or beast in sight. His eyes had trouble adjusting to the dark. “Hard to believe it was once a man.” He heard Susan hyperventilating. “Slow your breathing down before you get dizzy,” he warned her.

Susan took a deep gulp and focused her breathing. “He used to be known as Doctor Kyle Rivers, a neurologist. I thought he went home for a funeral.”

“The lie must be different on every level,” Louis said.

“It’s easy to be intrigued by a slide,” Susan answered. “By the time you see an actual infected person, you’re wrapped into the lie. I worked on the vaccine as much as Quitman. I’ve caused death.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest—”

She cut him off. “Of course you did.”

A sound like an unbalanced washing machine came from behind the steel door.

“They’re beating on the door in tempo?”

Susan nodded. “We call it pile-on behavior. They use their weight to crash through barriers. It’s a signal.” Susan tucked the revolver into her back waistband. “He didn’t drop until I shot him in the eye. Keep up!” She jogged to a sidewalk.

“Wait, he got close to me. Am I infected?”

Susan paused. “He had original Swarm because he had black eyes.”

Louis closed his eyes in relief.

“Let’s go.” Susan jogged down the sidewalk.

Louis kept his eyes on her back and followed after her, hoping he wouldn’t break an ankle. Once he crunched a dead bird under his shoe. He fixed his eyes on the ground to avoid another one. The poor things looked like pieces of black yard bags left on the ground. Louis stumbled on, but still couldn’t accept or comprehend the secret horror of Cloudland. He had to be in shock, or how else could he function?

Susan charged ahead like a thoroughbred in the final stretch when an outdoor alarm shrilled. The whoops deafened. She kicked open a pedestrian gate in the parking lot fence, and he caught up as she went through. “Gates are closing!”

She darted to a red and white Mini Cooper. Pulling the keys from a leg pocket, she unlocked the doors. Susan had cranked the engine and slammed the car in reverse before Louis shut his door. She stomped the gas pedal, and the car jumped forward. Louis wheezed and felt grateful to be alive. The alarm stopped, and he glanced back at the shadowed lab dug into a mountainside. “Not a light on.”

The car screamed toward the gate. Susan didn’t look right or left, she pushed in the clutch and shifted gears, making the engine whine. The Mini slipped through the gate seconds before they closed. Susan drove too fast for about three minutes down a dark road before she felt safe enough to stop the car. She put the car in neutral, got out, and threw up on the roadside.

He started to join her, but she gestured him to stay inside. Susan upchucked over and over. He kept his eyes on the road behind them using the side mirror. No car lights. She staggered back and leaned against the hood.

He climbed out. “What’s wrong?”

Susan said, “We almost didn’t—”

“But we did make it.”

“Eddie Jean’s blood may hold the cure. I left that sweet kid behind.”

Louis frowned.

“Her grandfather poured the infected fluids on her body, in her eyes, made her swallow it, and he kept her inside a house with an infected person without a mask. She defeated it.”

His breath caught. Eddie Jean had been tortured by her relative at the same time Ava tortured him. They had shared betrayal pain. “She’ll get out. We didn’t have a choice, did we?”

Susan broke into hysterical laughter. “I deserved to die, not her. What have I done?”

“Die? You said she would escape.”

“We both lied to you so you’d leave.”

“What?” He could barely speak.

Susan brushed tears away. “I don’t know her reasons.”

Louis looked back at the mountain. “She’s a teenager.”

Susan opened the driver’s-side door and grabbed a tissue travel pack from the door pocket. “I hope you can forgive me.”

He shook his head. Louis could still feel the kid’s palms on his scalp. Susan passed him a tissue. He wiped his face and asked, “Is your family here?”

“No, I’m on a leave of absence from Vandy. I peeked at a Swarm slide at a convention, and I was hooked. I left my husband and son in Nashville without a second thought.”

“Should we call police and emergency workers?”

“Locals don’t answer calls here. We have to file federal charges to expose them.”

“The employee parking lot was full.”

Susan nodded. “We were in long-term parking. Most workers bike or walk to work from our housing units. I haven’t driven the Mini in over a week. We’re lucky it cranked.”

“Will off-duty employees notify the authorities?”

She shook her head. “We had our own first responders. No one will move until there is an all-clear signal. We’re used to Quitman’s unannounced drills. After Peterson got infected, I’ve been waiting for my escape chance.”

“Please don’t lie to me. You, Ava, and me are the only ones who know what really happened?”

“Yes.” Susan bit her lip. “When I checked the pod computer, I found where Ava muted warning buzzers. She implemented a plan and good people were trapped. Very few will make it into safe rooms, and most that do will die.”

“Why would Quitman or Ava expose innocent lab workers?”

Susan threw her hands up. “If the lab burns, the virus is controlled.”

“The Swarm virus comes out of the ground! You know burning the lab will only delay the inevitable.”

“Swarm 1 could be controlled, not Swarm 2. I agreed with Q’s decision.” Susan burst into tears. “I can’t be known as the mother of Swarmers.”

Louis patted her back until Susan stopped sobbing. “You people lost control long ago. What if pockets survive and contaminate rescuers?”

“Oh, God.”

He wiped sweat from his face. “What is the safe distance?”

“Ten feet for the airborne version. Symptoms showed up in minutes, according to Quitman. If Swarm 1 and Swarm 2 combine, who knows?”

“Is vomiting a symptom?”

She flinched and got into the driver’s seat. “No. Asthma-like symptoms, spiking fever, hideous skin boils, and then wild, flesh-eating rage.”

He got back in the Mini. “Do the UV light and disinfectants work?”

“They did for original Swarm. The new version is anyone’s guess.” Susan released the emergency brake and they rolled forward. “I know Quitman had a secret tunnel. He would come and go without using normal routes. I hope Eddie Jean finds his exit.”

“Me too. Should we leave or self isolate to determine if we’re infected?”

“Eddie Jean wouldn’t have let us out if she wasn’t sure. She’s lost her mother and sister, but her dad and brothers are out here. She knows the score. We’re clean.”

“If she refused to open the door would you have shot me?”

“In a heartbeat.”

He shuddered. “Tell me more about new Swarm.”

“A vaccine-related mutation, and the reason Peterson was contacted.” She shifted into second gear. “I saw fear for the first time in Quitman’s eyes. If new Swarm gets out...We’re talking a walking-dead scenario.”

Louis rubbed his temples. “Zombies? Hollywood hyperbole isn’t helpful.”

Susan snorted. “What did they look like to you? If it gets out, it’s lights out.”

The cool air cleared his head. “Eddie Jean claims a disaster or a jump in evolution is on the way. You’re describing a massive pandemic. Where’s the science?”

Susan stomped harder on the gas. “Science failed us, Louis.”

“Slow down!”

“I’m worried Ava will stop the flight. She left first.”

He clenched his fists. “Let her try.”

Susan glanced at him. “She’ll shoot you and make up a story.”

“I feel like we should help Eddie Jean. She’s all alone.”

“Eddie Jean is Quitman’s granddaughter. She’s smart and savvy. Quitman is charismatic but a psychopath. He never managed to contaminate Eddie Jean. She defied him but never embarrassed him. Her father molded her character, not him.”

“Let’s go back for her, Susan. If she’s the cure, her blood will tell the story much better than you or I.”

“You have no concept, do you? Quitman has a hit team and uses it for troublemakers like us. We need to get clear fast.”

“Will exposing him hurt Eddie Jean?” Louis wanted to believe she was safe and helping others like she did him. Miracles should be free.

Susan exhaled. “You must realize she’s not a normal teen, right? Eddie Jean wants him exposed even though she knows her hometown will be sealed forever in quarantine. She lied to her father to get him to leave.”

Louis rubbed his beard stubble. “I feel like a coward leaving her behind because of a whacko science project. She saved my life.”

“Science project?” Susan asked, fuming. “We thought we were on the verge of a miracle. For a brief moment, I thought we could control the immune system. Think about the implications—aging without disease. We were shocked by what transpired.”

“Shocked? Turn the car around.”

Susan wiped her eyes. “My ego blinded me. I thought I was doing good, not bringing down humanity.”

“You’ve never read Shelley’s Frankenstein?” Louis asked. “Turn around. Let’s go help Eddie Jean. You’re running away from your creation, and I’m running away from my fate. The right thing is to stay and make a difference here, at ground zero.”

Wilbur

Wilbur took a break. He had checked into a motel with wifi and started his search for answers after leaving Bev Cain’s house. He didn’t relish telling house help they could be disease carriers without having his facts straight.

Mitchell Cain kept good notes. Winn Harmon’s Land Rover had an antitheft unit with GPS attached. He’d received information from the company, and he’d tracked the students’ route with a red pen. Cain had interviewed the owners of the Autumn Inn, a bed and breakfast, where the students booked rooms their first night in town. No one knew their final destination.

Cain concluded they intended to hike on private land and kept it quiet. He marked the map with a black X—where he believed their incident occurred. Apparently, the private land had underground caves prone to flooding. The map gave Wilbur chills. Did Mitchell Cain go to the cave and die like the students? Could locals be involved in a cover-up?

Wilbur tried to understand the purpose of finding a cave. What could be inside? Liquor jugs from Prohibition? Buried treasure? He stood and jogged in place. Answers were either in correspondence between the students or in the journal they found in the Duke library. His best bet would be to locate a family contact, but no one had answered his Facebook queries.

His room phone rang. Wilbur picked it up. “Jenkins.”

“It’s your lifeline calling. They won’t give me your room number.”

What did Lee want? “What happened to your party date?”

“You need me and I’m here.”

“Room 320.”

A minute later he opened the door for Lee. She carried a pizza box in her hands and her eyes scanned the room. “No girls?”

“Disappointed?” He locked the door.

“Nervous,” she said, sitting on the bed. “You didn’t come home. What happened?”

How could she know his actions?

He poured half his drink into a plastic cup for her. Her perfume saturated the room, and she looked gorgeous in a short skirt, knee boots, and a tight sweater.

He crammed a bite into his mouth while she watched. “Have a slice?” He pushed the pizza box over. “How did you find me?”

She shook her head and grabbed his arm to nibble on his slice. Her tiny teeth bit into the cheesy section. Lee sat back chewing with her eyes closed. After she swallowed she said, “Cookie’s friend saw you pull in and register. Who called you?”

He took another bite and chewed. She leaned over and he fed her off his slice. Funny how feeding her turned him on. “Someone with answers. I’m trying to tie up the loose ends. I’ve found out we’ve been exposed to a contagious disease.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Say what?”

He retrieved the death poster and balanced it beside the dresser mirror. “These people were exposed to Evaney Harwood. We’re carriers, but I think our O negative blood protects us.”

“How do you know I have…” Her fingers traced the death connections.

“Negative RhD blood is rare, but it’s super rare in blacks. Doc must have access to birth records or lab tests.”

“Birth records? I learned my blood type after a statewide appeal for black bone marrow donors. A preacher’s kid needed a donor, and she found one.”

“Same here. My grandmother had to sign for me to be tested.” Wilbur frowned. “I read later her bone marrow drive registered more black people than any other. I was in high school and never dreamed I’d be a live-in orderly.”

“You’re saying we were selected to be infected?” Lee’s face scrunched up.

When he tried to console her, she pushed him away. “Baby, we were hired for our blood types,” he explained.

“But why mainly black folk with O negative blood?” she asked.

“I’m guessing Mary figured it out. I didn’t ask questions when I gave blood. I’m saving for grad school, and Doc pays well.”

Lee flung the poster on the floor and paced on it. “Oh, hell no! No way, I’m sick with a disease. I recognize one name on the list—Amanda Perry. Wasn’t she a physical therapist?”

Wilbur leaned over to pick up the poster. “Yeah, she filled in during Tom’s vacation. I’ll bet she’s not O negative. She died from a fever of unknown origin in Costa Rica. Girl I dated almost died from meningitis. She’s brain-damaged in a nursing home.”

Lee’s hand went to her mouth and his cell rang. Wilbur answered.

“I’m Cate Collins, Dave Collins’s mother. I read your message on his Facebook memorial page and decided to call as you asked.”

Wilbur sat down. “Thank you.” Lee stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder.

“Is she still alive?”

“Yes, Miss Harwood remains in a coma. I don’t mean to pry, but I’m looking into the disappearance of your son and the other students.”

Cate Collins sneezed and asked, “Why?”

“House help have gotten sick.”

“I understand. Thank you for reaching out to me.”

“Did Mitchell Cain, a private investigator for the estate, ever contact you?”

“No, I had no idea they hired an investigator. Are you working with him?”

“No, he went missing in Alabama last year while looking for answers. His wife gave me his notes. Do you know what the students were searching for?”

A long silence followed and Wilbur asked, “Mrs. Collins?”

“Do you promise to share, or is this another one-way street?”

Wilbur thought about it. “I just found out I could be a carrier of whatever put Miss Harwood into her coma. So yeah, I’ll share.”

Mrs. Collins gasped. “I’m so sorry. My husband snuck into Miss Harwood’s hospital room hoping for answers. I believe he picked up his bug in her room. It took two years, but he slipped away, leaving doctors confused as to the cause of death. He didn’t have normal blood cultures, doctors had never seen the like before, and no medicines worked. He had tics, weird rashes, and a massive infection. His kidneys shut down.”

“Do you have O negative blood?” he asked and winced when she gasped.

“My God! Yes, but my son and husband had type A positive.”

“It’s my theory, no proof.”

“My son found a journal in an alumni donation box. The story went: A doctor discovered a group of men, all brothers from Cloudland, during WWII with super immune systems. Their blood killed cancer cells. When they were discharged, the men disappeared. The doctor, Herman Morton, didn’t try to find them until his youngest daughter became ill,” she said, voice cracking.

“I never meant to upset you,” Wilbur said.

She took a deep breath. “I want to help you. In the journal, Doctor Morton mentioned a cave the boys talked about, a place where they were taught never to reveal their special differences. Doctor Morton speculated certain people in Cloudland covered up their special gifts for reasons the brothers wouldn’t share. One brother drew a circle on a state map marking the cave’s location. The doctor thought the answer was in their cave, like in a water source. Dave found the map inside the journal.” Mrs. Collins coughed and blew her nose.

“Dave stole the journal and told me what he’d read. I wish I’d told him to put it back, but instead I agreed he should tell Winn Harmon. Winn’s sister was fighting ovarian cancer, and Winn took the diagnosis hard. Dave thought if they found the cave the Harmon family could offer money if people in Cloudland would donate blood or bone marrow to help Winn’s sister.”

“That’s not in the official record,” Wilbur said. “Part of the mystery is no one knows why they left Duke to go to Alabama.”

“I couldn’t brand my son a thief. My husband and I thought it might impair the search and rescue.” Her voice choked up. “Imagine telling the world six bright and gifted students concluded ‘find a cave, find the men’s ancestors, and save a life.’ Silly, but true.”

Wilbur stroked his upper lip and asked, “Doctor Morton. Was he a quack?”

“I looked him up in a bio-medical library in Houston—he was a brilliant research doctor. I found out that when his daughter got leukemia, he asked his brother to locate the Cloudland brothers. He never returned. Morton’s daughter died, and he died two years later.”

Wilbur asked, “What do you think happened?”

“I think they stumbled on the cure for all diseases in the cave. Someone in Cloudland sells the cure to the highest bidder. They’ll kill to keep it secret.”

Lee’s eyes glistened when he glanced at her. She reached over and entwined their fingers. “Thank you, for your honesty, Mrs. Collins.”

“Son, don’t go there to search,” she whispered before hanging up.

Wilbur put down his phone, feeling exhausted. Lee sat on his lap and his heart started pumping again. He was afraid to move or speak. She snuggled her head on his chest. His arms slid around her.

Lee said, “You’re not going to Cloudland, so kick the notion out of your brain bowl.”

Wilbur sighed. “Lee, Evaney Harwood enters my head whenever she wants. I’m afraid she’ll make me slit my wrists just like she did Mary.”

Lee pressed a hand to his forehead. “No fever.”

“I’m serious.”

Lee leaned back to stare into his eyes. “I know,” she said, and then kissed him.

Wilbur closed his eyes and wallowed in the sensation of her tongue in his mouth. This was way better than his imagination or his dreams. He prolonged the kiss as long as he could.

“Let’s fill your mind up with other things and there won’t be room for her,” Lee said.

Despite all he had learned Wilbur said, “I’m in your hands.”

She shifted around on his lap—nothing had ever felt so wickedly good.

“Take me to bed.”

He stood with her in his arms. Her phone rang.

“Don’t answer.”

Lee answered. “Cookie?”

“Let her wait.” He tried not to beg.

Lee listened and said, “We’re on our way.”

Eddie Jean

Eddie Jean watched the two doctors make their harrowing escape on the monitor. An alarm shrieked—the burn protocol began its countdown. No way out now. She closed out the computer just before the room barriers dropped. She carried the computer up to the monitoring pod. Eddie Jean stood at the edge and watched them interact. Peterson went straight for the ladder, but Jenna shoved him aside. He snarled.

She leaned over to observe Kimmy. Her little sister should be taking piano lessons, riding horses, and picking out a Halloween costume. Eddie Jean blinked away tears.

Peterson tried the ladder again.

Strong hands gripped her shoulder and she lost her balance.

“Steady, soccer girl,” Scot said, pulling her back.

Eddie Jean threw her arms around him. Like it or not, their parents had thrown them into a partnership. Even if said alliance had trapped them in Quitman’s lab. The odd twitching from being near Scot kicked back on. The sensation no longer bothered her. Correcting Swarm 2 would be a nightmare, and she didn’t want to do it alone. The alarm went silent.

“I’m sorry I lied and turned you over to Quitman.”

She flinched and punched his shoulder. “Aren’t you supposed to be making speeches at the pep rally and bonfire?”

“I betrayed you, EJ. I’m sorry.” He rubbed his shoulder.

She opened Doctor Cho’s laptop. “I asked for help and you came. I forgive you, but the alarm means we’re trapped. We’re going to burn in a few hours.”

“Still emo,” he said, followed by a wry grin. His ramrod posture relaxed, as did the pinched strain on his face. Below them Swarmers growled and snorted. He leaned over to look down. “Ugly, aren’t…” His voice drifted into disbelief. “Wait, is that your mom?”

She joined him and looked down. “Kimmy is beside her.”

He grabbed her hand. “Sick. Q is a psycho, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Scot stared down at them and his grip tightened.

Eddie Jean didn’t say anything else until he stepped back from the ledge. His eyes blinked nonstop. He was afraid to piece it together, and she didn’t want to hurt him. A stabbing pain appeared between her eyebrows. Oh God, please help me.

He shoved both fists into the pockets on his football jacket. “We all felt your misery and the others know I sold you out. They don’t trust me. Q’s evil rubbed off on me, I guess.”

She licked her lips. Scot couldn’t be left in denial. “Q tried to infect me with the fluids from a man with Swarm 2.”

“I know about Swarm disease. Is Swarm 2 something new?”

She couldn’t look at him, so she stared out across the domed ceiling, hoping he’d remember that today was affair afternoon. “Q took me home to infect me with the new virus he called Swarm 2. It’s airborne and there is no cure.”

His body went rigid. “Your house?”

She nodded.

His voice sounded like he called an offensive play. “Beam it to me—right now.”

Tucking hair behind her ears, she sent the thought stream using telep. She began when her granddad yanked her out of the hospital elevator. Her story wasn’t sanitized, either. She couldn’t lift her gaze higher than his knees. Eddie Jean didn’t want to see his face when he learned about his dad. Below them, the agitated Swarmers hissed like snakes. They sensed her and Scot above but couldn’t figure out how to make contact.

Scot doubled over like she had punched him.

She put her hand on his back, and he screamed. He kicked a trashcan, tossed Doctor Cho’s laptop over the side, and yanked a heart-rate monitor from its wires. Scot threw it on the Swarmers below. Cursing, he punched the wall with his fists. His knuckles bled and the scent agitated the Swarmers. They attacked each other. After a few minutes she heard him panting, she waited for him to throw her off the ledge next. “Damn Delaneys.”

He tossed papers, kicked medicine and equipment boxes off the pod, and threw medical charts into the air before sliding back against the wall into a sitting position. Below, the infected fought over the objects.

“Scot, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Just don’t,” Scot muttered, icy-eyed. He covered his face with his hands.

“There’s more.”

He groaned. “I didn’t say goodbye. I loved him, and I never told him.” He wrapped his arms around his stomach and dropped his head.

She waited until he calmed. Eddie Jean squatted down beside him, unsure how to proceed. His body language warned her not to touch him. “I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

He didn’t answer her.

She waited until he calmed. “I need your help. People are trapped and can’t get out. They’re not infected and shouldn’t die here,” she whispered.

He took a deep breath and wiped his face. “Okay, beam the last bit, ’cause your voice reminds me of her.”

She winced and complied.

He sat without moving and then jumped to his feet. “Yeah. Let’s give Q payback.”

Scot’s eyes had turned flinty and narrowed into squints. She barely recognized him. Grief had molded his face in a rictus-like expression, like a scream frozen in death. He would never let her help by removing his pain. “Why did you come here? High school threw a party for you. You’re a winner.”

“I’ve lost my father, EJ. I don’t care about school. Let’s end Quitman.”

She wanted to know what changed in his heart more than anything. What made him come to help her instead of sending Trev or Cara? Eddie Jean decided not to ask a second time. “We have to be better than him. We need to consider all options.”

“He needs to die!”

Eddie Jean waited before answering. “This is bigger than you or me. The Hum will explode in the morning. We have to warn people to leave Cloudland. Swarm 2 could be passing person to person right now, and when the Hum explodes the yellow gas will fill the air. Swarm 1 and Swarm 2 might combine and change people into something even worse. Cloudland could become a viral hot zone.”

“But not for us,” he shouted, beating his chest. “Not for our kind.”

“Our kind is human. You have family in town.”

“Good riddance.” His voice sounded like a key scratching a car.

He didn’t mean it. His mother probably felt as helpless as her father over the affair. Eddie Jean stood, determined to heal him so he could think clearly.

“Don’t touch me.”

His tone unnerved her. If she reached for him, he could turn violent. “Look down at my mother. You want the same for yours?”

Scot frowned. “Mom wouldn’t force him to make a choice. She enabled the affair. Every Thursday she worked in the shop so he could leave!”

“Every Wednesday night my dad went out to the garage and stared at his father’s gun collection. My dad hates guns. I worried one night he’d pick one up and load it. I prayed my father would never hurt yours,” she said, sitting beside him.

Scot wiped his eyes. “The whole town knew about them. I told Dad to stay away from my games, hoping to shame him into breaking up with Jenna. He chose your mother over me. Why?”

Eddie Jean sighed. “Doesn’t every adult go through a phase of wanting to feel like a teen again? They dated in high school. I guess they never fell out of love. Change has to start from within. They didn’t want to change.”

Revenge drained from his face, and he popped his knuckles. “What is it with you? Don’t you ever get pissed? You don’t have to fix everyone.”

He read her mind? “I prayed to God to make me a healer so I could fix broken people. Even as a child our enhanced senses showed me where people hurt. I didn’t know what I asked for…the weight of suffering.” Her voice trailed off, and she held up her hands. “My healing hands aren’t genetic. I’m proof God answers prayers.”

“Always emo, aren’t you?” Scot took her left hand in his and studied it. “If it’s not genetic, how did I help you heal Bill?”

She had no answer, but he sounded more like himself.

“Let’s ice the lab and take care of your grandfather.”

“First, use telep to warn the others,” she said.

He shook his head. “XOs can’t beam from the building. Don’t know what blocks it. We can beam to one another inside but not out. Phones?”

“All crashed when the burn protocol activated. Let me contact Q for alternatives.”

“Don’t bother. He’s been in telep calling me to come to his aid. Come on.” He pulled her up and brushed bangs from her eyes. They stared at each other and he said, “I don’t blame Dad, Jenna, or you anymore. I blame Quitman.” He ran down the corridor.

“Wait,” she shouted, “Swarmers are loose.” She turned to scan the hallways ahead and realized Scot destroyed the laptop. Eddie Jean peered over and watched one pick up the heart monitor. He hurled it against the exit door. She ran after Scot.

He waited beside a wall with a tunnel behind it, according to the shadows in her vision.

She stopped and ran her hands over the smooth wall. “You’ve used it before?”

“Quitman brought us here for training at night—well, all but you.”

“He trained you? You knew Swarmers existed and didn’t warn people?”

A mean look entered his eyes. “I’ve tracked and killed two. He called me a natural-born killer. This is his escape route in case they got loose.”

Shocked, she grabbed his arm. “Q says mean things to mess with your mind.”

“Worked.” Scot pressed a hidden panel and the door rolled open.

She glanced inside. Dim lighting, like nightlights, were scattered every ten feet. She couldn’t make herself step inside. Scot yanked her in. Shivering, she waited beside him as he closed the entry. He rounded on her and put his hands on her shoulders. Scot beamed the exit points to her in case they got separated. He took off. The lab was larger than she realized. They heard shrieks, grunts, and screams through the walls.

Scot stopped and she pressed close behind him. “Get to the computer and make sure we’re in emergency lockdown,” he said. “Leave Quitman to me.”

Louis

Susan laughed and pressed the gas pedal before shifting gears. “Very noble suggestion, Louis, but what part of ‘burn protocol’ don’t you understand? Going back is suicide.”

“Are you certain?”

“I have two bullets left.” She cracked the window and cool air blew in. “I know I can’t board the plane without you, but I can drive home. Your choice, I’m not going back.” She pointed a finger, and he saw the airfield in a curve up ahead. The airport lights gleamed like Las Vegas. He was free! Relief relaxed tense muscles.

Susan stopped to allow him to get out if he wanted.

“I’m conflicted,” he said. “I can’t help Eddie Jean without you.”

“Don’t draw me into your guilt. You know only public exposure will stop Ava.”

“Did my father work here?”

Susan cleared her throat and stopped the car. “Yes. He first suggested a vaccine, but Quitman thought he could do better. He turned to a vaccine as a last resort.”

Louis felt weak and nauseated. “Dad saw Swarmers and did nothing?”

“Not a live case. He saw film, but I suspect he treated it as a theoretical problem, not a human problem. The horror isn’t exposed until you see them as Swarmers and stripped of their humanity. They’re people you ate dinner with, or attended a surprise birthday party for.”

Louis felt like he never knew his father, but his real conflict came from abandoning Eddie Jean. She had a true gift and should have been saved, not him. Louis wanted to leave Cloudland—had to leave Cloudland if he intended to bring Ava to justice. “Let’s fly.”

Susan smiled. “If someone asks, I’m going to help get your lab packed.”

He closed his eyes to ask, “If you had a weapon, why didn’t you stop Ava?”

“I stole it from Quitman’s office after what happened to you. Ava pretended you came for her treatment. When you signed the consent without discussing risks, I thought you decided to gamble on her cure.”

“Is anyone that desperate?”

“One or two were.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died. Ava won’t concede her treatment kills.”

“Eddie Jean healed my scalp punctures. I have no proof Ava injected me against my will. It’s my word against hers.”

“Not true,” Susan said, and patted the steering wheel. “My backpack is stuffed with slides and jump drives. Flameion films everything. How do you think I knew you weren’t a volunteer?”

He rubbed her arm. “Thanks for helping me. You could’ve left me.”

“Not after I saw what she did. I worked on Swarm with Quitman, but not XB11. After the cavalier way Peterson’s infection was treated, the utter failure to notify his family, I knew I had to get out. Quitman reads thoughts, so I could never let my mind think about escape. I made myself daydream about our cure.”

“Telepathy?” He released her hand. “Like Eddie Jean?”

“Yes, but only a few locals have telepathy. The kids call themselves XOs, for extraordinary. They aren’t the first ones born in Cloudland with special gifts. Quitman claimed they were the next step in evolution. Interestingly, Eddie Jean agreed.”

“No, she said a new evolutionary jump is on the way.”

Susan shrugged. “I’ll believe it when it arrives.”

“Did Quitman Delaney examine me?”

“No, he cares about one thing—Swarm disease. He’s angry at Ava for bringing you in without his agreement. I figured out people like us never leave Cloudland unless we cut a deal.”

Louis rolled down his window. Like my dad? “How long has Swarm been around?”

“More than two hundred years. Q said the virus comes up in a yellow, mist-like gas during the tiny earthquake swarms. People would breathe the gas and go rabid within two weeks. In the beginning, it was a rare occurrence on Delaney land. They killed and burned the victims because Swarm attacked Delaney relatives. The mist eruptions have escalated in recent years and show no signs of hibernation. Cloudland should be nuked.”

“You’ll go public at my side, won’t you? I can’t do it alone.”

Susan sighed. “No, you were victimized, I volunteered.”

“Like Ava, you had the Nobel dream?” he asked.

She squinted ahead and nodded. “Quarantines won’t work. My name will be written in history beside Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Quitman Delaney.”

Louis shook his head.

“How did Ava get you to come?”

“Hooked by sex,” he said, blushing like a fool.

She grinned. “Always knew she was a scorpion.” Braking beside a guard office, she rolled down her window and the man leaned out to ask, “ID?”

Susan passed him her Flameion badge. “Lab drill still on?” he asked, glancing from her ID to Susan’s face.

“They’re in review stage,” Susan said.

The guard raised the security rail, and they drove in and parked close to the exit hub.

“Act normal,” Susan cautioned in a whisper. “The airport isn’t tied into the lab emergency alert system. If they ask about Ava, just say Quitman delayed her.”

He nodded and opened the car door. Louis stretched, happy to feel alive. He took a few seconds to tuck in his shirt and buckle his belt. His trousers were still damp.

Susan grabbed an overnight case and dropped the gun into the trunk beside an emergency road kit.

Louis snatched it and put it in his pants pocket. Susan started to argue and bit her lip. She must have realized the gun meant security to him. He wasn’t himself. The last few hours had changed him. Louis unzipped her backpack. “I’d like to hold on to the jump drive containing my injection.”

Susan pulled a red one out. He wadded tissues around it and stuffed it into his tee-shirt pocket. To conceal it, he stuffed more tissues around it. Picking up her backpack, he closed the trunk, and led the way to the entrance. They stepped inside the hangar. The same flight attendant on the morning flight sat at the counter, sipping coffee.

She perked up when Louis waved. “How did you like Cloudland, Doctor Janzen?”

Louis scratched his head where Ava had injected him. “Beautiful! I didn’t want to leave, but my students need their midterm grades.”

She laughed. “Pilot said we’re ready when you are.”

Louis put a hand behind Susan’s back. “Shall we, Doctor Cho?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing your lab.”

The flight attendant opened a door. “Right this way.”

They followed her up the steps and into the familiar jet he and Ava arrived in. As he made his way to the seats, Louis thought he smelled Ava’s perfume. A sinking sensation followed and welts peppered his skin. His eyes scanned the empty cabin as his skin turned cold. Nerves stretched to snapping points. Susan took the window seat and he sat beside her.

He swallowed past a dry throat and let his inner rage fade. Ava would pay later, he promised himself. He put the backpack under his seat, slipped the gun into a seat pocket in front of them, and buckled his seatbelt.

The pilot spoke over the intercom. “We’ve got great weather and a good tailwind to help us ease into Charlottesville. Relax and enjoy the flight.”

The flight attendant sat down. Louis held his breath until the plane rolled forward. Beside him, Susan’s temporal pulse throbbed. It didn’t stop until the plane lifted. Susan clutched his hand. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Louis.”

Her guilt became infectious. He held her hand, and they watched Cloudland disappear.

A few minutes later the flight attendant served him juice and poured both a cup of coffee. “Would you like doughnuts or chocolate chip cookies?”

“Cookies,” they answered in unison.

She went to the galley and returned with a plate of warm cookies. Louis watched her pull a curtain and caught a brief glimpse of her opening a bridal magazine.

“What should we do first?” Susan asked, sipping coffee.

“I’m calling the local police.” Hunger overwhelmed him and he devoured two cookies.

“Locals have no way to evaluate my evidence,” Susan said.

“Then I’ll call a colleague,” he said, drinking juice. “She’s married to the head of the local FBI office.”

“Now you’re talking.”

They chatted about family. Louis loosened his seatbelt and reclined his seat. I’m safe. Fatigue passed through him, making him drowsy. His eyelids drooped. Beside him, Susan released her seatbelt and slipped past him into the aisle.

She leaned over and whispered, “She has my son, Louis. I cut a deal.”

Confused, he watched Susan walk behind the curtain as Ava stepped out. His heart pounded hard. Her beautiful hair floated around her head, giving her a halo aura. A smug smile made Ava look sinister and far from angelic. Betrayal stabbed him. The drugs in the juice helped dull the pain. He reached for the gun, but his thoughts floated away.

Ava laughed. “So glad you made the flight.”

He tried to grin, but his lips froze.

She leaned over behind his seat to retrieve Susan’s backpack. “Eddie Jean would never help me cover my mistakes. She liked Susan. She healed you, and you’re my proof XB works.”

“Liar.” His body went into a shaking spasm.

Ava waved her hand. “Your first brain map compared to your second one will silence skeptics.”

His gut roiled, but he had news she didn’t. The Anchorons were still there, so she couldn’t claim a cure. He would get the last laugh if she let him live.

“I have another lab I’m eager to show you, Louis.” Her laugh grated on his ears.

She leaned over to push an intercom button. “Perry, I’ve changed my mind. Swing over to Atlanta, please.”

Louis struggled to stay awake. He watched the flight attendant come down the aisle and stop five feet from Ava. “I’m sorry, Doctor Allen. Pilot says no override. Charlottesville is the first stop. Doctor Janzen has an escort waiting for him.”

Ava screamed curses and the flight attendant stepped backward.

“Tell him,” Ava shouted, stabbing her finger into the air.

“You can’t override Mr. Delaney’s personal code.”

Thank you, Eddie Jean.

“Go away!” Ava screeched and sank in a seat across from him.

His vision grew fuzzy. Louis leaned over and threw up his cookies and juice at her feet.

Ava jumped up cursing him.

Louis smiled before falling asleep.

Eddie Jean

The door opened into brighter lights. Scot stepped out first, scanned the upper walkways, and motioned her out. Eddie Jean headed to a computer pod and skidded to a stop. Her granddad—Quitman Delaney—dangled by a rope around his ankles just a short distance above a mob of Swarmers. Weapons his men used to catch the infected were heaped on the walkway.

Q saw them and yelled, “What took so long? Pull me up, kids.”

“EJ,” Scot said in a low voice.

She darted to the computer pod and opened up the system.

Scot said to Q, “XOs don’t follow your orders. They follow mine. Clear?”

“You’re no leader,” Q said with a sneer. “Eddie Jean was right, an evolutionary jump is on the way.”

“We’ll find our place without you. Your time is over.”

Eddie Jean tuned out their argument. She scanned the computer and got the shivers. No escapes to the outside, but Swarmers were everywhere. So many people had been caught by surprise. She searched for ways to release frightened workers, but the access she used on Doctor Cho’s computer wasn’t available. Doctor Cho had a key into the locked system, but didn’t share it. Why?

In one pod, Eddie Jean watched lab workers with scratches on their arms and faces saying goodbye to one another. She turned the camera off and her chest tightened. A premonition came, along with a taste of axle grease in her mouth. The land beneath her feet moved up and down like waves. Rivers changed direction and trees fell like toothpicks. She had to run for her life.

Hands shaking, she searched for the burn protocol procedure. The computer revealed the burning wouldn’t take place until 6:00 a.m. What? People were trapped. Why didn’t he release them first?”

{I set the delay and passworded it} Q beamed. {Little help, please}

She joined Scot on the walkway. The scent of scorched syrup made her nauseated. Body parts, blood, and sections of ripped and chewed flesh smeared the concrete floor. The showdown between him and his protégé Doctor Allen had been bloody. Eddie Jean couldn’t believe the prissy ice queen had gotten the jump on him.

In the Swarmer pit, Eddie Jean recognized the uniforms on the men who helped subdue Scot’s father and infect her. Next, she noticed Q didn’t dangle from a rope. Ava had harpooned him with a metal barb while he had been in the pit. The barb passed clean through his right calf. Then she tranquilized him with a red dart. A red feather protruded from his buttock.

After a drug knocked him out, someone secured plastic handcuffs around his wrists at his back. Men winched him up to a height just out of reach. Looking down, Eddie Jean watched the infected fighting over a rolling cart with dried blood smears on the top shelf. If a tall one got on the cart and jumped, Q was doomed.

“Why did Doctor Allen leave you like this?” she asked.

Q glared at her. “I told her Flameion was toast. Their drugs and hers would have to be canned because the dead virus reactivated, and I couldn’t figure out how. She flipped out. Ava romanced my team members to betray me. She locked them in after I was hung.” He spat on one.

“Doctor Allen injected a drug from here into another doctor. He didn’t become a Swarmer. Could the Anchorons prevent infection?” Eddie Jean asked.

“Who cares!” Q shouted. “Pull me up!”

“Karma is real. Your granddad is hanging like the blood lures he polluted the woods with every fall before hunting season,” Scot said in a flat voice. “My uncles told me about them.” His hands gripped the railing so tight his knuckles blotched white. “We clear, EJ?”

“No, still trapped.”

“How did Doctor Allen release Swarmers after you initiated the burn protocol code?” Eddie Jean asked Q.

“She seduced him into granting a delay,” Scot said.

Q laughed. “Righto, I thought we were good right up until she skewered me. The situation forced me to barter with her. She would leave Eddie Jean behind, and Ava had time to grab what she wanted before it kicked back on. I allowed one interruption to the countdown. It can’t be stopped again, but I do have an option if you’re interested.”

Below them, one of the Swarmers stood on the cart. The others shoved the cart against the wall. The noise reached a crescendo and settled down.

“Pull me up!”

“I helped Doctor Cho and Doctor Janzen escape minutes ago.”

Q spat on the Swarmers. “Doctor Cho was a smart cookie. She wrote her own code, I’m guessing, and she didn’t interfere with mine. Too bad she sold me out to Ava.”

“Can we get back to Doctor Cho’s computer?” Scot asked her.

“You tossed it off the pod. Everything burns at 6:00 a.m. unless we take his deal,” she said.

“Smooth,” Scot muttered.

“Leaders make backup plans. Now, pull me up.”

“Quitman designed the barb, you know,” Scot said, clearing his throat. “Called it the “impaler.” He had fun using it on the Swarmers he kept for tests. It’s poetic justice he got popped with his own invention.”

Before she could answer Q beamed, {Check out your dad, Scotty}

Eddie Jean put her hand over Scot’s. She felt his temper ease back, and then she spotted his father. Weeping pustules marred his handsome face and a few patches of blond hair remained on his head.

“Dad!” Scot cried out.

His father reacted to Scot’s voice. His white eyes focused on him. He tilted his head.

“He remembers you,” she whispered. “White eyes are from the airborne version.”

“Give the old man a hug, Scot,” Q goaded.

Scot wiped his nose and his head sunk into his shoulders. “How did your mother get infected?”

“Q gave her a live virus vaccine and it mutated. She infected Kimmy and then went dormant until today.”

Scot stared down at his dad. “Quitman doesn’t deserve to live.”

Eddie Jean nodded in agreement.

“Pull me up,” Q yelled. “This isn’t the time to be divided. It’s humans against Swarmers. I know Swarmers better than anyone.”

“You created them!” Scot pounded on the railing. “The white-eyed ones are aware.”

“Aw, thank you.” Q broke into laughter.

“I hate him.”

“Me too,” she said. “He’s lost all sense of right and wrong.”

“Thought you Christians turned the other cheek and forgave, lass. Give me a chance to fix this and save Cloudland. Pull me up!”

“Your call.” Scot choked over the words.

“I have a supplement to heal people, lass. Isn’t that where your heart lies?”

“He told me his cure doesn’t work on Swarm,” Scot said.

“Will work on what’s coming,” Q shouted back. He beamed details to Eddie Jean.

Anguish flooded her, making her sad. He never considered his supplement might make things worse. “Scot, we don’t have to do anything. Time will take care of him, us, and them. You and I are the opposite of the Swarmers—we’re changed from the vibrations, and they’re changed from the yellow mist the vibrations release.”

Q said, “Have mercy on me, lass.”

“Remember what he did to you, to Kimmy, and our parents. Do you think the world needs more of Quitman?” Scot asked.

Eddie Jean bit her lip. “Why smear his blood on our hands?”

“I’m good with it.”

She couldn’t kill her own grandfather. The thought made her head spin until she closed her eyes. “Don’t let our last hours be cursed like this.”

“He deserves to feel the horror he’s set loose.”

She opened her eyes. Q’s face had turned gray and his voice had lost authority. “Pray with me, lass. I don’t know how.”

“Burning is too easy for him,” Scot said.

What did Scot want her to do? She believed in redemption and forgiveness, except she couldn’t forgive Q for injecting her mother with a killer virus. Maybe later. “You’re not a natural-born killer.”

“I’m what he taught me to be.” Scot pulled his hand from under hers and wiped his face with his shirt. “He needs a taste of his own medicine.” He reached down and removed a hunting knife from the equipment Ava Allen had left behind. “He wouldn’t show us mercy.”

True. “He wanted helpers who couldn’t be infected, so he brainwashed you. You’re not a killer until you act like one.”

“He’s not like you, lass. Think how he violated your trust.”

“You tried to infect her!” Scot shouted back.

“Daddy wouldn’t help him, so he pushed my mother at your father.”

“Jenna didn’t need me to push her, lass.”

“Go to the exit pod,” Scot said. “This is on me. I’ll follow in a few minutes.”

She swallowed. Scot wasn’t going to leave things alone because his grief blinded him. If he fed Q to Swarmers, he would be changed forever. “I can’t let you do that…”

“Atta girl,” Q called out.

“Alone.”

The words choked her. Family didn’t kill family. Q would wish he were dead as they fed on him, and his humanity, if any remained, would be lost when he changed. Wasn’t that equal to killing him? “We cut the line together or we leave him there.”

Scot looked from Q to her. “Still trying to fix things, emo?”

Misery made her feel sad. “I’m not fixing things. I’m helping you.”

Scot ran fingers through his hair. “I came to rescue you because you reached out to forgive me after—” Scot looked back at Q. “I’ve never felt anything like the healing heat from your hands. You need to be protected.”

Q laughed. “Yeah, you’re the man, Scot.”

She sniffed. “I prayed for help and you came.”

Scot put his arm around her. “It’s justice.”

She buried her head against his chest and fought tears. If she helped him, she could lose her ability to heal. She heard his heart thump against his chest.

“Ready?” Scot asked.

“I want to live!” Q sobbed. “I want to live. I want to live! Damn you both.”

She said, “My hands are shaking.”

“You’re afraid you’re going to lose the healing touch?”

Eddie Jean nodded. “And my connection to God, but so be it. I’m thinking of Kimmy.”

Scot put her hands on his face. “You’ve been through hell today. Let me do this alone. He has to pay for my dad, and your mom and little sister. They deserve justice.” He took a deep breath. “Go on.”

“Thought we were a team,” she said.

“Take the penalty.”

“Together, or come with me,” she answered.

Scot nodded. “Ready?”

“Lass, we’re blood.”

Eddie Jean kissed her crucifix. She put her hand over Scot’s on the knife handle. They sawed the rope.

“You’re cursed! I curse you both. I curse you, and I’ll despise you until the world stops spinning!” The rope gave and he dropped a few inches.

A Swarmer jumped and swiped his head with its claws.

Q shrieked. His screams echoed in the pit. Swarmers went wild at the scent of fresh blood and a new kill. Growling, snorting, and smacking sounds came from below.

“Eddie Jean!”

They sliced through the cord.

Granddad’s final screams were cut short.

Wilbur

Wilbur braked. “Gate’s open. Mansion is lit up like Christmas.”

“Haunted house fits better,” Lee said. “Cookie wasting juice? No way.”

He had to admit the lights gave the place a stately appearance, like one would expect from the Governor’s Mansion. He eased the Saturn up the brick driveway.

Someone sat on the front steps with their head bowed.

“Cookie?” Wilbur asked Lee and flashed his bright lights.

She peered forward. “Think so.”

Cookie lifted her head and ran out to greet them. Wilbur had never seen her so disheveled. Her bun looked messy, her apron fell to the ground as she ran, and she yelled, “Wilbur’s back.”

She pushed her upper torso through the open window and hugged him. “Miss Evaney screamed your name. It scared the bejesus out of me.”

Wilbur patted Cookie’s arm. “Start at the beginning.”

“A replay of Tuesday night,” she said, easing out the car window and wringing her hands. “Night nurse ran down the stairs and screamed, ‘Her eyes are bleeding!’”

“Rose did?” Wilbur asked.

“No, we had a temporary nurse from the staffing agency. Rose took a night off to cover the day shift on the weekend.”

“Where is she?”

Cookie shrugged. “Asleep in her room, I guess. I’m too scared to go check. Even the assistant followed the nurse out and both drove away.”

“So, it’s just the live-in help left?” Wilbur asked.

She nodded. “Veena’s on the back porch.”

“You call Doc?” Lee asked, and slid across his lap instead of getting out on the passenger side. Cookie opened the door for her.

“What’s wrong?” Cookie asked him when he didn’t get out.

“I’m thinking.”

“The bitch is wilding and you’re thinking?” Lee asked, sarcastically.

Cookie burst into tears. “Stop it, Lee! I’m scared.”

Wilbur tuned off the engine.

“Did you call Doc?” Lee repeated with hands on her hips.

“You know I did. Went to message.”

“He gets paid to handle the problems, not us.”

“She’s our patient, Lee,” Wilbur said.

Fire flared out of Lee’s eyes as she whirled around to glare. “She’s a bloodsucker, Burr. Everything else you think about her is a memory she planted.”

Cookie gasped.

Lee jerked Cookie’s hand away from her mouth. “Evaney knows all.”

Cookie slapped Lee’s hand. “How? She’s brain dead.”

“Not anymore, sista.”

Evaney knows what? The two women snarled like dogs. Wilbur climbed out. “Lee, chill. Miss Cookie, you stay in the kitchen with Veena. We’ll go upstairs and check Miss Harwood and wake Rose.”

“Me?” Lee interrupted. “Not without holy water and crosses.”

Wilbur glanced at her, expecting to laugh, but Lee was dead serious. He and Cookie walked to the discarded apron, and Wilbur picked it up.

Cookie put her arm around his waist, and they walked back to the front porch. Lee went straight to the dining room table and called out, “I’ll monitor your situation from here.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Maybe it was for the best. He didn’t want her to see him terrified.

“She’s a big talker,” Cookie said. “Seeing your face sure calmed me.”

“Miss Evaney’s more active at night,” he said. His feet felt heavy, and he walked at half normal pace to the stairs.

“Son,” Cookie called out. He turned back, grateful for the interruption.

She wrapped a green sweater around her. “Save yourself if she goes bad. Her light has passed on.”

“I’m with Cookie,” Lee chimed in.

He nodded. Wilbur jogged up the stairs like he’d seen President Obama take the steps up to Air Force One. The president’s hands never grasped the railing, and neither would his. Stepping into the hallway, the first thing he heard was a buzzsaw and feet running across the roof.

Jogging on, he decided to check Rose’s room first, but he turned to the connecting hallway and the sick wing. Overhead, rustling sounds rattled from the attic. He knew Evaney Harwood made the sounds, but not how. This time he wouldn’t let her play with his thoughts. He would put up a mental shield. In his mind, he remembered Grandmother Pearl singing Onward Christian Soldiers. He marched down the hall to the beat.

He flung open the door to her room. Evaney Harwood lay in her bed, the same as always. A quick glance and he saw no blood splatters. The room smelled like a funeral home.

A beautiful arrangement of carnations and hot-house lilies in a Waterford vase sat on the bedside table. Rose Carson’s touch, he guessed. Lee and the other women had long stopped doing bedside niceties. The room light wasn’t on, but a night light gleamed next to the rocking chair. He heard the clock ticking before the Hum cranked up in his ears.

Wilbur felt numb as he pressed close to her bed. Her eyes were shut, and she breathed a bit too shallow for his taste. In fact, he couldn’t hear her breaths. “Miss Evaney?”

No response. House rules said he couldn’t be alone with her in the room. But those concerns no longer mattered. He leaned over and said into her ear, “I’m a disease carrier, thanks to you. Guess it makes me a modern-day leper. It doesn’t mean I can’t leave Hell House—your house. Stay out of my head.”

No response, but he saw movement behind her eyelids, like during REM sleep. It creeped him out. Then he saw Grandmother Pearl in her white coffin wearing her favorite pink dress. He had allowed the open casket because her church expected it, but he didn’t like it. Next, he leaned over to kiss her stiff, rotten lips even though it never happened. Her mouth tasted delicious, like strawberries and chocolate, and he couldn’t stop kissing her.

He pinched his wrist and the memory faded. Panting and fighting the urge to puke, he could still taste chocolate. Wilbur stared down at her eyeballs swimming in her sockets. He refused to turn tail. In his mind, he heard the people at Grandmother Pearl’s wake singing When the Saints Go Marching In as pallbearers carried her casket from the church.

“No more blood donations. No more reading to you. I’m going to clue the whole town into your little secrets. I think you expel wigglers in your poop because you’re dead on the inside. I know when people die worms crawl out, not in. I enjoyed reading about you and Winn Harmon. First time I considered you human since Mary died.”

Evaney’s fingers strummed the air. The first time she did it he thought she was playing a piano, but now, he realized she typed words on an imaginary keyboard. Her fingers slowed down like he could translate the letters in his head. “Maybe you should lip-sync.”

No response.

“I talked to Dave Collins’ mother. She told me about the cure for all diseases in a cave in Cloudland. Did you believe it, or did you travel to Cloudland because Winn grieved over his sister’s disease? Help me to understand what happened, Evaney.”

Her eyes opened.

Wilbur swallowed and took a step backward. He was inside her head for a change. “I’m hearing a buzzing sound in my ears. I have aches and pains in places I’ve never felt before, including my eyes. You’ve turned me into a host for something I want no part in. I’m done.”

Her head swiveled to the left and her neck snapped and popped. The congregation singing in his head stopped, the buzz ended, and his mind went blank. He couldn’t see or think. Her mouth opened and she made sounds—loud attic noises.

Run, Burr! Grandmother Pearl shouted in his head. Shine a mirror on evil and it explodes.

His feet inched forward until he leaned over Evaney’s chest, panting. She’s controlling me like a puppet. The realization scared him. Evaney was in charge.

“Waking up,” Evaney sang out in a thick, guttural tone. Her eyes leaked dark red fluid, yes, it looked bloody. Her short fingernails stabbed at him, pressing into his cheek and then his neck. He knew she wanted his blood. Her nose wrinkled, and she tried to lock on blood scent like she did with Mary. His legs shook so hard, he thought he would fall.

Her fingernails elongated before his eyes, and she slashed into his neck and down his arm. Evaney was weak and didn’t draw deep blood. She bobbed her head, unable to get close enough to lick the wounds. Her body couldn’t bend as she wanted. The bed rattled as she tried over and over to make him extend his neck to her mouth. He fought her. Cold sweat shrouded his vision.

Grandmother Pearl shouted from his memory, Resist evil with all your might.

Evaney let out a mind-numbing screech.

Then, feeling as crazy as Mary probably did, Wilbur grabbed a sterile needle from the bedside drawer and ripped the plastic with his teeth. Frightening images danced in his head: people burned on crosses, organs were removed from screaming people, deformed, neglected babies were left to starve, and he felt their agony. She had even cut off his ability to close his eyes and scream. The horrific images rolled because she held the key to his thoughts.

Summoning Grandmother Pearl’s sweet face, he fought back by quoting Maya Angelou poems instead of scripture. He resisted the urge to stick the needle into his neck, knowing instinctively he’d lost his way—the moment he issued the vampire an invitation.

What did he care about her story? Or what happened to the Dukies? Screw them all.

His head filled with pictures of scenery he had never seen before. He smelled wild onions, but he suspected the odor came from her memory. How could this be happening? The Duke student’s story ran next and paused. If I tune in for answers, she’s got me.

Truth matters.

Hands shaking, Wilbur punctured his left wrist over and over with the sharp needle. He felt no pain as he jabbed it back and forth over the radial artery in a weak attempt to slit his wrist. He jabbed and scraped until blood trickled out. Wilbur offered his wrist to her and noticed her lip movements puffing like a fish.

As her mouth licked his cuts, his fear and anger subsided. Her mouth felt squishy. The sensation went from pleasurable to stinging in seconds. She bit as she drank his blood.

He threw back his head to scream and her story snared him. Wilbur thought he was watching a movie and couldn’t look away. Autumn leaves floated down as the six Duke students hiked across a sun-lit valley, telling bad jokes. One of the men looked up from a map and pointed in excitement. Evaney’s voice sounded sweet and innocent, like he’d imagined when reading her student essays. “Winn, we’re close.”

“I love you, Evaney,” Winn shouted back. “I love you all for coming with me.”

“Burr!”

Whatever held him trapped let go. He staggered backward and fell on his ass. The tile floor chilled him as his upper body slumped. Wilbur stared at the ceiling. He couldn’t see at first, and then his vision cleared.

“Bloodsucking bitch!” Lee slammed a broom over Evaney’s head. Swarming insect noises filled the room. “You stay away from him!” She swung the broom over and over and grunted with each blow like a tennis player.

Rose rushed in wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas to pull Lee away from Evaney. She skidded to a stop at the sight of him on his back with blood clotting on his wrist. “I’ve got him, Lee.” Rose grabbed Wilbur by the collar and pulled him out.

He grabbed the doorway and shouted, “Lee, come with us.”

Lee grunted and heaved her last swing. She screamed, “I’ll be back to stake you!” She ran out and slammed the door.

Rose pulled him down near a bathroom and ducked inside to grab towels to apply pressure. Lee dropped the broom and sprinted to him so fast that she slipped and skidded on her knees up to him. He could smell her jasmine perfume, pizza breath, and spicy pheromones. Wilbur looked into her worried eyes as she propped his head on her lap.

Her lips moved, but he couldn’t make out the words. The buzzing sound in his ears vacillated before he fainted. A cool rush, and then his body surrendered to a dark tunnel. A few more seconds and he would have known what happened to the Duke students.

Eddie Jean

Scot led Eddie Jean through a hidden hallway to a back pod room. “Quitman gave it to the XOs, so we didn’t mingle with employees.” His voice sounded low and dull. “If Swarmers escape, they’ll come here. They’re drawn to our scent.”

“I’ve noticed,” she said.

When he opened the door, a sweet whiff of cherry vanilla with a hint of buttered popcorn wafted out. Beige walls supported sports-themed posters and a large plaid couch dominated the area in front of a plasma TV and gaming area. Beanbag cushions were scattered around. A small kitchenette was to the right and the microwave clock read 11 p.m. Seven hours before burning.

He noticed her checking the time. “Don’t think about it.”

She saw a sink and a round table in the kitchenette. A mason jar of red and white aroma beads sat on a side table near the door—the sweet source of the cherry vanilla scent.

“Lockers have clean clothes,” he said, pointing to a changing and shower area.

Eddie Jean walked to the locker room. She tried to hold it together by encasing her feelings in concrete. Maybe Granddad did the same. He separated his heart from his feelings and went insane. Her family was either sick or scattered. Being alone hurt, like realizing you’ve been left behind on the family vacation. She willed her mind off family topics and Q’s last human breath. Eddie Jean searched for clothing other than scrubs and bare feet.

Through the door crack, she noticed Scot turned on a video game and grabbed snacks. He didn’t eat, and he didn’t pick up the joystick. He sat on the couch and stared at a poster of the Alabama Crimson Tide after winning their third national championship. She wondered if that was how Scot mourned his father.

Eddie Jean stopped snooping and opened the lockers. Mixing and matching pieces, she assembled khaki pants, a white long-sleeved pullover shirt, and a cardigan sweater. A pair of brown Uggs sat in one locker beside a pair of running shoes. The Uggs looked brand new, but the running shoes were missing the laces. Inside several overnight bags and shaving cases she found clean panties, deodorant, a wide-toothed comb, and toothpaste. The pants would be short, but the Uggs would hide it.

The white bathroom was small, but it held a shower and a cabinet stocked with towels. She ducked inside and shed the scrubs. Until then she hadn’t noticed her cold feet or stiff and sore muscles. The hot water came fast. She soaped up and washed her hair. Task completed, she burst into sobs and sunk to her knees. Her body ached from an agony she didn’t recognize. Eddie Jean let the tears flow in order to release the pain.

What have I done?

Quitman Delaney had hurt so many—but her life was about helping others and living in the light of Christianity. She couldn’t flick her beliefs on or off like lights. The last thing he yelled had been her name. Shaking and slobbering on the shower floor, she prayed for forgiveness and strength. The simple act of confessing her sins and asking for help calmed her.

Wiping water from her face, she kissed her crucifix before standing under the warm water. For a few brief moments, she could forget the burn procedure was hours away, or the possibility Swarmers might locate them first. She toweled off fast, combed out her hair, and put on the clothes. It was a tight squeeze into the boots, but her toes sunk into the soft, cushioned warmth with pleasure. Maybe they would stretch with wear. Last, she washed out her mouth with a washcloth and toothpaste and towel-dried her hair before rejoining Scot. The room smelled weird. She sneezed three times.

She walked out to the sofa. “All yours.”

Scot hadn’t moved, but his eyes looked red and swollen. He rubbed them, making them redder.

“They’re tight,” she said, holding out one foot.

Scot yawned, and tried to shake himself from his funk. He glanced at her feet. “Cara’s sneakers would have been better for escape.”

“No laces, and besides, we’re trapped—remember?” She flopped down beside him so he couldn’t ignore her, and she put her feet on the narrow ottoman beside his. The hot shower had made her sleepy. She forced her eyes to remain open.

He laced fingers behind his neck. “We’re secure and we’re not alone.” He crooked his head at the plasma screen. “Lab employees are trying to stop the burn protocol. Over fifty are locked in safe rooms.”

He’d changed the screen into six blocks featuring desperate survivors holed up in various spaces near company computers. “Isn’t it odd how the computers work but we can’t message out?” she asked.

“Flameion’s idea, according to Quitman.”

She pointed to one group. “They know how dangerous Swarm is, and they’re still trying to override security.”

“The will to live,” he said, reaching for a can of Pringles. “Most lab workers don’t know about Quitman’s research and development section.” He grabbed a handful of chips and started snacking. “Better eat and hydrate.” He pointed to a small dorm cooler.

Eddie Jean went over and looked inside: string cheese, a few cans of Faygo grape soda, bottled water, and a box of Snickers. Eddie Jean drank one bottle of water and opened another. She looked in a cabinet and found vanilla wafers.

“Join me?” she asked, snatching everything up and putting it on the round table.

“No, thanks.”

Sleep tried to take over and she yawned. Her eyes burned and she smelled adhesive. Eddie Jean turned around and sniffed the air. “You smell gas?”

Scot stood and sniffed. “It’s coming from the vent!” He jumped on the sofa and tried to hold a pillow over one vent. “Block the other one,” he yelled.

Eddie Jean grabbed a sofa pillow and jumped on the opposite end to block the second vent. She swayed on her feet. “It’s no use.”

“Is there anyone your grandfather won’t kill?”

“Why would he?”

Scot sneezed three times. “He lost control of us.”

Her head whirled. “He can’t be doing this.”

“Q programmed it in,” Scot muttered, dropping the pillow. “Damn Delaneys.”

Eddie Jean dropped to the sofa. Scot stood a bit longer and then slid down beside her. “Is it a poison?” Tears fell down her cheeks. “I feel sick.”

She slid over on her side face against the back. Scot shifted her position so she could breathe. He smoothed her hair back, and she realized he tried to make her comfortable before he passed out. A last glance at his pale face, and she knew he was fading fast. “Thank you.”

“You look like your mother.” Scot tossed a pillow onto the floor and fell on it. His deep breaths grew fainter.

Eddie Jean’s last thought was gratitude. She wasn’t going to die alone in a horror filled lab, and best of all, her father and brothers had escaped Cloudland forever.

Wilbur

Wilbur woke to an argument and the heavenly aroma of ripe apples. His punctured and slashed left wrist burned and throbbed. He raised his arms and saw his lacerations were swathed in Kerlix bandages. When his fingers moved, he sent out a silent prayer of thanks. He tried to sit up and grabbed his head before lying flat.

A crushing headache made him nauseated, and pain stabbed his eyes when he looked at the light. The cure for migraines, according to Grandmother Pearl, was to drink hydrating fluids. His body felt like it had run dry, and he craved salt.

“Doc isn’t coming, and Burr needs to see a doctor,” Cookie said to Lee. “What if he dies on us? How do we explain sitting here instead of having him checked out?”

“He’ll infect people. Burr told me, we, all of us, even Rose, are carriers.”

From his position on the teal-blue sofa in the library, Wilbur watched Rose’s face blanch whiter than sugar. He’d given her the wrong advice. She regretted hiring on at Harwood House, and who could blame her? He stared at the Monet over the blazing fireplace as he eavesdropped on their conversation.

“I’ve only worked two days,” Rose said. “I feel fine.”

The other women ignored her. Unlike Wilbur, the others wouldn’t accept her input. Rose would have to work in the mansion for months before they would turn to her for advice or allow her a share in group vote.

“We should leave as we planned.” Cookie’s voice sounded firm. “Burr couldn’t escape her trap, and he’s a big man.” She resumed peeling apples over a green bowl.

Planned? Cookie was the heart of the household, and she knew Evaney Harwood before the coma. Why would she make plans to leave Harwood House? Her family lived in Jamaica.

Lee’s foot tapped the wood floor. “Cook, she’s mainlined our thoughts! She’ll tell the hunchback what we’ve done, and we’ll end up back in Hell House or jail.”

“Jail?” Rose repeated. “What are you talking about? We haven’t abandoned our patient, yet. As the RN, I’m the only one who will be charged with a crime if we do.”

“Drag your nose from the clouds, woman,” Lee said.

“My nose is fine, thank you. You’ve been talking crazy about vampires and staking her. We have a normal alternative to this crisis, and it doesn’t involve holy water!”

Wilbur sat up with a grunt. All four women rushed to fuss over him, and he let them plump his pillow and adjust his blanket. He held up a hand. “Ladies, thanks for the rescue, but I had it under control.”

“What!”

Wilbur ignored Lee and said, “Vee, I’m thirsty.”

Veena jumped up and went to the kitchen.

He spoke to Rose first. “Thanks for dressing my cuts, but yes, you’re infected like the rest of us. I’m sorry.”

Rose closed her eyes and nodded.

Cookie put down her paring knife. “Burr,” she said, “look in my eyes and tell me I’m a disease carrier. I never get sick, you know.”

Wilbur stared into her bright eyes. “Miss Cookie, I’m not a doctor, but it’s true.”

She made clucking noises with her tongue and held up her hands. Both of her ring fingers were longer than her index fingers. “You’re saying my hands infect when I cook?”

Wilbur gentled his voice like he used to do with Grandmother Pearl. “I love your hands, Miss Cookie. You create beautiful and delicious meals with them and you knitted me my favorite sweater and scarf. No, I’m not saying when you cook you’re spreading disease. I’m saying you’re spreading disease and you don’t know it. We’re not responsible for what’s happened to us, but we need to deal with the responsibility of being carriers. No ER for me.”

Cookie’s chin quivered and her voice grew husky. “Evaney Harwood lived through hell with a she-devil grandmother long before she came here to live. She-devil scarred her body. I cried the first time I saw her bare back. We all heard Evaney screaming in her sleep. She’d wake with her pajamas soaked with pee and sweat. Back then when I worked nights, she told me no one had ever comforted her after a nightmare. My heart ached for that poor girl.”

“Well, she’s gold-leafed and immortal now,” Lee said in a sarcastic tone.

“I went to her room one night before Mary went crazy,” Cookie said. “The noises I heard sounded like a battle to me. A battle for her soul.”

“Oh, please! Vampires don’t have souls,” Lee said. “She drained Mary’s blood and now she wants his. Soon she’ll be flying room to room to suck us dry while we sleep. We know what to do. What are we waiting for?”

“You watch too many vampire shows,” Cookie muttered.

Veena rushed back with a tall glass of lemonade.

“Thank you, Vee.” Wilbur took the glass and drank all the liquid. Veena hesitated, took the empty glass, and went for a refill.

“Evaney is a sick woman and she depends on blood transfusions to live,” Wilbur said. “Lee, you know vampires aren’t real.” Wilbur burped, surprised by his words and calm tone.

Lee stalked over and stopped in front of him. She looked a bit wild with her hair out of place and her eyes appeared slick as glass. “Say it again with a straight face after what she made you do. We have to kill her or we’ll end up watching you die. The women will make the decision, not you. You’re not thinking straight.”

“And you are?” Rose asked.

“Evaney’s disease forces her to crave blood, just like I’m craving fluids because I’m dehydrated. She needs another transfusion. Right, Rose?”

Rose cleared her throat. “Burr, you gave her a pint of blood yesterday. Doc gives her blood transfusions without supporting lab work before or after. Lee may be right, as much as I hate to admit it. Doc’s medical supervision is screwy.”

Wilbur stared at Rose, dumbfounded.

“Have you forgotten what happened to you?” Rose asked. “I can’t. Look, we can end our conflict now. Let me call an ambulance to take her to the emergency room. I have no problem warning them she’s been exposed to meningitis. They won’t take risks, and they’ll protect themselves from infection. Hospital workers will do the same.”

The house vibrated with sharp keening sounds, like bees swarming. Ears popping from the noise, Wilbur tried to stand but his vision blurred.

Cookie started praying, and Rose flicked her lighter.

Lee said in a low voice, “Guess the vamp didn’t like your plan, Rose.”

Rose lit a cigarette and no one complained about the smoke. “I’d call it confirmation. We should act as one group. She’s trying to divide us by scaring us.”

Veena came in with a glass of water and full pitcher on a tray. “It worked. Count me as scared.” She put the tray on the coffee table and sat beside Cookie.

Wilbur reached for the glass and swallowed half. “Lee, I need you to explain your jail remark. Maybe Evaney’s reacting to what you’ve done. So?”

Lee clenched her fists and glowered at him. “Whose side are you on?”

“I’m on truth’s side.”

Lee shook her head and pointed a finger at him. “She’s cast a spell over you. The banshee is the living dead, and she’s calling her Renfield for help. We have to kill her before she gets stronger. Tonight!”

“I’ll second that,” Cookie said.

Eddie Jean

Eddie Jean woke to a full bladder and heard noises. She sat up and watched Scot’s left foot kick against the sofa. Her bleary eyes couldn’t focus on the microwave clock until she rubbed them. Almost 5:00 a.m. She’d hoped to sleep through the burn protocol.

Eddie Jean climbed over Scot and went to the bathroom. She washed her hands and face and then combed sleep tangles from her hair. Should she wake Scot or face the burn alone?

He called out for his dad and whimpered. She came back to the sofa and shook him. If he had slept peacefully, she wouldn’t have. Eddie Jean leaned over to shake him again, and he grabbed her arm. Blue eyes looked angry and then they calmed.

“Sorry,” he murmured, releasing her arm and sitting up. She sat on the sofa and crossed her legs meditation style. Her granddad had chosen to sedate trapped people before the lab burned, and, for some reason, she thought better of him.

Scot rubbed his eyes. “What’s happened?”

“Q sedated us, remember? It’s 5:00 a.m.”

“The bastard.” Scot jumped to his feet. “He put us to sleep all night but made sure we woke in time to be burned alive! What a humanitarian. If we had helped him, he’d be long gone and we’d be stuck here. You and I were everyone’s best escape chance.”

Her head remained foggy. “He—”

“Didn’t gas the others,” Scot yelled, and pointed at the plasma screen. “We would wake long before they would. He gassed one room—the XOs room.”

She turned to look at the screen. One pod of employees had become Swarmers. Inside their secure areas people talked, paced, and three couples were having sex. They didn’t look rested nor were they yawning.

Scot was right…Quitman Delaney…evil…pure evil. He targeted XOs. Why? He meant to wipe out XOs and Swarmers and anyone who knew the truth. Panting as the full realization struck, she swore never to give him a second thought ever again.

“Did you wash his blood off your hands?” Scot asked before staggering to the bathroom.

He knew she felt guilty. She couldn’t help wondering if guilt had an accompanying odor. No more guilt. She watched the safe people. Even though the end neared they reached out to touch, to hug, and to laugh. She wanted to join them in the last hour.

Scot came back into the room and Eddie Jean said, “I prayed before we passed out. Prayed for you, too.”

“Can’t you give up religion?” He stared at the computer images.

“You need to deal with who I am, not who you want me to be.”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“Prayers aren’t like looking up answers in a dictionary. Heartfelt prayers lead to feelings mostly, and feelings comfort believers.”

“Praying makes me uncomfortable.”

“I don’t pray as entertainment, it’s private.”

“I’ve seen you going to church.”

She shrugged. “Prayers boost trust, hope, and faith. They make me stronger.”

“Don’t want to fight with you.” He combed damp hair off his forehead and his hair settled down back over his eyes. “Thanks for sticking with me. I know it was hard after I betrayed you.”

She jumped up and jogged in place. “Forget it.”

“EJ.”

“I said forget it.”

“Your eyes look haunted, and it’s my fault,” he said.

She stopped and flipped hair behind her shoulders. Swallowing the denial made her feel like a little kid again. Tears welled. She held her breath, hoping to quell them. “It nearly killed me when you handed me over to him after I felt so close to you. We both healed Bill. I wanted to die when my grandfather tried to infect me, but, worse, he made me watch my little sister and other Swarmers eat my mother’s flesh. I’ll never be able to trust anyone again if I can’t pray. So do what you want. I’m a Christian, and I’m not hiding my faith to make you feel better!”

A grin cracked his face. He peered over at her from under too long hair. “Better eat,” he said, and tossed a candy bar to her. “You need energy before we blow this joint.”

She caught it and tore the wrapper. “We’re martyrs, remember?” She took a bite.

“I can get us out.”

She stopped chewing. He looked serious. For a moment, hope washed over and she yearned to feel the sun on her face again. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“You, we needed to grieve. I didn’t expect to get gassed.”

Tears flooded her eyes.

Scot said, “You’re acting emo again.”

She wiped her eyes and took another bite. “Sorry, go on.”

“Trev suggested we shouldn’t blindly trust Quitman. He found the burn protocol file and wrote code to short it out and reboot the system. Trev didn’t think workers should die because Cloudland-Flameion produced monsters.”

“What about the Swarmers?”

“A few might escape.”

Shocked, she stared at him in disbelief. “No, we can’t let any out.”

He ripped open a Snickers bar and ate half. He spoke with his mouth full. “Here are the possibilities: All doors could open or none because Trev got the code wrong. Just you and I might get out and the others don’t. Or the pits might be released or just the nursery. If we’re lucky, the doors will only open for a short time, like they’re supposed to do, so people can escape. Our runway to the outside is much longer than the others. Don’t plan on the doors staying open. Run like hell. Agreed?” He gulped grape soda.

“My mother, sister, and your dad might get out?”

“Quitman too. Swarmers don’t die unless shot through the right eye.”

“Nursery? That implies—”

“No, not babies.”

“Why are so many kept here?” she asked.

“Black gold. Their blood changes from red to a deep purple that looks black. Q milked them for blood. He used its special properties for new drug development. Quitman asked Flameion for people with specific blood types to turn into Swarmers. They arrived drugged on the company plane. Q wanted to know if Swarmer blood was different based on original blood types. He experimented and found out the richest blood begins as A negative.”

“My God!” She dropped her head into her hands. “He infected people to drain their blood? Who were they?”

“Enemies, vagrants, and drug dealers.”

She shook her head, speechless.

“See why I hate him?”

She nodded. “The Hum will explode soon. Massive change is coming and no one’s prepared.”

Scot shrugged. “We’re doing all we can. We’re a team now, and we stick together. All in?”

Eddie Jean punched his fist. “People in town won’t know what hit them.”

He handed the soda can to her, and she took a long swallow. “I’ll beam the other XOs as soon as we clear. They can notify the authorities.”

“No one listens to teenagers. They’ll call a meeting before doing anything.”

“Trev, Brodie, and Cara know we’re here. You sent what happened in telep, remember? They’ve warned friends. There are a few.”

“The emergency storm alert needs to be activated.”

Scot nodded in agreement. “We can make a run for the emergency shelter on Fringe Mountain and activate it. It’s not far from here.” He opened another warm drink.

They took a minute to eat and drink.

“Will people sense the danger and get to safety?” she asked.

“Don’t know, but it’s worth a try.”

“My dad and brothers left town, but what about your family?”

He looked down and his jaw muscles clenched before he spoke. “Mom called me to come home after Q snatched you from the elevator. I went. Our van was packed, and the other kids were home. Mom said we were moving to Tennessee. She told me after I left for school a deputy delivered divorce papers. Mom couldn’t take the humiliation anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

“You stayed for football?”

“Yeah, I asked to stay for the game tonight. Afterward, I’m supposed to drive to Tennessee to discuss my choices. Then you beamed your situation into our heads. No way could I leave you with him. I met with the others, and we hatched a plan. Trev agreed with you about the Hum. I came in through the XO entrance.”

“Why didn’t you send Trev?”

“They lost faith in me. We had voted to quit working with Quitman. And then, I gave you up to him.”

“What’s the XO plan?”

“Pack for us to go high. They wouldn’t leave without us, so they’re near.”

“I think the Hum’s effects will be worse than dealing with escaped Swarmers. Everyone in town needs to go higher.”

“There are emergency phones at the station. Let’s play the cards we’ve been dealt.”

“Cards?”

His cheeks burned red as he gritted out his meaning. “We weren’t dealt a solid. Quitman and the other doctors put this play in motion. We can warn Cloudland residents and call for help. We should leave afterward.”

“But—”

“I want to play football.” He stared at her and then glanced at the screen, where the workers tried to leverage open doors. “Q can’t have the last word on our lives.”

“The new Swarm is airborne.”

He pointed at his eye. “Some men in Cloudland know how to kill them. Heck, we can retrieve the weapons we left behind on the catwalk and draw them away from town.”

“They’ll track us? You’re sure?”

Scot nodded. “XOs are better than blood lures. Quitman told us that. We don’t want to be trapped, though. I’ll get the weapons. Get ready.”

He went out the door before she could protest being separated. Staring at the screen, she prayed for wisdom and felt better. Scot came back in dragging two bags and locked the door. “The new ones are smarter. They’re climbing.” He squatted down and went through the bags. “Quitman’s on his feet. No more guilt.”

His brilliant blue eyes focused on her face.

She nodded. “Agreed.”

He grinned.

She went to the computer and stared at their faces. They knew death loomed, and they didn’t want to let life go. They were lab workers, custodians, and security staff. “Do they get a warning?”

“Don’t know. They…”

“Knew the risks.”

He didn’t quite cover up his surprise. “You sounded like Quitman.”

She flinched. “They kept his secrets and knew about the burn protocol.”

“A few knew. Most didn’t.”

She shook her head. “Q told me scientists came here for the freedom to explore new frontiers without regulations, and to find cures and fame.”

“It’s only fair they face the monsters they’ve created,” he said. “Right?”

She nodded.

“You’re tougher. Ready?”

Her teeth clenched and sweat beaded her forehead from the Hum. Hives itched on her throat and on her chest—new Hum effects.

Scot staggered to the wall, blinking his eyes. “What’s happening?”

“Hum is nearing its end.”

“You feel sick too?”

“Yeah.” Sharp pains behind her eyes made her wince. Her balance tipped and she leaned against the wall. “The most important thing we have to do today is survive the Hum.” She beamed an impression of the after effects to Scot.

He clutched his head between his hands. “Stop!” He looked up at her. “We’ve got to bounce.”

“Not while we’re loopy. We’ll be easy targets.” She reached out to him, and they held on to each other. After the sensation passed, they walked back to the weapons bags and picked them up. “I think that was the last warning.”

He took a deep breath and faced the keyboard. Scot popped his knuckles and typed in the password. He slung the bag’s strap over his shoulder and she did the same.

Swarmers beat on their door. “It might open first,” Scot said, pushing the sofa against it.

A female computer voice came over the intercom. “Emergency burn protocol countdown interruption. Prepare to exit in one minute and then resume countdown.”

Scot shut down the computer, but not before she saw the trapped employees get ready to run. “Exit doors stay open for forty seconds, so don’t trip.” Both doors in the pod creaked, and with a hiss, rolled back.

Behind them, Swarmers snarled as they fought to be first inside. Scot pushed her through the back exit door.

“Follow me,” he shouted, and sprinted ahead.

Rett

Rett Franklin dozed at the wheel.

An angry blare from a car horn jerked him back to alertness. He swerved into the right lane just in time. He missed getting sideswiped by a white sports car going over ninety. Red brake lights flashed and then sparks ignited as the driver lost control, and the white car slid along a guard rail before flipping outside of Atlanta on I-85.

He accelerated to move past the car in case it flipped back onto the roadway. Traffic in his rearview dropped from sight. Since he left Cloudland on the run, he didn’t stop to help. Rett wouldn’t let guilt creep up on him either. There were times in a man’s life when family had to come first. Like this one. His sons’ soft breaths reassured Rett he had done the right thing. In Texas, they could heal. He drove on and continued checking his rearview.

He considered and rejected stopping until he found rooms at a Holiday Inn close to the airport. Rett parked the SUV in back, so it couldn’t be seen from the road. In the room, he tucked the boys under sheets and blankets and took a hot shower. Before falling into bed for four hours’ sleep, Rett called Eddie Jean’s cell and then the number for Doctor Allen. No one answered. Despite the cramps in his muscles and heavy heart, he fell asleep. He managed to snooze through the alarm, but when the room phone gave its wake-up call, Rett sat up.

Herding the boys through a quick shower, he managed to grab fresh fruit, milk, and biscuits before they checked out and took a shuttle to the airport. They were booked on the earliest flight out. The boys ate before they passed through security.

He scanned the other passengers at the gate and noticed three Cloudland residents. They looked sick and pale. The men didn’t act like they recognized him or the boys. Rett pretended the same. First class boarded.

He read the newspaper while the other passengers found their seats. At 6:30 a.m. they were wheels up. A heavy weight lifted from his shoulders.

Rett allowed himself to close his eyes after the pilot gave a brief welcome and flight attendants stood to prepare refreshments. Both boys fell asleep as soon as he buckled them in.

Something’s wrong.

Rett folded the newspaper. He felt a change in cabin pressure, and his ears popped like crazy. Then a foul, bloody discharge oozed out both ears and dripped onto his jacket. He swabbed out his ears with a napkin tucked inside his jacket. The same dark brown substance oozed down Teddy’s cheek too. He checked his watch—thirty minutes into the flight. He signaled to the flight attendant. She handed him damp washcloths and said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re not the only ones.”

Rett wiped his ears and face again and then did the same with each boy. They woke and then fell back asleep. His ears stopped throbbing and the buzzing noise stopped. Suddenly, a force grabbed hold and shoved the jet straight upward. He could feel and hear the engines straining and whining in protest.

Passengers screamed.

Their bird bucked and vibrated for way too long. Luggage spilled into the aisle from overhead compartments and yellow oxygen masks dropped. For a horrendous moment, the plane rocked wildly before righting itself. Panting, Rett put his mask on and then leaned over and put masks on each boy. Rett crossed himself, grateful they were still asleep. He saw their flight attendant stand to make an announcement, but she fainted right before he blacked out.

***

Rett woke to pandemonium. Had the oxygen failed? He yanked the mask off and glanced around. Most people wore their masks. From hysterical conversations, he learned a few people passed out, including the pilot, while others didn’t. No one knew why.

He glanced at his boys. They were so pale their skin looked like the underbellies of fish, but they were breathing. Both had dried blood around their noses and inside their masks. Passengers prayed and others called out for medical assistance. White-faced flight attendants were either still sprawled in the aisle trying to get up or terrified and buckled in their seats.

Rett wiped the boys’ faces clean first and then his own. What a disgusting mess. An older woman across the aisle handed him clean ones. “Thank you.” He swabbed out their masks and put them back on.

“We need a doctor in the rear,” a flight attendant called out five minutes later. “Any kind of doctor.”

FASTEN SEATBELTS flashed.

Five minutes ticked past before the pilot spoke. The tremor in his voice trumped his words. “Folks, I’m back in charge. I had pulled our plane back on course and flipped on the autopilot before the flight crew passed out. We’re fine up here and hope you are as well. We radioed Dallas/Fort Worth, and we’ll be one of the first planes down.”

“What happened?” a man yelled. “People passing out isn’t normal.”

“We deserve to know,” another shouted.

A flight attendant spoke. “Please remain calm and remain seated.”

“Any nurses on board?” a flight attendant shouted from the rear. “Anyone with medical training? Please come to the rear.”

A man screamed from the back. The sound made Rett’s neck breakout in goosebumps. The last time he heard similar screams, Anna Martin’s relatives were on Quitman’s land. The rough flight continued another three to five minutes, and the plane rattled like it was shaking apart. Rett couldn’t remember ever being on a plane traveling this fast through rough air. When they transitioned to smoother air, Rett relaxed tense muscles and stretched out his legs.

The first-class flight attendant stood and shouted, “The pilot says we’re low enough to take off the oxygen masks.”

Rett left his on. Everyone he could see did the same.

A strange sound erupted from the back. It sounded like animals snapping and growling—like Jenna did. Wild screaming and panic erupted from rear passengers.

People left their seats, crawling up the aisle to escape. Rett unbuckled his seatbelt in order to look behind him and removed his oxygen mask. Passengers stampeded up the aisle. They pushed and shoved each other in the surge. Spilled luggage and a wedged refreshment cart blocked them. “Help! Help us! He’s killing people with his bare hands!”

“People are dyin’ back here, please Jesus!”

“Oh my God. Another one!”

Rett couldn’t believe his eyes when cranberry-colored blood speckled the air and landed on startled passengers. A man in a dark suit sitting two rows in front of Rett stood and walked back to the coach section. He held onto seat backs and raised a federal badge. “FBI! Go back to your seats.”

Rett stood and caught a glimpse of the people jammed up in the aisle at the back and center. Forward passengers shoved them back, not wanting to get blocked in their own seats. A young boy’s face began to change into something hideous in the middle section. Rett couldn’t believe his eyes. It looked like the thing on Quitman’s land.

A dark-haired man beside the teenager unbuckled his seat belt and jumped up, screaming, “Help. My son’s having a seizure!”

Rett knew it wasn’t a seizure changing him. If it went the same as for the things on Quitman’s land, the whole plane would be infected soon.

The FBI guy whipped his head around and shouted back to the first-class flight attendant, “Land the plane! Oh my God. Tell him to land. Now!”

The air became turbulent again. Rett heard a flight attendant screaming through the intercom in the galley. “A man has gone insane. He’s killing people right and left! Tearing their arms off and biting their heads.”

What the hell? Rett dropped back down into his seat. He felt the jet engines kick in and momentum pressed him into the cushion. Minutes ticked and the screams continued. Passengers shouted for help. A cacophony of terror woke the boys. Rett leaned over to remove their masks and consoled them.

“Stay calm, boys. We’re landing soon.”

“Daddy!” Timmy shrieked, eyes bulging. “We’re crashing!”

Rett leaned over and hugged him. “No, son. We’re fine.”

The pilot came on: “Flight attendants, prepare for emergency landing. Say again, prepare for emergency landing. Open all chutes and save yourselves!”

Rett couldn’t believe his ears. He concluded the pilot knew what occurred in the rear and suspected they might not make a landing. Evil had boarded from Cloudland.

That’s when Rett knew he wanted to live, to make a difference, to give the good life to his boys as the old man had handed to him. Rett’s habits were the old man’s habits. He knew where the closest exit was, and he kept his body in top shape for emergencies. He had never heard of a flight like this one. He only hoped the pilot was as talented as the one who landed a plane in the Hudson River.

“Rett!”

No, the lunatic in the back did not call out his name.

The plane dived. The engines whined and then eased into a sigh. As soon as it did, the screaming in the back grew louder. Timmy grabbed Rett’s hand and he did the same with Tommy. Screams marked every passing second.

“Rett!”

Louis

“Louis! Wake up.”

Was that Cindy Van Zant? His secretary had turned into a supermodel. Her vivacious smile dazzled and her eyes sparkled like sun beams on the ocean. She had an oval face, sorrel-colored eyes, and curly auburn hair. Louis felt good, like waking up at home in his boyhood bed.

Cold water splashed his face and flooded up his nose. Louis sat up, gagging.

“Sorry, Louis,” Cindy said, handing him a towel, “but you pinched my ass.”

He coughed and then vomited on the floor.

His stomach cramped as sour smells fouled the air. Seconds later, Cindy scooped up his emesis with newspapers and dumped it into a trashcan. Louis looked around and realized he was back in his lab at UVA. What the…

“Feeling better?” she asked, dampening a washcloth at the sink. Cindy walked back to his cot and wiped his forehead.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the cloth and rubbing it over his face. “I feel spacey.”

“Your skin turned so gray I thought you had a heart attack. Almost called 911.”

Groaning, he dropped his head in his hands. Queasiness also gave him a pounding headache. He took a deep breath and stared down at the glossy linoleum floor. He heard Cindy at the sink washing her hands. A wintergreen scent cleared the sour odors from the air as she sprinkled air refresher on the floor.

“How did I get here?” he asked.

Startled, she whirled around. “You don’t…” She cleared her throat. “I got a call from a Flameion rep. She said you required security to be waiting at the airport. I asked campus police to pick you up and take you home. They said you arrived drunk, but they drove you home. An hour ago, security called and said you staggered into your office. I came in, and we talked but you fell asleep.” She put the disinfectant bottle on his desk and patted his shoulder. “You’re not yourself. What’s happened?”

The ache in his head felt like an electrical zap. As if he had a nerve stimulating device, like a TENS unit hooked on his scalp. “What day is it?”

She looked crushed and grasped both his hands. “AL’s really kicking you. It’s Friday morning.”

“Friday,” he repeated in a daze.

“Some Halloween party.”

He released her hands. “No party and no drinking.”

Concerned, she dropped to her knees in front of him. “Your clothes are mismatched and you’re missing pieces.”

What? Louis rubbed his eyes. “Is Grandpop’s brain safe?”

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty in the morning. Your nine o’clock meeting was canceled. The dean’s wife had surgery for appendicitis. I sent flowers from you, by the way. Want me to drive you home?”

He opened his mouth and snapped it shut. To speak of what happened in Cloudland would make him sound like a certifiable nut. The truth often complicated matters. Still, Cindy was perceptive and into spiritual crap and natural cures.

Her eyes narrowed and she said, “Spit it out, Louis. What happened to you?”

“Instead of swiping my microbe, Flameion’s representative, Doctor Ava Allen, flew me to Alabama to tour their lab facility.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “I saw things there no one would believe. Monsters.” He laughed, wishing he hadn’t said monsters. “Cin, she doped me and injected my brain with acid. I thought it would kill me.”

“Louis, you’re shaking and you’re scaring me.”

His eyes jerked from focal point to focal point, and his fingers clutched at her pink sweater. “Better hit me with the water again.”

“Could this be AL fog? You’ve wandered from home to the lab enough times that security notes it and follows you to make sure you’re safe.”

Christ, did students know him as the campus lunatic? Louis reached over and pulled her up to sit beside him. He had confided in her once about the spacey feelings he had from time to time. “No, it’s not from AL.”

Cindy’s eyes searched his face. “Flameion is secretive but legit. Its lab is in Atlanta, not Alabama. Their specialty is immune system drugs, not Alzheimer’s treatments.”

“You found their public face. Search deeper.” He coughed and grabbed for a wad of tissues in his tee-shirt pocket. Cindy picked up something red while he blew his nose. “Is this your jump drive?”

Tears of gratitude flooded his eyes as he took it from her fingers and into his hand. Susan Cho didn’t tell Ava he had it. Cho wasn’t all bad, just desperate. “A Flameion microbiologist, Doctor Susan Cho, escaped with me on the company jet. She stole the jump drive along with other items to use as proof. Doctor Allen drugged me in flight. I woke up here.”

“What’s on it?”

“My brain treatment.”

Her finger pads slid through his hair, not unlike Eddie Jean had done, but Cindy searched for scalp punctures. “You won’t find any holes or scabs on my scalp. They didn’t even shave my hair first.”

She gulped. After a few seconds of silence, Cindy put her hand on his thigh. He jumped.

“Excuse me.” Flushing, she removed her hand, but he caught it and put it back.

“Didn’t want to gross you out by letting you get close. I stink,” he said.

Cindy smiled.

God, she was sweet, but it never felt right to act on his feelings given his AL future. He decided to tell her he loved her, but felt foolish after what had transpired with Ava.

“I’m going to walk to your condo pretending to look for you.” She leaned over to grab a Sharpie pen from his desk and wrote directions on his palm. “I rented a Shady Lane apartment last week. Number 205. I couldn’t take the daily commute. Wait for me there.”

“Why did you rent an apartment?”

She blushed. “If I have to explain, you’ll never understand.”

He didn’t want to gross her out by kissing her after vomiting. “I’m your boss, but I wanted to reach out to you so many times.”

“Why didn’t you? Because we’re so different?”

He smoothed hair from her eyes. “There’s no future with me, and you have small children.”

“I don’t care about AL. Let me take care of you. I love you, Louis.”

Louis hugged her. He wanted to pull her down on the sofa with him, but he had to get the jump drive to the authorities first. “Will you help me?”

“Of course,” Cindy said, “but you must go to my apartment.”

“Why?”

“In case the microbiologist you mentioned is in your condo—dead.”

His fist tightened around the jump drive. “That’s crazy.”

“Crazier than having acid injected into your brain? If your story is true, then she’s probably dead and you’ve been set up.” She pressed her car keys in his hand. “Get moving.”

“No, you can’t be involved.”

“I already am. The man I’m crazy about asked for my help.”

Louis hugged her again.

She kissed him all over his face, but he enjoyed the light smooches on his eyes the most. Cindy jumped up, turned, and blew him a kiss at the door.

Grinning, Louis stared at Cindy’s car keys and the instructions. He placed the jump drive into the paper-towel dispenser in his tiny bathroom. Damned if he’d let Ava make him run and hide. Stripping off his stinky clothes, he grabbed a towel and ripped paper from a bar of soap before stepping into a shower.

He stayed long enough to get the job done, used the soap to wash his mouth out, and climbed out feeling hungry. Louis toweled dry and dressed from the emergency stash of clothes he kept on hand. From his desk drawer, he removed a can of Boost and gulped it down. He removed the jump drive and went down the hall, greeting lab workers and secretarial staff.

Inside the residents’ room, he loaded up the jump drive. Louis saw enough to make goosebumps tumble down his spine. He wrote a short explanation and then e-mailed the contents to the COGS. Last, he uploaded it to YouTube. Publicity was the best way to stop Ava Allen.

“Lie your way out of this, bitch!” He hoped it went viral.

He removed the jump drive and hid it in a pocket of a brown jacket hanging from a hook on the door. Louis stepped out whistling, and a policeman shouted, “Police. Freeze!”

Eddie Jean

When Eddie Jean and Scot reached the first door in their sprint, they turned right and ran down another corridor. Eddie Jean estimated the last stretch equaled the length of an Olympic swimming pool. They were well ahead of Swarmers, but one stumble would close the gap—permanently. Running in too-tight boots slowed her speed.

“Hurry!” Scot yelled, taking her weapons bag and floating ahead.

Scot leapt through the exit first, and she went through as the heavy door began to close. He waited for her and he wasn’t winded. “Lose those boots!”

She leaned over, hands on her thighs, to catch her breath. If he hadn’t taken the bag, she’d be on the other side. A grating sound and then the door locked. Seconds later, Swarmers banged against the door.

“EJ?” he asked.

“I’m not losing the boots until I find shoes.”

“My mom could’ve outrun you.” Scot’s face changed, and he tuned into telep.

Morning painted the mountain in swirls of tangerine colors. A crisp October breeze cooled Eddie Jean’s forehead. Adrenalin saturated her blood, making her jittery. Her eyes scanned the shadowy woodlands, searching for movement. Far to the left, Eddie Jean saw five lab workers run into the woods, pursued by two Swarmers.

“Don’t move,” Scot warned her. “Let them pass.” He knelt down and removed a hunting rifle and checked the rounds. “Brodie beamed me. Five Swarmers are in town and electricity went down. People will wake to Swarmers running up their street. He and Trev killed two. They’re holed up in your church’s bell tower.”

“Did you tell them first priority is to survive the Hum?”

He nodded.

Screams made Eddie Jean wince. “Aren’t you going to shoot?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the straggler both Swarmers brought down. She’d seen wild tigers bring down prey in the same manner on Nat Geo.

“Not before we’re clear and ready. Noise draws them and they pile on. Follow the flagstone pathway.” Scot dropped the heavy bag on her shoulder. She stumbled forward.

“Where’s Cara?”

“With Bill Franco. I told her to go higher but to alert the sheriff first if they can.”

She noticed the light-colored stones glowed green under weak light, like glitter. Her peripheral vision had blurred, and her gaze jumped from dark clump to gloomy shadows. “Where are we headed?”

Scot brought up the rear, checking for pursuit. “Quitman kept a private, fenced parking lot. My Jeep is there.”

Behind them a woman shrieked, “Help!”

Eddie Jean stopped, and Scot bumped into her.

“Faster, EJ. We can’t stop to help.”

“You have a gun.”

He sounded annoyed when he answered. “It’s a rifle. Have you changed your mind about pulling the town’s emergency alarm? If so, feel free to fire.”

Frustrated, she jogged faster and wondered if she carried the heaviest bag. Scot moved with ease and seemed comfortable. “Fence is twenty feet high,” he said.

Inside, she saw Q’s red truck and Scot’s Jeep. Scot tossed his bag over the fence and did the same to hers.

“Climb,” he ordered, using a strap to secure the rifle on his back.

Freed of the extra weight, she jumped up, but her boots’ tips wouldn’t fit inside the fence gaps. She pulled herself up with her arms. On top she paused because her biceps ached. She heard running through the brush.

“Swarmers caught our scent.” Scot scrambled over the fence. “Better hurry.”

Eddie Jean swung her body over the top and made her way down. Her arm muscles cramped. Scot shouted, “Drop now.”

She did, and he caught her, breaking the fall. A Swarmer rushed to the fence with a bellow. The sudden noise made him sound like a wounded bear. Its attack speed startled her.

“They’re faster,” Scot said. “If we weren’t XO, he would have infected us.”

Another joined the first, and then another. Swarmers tried to push down the fence and then settled for biting it. This group looked different—in fact, they leered at her as if they could see.

“They see me,” she said.

“No, their smell senses are better.”

“No, they’re watching and learning. What if they start climbing?”

“Fence is built high and climbing requires skill.”

“All the lab doors didn’t seal,” she said, unable to watch them learning how to attack. “Are Swarmers different? One skill set for those who inhaled the yellow mist, another for those infected by bites or scratches. We know the airborne version causes eye differences.”

Scot shrugged. “All that matters is how to drop them.”

She jumped when the fence bent under their weight.

“Chill. The fence will hold,” he said.

“One’s climbing.” Her heart galloped and her breathing kept pace. “How can people escape?”

Scot brought his rifle up, moved in closer, and fired through the right eye. The shot made her flinch, and the noise blocked out the Hum. She saw a dark splatter exit the second one’s head as Scot repeated the shot. The third growled and snorted while beating its hands on its chest. Scot lowered the barrel. The third one worked itself into a rage as Scot walked closer to the fence. Scot stopped and said, “Dad?”

Eddie Jean put her hand to her mouth.

The Swarmer quieted and watched Scot. It sniffed the air. The Swarmer turned its head left and right, and the sun reflected off his blond hair patches. With a grunt, the Swarmer climbed and used its arm strength as she did.

“Scot? Let’s go.”

Eddie Jean wanted to close her eyes, but instead she moved up behind him. She put her hand on his shoulder. A few too many heartbeats slipped past before Scot fired and his dad fell.

Eddie Jean sobbed and then wiped tears.

Scot turned and said, “Get the bags.”

“Scot.”

More Swarmers piled against the fence, growling and watching them.

“Move!”

She leaned over and picked up both bags.

Scot began nonstop firing.

When she looked back, she saw more rushing the fence. She dropped the bags at the Jeep’s rear. Scot reloaded. She heard them running to pile on. At least their gunshots drew Swarmers away and gave the other people a chance.

“They’re stacking the dead to get a higher start up the fence,” Scot shouted, jogging back to her. “Swarmers have changed.” He removed the keys from a leg pocket and unlocked the vehicle. She opened the back hatch. It was packed with clothing, camping gear, and footballs.

She looked at him.

“Mom moved out, remember? I kept what I needed.”

She tossed her bag in, but Scot unzipped his and took out more rounds. He also loaded another rifle for her before they slid into the seats. Swarmers surrounded them on all four sides. They shook the fence so hard it rattled.

“Safety,” he said, and pointed to it. She carried the rifle in her lap even though she’d never shot a weapon. He put the gun barrel beside his leg with the rifle butt resting near his hands.

She licked her lips. “I liked your dad. He offered to sell my necklaces in his shop without charging me rent—”

“He wanted to impress Jenna.”

She didn’t want to argue. “He was humble and kind.” She sniffed.

“Told you, that thing wasn’t my dad! Don’t cry for it.”

She swallowed and sucked in her lower lip.

“Buckle up.” Scot cranked the engine. “Let’s hope the gate opens.”

Engine noise agitated the ones on the fence. Eddie Jean saw a Swarmer reach the top and it fell over to the asphalt below. It staggered forward, dragging a broken leg.

“Q said they don’t feel pain, but I think they do,” Scot said, looking in the rearview. “The drive to feed is why it keeps moving.”

Scot opened the gate, and the Swarmers jumped back when it moved. He stomped the gas. They ran down two and behind them the gate rolled shut.

“Let’s get to the emergency alarm. Find my phone and call the sheriff. Warn him Swarmers are on the loose.”

He turned on his lights as they sped down the narrow road until they merged to the county road. Scot drove fast, and she didn’t dare tell him to slow down. She found his phone between his seat and the seatbelt lock and yanked it out.

“It’s dead. Charger?”

He shook his head and muttered, “Smart phones are an oxymoron.”

Scot turned off paved road onto dirt a half-mile from the private airport. He switched to four-wheel drive. The recent rains had created potholes, and they bounced over them. She watched him wrestle with the wheel to keep the Jeep from sliding. A few minutes later, he stopped and stared at the muddy road. “Look at all the animal prints.”

“A herd of deer passed through here.”

“Or animals are heading for higher ground,” he said, shoving hair from his eyes. He turned on the radio and country music blared. After a while they came to another paved road, and then, a mile later, a dirt road. “Almost there.”

She braced herself as they bumped up and down. The washboard road loosened the rearview mirror and it dropped to the floorboard.

“There’s the gate.”

She saw a lock and thick chain. “You have the key?”

“Bolt cutters are in the bag. Get out and cover me.”

“I can’t shoot people.”

He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “No more, emo. You’re XO and welcome to the new world. Aim for the right eye. You miss and it enrages them.”

She licked her lips. “You didn’t see my mom or sister?”

He shook his head. “Would you want me to shoot?”

Eddie Jean jumped out, and her boots sank into mud. She lifted the rifle out and released the safety like she saw her uncles do during hunting season.

Scot retrieved the bolt cutters and went to the gate. While he worked on the chain, she stood at attention, rifle ready, and listened to the silence. Even the insects were mute.

“Got it,” Scot sang out. He threw open the gate and got back in. Scot moved the Jeep inside, and she walked back to close the gate. Scot got out and together they threaded the chain around to keep the gate closed.

“You think Q got lazy and released Swarmers?” she asked.

“No. Heads up.”

Unnerved, she climbed back into the seat. He drove to the square concrete building. Eddie Jean marveled at her vision. It had improved since Q exposed her to Scot’s father’s virus.

“Q got Flameion to build the bunker, you know, just in case. He showed us where he kept a spare key. Said he’d skin us if we ever broke in and used the place for a hangout. Charged phones are inside, and it’s stocked with MREs and water.”

“You brought Tayla here?”

He glared at her guess work. “Once or twice.”

She glanced at the radio antenna high above the roof.

“Tower platform is about twenty feet behind the building,” he said. “We can emergency broadcast, but I’m not sure how far. Get the bags. For now on, we leave nothing behind.”

He slid out and took both rifles while she went to the hatch to yank out the bags. She heard the doors lock as she walked back to the emergency shelter. He slipped the keys into his leg pocket and jogged ahead to open the building.

By the time she walked inside the door, he had activated the emergency siren. The sound drowned out speech as lights flickered on inside.

“Town is warned,” Scott shouted, and pumped his arm.

They grinned at each other. The siren would save lives.

She dropped one bag and went out for the other. Halfway back she stumbled and almost fell. She managed to carry the second bag in and dropped it.

“Hey, careful,” he said.

Eddie Jean locked the door and then pain stabbed her ears. Blood oozed out. She wobbled, feeling nauseous. The ground rippled and heaved before the Hum exploded. Screaming, she fell on the floor and writhed in pain.

She lost track of Scot. Her lungs ached for air, and she rolled to her side, gasping. A loud noise erupted like a passing train. The ground shook and vibrated.

Scot lifted her up and pulled her to a metal desk. He pushed her underneath and then joined her. “Sounds like a tornado,” he yelled.

She cried out, not caring if he saw her suffer from her insides knotting up and twisting. He grunted, but kept calm. Eddie Jean wrapped her arms around him as the wave of vibrations affected everything—ears, eyes, bones, even creating a shrill ringing within her skull like a bell. Blood seeped from Scot’s nose and ears. They thrashed against one another bumping into the sides of the desk. She couldn’t even feel her legs.

Equipment crashed to the floor and fell on the desk. Something heavy struck the roof.

“Percussion waves,” Scot shouted.

She felt his arms encircle her waist. They cracked heads. Then their bodies slammed against the desk. The light fixture crashed to the floor, plunging them into darkness. Her muscles turned gooey and they twisted into shapes that shouldn’t be possible.

Eddie Jean closed her eyes and tried not to resist. Acute pain numbed all nerve sensations. Beside her, Scot went into a seizure before she did the same. She was grateful when everything went dark.

Louis

Louis stretched his arms upward. He guessed this meant Susan Cho must be dead in his condo. Grief made him blink his eyes and bite his lip. He didn’t anticipate this scenario.

He saw people peer around doorways and then dart back to safety. A housekeeper in a brown uniform stepped from the coffee room. She saw the gun, dropped her caffeine fix, and scrambled back inside.

The pain in his ears reached a pitch he could no longer tolerate. He could barely hear normal speech and keep his balance. The Hum reminded him of a huge crowd whispering at a sold-out concert right before the band takes the stage. Sweat beaded his upper lip. A powerful force headed straight for them. What should he do?

“Turn around, slowly,” the policeman ordered. Three other officers advanced with guns drawn—to handcuff him, Louis guessed. He tried to smile, but feared he might look sinister. In the background, he noticed an older officer decked out in gold medals and gold hash marks on his uniform arguing with Cindy Van Zant.

A sleepy-eyed pathology resident threw open a lab door and blocked Louis from the line of fire. Louis shoved the resident forward, ducked into the lab, and locked the door. He heard shouting in the hallway as the poor resident hit the floor. Louis went through another door and jogged to the AL lab.

After what happened to him in Cloudland, Louis had no intention of being imprisoned. He hoped to defuse the situation by bargaining from the one place he felt comfortable. His lab.

“Doctor Janzen!” an officer shouted.

Louis wasn’t surprised he followed. Everyone in the building had common door keys.

Passing the main research lab, he saw his dedicated lab team bent over their microscopes. He turned down another hallway to confuse the men behind him. His AL team kept working, unaware of his current ordeal. Louis would never want his personal problems to hobble their work. Finding the cure for AL was a noble endeavor. Whatever happened to him, his colleagues would be safe inside the shielded lab.

If he hurried, he would make it to his private cubby before the police caught him. He turned and across the hall in the AL war room, he saw his nephew, Justin Janzen, drinking coffee. Louis had forgotten about their standing breakfast date every Friday. Justin, a pre-med student, reminded Louis of himself. Behind him, he heard booted footsteps.

“Justin,” Louis yelled, “go back to your dorm.”

“Freeze!”

Justin looked up grinning, and then his eyes widened. He grabbed his head like he had been shot and staggered to the side.

“Justin!” Louis screamed.

No. His nephew wasn’t shot, but a force, something big, struck the building. A tornado? The entire structure wobbled and oxygen disappeared. He gasped for air. Concussion waves passed through walls and shoved Louis to the floor. Glass windows shattered, except in the sturdy AL research lab. Too late Louis realized the force waves might throw the AL lab into an emergency lockdown. Sure enough, he heard the alarm. Louis didn’t know what happened. A bomb? He felt too feeble to think.

Inside his head, a scratching sensation made him think the Anchorons gnawed their way to freedom. He dropped to his knees, screaming. His brain burned. Then he noticed, between tears and snot, the policemen rolled and jerked on the floor. Could this be the Hum eruption Eddie Jean predicted? Didn’t she say Hum survival mattered most?

How did he sense the wave coming?

His tympanic membranes stopped aching, and he staggered to his feet. The floor rippled beneath him. Floor tiles shot up from their grout and into the air like square bullets. The force tossed him up and threw him down the hallway. He skidded headfirst into the far wall. Air popped out of his lungs with a belch, and he felt loopy. Inside his ear canal, something stung.

Grunting, he jabbed his finger in one ear and encountered a soft, squishy gel not unlike the inside of a grape. Louis tried to pull it out and figured it caused his dizziness. He couldn’t breathe. It felt like he was underwater, floating and twisting into a deformed shape.

Underwater. Louis flashed back to his vacation in May. A weird, dangerous jellyfish had washed up on the Mexican beach. A crowd gathered around it and many locals looked disturbed. Louis had never seen anything like the strange, twisted creature. Brave boys poked the jellyfish with shell fragments, but the membrane wasn’t punctured. He asked a surf fisherman to tell him about the jellyfish. The old guy spoke bad English. “New kind. Globe warming.”

Were new species popping up and going unnoticed? Global warming became a convenient scapegoat for those too scared to explain the science. Last time he heard, oil spills had caused minor mutations. No one had ever suggested an oil spill would produce an entire new species. Where had the jellyfish come from?

He had read about hybrids in the Arctic, even though he denied knowing it to Eddie Jean. Matings between grizzly and polar bears, bowhead and right whales, and narwhal and beluga whales had made new species. Hybrids were a normal part of evolution. The articles had omitted details on the speed at which the new species were produced. The theory of evolution happening slowly, trashed. Few paid attention. Even me.

He had returned the next day and asked the same fisherman what symptoms the new jellyfish breed caused when it stung human flesh.

“Stinger makes deep, uh, sores.”

Louis used hand gestures to help his speech. “The stinger is alive and motile?”

Laughing, the man answered, “No like sperm, okay, maybe yes. Not sure what you mean. Stinger needles move around. But no worries, season over.”

Louis felt relieved he hadn’t run into the hideous jellyfish while swimming. Knowing it existed wouldn’t have kept him out of the ocean. He lived on borrowed AL time. In Mexico, he had decided to change his life. He planned to get the family all together in one place, build connected housing, so they could all share in the care of their Alzheimer’s relatives in a group. He knew retired nurses willing to take shifts to ease the workload.

His aging mother was exhausted from moving from house to house to assist with the nursing care of her grown children. His sisters-in-laws were devastated by the AL situation and the physical care their spouses required. Distance killed the family’s chances of helping one another. Louis believed life should end with self-respect intact. To ensure the possibility for his relatives, he planned to cash in his 401k, buy the land, and build a Janzen compound so his relatives could live their final years in dignity together.

Louis dropped out of his vacation daydream when his ears popped again and sticky fluid drained down his neck. He smelled sulfur when he sniffed the exudate from his ears. The stench woke him from a daze, similar to popping an ammonia vial under his nose.

He crawled on his knees toward the lab viewing window, feeling dopey. Even jagged glass shards didn’t faze him. He needed to see if his lab team was safe. Louis used his hands to claw up the wall and stood, panting. His vision had changed, and he couldn’t focus his mind.

He glanced inside the lab, blinking his eyes while swaying on his feet. His thoughts were cluttered and sticky. He noticed the lab specimens stored in shatter-proof containers had exploded. Dead samples looked alive on the counters multiplying and growing in size. How could that be? Even as he considered the reason, he marveled at his excellent vision. But he couldn’t focus his attention. His AL research team lied scattered on the floor in odd positions. No, two were standing like him. Theo Frazier, a leader, looked asleep on his feet. Why didn’t he try to reset the alarm? Louis fumbled with the intercom.

“Theo, put the code in to reset the locks!”

No one moved. The alarm trapped them in the lab. Focus. His brain couldn’t work out what occurred. What he saw wasn’t possible, therefore he was hallucinating or he suffered from brain injury. He refused to believe what he saw because it skewed all tenets of basic science. He blinked and stared at the unbelievable.

Louis lived for the science. Life made sense based on scientific principles. Science created order out of chaos. A bleed, yeah, the head injury caused bleeding in his brain, and it affected his vision like people described out-of-body experiences. Besides, he felt faint again, but before he collapsed his rational mind told him what he saw was impossible. Good. If he believed his eyes, then monsters of legend walked the earth again. And legends weren’t true, right?

Eddie Jean

Where am I? Eddie Jean blinked, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. The air was stuffy and too warm. A hand dropped over her mouth and she flinched. Scot’s lips touched her ear as he whispered, “Swarmers. Half the roof has caved in. We’re sealed in for now. I’m going for the weapons bag.”

She nodded, listening. The Hum was gone. Slowly, she raised her legs and moved her arms and fingers. Normal. No lights were on, but the interior was as clear as day. Maybe she had night vision now. She scratched her arm. Her skin felt scorching hot under the shirt. She looked down and gaped.

A colorful, phosphorescent sheen gleamed from her hands. She rolled up her sleeve. The startling effect went up her arms. Charles Darwin had been intrigued by the lights in the ocean. He studied them during his five-year science journey on the Beagle. Her skin glowed with the same weird, silver-green ocean color. She tried to wipe it off, and the layer under her epidermis crunched like potato chips.

Fingers quivering, she pressed the skin on her chest under her necklaces. Crunch. Crunch. The same brittle sensation extended to her back and legs. She started to touch her face and hesitated. Scot looked the same to her, and then she noticed his pupils as he crept back. His pupils had a cat-eye effect. Instead of a vertical slit, he had a slit from his pupil, across his blue iris, and into the tear ducts at the inner edge of his eye.

“Other bag is pinned under debris,” he said. “They tracked us here. There’s at least twenty and more coming. What’s wrong?”

“Your eyes—there’s a black slit in your iris. Does it hurt?”

“No, I see in the dark even better than before, though.” He tilted her chin. “Same with you, but it looks more like a light bulb shape to me. Maybe its purpose is to let in more light.”

“How else am I different?”

He sucked in his lips and said, “Your skin glows. My uncle called it bioluminescence and my aunt called it fire in the water.”

She couldn’t look at him. “Anything else?”

“You can’t feel the color wheals on your skin?” he asked. “Even on your face?”

“No!” She examined her hands and upper arms. All she noticed was the phosphorescent sheen. Her palms covered her face before she could think. “I’m a freak?”

“You look like those tough chicks in fantasy games. Makes you look hot.”

She wanted to cry. “You dork.”

A Swarmer banged on the door and bellowed.

“I’ll try to probe them with telep.” He closed his eyes for a few minutes. “No mind intelligence.”

“They followed us here. How?”

“Don’t know.”

In some ways, he had more skills than her. When she tried to tune in with her finger pads resting on temporal pulses, she got a piercing headache. She dropped her hands. Loud, static gibberish beamed in and her head throbbed from the sound.

Scot nudged her with his elbow and beamed, {What is wrong}

“Static.”

He shrugged, and then the Swarmer at the door went wild. It kicked, punched, and threw its body weight into it. Then it left.

“My hearing is…” she said.

“Fantastic. Mine too.”

He stood and pulled her up. They both stretched. She wouldn’t let her mind drift to what would have happened if the Hum rupture occurred when they were outside.

Scot cleared his throat. “Once we open the door we need to know what we’re doing.”

Then she heard feet snapping wood splinters and pushing aside rocks. She heard a low growl and a sudden high-pitched roar as they hit the door. The sound echoed inside their safe space. It was an impressive display of power.

“No intelligence? They’re working as a team,” she said.

“We can’t intercept their communications either.”

“The Hum changed all. Before the Hum we controlled the Swarmers because they weren’t smart. Maybe they control us in the new future,” she said.

“Stop with the gloom and doom, okay?”

“Have you called the others to help us?”

“No, this is our fight. We’ll meet up when we get clear. They’ve had their own problems.”

“Twenty against two?”

“My call. If you have a better option, let’s hear it.”

She sighed. “What if my sister and my mother are out there?”

They locked stares.

“You want Kimmy to live on as a Swarmer?”

“Maybe they’ve evolved or will evolve in the next few days.”

He grunted but didn’t laugh at her. “You have to let them go. I’m sorry.”

She bit her lip and hung her head. He surprised her when he hugged her. She groaned at the idea of hurting them. Scot patted her back. “You okay?”

She sniffed and flipped hair behind her shoulders. “So, we’ve been given amazing upgrades, but we’re trapped.”

He grinned. “Gotta love Mother Nature. Ready for the blitz, soccer girl?”

“The sole option is to fight our way out?”

He nodded.

“If we didn’t have the weapons bag?”

“Same. We’d have to fight with what we could find. They’re coming in.”

After everything she went through yesterday, she had hoped day one post-Hum, would be better. Much better. If humans were making their last evolutionary stand, she’d go down fighting. First, she would pray the Swarmers would leave even though the resumed banging on the door didn’t give her much hope.

Eddie Jean selected a rifle from the bag and pulled out extra clips. “Better show me how to load and reload.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Louis

Louis’s hands ached and itched. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He’d passed out, he guessed. He quit wearing a wristwatch years ago—why count something he couldn’t control? He had no way to gauge the time or how long he’d been down. Pictures of various AL research teams he’d hung with pride along the hallway had tumbled to the floor. He sneezed and brushed slivers of glass off his face. His eyes were fine, thank goodness. In the distance, he heard shrill alarms.

All unanswered.

Louis tried three more times before he could sit up without feeling faint. He took a deep breath and decided to check for serious injuries. The first oddity he found was a huge blood clot the size of a plum attached to his left ear. Louis knew he should wait for paramedics, but they took their sweet time. Impatient, he ripped the clot off and felt nothing. He squeezed the black clot and found dried blood and tiny gray and red worms inside.

What? Panting, he tried to make sense of his body. He stared at his hands, but they didn’t register—almost as if they weren’t there. Was he in surgery? No, he recognized the hallway.

What’s happening? Where are the paramedics?

Look in the lab.

Panic made him nervous, jumpy. His thoughts were muddled and he couldn’t focus.

Something tapped on the lab viewing window.

He couldn’t look up, much less stand.

See us in the lab.

I don’t want to.

Louis started shaking. He didn’t want answers anymore. All he ever wanted was to be free from a soul-stealing disease. He didn’t sit back, helpless, waiting for others to do the work. He searched for the cure. Was a cure for AL too much to ask for? He shook his head to clear it and foul sulfurous fluids escaped his ears.

Okay, he owed it to his lab assistants to check on them. Tears blurred his vision, but he managed to stand, swaying a bit, with his back to the viewing window. He grabbed his stomach and doubled over with cramps. Pain seared his gut, creating an overwhelming need to eat bloody, raw meat.

Gases must have been released by the earthquake like the yellow mist in Cloudland. No, he rejected the thought. He didn’t have Swarm disease. Nope. No way.

No one called for help, unless he counted the nonstop tapping on the glass.

Tap-tap. The sound heard in nightmares. He shivered.

Stop worrying about losing thoughts.

Now he heard voices in his head. Schizophrenia? Louis rubbed his temples and his head felt rougher. Different.

“I’m Doctor Louis Janzen and this is my lab.” He felt stupid talking out loud, but it helped him focus even if his voice sounded muffled. The force wave had damaged his ears, he concluded. Inhaling, he turned to look inside the lab.

Two faces, two alien faces stared back.

Shaking, he blinked and decided he was under anesthesia. He hoped so, anyway. He looked down at his hand, or maybe he should say his claw. He swallowed, and stared at their faces again with his stomach flip-flopping in revulsion. Human-like, but not what had been seen on earth lately. His clinical side couldn’t stop noting the new characteristics:

Protective eye scales

Superior musculature

Cutting edge incisors

Could the force wave have rearranged human DNA? Was such a thing even possible? No, it wasn’t possible. But he stared into the face of evidence. His staff had changed from human to other? He pressed his face against the glass to examine them closer.

Threaded into the skin across their cheekbones were floaters that looked thin and long, like transparent spaghetti or long, fleshy worms. They undulated back and forth like animal whiskers. Did they pick up sound vibrations? The floaters gave the appearance of gills, or maybe a filtering type of apparatus made from a natural substance. He sensed one was male and the other female, but couldn’t tell a difference from the neck up. The one on the left was smaller—female.

Both made clicking noises at him, not from the mouths, but telepathically. Louis’s bladder nearly released on him. Telepathy?

Release us. Tap tap. Release us. Hunger.

Hunger? Did they…He stared at the inert bodies scattered on the lab floor. Some of his staff’s faces and even their brains had been scooped out. Dark blood congealed on the floor. They were still hungry? He jerked back from the viewing window.

Wait, it made sense. Blood was salty. Searching for essential minerals, enzymes, or vitamins to complete their physical needs must require incredible energy. The idea repulsed him. He should’ve been in the lab with his colleagues, like a captain on a sinking ship.

Louis waited, hoping to pass out again, relieving him of his responsibilities.

When he didn’t respond, one slammed a fist into the glass. Work to do. Release us.

Confused, Louis concluded he retained human thoughts and feelings, but they didn’t. In the next eureka instant, he realized that to survive, he had to keep his humanity secret.

And then, Louis sent back, Danger, let me clear path.

Hurry Tap-tap-tap hurry. Hunger-hunger-hunger.

Rett

“Vampire!”

“Move!”

“Help me, Jesus, help me.”

Rett focused on his breathing and hoped the creatures didn’t make it out of coach before they landed. He felt the plane flatten out, but instead of going in on a slow, graceful glide, she went down fast, engines backtalking the whole way. His stomach bounced between his chest and his lap.

He imagined the pilot made a decision to give the folks in the rear half a chance at survival. His old man had called them shake-and-bake landings. Rett didn’t fault the pilot for trying, and maybe it prevented hysterical people from running up the aisle, boxing them in. His biggest fear was getting blocked in their seats—well, second biggest fear. He felt the wheels touch down and then the brakes slammed hard. Rett suspected rubber slung off the wheels when he heard grinding noises.

More screams. Christ, people were dying and he couldn’t help. He couldn’t. What had been unleashed, growing unnoticed in Cloudland for who knows how long?

Rett clutched the armrests and used his feet to keep his back pressed in the seat. Earsplitting screams from the rear never ceased the whole way down. Rett planned his exit moves until Tommy cried out, “Eddie Jean’s scared!”

The kids always had a mental connection he and Jenna couldn’t fathom. Rett said, “Boys, when this plane stops I’m grabbing you, and we’re jumping out. We’re not waiting on the stairs. You hear me!”

They were too scared to answer. Rett unfastened his seatbelt and then leaned over to pat their shoulders. He used his legs to brace against the hard stop. The plane vibrated and shuddered. He felt the strain of not being belted in, but gritted through it. “Don’t grab your backpacks. We’re leaving this bird with what we’re wearing.”

“Rett!”

He went cold all over, like diving into a mountain stream. His thoughts and reflexes waned. The killing thing shouted his name again. His name! Fear made his heart sputter and start—sputter and start. His mind raced over the many faces at the airport he’d recognized, but not one would want to harm him.

“Rett!”

Or maybe not.

Panic killed his survival plans, and his mind turned to mush. Tommy grabbed his arm and forced Rett to take control of his fear. Crap, an emergency was no time to wuss out on the boys. He put his hand over Tommy’s and took a deep breath. Seconds passed like minutes, but now he knew how to react. His mission required him to get them to the ranch alive.

By the time the plane’s speed slowed he had unsnapped both boys, grabbed each one by their shirts, and made it first to the exit behind their seats. Others did the same, crowding up behind them, and the aisle around first class filled. The killer in the back flung a severed arm over the frightened crowd.

His boys cringed against his legs while Rett watched frantic passengers trying to climb over the occupied seat backs. The teen, changing into something grotesque and definitely not human, had ripped off his seatbelt. He bit into his father’s neck. Crimson blood flowed onto the older man’s white shirt. The father shrieked and punched his son’s head.

People began to fight—biting and kicking each other. It was fight or die time as the cabin erupted into bedlam. Everyone, including old ladies, climbed over the seats. People in the aisle tossed luggage on people still belted in to keep them seated.

“Rett!”

He tried to glimpse the evil trying to get to him—and his boys. The adult thing had made forward progress. It was six feet tall. No eyes and long, worm-like things attached to its crooked nose fanned out. When it swiped its hand out, the claws flayed open like a big mitt, ripping jackets and piercing bare skin. The nares on its hooked nose were widened and crimson colored. It had split lips, which snarled up like a fightin’ dog.

Rett swallowed. It looked right at him and growled. Then it bit into a seated man’s head! How could a man change into a monster?

It didn’t look like the one he’d shot last night. Wait! Its crooked nose—the wife poacher last seen at Thirsty’s Bar? No way. Rett winced and his stomach tightened. It was crook nose. How did he miss him at the airport? It took all his will power not to open the exit door. “Don’t look, boys.” He shielded them with his body.

“Please help my father,” a woman begged.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” a child yelled.

A rotten potatoes odor permeated the air. A few people boxed in the crowded aisle fainted. Had one released a poison?

“More are changing!”

The wife-poacher beast spat out bloody scalp and brains. The crowd walked over the fallen, trying to surge forward to escape. It grabbed a short, older woman and flung her over the heads of seated passengers. The FBI guy stood behind them panting, with a Glock clutched in his right hand.

Rett smelled FBI’s fear. “Shoot them,” Rett said.

FBI shook his head.

“Give us a fighting chance, man.”

The boy attacked people standing behind them. Rett had the feeling it wanted him. Maybe the pair communicated. Rett knew he had to keep distance between his boys and those things to give them a survival chance. Can I shoot a kid?

It screamed, sounding like a wolf fighting a bear and shoved people aside with uncommon strength. That ain’t a kid anymore.

“God help us!”

Rett grabbed FBI by the wrist and swiped his Glock. He fired twice into the kid’s chest. He staggered backward and fell on seated passengers’ laps. Screaming erupted and reached ear-piercing levels. The boy thing staggered up and resumed his forward charge with blood dripping from its mouth. He fired twice again and it fell. What could survive four direct hits to the heart? Wait, what had Joe Vickers said? Shoot through the eye. But this wasn’t the same rabid thing he’d seen on Quitman’s land.

FBI grabbed his arm and Rett returned the weapon. “Just protecting my sons.”

The fed swung the Glock at the boy in the aisle.

“Hang on to my legs, boys!” Rett shouted.

The pilot slowed their momentum by steering the plane out in a circle on the apron. Rett opened the emergency exit and the door blew off. The twins screamed. Clutching them against his body, Rett jumped out into the bright, clear air.

Behind them, the adult thing roared. The chute inflated and they dropped onto it and slid down. He landed on his feet and staggered a moment. Both boys landed on the ground, but he yanked them up before the people behind knocked them over. He grabbed their hands and shouted, “Run!”

He was relieved the plane had stopped at the end of a long runway far from the massive airport. Rett was shocked when FBI ran past them. He guessed standing at the bottom of the chute to kill a real monster wasn’t in his job description. Or he knows it would be futile. Then Rett saw the teenage zombie, because that’s what he had to be, jump down the chute and onto the back of a young mother. The sight nearly paralyzed him. He’s still alive?

FBI ran off to the left to intercept a black SUV and pointed his gun and badge at the driver. Rett watched the vehicle knock him up in the air, the thud of metal on flesh seared into his brain. The SUV continued to the plane.

Shocked, Rett paused and then ran over to the fed. Out cold and still breathing. Rett shoved the FBI badge in his own pocket, grabbed the fed’s wallet, and jammed the Glock in his back waistband, hoping his jacket covered it. Might come in handy.

“Daddy!” Teddy shrieked as a red ambulance came right at them. A medic with a short buzz cut jumped out. “Why’d he run over him?”

Rett shook his head.

The medic opened his kit and said, “Man, we’re riding solo because the whole world’s gone nuts. What happened on board?”

Rett took deep breaths and crossed himself. He could see terrified passengers running in every direction while the boy thing fed, unhindered, on the woman. A toddler stood nearby, wailing. “Someone started killing passengers. A lot of passengers. Blood everywhere. We flew out of Atlanta.”

“Monsters are on the plane,” Tommy said as the medic hooked FBI to a heart monitor.

The medic jerked his head up and then a silver Chevy truck pulled in behind the ambulance. Another medic jumped out. Buzz cut looked relieved to see him.

Rett glanced back at the crimson-smeared chute. He took the boys’ hands, and they backed away from the working medics. Another chute had opened. From the plane, he heard the adults roar and toss bodies on the emergency exit. Lucky passengers ran to the airport.

As they passed the medic’s Chevy, the keys sparkled at him.

Rett opened the door and threw the twins inside. They didn’t react as he cranked the truck. Rett hoped the medic stayed safe, but knew once the adults got off the plane it would become the Wild West at the airport. He eased the truck into a circle and sped back in the direction it came from. Passengers screaming for help, the bloody adult jumping off the plane, and FBI bleeding out combined to keep both medics too distracted to notice.

He followed the wheel treads in the grass until they came to a rusting gate. Rett jumped out to push it open and drove through. All he could figure was the second medic lived nearby. He’d cut the lock and threw it in the tall grass in order to help injured people. Fifteen tense minutes later, they hit a road to connect them to I-45 S.

Please don’t let those things track us down.

Wilbur

Sunlight eased into the library on Friday morning at Harwood House. Wilbur woke with a jerk when the women unblocked the doors. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

Lee sat beside him and put her hand on his forehead. “You moaned all night.”

“I’m good to go.”

“We stayed up discussing our options. Nothing made sense without you.”

He smiled. Wilbur suspected they were too frightened to sleep. He never thought he could close his eyes inside the mansion again, but he did. He hobbled to the bathroom. When he came out, the women worked as a team in the kitchen to make their last meal.

For the first time during his tenure, he smelled no delicious cooking aromas wafting from the kitchen. No fresh-ground coffee scent either. From the looks of things, they would eat cold cereal, juice, and leftover apple tarts. The five ate in exhausted silence until full.

“Tell me your decision,” Wilbur said, sitting back in a chair. “Rose?”

“I can’t kill my patient by setting her bed on fire,” Rose said firmly, “so I don’t want to hear any more crazy talk. The responsible thing to do is call the police, except we’ve got this debilitating disease we might harbor to consider. Let me say for the record, I don’t believe I’m infected. I should’ve had mild flu-like symptoms, for instance, and haven’t. I don’t agree with patient abandonment either, so I’m undecided.”

Wilbur agreed with Rose on her former point and not the latter. “Lee?”

Lee rambled on about how to stake Evaney and be done with it.

“Except,” Rose said, “we need to consider how this will sound to a jury.”

“Amen,” Cookie said.

“We’ll puncture a blood bag in front of her and let the jury watch. I think we’ll be found innocent,” Lee said.

Wilbur flinched at what Lee said. For an instant, he was back fighting with Mary.

“Burr?” Lee asked. “Listen to how they kill vamps on the show True Blood.”

Apparently, the women had discussed various means to kill Evaney Harwood using tips gleaned from TV shows. “I’m not sure if the writers guessed or used actual science,” Lee said.

“More crazy talk,” Rose mumbled.

“Crazy talk? Where have you been, Rosethorn?” Lee snapped in reply. “She hasn’t tasted your blood yet. Is that why you feel safe to take the high road?”

Cookie shook her head and Veena kept quiet. They looked at him.

Wilbur thought vampire powers and their physical appearance had gotten mixed up over the centuries. Maybe true vampires, if they existed—because he wasn’t sold yet—looked like Evaney Harwood. A half-dead corpse described the patient they cared for around the clock.

Veena stood to clear the table. She came back in, carrying the half-empty OJ carton for Wilbur. He’d never quenched his thirst despite drinking and snacking through the night. He grabbed the carton before she poured, swigged it down, and ignored Cookie’s glare.

“I almost saw what happened to the Duke students,” Wilbur said, wiping his chin with his hand. “When our minds connected, I saw her memories. They found the cave.”

The others stared at him in disbelief.

“Your mind synced up to hers?” Rose asked, sounding puzzled.

“Yeah, like watching a movie.”

Veena said, “She asked me to come up and feed her. It’s past her tube-feeding time.”

“Asking you how?” Lee shouted back.

Veena flinched and covered her face with a dish towel

“You aren’t to leave the first floor, honey,” Cookie said, reaching over to pat Veena’s arm and shooting Lee a scowl. “Nurses do tube feedings, not you.”

“She said we’re both abuse survivors.” Veena’s voice shook.

“Yeah,” Lee growled, “if you go up there, Vee, you’ll be her blood pastry.”

“I’ve asked my guides, spiritual guides to protect me,” Rose said. “As long as we sit in her home, eating the food her estate provides, we have to look in on her at least.”

Wilbur recalled Rose’s dowsing pendulum. “How can you be sure it wasn’t Evaney answering you and not your spirit guides?”

Rose nodded. “Good question. I’ve been dowsing long enough to sense the difference, plus, I’ve got a built-in safety program.”

“You people are drowning in the deep end,” Lee muttered.

“We may seem nutty,” Rose answered, “but you’re the one panicking. You can’t sit still, and you’ve developed a facial tic right here.” Rose pointed to the spot.

Lee knocked her glass to the floor and pushed her chair back. “I saved his ass, and I’m willing to save yours too. What more proof does anyone need?”

“Lee’s right,” Cookie said. “Mary’s dead from blood loss and Miss Harwood tried to do the same to Wilbur. Let’s get our stuff, leave Doc a message, and get as far from Bridgeport as we can.”

Rose sighed. “Can’t dispute your logic, Cookie. If Wilbur’s right and we’re carriers, we’ll make people sick wherever we go. I’ve got three grandkids I want to hug and kiss. Maybe she knows the cure, or maybe she can say we’re not infected. Wilbur, would you consider having another go at her to get us answers? Please?”

“He’s done enough! Put your blood in her,” Lee said, sounding shrill.

Rose didn’t respond to Lee. She stared at him. “I don’t have a bond with Miss Harwood like you do, Burr. You’re both young, college educated in literature, and you’re male.”

“You quiz her, thorny,” Lee said before pacing again.

Wilbur hesitated. No way did he want to endure helplessness like that again. He functioned now because his mind’s eye averted from what happened. His size quelled bullies as he grew older, but size didn’t intimidate her kind.

“You won’t be alone. I’ll go with you,” Rose added.

“Me too,” Cookie volunteered. “Veena can wash the dishes.”

And, before he could debate the idea with his usual logic, Wilbur said, “I’ll do it.”

“What?” Lee skidded to a stop.

“I’m tired of talking and thinking, Lee. Let’s end the stand-off.” Wilbur realized he’d spent his entire life searching for answers on addiction, behavioral problems, and abandonment issues. If he learned one thing about himself, he discovered that before he could close the door on a problem he required answers.

Lee balled her hands on her hips and glared at Wilbur. “You don’t need a lifeline, you need an exorcist. I can’t bear to watch you suffer or, worse, turn into her.”

“You think I want her sucking on me? No, I go back with armor.”

She looked suspicious. “A wooden stake?”

“If she’s a vampire, as you think, wouldn’t we be able to use that UV wand we sterilize the room with once a month to keep her away? Maybe force her to answer our questions?”

Lee’s eyes widened. “Wish I’d thought of it. Yeah, the wand should work if we put it on an extension cord. This is about finding out what happened in Alabama, isn’t it?”

“It’s about getting all the answers we need, but I’d be a fool not to notice that every clue leads back to Cloudland, Alabama.”

“If she doesn’t cooperate?” Cookie asked.

“Then we play it Lee’s way.”

Rett

Police cars were everywhere with flashing lights, but they weren’t looking for stolen trucks. They were setting up checkpoints. As they passed, Rett noticed one side of the street had electricity and the other side went without. Traffic lights still worked. Had an EMP been released? A newsflash had reported on several plane crashes across nine states. A second report featured a power blackout stretching along the eastern seaboard and leaving thousands without power. No reasons were offered. He decided against an EMP because their flight remained airborne. But what caused the thrust and vibration that set off the murder scene in the rear, crashed other planes, and made people faint, then?

Rett kept to the speed limit, feeling better after every mile marker. He felt confident the things wouldn’t be allowed to leave the airport.

“Daddy, I gotta go,” Tommy said.

“My tummy hurts,” Teddy chimed in.

“Okay, next gas station.” Rett really wanted distance, but knew from experience the kids couldn’t hold it. Besides, the need to piss was a normal function. His kids weren’t in shock.

Rett pulled over to an open Exxon station and they used the facilities. Teddy threw up and then Tommy. Rett washed their faces, helped them rinse out their mouths, and then carried them back to the truck. He opened the glove box and found a thick wallet. Between the fed’s wallet and the medics he had almost four hundred dollars in cash. Rett filled up the tank first.

He locked the boys in before going inside the gas station. In the Subway restaurant, he ordered six different foot-longs with everything but peppers. Afterward, he bought a cooler and filled it with ice and drinks. He grabbed up snacks, sunglasses, a map, and a few Texas tee-shirts and ball caps for later. Last, he fixed up the biggest mug of coffee money could buy. Rett paid cash. If the world didn’t end, he would pay the men back with interest.

Rett asked the man at the register, “What brought so many planes down?”

“Terrorists are what they’re saying, but my wife overheard talk about a wave.”

“What kind of wave?”

“No one knows. Lights are out from Beaumont back to Savannah and from Richmond down to Jacksonville. Folks claim an earthquake occurred but how did it crash planes?”

“Most phones aren’t working, and CNN is off the air. Other stations claim the East Coast is in ruins,” a woman behind him in line said. “End times are here.”

Rett wanted to ask for more details but the line had grown long.

The gloomy atmosphere reminded him of nine-eleven. The boys were asleep when he opened the door. He turned the radio down low to get information on the mysterious wave. To his surprise, most stations carried on like normal. When he switched to AM talk radio, Rett got more information.

One old boy called in and said, “Wave? Hunker down, people.”

“New caller,” the DJ said, “you’re on.”

“Cuss, my brother works at the airport. He claimed four monsters jumped off the plague plane. Said two looked like movie-type zombies, but the others were half man and half beast.”

Rett turned up the volume.

The DJ said, “Whoa dude, back up. Zombies and beast-like monsters? Was he drinkin’?”

“No, sir. Dallas TAC team—you know, like SWAT teams? They unloaded their weapons on them. Man, he said it took over a hundred rounds before the two big’uns went down for good. Someone in law enforcement shot the runt at least twice on the plane. He fell a bit faster.”

“Hang on, caller. Hey everyone, this is the Cuss Brown show. I’m not going to break on a whopper like this one. Here’s the public service announcement I’m supposed to play with a spin all my own: Citizens of Texas have been ordered to stay home. If you’re caught rubber necking, you’re going to jail. Dallas/Fort Worth is under a mandatory quarantine because of the plague plane. So stay home unless you’re a first responder or hospital worker. Now, some cell towers are down and some aren’t. Hope you’re lucky. Landlines, if you still have one, are operating west of Beaumont. Now, let’s get back to the big story.

“Okay caller, I’ll bite. Where are their carcasses?”

“That’s the best part, Cuss—they’re still in the airport. Men showed up in HAZMAT suits and put a plastic tent around ’em. Hundreds, and I mean hundreds of pictures were snapped. Open your website and ask for ’em.”

The DJ laughed. “I like a challenge, so if anyone wants to hit me, go to www.cussupastorm.com. Now, I heard the plague plane was full. Any information?”

“Yeah, but call it the slaughter plane. Heard dead and mangled bodies plus body parts covered the field around the plane. Passengers are being rounded up. I’ve said enough.”

“This is Cuss—go for it, new caller.”

“Cuss, I don’t know how long it will be ’fore they shut down folks like you, but the previous caller was dead on. My husband is with the TAC team. After they killed them, he called me. He told me to drop everything and go to my family’s ranch. I’m on the road out of state now.”

“Are you sure you’re a Texan? We don’t cut and run, girl.”

“Yeah? Well, my hubby isn’t used to doing it either, but he was scared. The TAC team has been quarantined. He said those things boarded the plane looking like everyone else. What got off wasn’t human.”

“Whoa, emergency responders have been quarantined? Take care of yourselves, listeners. I’m betting 911 emergency calls will be delayed.”

“Cuss, the entire airport and all employees and responders are quarantined. Boyd said both beast monsters had chest armor, both front and back. Said it looked natural and grew out of their bodies. Armor-piercing shells is what brought the adults down.”

“Adults? One kid?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I apologize to Dallas’s finest. Good job, boys! This is Cuss—hit me, new caller.”

The woman’s voice quavered as she spoke. “I was on the plane, Cuss, and I’m still in the parking lot. I’ve sent pictures and they’ll be rounding me up soon. They claim we’re all infected. The lucky passengers sat in first class and the first few rows behind them. Everyone on the plane was fresh meat, including women and babies. Babies, Cuss. I want folks to know it wasn’t a terrorist, it’s monsters, and they were after someone on the plane!”

“Whoa! Hold it, sister. Who was it after?”

“The big one near me made noises like clucking sounds. Every once in a while he growled out ‘Brett’ or ‘Dred.’”

“How’d you survive?” the DJ asked.

“I chickened out. I was trapped by a window seat and I’m short. I slid down on the floorboard, legs under the seat in front of me, and covered my head with a blanket and ducked down. The aisle was blocked by luggage and trampled people after the wave. Folks panicked and climbed over the seats to escape. More than one stepped on me. The monsters didn’t have to look for the scaredy cats to eat.”

“Smart thinking. Can you explain the wave?”

She took a wheezy breath. “It felt like the hand of God grabbed our plane, shook it around, and then tried to shove us out to the stars. I thought we were goners, but our pilot must have been the best. I hear he’s dead too.”

“New caller. Wait. Folks, you’re not going to believe it. Hang on. My website crashed, but not before we got images on our back-up server. Listeners, you got to see it to believe it. I’m calling the big’un Humgill. Humgill biting a man’s brains out, Humgill snapping off a guard’s arm, Humgill clawing a woman’s face. People, we are in bad trouble if a virus causes us to kill each other like that!”

Rett turned off the radio. He knew shooting the kid had to be done, so his kids could escape unharmed. A feeling in the pit of his stomach turned his heart cold and heavy. A few minutes earlier, the thing he’d shot had been a normal teenager. Right around Eddie Jean’s age, he guessed. Oh, baby, where are you?

I can’t go back for her like I promised. The realization made him feel faint.

Rett pulled off the road and cried like a kid. In less than a day, he went from abhorring guns to shooting two monsters and carrying a gun in his lap. He abandoned his sick daughter to whisk his boys to safety. Circumstances had changed him, and he feared the end result. He wasn’t sure he could live with it, but he’d try. At least he didn’t kill the boy, but he had weakened him and slowed his change process. He dried his face with his shirt and called Uncle Jed.

No bars on the cell. A few minutes later, he saw a payphone near the road in a closed service station. Rett pulled in, looked around, and drove to the phone. He could use it while sitting in the truck. He kept one eye peeled as he fed the machine quarters. Fast-food trash littered the oil-stained concrete, but no people in sight. Rett put the gun on the dash and called.

“Hallelujah!” Uncle Jed sounded happy. “I worried you boys were in one of the crashes.”

“No, sir. But weird things happened on our flight from Atlanta.”

“Atlanta? Figured you’d fly out of the ’Ham. News claims a virus got released on your flight. Airport authorities ordered the passengers and crew to be locked up in quarantine. Dead people filled the plane.”

“Yeah, we drove to Atlanta and we flew first class. The killings went down in the rear, and later the center of coach. We were lucky to escape.”

“Listen here, officials claim a killer virus got released on the plane. They’re even roundin’ up the folks who tried to help calm passengers down after the rough landin’.”

“Rough landing? Pilot did it on purpose to give us a chance. Emergency landing was the only way to get us down fast and dirty.”

“Let me say again, son. They say escapees are contagious and could wipe us all out with a new form of plague. A friend told me the dead got up and walked.”

“I didn’t see if they died first. I saw people changed into a new species, or monsters. You ever hear of a virus severing arms or eating human brains? Truth is, I killed a monster last night in Cloudland. He didn’t look like the ones on the plane. We were exposed, but didn’t come in contact with blood or body fluids. Your call, Uncle Jed.”

A long pause followed before Uncle Jed said, “Texas will freeze before I turn my kin away. Better go to red alert.”

“Payphone.”

“Good choice.”

“Have you heard any news from…home?”

“Not from home, but around Cloudland. It ain’t good.”

“You want company or not?” Rett asked, giving him a second chance to refuse them.

“You remember what your old man said to do in a red situation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll have stew waitin’, then.”

Rett pulled the battery out of the cell and pulled back on the Interstate. A few minutes later, he tossed it out the window. He waited ten miles and tossed the phone in the road. Rett drove on until he spied a rest station and pulled in near picnic tables and a trashcan. Very few cars or trucks were parked at the Welcome Center. He looked around a moment and heard the comforting sounds of road traffic.

It took a few minutes, but he found and evaluated every piece of ID in the truck and on him. He kept his driver’s license, cash, and prepaid credit cards. He dumped everything else except a map and the Glock. With his luck, they might encounter another monster, and he wanted to protect the boys. Hopefully, all would be quiet out in the Texas outback.

He climbed back in the truck.

Teddy moaned in his sleep. It gave Rett the heebie-jeebies. Jenna used to do that too.

He dropped his left hand down to push the seat bench back for comfort. Rett felt cold metal press into his temple. Someone thumb-cocked a revolver. His bladder ached.

Rett heard his old man’s voice. Cat eyes, son. Always check the rearview.

Wilbur

In the doorway of Evaney’s room, Lee pulled UV goggles over her eyes. “Check it.” She fired up the UV wand and held it like an M16. She waved it inside the room. “Bite my man, Drac, and you get this, plus a stake in the heart,” she yelled.

Evaney snarled, but didn’t open her eyes.

Did Lee call me her man? Wilbur’s heavy heart lifted despite what he would face in the next few seconds. He tried to compose a poem to mark the moment. Wilbur still couldn’t connect his words. Heat flushed his ears.

Lee purred, “Leave a tender moment alone, Burr.”

Rose whispered, “Yell, if you need us.” She held her pendulum at the ready. “I’ve got you covered.”

Wilbur stepped inside the sterile white room. His tongue shriveled into a weed, tunnel vision clamped down, and he focused on Evaney. His symptoms were courtesy of adrenalin, he guessed—drug of choice for people scared out of their words.

Evaney Harwood reclined on her back, eyes closed, and she rubbed her hands together. The movements looked coordinated and revealed her inner agitation. Something about her triggered a vague memory from the night Mary died, but he couldn’t recall details. After a moment, he realized her hand movements were attempts at trying to locate her ring.

Years ago, caregivers had taken the expensive ring off her hand. Wilbur touched his pocket to make sure the key to the Saturn was safe. Grandmother Pearl had left her home to the church, but she left him the Saturn. The car key meant freedom to him, like the ring had special meaning to Evaney. Winn Harmon had placed the ring on her finger. Her bloodsucking was the will to live—nothing more or less.

Despite her invasions into his mind, he felt connected to her. Like him, she had doodled facial caricatures in her classroom notebook margins and wrote funny observations about her fellow students and faculty. He’d laughed at three of her comments:

One professor who hit on girls wearing glasses “used truth like Kleenex.”

A student who plagiarized was “the diva of déjà vu.”

A shy guy in the Naval Reserve “could charm gold threads from moonbeams after being on the hard for two weeks.”

Yeah, Evaney Harwood knew how to connect her words as much as he did. Wilbur’s wrists began to itch and his fingers picked at the bandages. He stepped forward and went to the dresser.

“Remember, you’re in Underworld,” Lee whispered from behind him.

He removed her engagement ring from a red velvet pouch. He slid the heavy ring on the straightest finger on her left hand. Evaney’s eyes opened.

“No more blood,” he said. “I’ll listen if you want to explain the accident. We need to know if we’re carrying the same disease as you.”

His vision blurred and then she sent in his head, Vibrations evolve.

Wilbur winced. Did she mean the Hum?

He grabbed the side rail to steady himself. His head felt like it had been split. She used telepathy? His knees sagged. “Get out of my head!”

“Burr! Listen to the house,” Rose shouted.

Wilbur shook his head. He’d come close to stroking out. He turned his head and lied to Rose. “I’m fine.”

“Insects! It sounds like the house is being invaded,” Rose yelled.

“She’s crying bloody tears!” Cookie screeched from the corner.

“Just like a vampire,” Lee said.

Wilbur said, “Tell me what happened after you found the cave.”

“Vampire’s got me,” Cookie screeched.

Wilbur turned and watched Cookie perform a weird, marionette-type dance. “Help me,” Cookie begged him.

Evaney froze him as she let Cookie go. He watched Lee and Rose rush to Cookie, who staggered a few steps and dropped to her knees. Behind him, Evaney sat up and sunk her teeth into his neck.

For feeding her, Evaney shared her memories as if they watched a movie.

Wilbur lived every piquant and tender moment of her engagement night, including their lovemaking, which made him feel shamed. He heard the back-and-forth teasing between the Duke students as they ate breakfast. They pretended to the inn’s owners they planned to hike in the state park. In the Land Rover, he heard them discuss how to spread the news of a cancer cure in Cloudland, if Winn’s sister was cured.

He sat beside them when they found a little used road near the cave spot. And then he felt Evaney’s sudden fear, as her survival instincts from years of child abuse were aroused. She panicked as the other students hiked to a hill. Evaney wanted to tell them a disaster loomed, but she didn’t want them to laugh at her.

Wilbur felt the same all-over skin tingling Evaney did. The tingles turned into shivering. The warning shivers always came before her grandmother beat her. By heeding her symptoms, Evaney gained time to hide. The odd sensation may have saved her life.

The valley smelled like sweet pine and sunshine, but Evaney’s legs trembled and the urge to pee her pants became painful, urgent. Evaney lied to Winn and the others. She pretended a migraine made her nauseous, and she went back to the Land Rover for medicine. Evaney took her time and waited for a sign.

Her fear sickened Wilbur, but nothing happened.

He climbed with her to rejoin her friends. He heard their screams, felt her struggle to hang onto a small tree, and then he felt her body go cold. All that made her human disappeared. Her well-honed survival instincts took over, and Evaney became her grandmother.

You killed Winn and he loved you, Wilbur thought.

She answered, I’ll kill you too.

“Finding out the truth isn’t worth this misery,” he said, watching them help Cookie out. “You betray everyone.”

Evaney responded by revealing vampire history. She told him things about the Hum and how it brought change. The earth had a built-in protection mechanism to induce change and cleanse the environment. Wilbur felt as trapped as Mary surely did.

He and the others had been nurtured on the estate to feed her when the time came. Type O blood gave the vampire their best health. Type O blood from black people gave the vampire an added kick—they could walk in full sunlight. The catch was she needed to ingest type O blood during the Hum’s major effects. The Hum didn’t happen at once, but at spaced intervals until the entire planet was affected.

Wilbur wept for humanity.

He saw destruction and the rise of the vampire class. People were due another DNA upgrade. Evolution favors the fit and healthy, but the sick get a second chance by becoming vampires. Vampires benefitted from a shared memory of their past history. Humans had no such memory advantage. He saw the long line of vampire history, their rise and fall over numerous time periods. Humans had suffered much in forgotten past history. Vampires came close to winning several times, but always, humans defeated them.

Wilbur watched the horror scenes to learn how to kill them. She cut him off.

He grabbed hold of the movie in his mind and asked Evaney what she lived for. He got two answers and felt her anger at his audacity. She tried to scare him by revealing his fate, and how the live-in help would die hideous deaths.

Fear consumed him.

Wilbur figured she had bled him dry. In the mind movie, he watched Evaney look down at Winn, and he saw the Cloudland monsters? Not vampires! Rabid-looking creatures penned in a cave and set free by small quakes. Wilbur wondered if she was confused. The monsters infected her and not vampires. Evaney wanted to be a vampire, had been destined to be a vampire from her blood disease porphyria—except her destiny could’ve been changed in Cloudland. Wilbur fought to exit the nightmare. He had to lead the house help to safety.

“Get him out, Lee!” Rose shouted. “She’s drinking his blood!”

“I’m looking right at her, and she’s asleep,” Lee answered.

“Now!” Rose screamed.

Lee darted forward, UV wand glowing like a lightsaber. “Vampire, release him! Don’t you dare give me the stink eye or I’ll poke it out!”

The horrific images stopped, and Evaney flopped back down in the bed.

Wilbur staggered backward and reached for Lee. He had never felt better than when her arms encircled him. He wheezed, his vision dimmed, and he slumped to the floor. Evaney smacked her lips.

Lee dropped the wand on his chest and pulled him from the sick room. Rose shut the door and poured kosher salt across the doorway.

Lee shouted, “Salt doesn’t stop vamps.”

Rose discarded the salt box. “Want to bet?”

Muttering curses and prayers, Lee dragged him to the stairwell. “Next time a fool asks me to be his lifeline, I’ll spare him the trouble and drown him.”

Wilbur watched her, loving every grunt and snarl she uttered. He felt as weak as a newborn pup. He quit fighting to stay awake, and put his life in Lee’s hands. First, he had to warn her.

“Lee, Wilbur needs a blood transfusion,” Rose said after taking his pulse.

“He can have mine after I finish what she started.”

“Baby, we have to leave,” Wilbur said, “and survive the Hum first. My blood has powered her up. Once she’s peaked, I’m stuck here as her food source. I won’t be able to leave.”

“I’m going to stake her,” Lee said, “or you’ll never be free.”

“We have minutes to get clear of her feeding frenzy, understand? People first.” Fatigue overwhelmed him and he rested. He looked at Rose.

Her pendulum spun so fast it became a blur. “He’s right. We fight her at the place and time of our choosing, not hers. We have to leave right now!”

“Little help!” Lee yelled to Cookie. “We’re checking out of Hell House.”

Louis

For the first time in his life, Louis understood addiction. Oh, he knew the medical mechanics, but he had never felt the gnawing aspect before now. The drive for nutrients made him gorge on the blood and flesh of his staff and colleagues. Screams erupted now and then as faculty and students woke from the knockout wave. He passed a window and caught a dim reflection of himself and stopped. A howl began in his feet and worked its way out as “No!”

What came out sounded like a roar or deep growl. He looked like the others in the lab. Louis punched his fist into a door, cracking it. He felt like screaming but was incapable. Was this mutation caused by Ava’s brain injection or the Anchorons? He couldn’t decide.

His religious beliefs had lapsed over the years, but he had been raised Methodist. Now he wished, before all human thoughts left, that he could bow his head in prayer. What he was becoming found the idea confusing. He massaged his temples.

Hunger cramped his gut, and he doubled over in pain. A student ran past, also evolving but at a lower level. He wanted to reach out and snap her neck and feed, but resisted the impulse.

Not as long as I’m alive.

End, then!

Louis realized the schizophrenic battle to keep his human feelings had begun. He tried to open the door to the AL war room, but his digits were clumsy. The door was locked out, but he remembered the pass number. The concentration to complete the task of punching 8574 frustrated him. He should be feeding. The door clicked and he kicked it open. Cindy Van Zant screamed and ducked behind a table chair.

He sniffed the air.

Cindy should be changing, but something delicious coursed through her blood, preventing it. A spice? She was a vegan and drank herbal teas for health. Louis took another sniff. She didn’t have the human genetics for remaining unchanged. A food she ingested regularly had prevailed and stopped the change. Enough of his scientific side remained to get excited by the idea, but could it change him back to human?

What for?

He sniffed again. Smell was stronger, but hearing was incredible. Her heartbeat sounded like an engine. He should protect Cindy because she had the reversal key. Louis took a step backward when he heard her cowering thoughts.

He loves me. He’ll never hurt me.

Oh, God. Oh, God, he’s hideous.

“Cindy.” Louis tried to vibrate the sound closest to making her name. “Forgive me.”

She covered her ears, sobbing.

Cindy is scared.

The prey trembles.

Louis jumped on the tabletop. The ease surprised him. His physical agility and strength pleased him. I’m still human.

Cindy scampered under the table and the chase thrilled him. Louis followed her down, shoved chairs aside, and overtook her. He let her crawl out from under the table before flipping her over on her back. Her teeth chattered, and her eyes were shut tight.

He slammed the door with his foot. No sharing of this feast. She tried to get away, but the end of his lower appendages, his toes, held her in place. She kicked and even bit into his leg. Her resistance thrilled him, and he sank down beside her to enjoy. Cindy punched his chest, slapped his face, and poked her fingers into his eyes. He let her struggle without biting back or hurting her. Worn out, she succumbed to tears.

The good substance in her blood secreted onto her skin during her struggle. He lifted her up over one arm and ripped her clothes off. He sniffed her back and then licked her skin under the blue lovebirds’ tattoo. Mmm. Nutty? It’s so good, good for us. He smacked his lips. The taste was familiar. He rolled her over.

“Louis, stop! We’re friends. We’re more than friends and you know it.” Her voice cracked, and she shook with delirium tremors. Her palms hid her breasts from him.

He wanted more than anything to hug her and apologize, but couldn’t. Every time his human emotions surfaced, his physical movements wouldn’t cooperate. When he didn’t answer, fear infused her blood—her rich, vital blood loaded with chemicals he needed for survival. He knew Cindy’s blood type was AB negative because the blood bank called often for donations. Her blood was vital to him. To us. Louis tried to stop his growing compulsion to feed, but couldn’t. Hungry-hungry-hungry.

“Eating human flesh is a mortal sin. It’s a curse you’ll never escape. Let me go!”

He laughed, but it sounded like a snort. Eat you? I couldn’t eat you.

Yes, yes, yes.

Louis pressed her wrist against his nose. Smelling her blood churning inside the tiny vessels excited him. Saliva rolled from his mouth and dripped on her. He made sounds to terrify her until her blood boiled with the required substances. Louis dragged sharp, talon-tipped digits up her belly.

“I love you, Louis. Please don’t hurt me.”

He let her go.

Shaking, she crawled away. But as the good scent faded, he had to stop her. He reached over and stabbed her in the notch at the back of her head with his poison talon. Not to kill her. No, feeding was best while the prey breathed.

Cindy sobbed.

What am I doing? I must stop! He knew if he ate the woman he loved, he could never be human again. Louis tried to move away from her but couldn’t. Existence, his existence, required her blood. He rolled her over. For the first time, Louis noted freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Tears had washed the makeup away. Seeing her freckles embarrassed him.

“Get it over with you son of a bitch!”

No-no-no.

Yes-yes.

He sunk his teeth into her carotid artery. His suction tentacles dropped and drained her life-giving nutrients into him. Immediately, he felt a cellular response. But the other taste, the required taste, was so delicious he stopped sucking her blood to roar. More-more-more. He bit back down, trying to tease the special taste out. He felt Cindy’s fingernails gouge into his face and claw downward. Ah, good.

What is it? Louis felt torn, adrift. He wanted to save her, but he had to save his pack.

She panted in terror. He pulled back to extend the venom fang from his finger, like humans use guns to threaten. Louis cringed at the monster he had become. He listened for her thoughts to answer his question, but nothing came.

“You’re drinking me!”

Louis stroked her hair. He had to get the answer or die. The substance was vital to their survival. He would need a lot more, and so would the others to become the new kind. Or he could feast on her and hope she provided enough for him to live on.

“No,” he howled.

“It’s, it’s…Fuck you!”

Louis had always admired her feisty nature. But the beast in him would not let him stop eating her. Appetite came from the brain, and the Anchorons controlled his. The human part would have to submerge to survive, but how could he let her die?

I need to know what the substance is first.

We must survive.

Who is Eddie Jean?

She is light.

We want her.

Louis marveled at the power that evolved him. He knew few were of his caliber. How would children deal with this addiction?

Who is Eddie Jean?

He would find her because she held a key, or knew details on a subject he required, and Eddie Jean knew the key couldn’t be shared with his kind.

“I forgive you,” Cindy said, gasping. “I loved you, Louis.”

He bit into Cindy to silence her. She was dangerous. Cindy made him want AL back.

The hunger frenzy continued nonstop as he drank her blood and then tore out her heart and drained every drop. Next, he sucked out her spinal fluid before succumbing to the need for rest. Satiated, he looked down at her lifeless body with horror. Anguish stunned him, and he screamed out his revulsion.

Maybe he should release his feelings?

No! To let go is to devolve.

The human side clutched Cindy’s body to his chest as he leapt on the AL table. He howled out his anguish while cradling her limp body. His kind stayed away. They didn’t understand, but sensed danger if they moved in. His grief felt not unlike his human grief. He found rocking her body helped him feel better.

Louis slept—or a semblance of rest. The hunger pains receded and were replaced with a new high—the intoxication of feasting on human flesh and blood. No wonder it was considered a sin and crime against humanity—otherwise, it would be called a delicacy.

He knew then humans made the rule because someone remembered when humans were feasted on. Louis looked down at her pale face, feeling sad. To endure this madness, he had to jettison his feelings and forget being human. He couldn’t accept that. Louis tried to brush hair off Cindy’s face.

He remembered the way she had kissed his eyelids before she walked out of the room. His heavy heart had danced with pleasure after each one. He didn’t want to forget. Never forget. He couldn’t go on split like this, aching to be human, wanting to be other.

“I can’t live like this,” he yelled out. He looked at Cindy’s pale face. Sorrow swept over him. What did a long life mean if he had no one to love?

You must go on. You will go on.

Be quiet!

Ava had a lot to answer for. She had answers his father had passed on. To confront her for all she hid from humanity, he would go on. To honor Cindy, he’d keep his human feelings and hold on to his memories of her. She gave him long life, and he’d remember her until his last day.

I’ll miss you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m not a monster. I’m not.

You tasted so good.

Rett

Rett’s left hand jerked the seat lever and the bench seat flew back as the shot cracked his eardrum and shattered the glass on the passenger window. He ignored his hysterical children, and his left hand pushed the gun upwards as the second bullet penetrated the roof. He stabbed his right hand out, striking the assailant’s throat. The person released the gun and dropped to the ground.

“Daddy!”

Blinded by rage, Rett shoved the door open and jumped out. He grabbed a thin arm and flung the assailant over. He shoved the gun at his face. A woman? She held her arms out in a “stop” gesture even as she gagged from the blow to her throat. A girl.

He noted her sunken eyes, emphasized by neon-green eye shadow, looked hopeless. Tears humanized her half-dead face. His anger faded. He stuffed the weapon in his waistband. Christ, she couldn’t be twenty-one yet.

His eyes scanned the quiet rest park illuminated by a white ball of sun. No traffic had stopped and no one ran from the main building to check out gunfire—twice. He noticed a wooded area he had failed to detect earlier and supposed she came from there. Two vehicles pulled off the Interstate to use the facilities, but the people inside pretended not to notice them.

“You alone?” he asked.

Sniffing, she muttered, “Yeah. I didn’t mean to shoot.”

Never heard of a hair trigger, he guessed. “Don’t move.” Rett moved to the driver’s window and asked, “Anyone hurt?”

The boys hugged each other and reminded him of Anna’s younger sisters.

“No, sir.”

Rett took a moment to check them out. Relieved, he said, “A’ight. Stay put, okay?”

“’Kay,” Tommy answered.

He turned back to the girl. She was petite and not quite five feet tall. At sixteen, Eddie Jean dwarfed her. “Why’d you draw down on me?”

“I’m sick,” she said like it was his fault. “Need my meds.”

Too bad.

“I’ll ask again, why?”

“Nobody’s picking up hitchers.”

“There’s been an emergency, in case you’ve been in a hole. Where did you get the gun?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Uh-huh. Where’s he?”

She bit her lip and wiped her nose.

He watched, unmoved by her discomfort. “The boyfriend?”

She sniffed and made little hacking sounds like she tried to clear her throat. Finally, she snapped out a reply. “Took my money and left me three weeks ago.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

No way. “Can you prove it?”

“Why?” She reached into her jean pocket and flipped a license at him. He caught it with his left hand. A Texas license about to expire in two months, and her name was Katie Lyons. He studied the cute, smiling picture and tried to line it up with the shrew on the pavement. She had been on the hard road, he guessed. “Get up.”

“Huh?”

“Stand.”

She held out her hand to him, but he ignored it. Slowly she stood, swaying. He surveyed her with pity. Skinny as a jump rope and as filthy as one left out in the yard. Scruffy, threadbare clothes, and even her black hair looked greasy and dull. She had a short, spiky hairstyle. Her neck and upper chest were surrounded in a lasso of angry ink that would keep her unemployed for life.

She noticed him checking her out and unzipped her windbreaker. Grime-ringed fingernails unbuttoned her shirt, exposing a black push-up bra, like its color was the ultimate turn-on after nearly blowing his head off.

When she thrust her hips out in the age-old street hooker signal, he felt sick.

“I’ll take care of you, baby.” The windbreaker hit the ground and the blouse flapped open in the breeze.

Crap, with the adrenalin pumping through his body, he wouldn’t have minded a quickie—except a paper doll was sexier than her. Her jutting ribs looked like they would pierce her pale skin, making her appear terminally ill. He supposed her foreign tats might warn “Fragile—Handle with Care.” From her appearance, he judged her to be a meth addict. Power company employees often notified police when they smelled the big three odors from a house—ammonia, rubbing alcohol, and acetone.

Her chin quivered when she noticed his disinterest. “You’ve gone Brokeback?”

He didn’t have time for this. Rett figured people stopped if they had to and since most phones weren’t working folks stopped being nosy. From the road, it must look like a grown man had forced a young girl to strip and no one cared.

Something to remember in the future.

“Cover yourself, so I can let my boys out.”

Nose dripping clear snot, she buttoned her shirt. Rett motioned her to the back and waved her to step back about ten feet. He hoped she’d run when he turned around, but she didn’t. He scanned the area again before letting the twins out. They were unusually quiet, staring at the girl like she was a ghost.

Rett squatted down and checked each one for glass cuts, but found none. He hugged them both, amazed by the feeling of grace in his heart.

“Why’d she shoot at us?” Tommy asked.

“She’s lost and scared.” Rett released them and walked to the back of the Chevy. The boys followed him like a shadow. He dropped the tailgate and lifted them up.

“I’m sorry I scared you boys,” Katie told them.

Rett removed the cooler from the backseat, liking her better for the apology.

“But I’m not lost,” Katie said, licking her lips. Her right eye twitched, and her thumbs rubbed her other fingers instead of her belly.

Rett raised the lid and pulled out two sandwiches. He opened apple juice for his kids. The boys devoured their subs.

“Are monsters chasing her too?” Teddy asked, chewing with his mouth open.

“Naw. Police got them at the airport.” He hoped they’d forget what happened on the plane, but he could tell they remembered from the nervous way both glanced around. They were the old man’s grandsons, all right. Both reacted instinctively, checking out their surroundings.

“Monsters?” Katie asked, sitting down on the pavement, knees pulled to her chest.

“Four people on our plane changed into…into something not human, and attacked,” Rett explained, wishing he didn’t. If she told the authorities they escaped their net, he and the boys were sunk. “No one knows what caused it. They’re calling it a plague plane.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.” He walked over to her and handed her a Coke and a foot-long sandwich. Watching her snatch and gobble tugged at his heart. She wiped mayo from her lips. “Two days since I’ve eaten. You and the boys aren’t contagious, are you?”

“We look sick to you?”

She shook her head. “The epidemic is why no one’s picking up hitchhikers?”

“Folks are scared.”

“Good,” she said with a smile. “I thought people didn’t like me.”

“You do look a little sick.”

“My medicine.”

“Don’t.” Rett interrupted her. “Don’t talk about drugs like they’re prescriptions.”

She swallowed a bite without chewing and then rasped, “Sorry.”

Rett walked over to the nearby trashcan and pulled out a piece of cardboard. He brushed the broken glass from the front seat and floorboard. Anger made him kick the door shut. An open passenger window put his children at risk. He would have to put them in the back seat. What was he going to do with her? He wanted to reach Uncle Jed’s before dark.

Rett walked back to them and grabbed a meatball sub. “Won’t be long until road travel is stopped. I need to get the kids to their uncle’s house. Don’t need any hassles, understand me?”

“’Cause you hit me?”

Rett leaned back against the tailgate beside Teddy and bit into his sub while staring at her. Her throat would be a vicious bruise soon. He chewed and swallowed before answering her question. “You shot at my children.”

She slurped her drink and brown fluid rolled down her chin. “I’m heading to Tyler.”

He frowned. It wouldn’t be much problem to drop her there, but traveling with strangers could be dangerous. What if another wave came?

“I’ve got a sleeping bag, and I’ll nap in the back. It’s about eighty miles.”

He’d seen the monsters in action. Punching through the back glass to snack on one of his boys would be easy. But with luck, she would be in the back for less than two hours. At some point he would have to err on the side of acting like a decent human being, and decided to start now. If Eddie Jean survived the disease, she might end up in similar circumstances. He wanted people to help her. “You’ll have to pee when we do. No special stops for you.”

Katie licked her fingers, so he tossed her a Hershey’s bar. She ripped the wrapping with her teeth before saying, “Fine by me. I’ve got a warrant out on me in Tyler.”

Telling the truth shouldn’t be penalized. It pissed him off that she waited until he agreed to drive her there. Katie had been around the block.

“Thought I should come clean,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get home for a long time.”

Katie’s confession brought out the feelings he’d suppressed since he went looking for Quitman’s cave. Normal things like kindness, concern, and charity. He savored their return. Rett suspected charity would soon be seen as weakness in the new pecking order. He didn’t care.

Eddie Jean wasn’t going to find her father one day living without compassion like Quitman Delaney. To have compassion, a man had to practice it. He had to raise his sons with heart and compassion too. The new world might change him, but he’d be damned if he let it take his humanity from him.

He said, “Thanks for being honest, Katie. It’s our pleasure to take you home. Collect your gear. We don’t want to get caught out after dark.”

Eddie Jean

Scot decided to let the Swarmers expend their time and energy breaking in the door. A good idea—except they didn’t tire. They had almost breached the door. Waiting was hard, harder than going out the door. Waiting let fear in, and then doubt.

Eddie Jean pressed her crucifix against her lips and bowed her head. Her prayer was one of thanks for every gift, smile, and hug she had ever received. She didn’t want to die, but if she did, she wanted to be appreciative for all she had loved and enjoyed.

Scot had established short telepathic communications with XOs and other humans fighting Swarmers. He’d learned telep extended past the town boundary lines, but he didn’t know the extent of its reach. He failed to contact his family in Tennessee.

In his helplessness, Scot communicated verbally and telepathically. “Leave her.” He held his breath. “No! Go out the window.” Seconds ticked past. Scot yelled, “Tayla? Tayla?” He punched a filing cabinet and then kicked it.

Outside, the Swarmers growled and beat against the door. Every so often Scot repeated Tayla’s name, but she never responded. He stopped trying.

“Did Tayla make—”

“She didn’t trust my advice.” He turned his back.

“Maybe she needs to concentrate on escaping. You’re experienced with telep, she’s not.”

Scot nodded. “Her mother turned and she locked herself in the bathroom.” He rubbed his face with his hands.

Eddie Jean had learned from half listening to him that she had been right about a jump in evolution. There were three distinct types of infected or monsters and two types of enhanced humans. People able to make the evolutionary jump became XOs. She and Scot had upgraded with even more skills.

Eddie Jean felt different. Her reflexes were faster and she could block all the jumpy, frightened, telepathic shout-outs with ease. Scot seemed to be hypersensitive to them. He had information overload symptoms. She could tell by his glassy stare and clenched fists.

“Why aren’t you helping people on telep?” he asked.

“It’s too chaotic.”

They were surrounded, like everyone else. Humans woke last after the Hum wreaked havoc.

“They’ll be in soon. I counted thirty.” He squatted down beside her with his rifle across his lap. If this was their last stand, she wanted to share her feelings. “Scot, I’d like to say—”

“Not now,” he said. “Stay sharp.”

She licked her lips and worked the bolt on her rifle with lightning speed. She reloaded in a snap too. Eddie Jean didn’t want to think about it, but she worried her healing touch would be lost the moment she killed one. Gifts from God didn’t come with lifetime guarantees.

“Quitman would be proud.” Scot ducked his head after his goof.

“We’re facing a last stand,” she grumbled, “and I’m stuck with you?”

He flicked a hunk of hair out of his eyes and grinned. “Sorry.”

Eddie Jean almost smoothed his hair back but instead asked, “XOs?”

“All fine. Cara said people taking Q’s supplements didn’t make the jump.”

Eddie Jean frowned. “That’s bad.”

Scot said, “I can’t make decisions without info. Tell me what you know.”

“The upgrade had a purpose. Humans have been through this live-and-die scenario before. Last time our bodies quit making vitamin C, for instance. Maybe our history is censored so people can be free from our violent past.”

“Cyclic destructions? Like a worldwide flood?”

She nodded. “The unchanged people will handicap us. You can see the conflict coming, can’t you?”

“Sure, discrimination, but first we have to survive day one-post Hum.”

Banging on the door in tempo grew louder.

She tucked her crucifix under her sweater. “I’m sorry my mom messed up your family.”

Boom! The door cracked inward.

“Sounds like they’re using a tree trunk,” Scot said.

She caught their syrupy stench as sunbeams bounced in.

Scot moved to the center of the room and she joined him.

He said, “Stay focused and fire with precision, don’t panic. Move forward when I do and count your shots. We don’t want to reload at the same time.” He touched her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad I’m with you.”

“Thanks.” She steeled herself and opened her telep.

The door crashed onto the floor. The first faces she saw looked way worse than Swarmers. They were too malformed to look at. Others were more exotic and bigger. Her heartbeat pulsed in her temples. They didn’t stand a chance.

Scot fired. Pop! Pop! Pop! He beamed, {In the eye}

His shots inside the building woke her from a defeated daze. She followed his orders. All discomforts vanished as she worked her firing sequence in with his. The putrid stench the exotics emitted no longer affected her. She turned off her feelings, and focused on aim—pinpoint the eye, and squeeze.

In their eagerness to rush in, the exotics got stuck in the doorway, creating easy targets. Their rage became so intense they attacked each other. They piled up fast, several feet high, before the ones behind pulled the dead away to clear the entrance.

Scot yelled, “Follow me.” He charged through the door, firing as he went.

What’s he doing? Her legs propelled her forward before she completed the thought. Fear didn’t restrain her. Blinking from the blazing sunlight, she searched for targets. The environmental devastation jarred. Trees were stacked helter-skelter, and the ground had been gouged with fissures and deep gorges.

An arm slammed into her side, knocking her over into the gravel. She rolled with the force and jumped to her feet. Scot shot the one lunging for her throat. She brought the rifle up before the next one moved in. The exotics backed up because their victims fought back. They hesitated and their attack waned.

She felt heartsick for what humankind faced in the future, but she rejected the fear that threatened to overtake her and fired. Even though she couldn’t see Scot, she knew his location like she had GPS in her head. He was surrounded and never stopped shooting.

The rifle barrel grew warm as she fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded. Ejected shells dropped near her feet. The big exotics with webbed feet retreated into the background and let the others attack. Left behind were the tall ones with fangs and messianic glares, the hideous troll-like things, and Swarmers. The trolls were eating machines, and they attacked from different directions in a ruthless manner.

“I’m out,” Scot yelled, and then he yelped.

Eddie Jean felt his pain explode in her head. Terror of losing him infused her blood with heartfelt agony. She dropped the rifle, clutched her head, and flashed—her telep network lit up like a lightning bolt. The flash short-circuited the nearby exotics, and they fell to the ground.

When she realized that she killed them with thoughts, she panicked, covering her head and squatting down. She couldn’t use it again. Never. Did she kill Scot? Panting, she listened. No, she heard his shallow breathing. The exotics acted confused and then charged. She crossed herself.

Closing her eyes, she flashed. And then again—pulling back on the intensity. The exotic pack sprinted in different directions. The creatures leapt gorges in the warped road and over fallen tree barriers twenty feet high. Closer ones dropped dead.

Scot groaned. She picked up her rifle and went to him. The ground under him appeared jagged and slashed with shallow fissures. Blood saturated his sun-streaked hair. He’s not moving.

A big one tried to crawl away but convulsed about ten feet away from Scot. She recognized death throes and ignored it. Eddie Jean carefully rolled Scot over onto his back. He was conscious, but going into shock. His eyes looked glazed and stared off behind her head. His lips moved. His breathing was rapid, shallow, and irregular.

She assessed his head injuries and lacerated triceps muscle. Anxious, she waited, watching over Scot until he self-healed. He didn’t heal.

Please, God. Please help him.

“Run!” he said, trying to move his injured arm to push her.

An exotic rushed at them from behind the emergency shelter. A vampire. Its shirt wasn’t bloody, so it hadn’t fed. Eddie Jean targeted it with flash. It stopped, grabbed its head, and burst into flames. Behind a rock, creatures attacked each other. A flash side effect?

Eddie Jean put her hands on Scot’s chest and reached for the healing flick. Nothing happened. Scot couldn’t self-heal and she couldn’t help him! His breathing slowed.

“No!” she screamed as pain seared her chest. “Help! Please help me!” She clutched his hand and raised her head to search the sky. Eddie Jean had never felt so lost or alone. “Please? Oh, please?” She couldn’t curse God, but she could pray for help as Scot struggled to breathe. She bowed her head and the words wouldn’t come.

Eddie Jean opened her eyes and glanced around. Her little sister, Kimmy, stepped out of the shadowed woods.

Eddie Jean

Eddie Jean gasped.

She stared at her sister, shocked. From a distance, Kimmy didn’t look half-dead or rabid. For a stunning moment, she looked like the same little girl who crawled into her bed after a nightmare. A rush of good memories flooded her, and Eddie Jean smiled.

Kimmy paced naked and stopped to stare at her. Her body movements reflected concern. Had she heard her yell and come to help her big sister? Tears clouded her vision. She wanted to believe it. They had been close.

For the one-hundredth time, she wondered if she could heal Swarm in a small person. Granddad warned her never to try. Not that it mattered now.

Kimmy became agitated. “Stay away,” Eddie Jean begged, silently.

She glanced from her sister to Scot. “Heal, Scot,” she whispered. Nothing.

Light faded from Scot’s beautiful eyes and his pupils dilated. Tears spilled. Her feelings for him wouldn’t allow her to sit by and watch him die. She had to try something to help.

Eddie Jean delivered a chest thump and began rescue CPR. Tears blinded her as she pumped his chest to keep his blood moving. After years of healing, CPR seemed archaic. Her new senses told her he wasn’t responding.

She stopped and cried. Eddie Jean cried for everyone lost in the new world’s birth, and for people who ached with the same loss as she did. Slowly, the gut-wrenching tension, narrowed vision, and bounding pulse faded. She leaned over to brush Scot’s hair out of his eyes. She couldn’t take her eyes off his face.

People were always watching them after their parents’ affair became public knowledge. She had made a point of not looking at him except during football games. She even ignored him when he came out to watch her JV soccer games. Eddie Jean hesitated and then leaned over to kiss his lips. They were still warm, and she kissed him again. “Don’t leave me, Scot.”

Kimmy shrieked and darted straight at them.

Eddie Jean stiffened. Scot was dying, and Kimmy ran arrow-fast. Behind her sister, her mother and Granddad charged. A family feast. The one thing she hoped never to witness. Scot’s breathing became slower and fainter. Grief choked her.

She couldn’t flash Kimmy.

Her hands felt fire hot and ready to heal. What if her healing depended on her mindset? Had Kimmy brought her back in touch with her feelings, so she could tap back into her healing? “Thank you, Kimmy.”

Eddie Jean felt the colors in her skin return like a soft brush of a feather. Startled, she put her hands on Scot’s chest and let the good flow in a single flick.

Scot grunted, and his breathing improved.

Her heart raced. I haven’t lost it. Focus, focus, focus. She dropped into the calm. Could she heal Scot and then Kimmy? Or should she tackle Kimmy and heal her before healing Scot fully? Indecision choked her. Her little sister deserved to be healed as much as Scot. In the past, she could heal one person at a time. Anguish blinded her.

Scot or Kimmy?

She had seconds to choose. Family first?

If Scot couldn’t self-heal, he would be vulnerable to airborne Swarm. He’d become Swarmer. Eddie Jean couldn’t let that happen. She looked away from her sister and tried to forget Kimmy unwrapping Christmas gifts, dancing to cartoons, and catching butterflies.

Head first—heal his head first.

She remembered the light had dimmed when she couldn’t shake her foot free, and she couldn’t hold her breath any longer. Scot dived in and gave the light back to her. Her hands zapped like they housed electrical current. She put one hand on Scot’s forehead and the other behind his head. The colors rushed in under a new-found power and he gasped.

Kimmy yelped and veered off. Her mother followed. Scot groaned and his breathing returned to normal. Eddie Jean repeated the previous attempt. The flick snapped and the cold swirled into her hands.

Granddad stopped twenty feet behind her, watching. He knew healing required unbroken concentration. He hoped to make her screw up. Her skin colors swirled. She put one hand on Scot’s chest and the other under his back. This time Scot reached up with his good arm to grasp her wrist on his chest. A heat wave, an energy surge, popped him like a defibrillator shock. Behind her, Granddad screeched, and he ran.

Scot groaned. Surprised, they repeated it.

Minutes later, he pushed her hand off his forehead and sat up, squinting at the sun. They smiled at each other and hugged. She crossed herself and said a prayer.

“Thanks, EJ.”

“We’re a team, remember?” Eddie Jean stood and looked for Kimmy. All three had left.

The vampire’s smoking carcass fouled the air. Gunfire echoed in the distance. The fighting had not stopped.

“Ow.” He cradled his wounded arm.

“Don’t move.” She examined his arm and noticed healing had begun, thank God. She pushed her fingertips into the wound. Eddie Jean visualized his microvasculature and reached for the flick. Cold burned her and heat cooled her. Eddie Jean removed her fingers. She left a patch of healing salve over his wound.

“That felt weird.” Scot lifted up his arm. “Looks like a big purple blister.”

Eddie Jean sat back on her heels, staring at her hands.

“Not more, emo?”

She bit her lip.

“Seriously, light faded but I could see you.”

She dropped her head and cried. He put his uninjured arm around her until she stopped. “What happened?”

“You couldn’t self-heal because of the head trauma. Don’t share our weakness over telep.”

His eyebrows rose. “Agreed. What else?”

“Nothing.” She helped him up.

“Tell me.”

She took a deep breath. “Swarmers can’t attack while I’m healing.”

“Good news,” he said, and surveyed the scene. Eddie Jean had never seen such destruction. Sure, trees were uprooted when a tornado appeared, but not like this. Even Scot’s Jeep had fallen into a deep gorge. In the distance, a violet-colored, circular beam of light surrounded a clear glade with trees. The tiny island looked serene in the torn landscape.

“Let’s check these freaks out. Gather intel,” he said. “How did they die? They’re not shot.”

She covered her face with her hands.

“EJ?” He peeled her hands away. “How did you kill them?”

She licked her lips. “You went down. I freaked and flashed. Like a lightning strike in telep and the ones near me dropped dead. I thought, I thought I killed you too. It happened before I healed you.”

He hugged her. “It’s self defense, not vengeance. There’s a difference.”

“These were people I passed on the street.”

He rubbed her back. “I know.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist. “My healing is stronger.”

“Lucky for me.” They walked to the dead exotic with webbed feet and hands.

“This exotic bit you. Your blood gave him seizures or an allergic reaction before I flashed.”

Scot cut his eyes at her. “Exotic? Accurate description, and it fits all. Is this worldwide or localized?”

“Worldwide, but not everywhere yet. We could get nuked before it spreads all over.”

“Can we make a difference?” he asked.

“Yes.” She looked again for her sister and mother. Not a trace. Sadness stabbed her. What if she could’ve healed Kimmy? Didn’t she owe her sister to find her and try?

“Look at the web’s claws, they’re hard. Why bash my head in and not stab me?”

“They’re learning like we are. It feared injury.” She kicked its chest. “They have exoskeleton chest armor.”

He squatted. “They grow armor, but we’re left vulnerable? What does this imply?”

She didn’t want to express her internal fears. “This breed isn’t supposed to be here. They pose the biggest threat. They use telep too.”

“Mine’s vanished because of the head whack. Think it will come back?”

Eddie Jean didn’t know. “After you rest, I’ll try to boost your signal.” She found a stick and touched the exotic’s eyes. “Protective scales,” she said. “No hair, just bristle, but you can still see he formed from a man.”

Scot reached over and pointed to a spot where an eyebrow would be. “A gill?”

“Let’s roll it over.”

Four slits at the nape. They rolled the web back supine. Eddie Jean touched the skin on its legs. It was dusky gray and felt like sandpaper. When she was young, the family had stopped to visit relatives on Dauphin Island during summer vacation. A deep-sea fishing rodeo was in progress. Her dad had lifted her up to touch the shark’s body. The exotic’s skin felt similar.

“Amphibious?” she asked him. “Webbed extremities and gills, not like the others.”

Scot shrugged. “Armor would make them sink, right?”

“Unless it softens in water or they excrete an enzyme when under attack. After attack, the armor shrinks. This species formed from humans infected with Anchorons.”

“I’ll accept DNA upgrades, but physical changes are impossible. It kills scientific principles.”

“My fingers left a purple blister over your wound. How come you can believe in my healing but not evolution? The Anchorons had intelligence.”

He shook his head. “So, we have three types of humans. Those like us, those like we used to be, and regulars. Four types of exotics counting the Swarmers, right?”

“So far. The West Coast could be different or unaffected.”

“Okay, focus on here. This web made the evolutionary jump. He’s fully changed. Are the others failures? In time, they’ll die out?”

“The failures could be a result of chronic diseases or blood infections.”

“Guess we’re back to survival of the fittest,” he said.

“The webs change everything.”

“Are you afraid they’ll knock us off the top of the food chain?”

She nodded.

“Let’s check its teeth.” Scot struck the jaw with the rifle butt. Its jaw gaped.

Eddie Jean flinched. It had two rows of ripping teeth.

Scot looked pale. “We’re their food source.”

Eddie Jean walked over to sit on a tree trunk. A new thought had depressed her.

He followed. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m tired.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “The flood of emotions you’re experiencing is normal. Soldiers go through it after close combat. Let me help you for a change. Talk to me.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t keep secrets like Q.”

She didn’t want him to feel guilty or think he owed a debt because she chose to heal him over Kimmy. “I thought I lost you,” she blurted before the tears and hurt poured out. “I can’t, I can’t lose anyone else.” She started shaking, sniffing, and hiccupping.

“You won’t. Don’t give up—even if I don’t make it. You get up and go on.”

She wiped her face. “I never expected a brutal killing world. I expected—”

“Paradise? Humans fought our way to the top of the food chain before, and we can do it again. Right, soccer girl?”

Eddie Jean smiled. “I’ve been training to help people, not learning fight skills.”

“You were kicking ass,” he said, pointing at the corpses. “Don’t step backward, we need you. I need you.”

She shook her head. “I can’t heal and kill. I’m not meant to do both.”

“You healed me. People who won’t fight,” he said, taking her hand, “will be weeded out. You’ll have to do your part.”

She stared at their locked hands. “Most people were upgraded. Who will I be healing?”

He frowned.

“Q told me people would come to me to heal their monsters, and he said I should refuse.”

“Why?”

“He said Swarmers’ basic natures were altered, and healing doesn’t reach their minds.”

Scot stood. “I’m not used to you acting like this. You’re the optimist, not me. This is our time. We’re poison to the invaders, and they want to destroy us. If we pursue our personal dreams, we’ll waste our best chance to defeat them.”

“I saw Kimmy when I healed you.”

“You’re conflicted. You wonder if she’d come back like a serial killer or a sweet little girl. You feel guilty because you weren’t here when she got sick. Ease up on yourself.”

How did he know about her guilt? She licked her lips and nodded.

“You’re looking for excuses to duck the fight. Now is the time to help people. We’ll form a resistance and use telep to tell others how to fight them. We’ll use coordinated attacks. Once we’ve got them on the run, we find our families. Agreed?”

“What if everyone is still evolving? Stop the killing and see what happens.”

“They’re attacking! Offense is better than defense. Until we know the score, we protect our own. We fight, we use our skills, and we make sure the new kind doesn’t end us. You in?”

She shook her head. “I have to find Kimmy.” She stared at their locked hands, expecting him to let go, but he didn’t.

“This is survival. You have to deal with the situation. It’s our turn to step up and help people. Isn’t your thing helping people?”

Halfway commitments always failed. She had another choice to make. Healing a Swarmer had never been done. Although Q had told her she was nature’s answer to Swarm, she knew he lied. He had a way of weaving truth between lies. She had to find balance. She could waste time and energy trying to do the impossible, or she could help people the best she could. As she had always done in the past, she chose to follow her heart. She squeezed his hand.

“I have to find and help Kimmy.”

He stared off in the distance. “I wasn’t truthful,” Scot said. “I’d give anything to have my dad back.” He looked into her eyes. “I don’t blame you for wanting to heal her. Let’s go into Cloudland and hook up with the others. We need to get a handle on the scope of the situation. After our group is united, we’ll come back and find her. Deal?”

She nodded and tried not to act emo. “Together?”

He nodded and put his free hand over their clasped ones. “We’re connected, and I’m not going to deny it. I promise, I won’t let go.”

She tried not to smile as she put her hand on top. A lump grew in her throat as her pulse jumped. “Me either.”

The End

About the Author

R.V. Doon loves to write stories with added thrills and chills no matter the genre. Swarmers is her first apocalyptic thriller. The story seeds sprouted during a forensic brain cutting, and she wrote the story from there. Doon claims the best way to relieve work-related stress is to read scary stories, because it changes your brain chemistry.

In any case, she hopes reading Swarmers will evoke comparisons to The Strain and The Walking Dead as a lethal virus with no known cure is awakened and goes airborne in a small town. After every catastrophe, unlikely leaders arise to help the stunned survivors survive. Swarmers is their story.

Other books by R.V. Doon:

The War Nurse: Chosen as a 2015 Next Generation Finalist in Historical Fiction. The War Nurse is a historical thriller and adventure story.

Double Blind: Is a medical thriller that will make you think of whistle-blowers in a new light.

Body Wave: Is Book 1 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series, featuring Reece Carson RN as an amateur sleuth. In this book, Reece discovers secrets can kill.

Body Aches: Book 2 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series. Reece finds out lies are more dangerous than secrets.

Body Magnet: Book 3 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series. Reece discovers that black-hearted lies create coldblooded killers.

Find R. V. Doon:

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Thrown Away

Parts 1-3

Glynn James

PART ONE

IN A FALLEN WORLD

He sensed them in the darkness, all around, moving quickly through the building, room by room as they searched. Every few minutes the silence was broken by loud crashing sounds as they broke into another area, the clatter of broken wood scattering across rotten floorboards and cracked concrete, or the terrible, grief-stricken and desperate cries of those who had been found, their hiding places uncovered. He could hear the thud of boots sometimes, echoing through the corridors, or the creaking of the building’s very structure as it protested against the abuse.

Centuries old and given to spontaneous collapse, the tenement buildings of the outer zone had ceased to be safe long before any of their current residents had been born, but the crumbling ruins were the only real shelter for many of the inhabitants of the zone, the only place to hide from the danger on the streets or the often unforgiving weather.

Most of the dangers lay outside of the crumbling walls – things that wandered the streets at night that were far from human, but the hunting squads from the city travelled deep into the darkness of the buildings, seeking those who would avoid capture. Finally, the noise that everyone dreaded could be heard in the distance – the rising hum and the sharp crackling buzz as a stun rifle was fired.

Jack sat in silence, listening, willing his nerves to calm and his heart rate to slow. The sounds were getting closer now, and he knew they were in a nearby corridor, possibly just a few rooms away. He heard boots shuffling along the floor, and the crash of rubbish as it was kicked aside – the barrier that he had built outside provided no protection, was merely an inconvenience for the heavily armoured troopers whose faces had never been seen, at least by anyone who remained to tell of them.

Jack had never known where the raiding parties took the captured, for no one ever returned. There were always tales, and rumours of course, but no one that he had ever met had confirmed any of them.

The corridors of the sprawling, old building were littered with the junk and debris of decades, most of it useless and left there because there was nowhere else for it to go. But the trash also acted as a territorial marker, a sign of neighbouring borders, of marked out claims. Often it was piled up to waist height, to act as a makeshift defensive barrier, and a way to slow intruders down or ward them away. Folks who lived in the area would know to stay away, and recognise the barrier for what it was, but the Hunters saw it as a sign of life, of someone to capture and drag away to their prison vehicles. The vehicles had no windows on the sides or the back, and Jack suspected it might be completely dark inside them, but that was something else that no one had confirmed. No one ever came back.

His heart thumped harder in his chest and he doubled his efforts to control his breathing, to remain silent, but a cold trickle of sweat heightened the twitching of already ragged nerves as it ran down his neck. Jack knew there was a chance, if only very small, that they could pass him by. The Hunters might enter the room, their pinpoint searchlights flickering over the walls, passing over the cracked paint and the curled and mould-ridden wallpaper, skittering over the rubble and litter covered ground and not stopping as they zipped past the broken wardrobe that was his hiding place. Even if they did look into the wardrobe, they could still miss him as he lay huddled in the bottom, covered by rags and old clothing. With this thought, he crouched lower and did his best to be a pile of discarded junk.

It was possible. But maybe this is my time? He thought. They could pass you by, like before, but they are smart, not stupid, and you know that they see more than you think they do, don’t you? What if they did take you?

He tried to ignore the thoughts. From his hiding place he could only see a tiny slice of the derelict room beyond. Both doors of the wardrobe were still attached, even if they did hang at odd angles, and he had pulled them as closed as they would go. It only left a few inches in between the doors, so his vision was limited, but his hearing was sharp, and when the first Hunter stepped into the room Jack slowed his breathing to almost nothing. Instinct kicked in and he lay there, perfectly still and silent, not knowing how long he could keep it up, but hoping that the search would be over quickly.

Slow and shallow, slow and shallow, he thought. Repeating the mantra in his mind, over and over. If he could just keep this up long enough, and if he made no noise, they would go away, wouldn’t they? The old man that Jack had once travelled with, so very long ago, had taught him how to hold his breath and stay perfectly still, had even beaten him with a stick until he got it right. And so, over the years, he had done this before in many other places and not been found.

But I’ve also never been this close to them, he thought. Not this close. Just a few feet away. They can see through walls – that’s what some folks claimed, and they can see you in the darkness. His breathing wavered very slightly at this thought. If they could see him anyway, wasn’t he just delaying the inevitable, waiting and waiting only to be taken like all the others? But what choice did he have?

The same choice you had back then, he thought. You have your machetes. But what good would they be against the armour of the Hunters? If you had the guts to use them, you would have done it back then, back when it really mattered.

The Hunters never searched thoroughly, they just swept through an area like a hurricane, raiding entire buildings in just minutes, satisfied if they found someone to stun and carry away. Jack would hear the buzz of a stun rifle and the thud as a discovered victim hit the ground, and then heavy boots clomping away as the Hunters carried their latest catch to the vehicles that awaited them in the street – the vehicles with no windows.

Sometimes there would be a struggle if the Hunters found a group of people together, but the fight was always over quickly. There was little defence against the weapons that the soldiers used. Sticks, knives and metal pipes were no match for reactive armour and a stun rifle that could knock you out cold, at fifty yards, with one shot. Fists were useless against a shock stick that could render you unconscious with just one strike, twitching and writhing on the ground as the electrical pulse surged through your nervous system. And if the resistance was too high then they would just throw in a grenade and stun everyone in the room. One loud thump and it would be over. Except the grenades didn’t always stun – sometimes they caused more damage than that. Sometimes there would be bodies left behind.

The outer zone of the city – the area beyond the glowing barrier – was massive. Thousands and thousands of square miles of ruined, crumbling decay. Endless desolate streets lined with empty shells that had once been buildings – their windows shattered, doors long taken for firewood, bricks and stone cracked and collapsing, leaving holes that looked like gaping wounds. It was among these ruins that the destitute – the people not allowed to live on the inside of the barrier – were forced to make their homes, to scavenge and scrape some form of life from the remains of a fallen world. These people were never permitted within the confines of the barrier, but for some reason that no one had ever discovered, the people on the inside were capturing the ones on the outside, and in large numbers.

Where were they taken? This was the question everyone wanted an answer to, but one that was never given. There were places that were left alone – larger outer zone communities, workhouses – anywhere that had a dense population – these weren’t raided. Maybe there was too much risk involved attacking such heavily defended locations? He didn’t know. What he did know was that to claim your own pitch in many of the bigger hovels was a fight that most people couldn’t win, so they were forced to live in the surrounding ruins. Those were the ones who would be hunted and taken.

It had been nearly three months since Jack was last in an area targeted by the Hunters. With such a vast city to search, it was rare to even see them in the distance. They only came down from the inner city once every few weeks, that much he did know. But knowing where and when they would strike next was an art form that very few had mastered, a total mystery to most.

And it was so fast when it happened, the huge Dropship soaring across the sky at a speed that was dazzling for such a massive behemoth of a vehicle. It would land within seconds of appearing on the horizon, the huge black shape plummeting towards the ground as if it were about to crash. But it never did crash. Seconds after the blast of jets were unleashed, the Dropship was on the ground, spewing out a torrent of fast-moving armoured carrier vehicles that burst through the clouds of dust kicked up by the beast’s arrival. The vehicles quickly sped through the streets at a terrifying speed, and when they arrived at their target location, dozens of armed squads would jump from the trucks, surging into the ruined buildings in search of vagrants. In search of prey.

Jack tried to recall the first time that he had seen a raid, and the picture came to him almost immediately, blanking out the sounds of the Hunters moving in the darkness around him. There were several of them in the room now, scanning, searching, but even with capture in such close proximity, his mind still drifted away, seeking a place to escape to.

Just Once

Many years before...

How old had he been at the time? He had been very young, seven years old at most, and life in the ruins was still a thing of terror for him – a time spent hiding in dark corners and shadows, avoiding the folks that searched the ruins. It was a time of catching rats or mice and scratching for life, even though it was one spent in near constant starvation. That he had survived those days was a miracle in itself, for many others that he had known hadn’t. He tried to wipe their faces from his mind and think back to the one scene that might ease him.

So many of them lost, he thought. So many friends, and some not so much friends. It didn’t matter which, though. They were all gone, now. Taken was taken and dead was still dead, unless you were one of the things that roamed the streets at night, and no one really knew much about why they were still there.

The building Jack had been hiding in the first time he’d experienced a Hunter raid, all those years ago, wasn’t in the block that the soldiers had targeted.

Lucky, that’s what you were. Others hadn’t been as lucky as you.

He remembered hiding for a while, curled up in the corner of a bathroom, high up in the crumbling shell of an abandoned apartment building. He had been tired, almost completely exhausted, and had huddled inside the recess behind the cracked sink to sleep for a while. He’d found the spot a few days before, as he entered the bathroom in search of water. Some of the pipes and taps in the old buildings still gave occasional bursts of fresh water. No one knew how or why, but the old man that taught Jack how to slow-breathe also said that some of it came from hidden water springs, deep under the ground, and that it would occasionally overflow into the old water systems.

The hole behind the sink was almost unnoticeable even from a few feet away, and Jack certainly hadn’t spotted it immediately, and probably never would had he not also been searching for metal to trade as well as water. A scavenger group living not far away loved their metals, and plumbing pipes were still the most abundant source, if you knew where to find them. As he had crawled behind the sink to see if any of the original piping was still there, he found that the area opened up into a small compartment just big enough for him, and a little left over to stretch his legs if need be.

Hiding places such as that would serve him for many years.

That first experience of the noise of the incoming Dropship was the most terrifying. The roar was louder than anything he had ever heard, and since he was unable to see its source, it sounded like some huge beast was about to trample the whole city. But the noise stopped in an instant, and the sound of smaller engines cut through the quiet. Jack had crawled from his hiding place, curiosity overcoming his fear, and peeped out of the broken window just above the sink.

The streets were buzzing with large grey trucks, and he could see soldiers dressed in grey armour rushing into the buildings nearby. They carried weapons that he had never seen before – large black rifles that looked heavy and awkward, and long black sticks with tips that glowed blue in the darkness.

He watched, struck motionless with fascination, as a group of people in a building just two blocks away were roughly ushered into the back of one of the vehicles, and a surge of fear hit him. What if they came to his building? Still, he watched from the window as the vehicles came and went, and once he realised that they weren’t coming into his building, he tentatively crept closer to the window and watched. He still kept to the shadows, fearing that one glimpse of a person in a neighbouring building would set the hounds upon him and the few vagrants that lived in the lower levels, but he couldn’t help but watch. Some morbid fascination kept his eyes glued to the chaos just yards away as more soldiers piled from the backs of vehicles and ran into the surrounding buildings.

Heavy boots kicked down doors, and long black sticks smashed through windows. Minutes later they reappeared, dragging the unlucky people that they had found, throwing them into the back of their trucks. This went on for ten minutes or so, until finally a group of four soldiers approached the front of a dilapidated and crumbling storefront opposite the tenement building he was hiding in.

Then the real chaos started.

The old store was where the gang of Scavs – scavengers – had been holed up, and Jack estimated there had to be at least thirty of them in there. They were inoffensive folk, if a little rough, but they left him alone, never harassing him or any of the other dwellers in the area. It wasn’t their way. They weren’t territorial, and would be gone in a few months, maybe even weeks – that was how the Scav clans worked. Jack had met their kind before on the few occasions when he ended up near the outer circle – the furthest parts of the city from the centre. It was usually where their kind lived. Except they moved around a lot, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks, scouring the area for metals to salvage and then moving on.

But he had no idea just how heavily armed Scav clans could be until the moment the four Hunters headed for the front door of the store.

The streets were silent, except for the distant crashes of doors being broken, and the cries of the discovered. Most of the search was over and many of the trucks were already filled with those unfortunate enough to have been found. When the four soldiers got to the door of the store, and the first lifted his foot to smash a way in, the doors burst open, both swinging wide. The first Hunter, one boot lifted in the air and now off balance, fell backwards, struck down by the force of the door, and that was what saved him from dying with the other three. Even as they started to raise their stun rifles, a deluge of weapons fire erupted from within the building. Jack had never heard such a tremendous and destructive noise. Flashes of blue light rocketed out of the double doors and tore into the three soldiers. All three fell to the ground, their bodies torn apart.

The Scavs weren’t using weapons that just stunned.

The fourth Hunter rolled to the side of the doors, jumped up and started to run from the store, but then the Scavs were flooding out of the front doors, most of them carrying bags and sacks as they turned and ran, but the first half a dozen were armed with heavy, black weapons. The fourth Hunter got maybe twenty yards before they gunned him down in the middle of the street, flashes of blue energy thundering into him, tearing the limbs from his body.

In the distance, a klaxon sounded – an alarm from the direction of the Dropship, and Jack crouched down, further into the darkness, watching as more armoured vehicles sped through the streets, heading in his direction. He looked down at the store below, and saw the last of the Scavs grabbing the Hunters’ rifles and pulling belts and other equipment from the dead bodies before they ran, moving swiftly into the darkness of the surrounding streets.

By the time the half-dozen armoured trucks arrived, the Scavs were long gone and all that was left were the four dead, stripped bodies.

It was the only time Jack had ever seen or heard of someone putting up a fight and winning.

Hunted

Now, sitting in the wardrobe, pretending to be a pile of rags and holding his breath, he wished he had one of those weapons, in case the Hunters, just feet away, managed to detect him, and that he’d had one of those Scav guns a few years ago.

Then it never would have happened...

...and there it was, again. The ever-haunting memory he wished he could remove. But frustration had once again brought the memory rushing back, his brain desperate for distraction.

Jack had been furious at the boy for drawing in his magazine, so angry that he had stood there, towering over the child, shouting angrily at him. Until he saw how small the boy was, the tiny figure looking at the floor, his rounded face bright red with the shame of what he had done. They were Jack’s things. His magazines. His way to learn about the past. The boy had known that, and should have known better than to de-face one of them. Jack had been so angry with him that he hadn’t heard the Dropship approaching until they barely had the time to react – so little time to hide.

On that day, because of his scolding, the boy looked as fragile as he had the day they’d met.

They Took His Shoes

Three years before...

The boy had been sitting at the side of the road the day that Jack met him. The child’s scrawny arms were wrapped around his knees, his head bent low as he shivered. It wasn’t too cold, but then the child wasn’t wearing the extra layers that Jack was. Where Jack had two shirts underneath his heavy leather coat, and black overall bottoms pulled over his jeans, the boy was dressed in a torn and filthy t-shirt and a pair of thin, ripped trousers.

You saw things almost every day in the outer zone – people in doorways, huddled against the weather, their eyes dark and tired, their faces gaunt, but you just moved on. Life was harsh and deadly, and to even attempt to help others was considered a foolish way to shorten your own life.

Jack had just been to The Crossing, a walled and defended section of the ruins that had grown over many years into a dangerous but necessary marketplace. It was a hovel – one of the small towns that the Hunters ignored. There were many such places dotted around the outer city, thriving hubs of activity where people had gathered and built defences against the world outside, ramshackle shanty towns filled with all manner of folks trying to survive and not wanting to live on the streets of the dead city. But to hold on to a place in one of the towns you had to have resources or weapons, something to ensure that you could keep your pitch. The Crossing was a place that Jack visited regularly, the centre of everything for miles around. That also meant that it was the hang out for every thug, gang or would-be overlord in the area.

But it was also a place to trade. If Jack found something while scavenging, something that had a value to someone, then it was to The Crossing that he would usually take it. Metals, ammunition, paper, plastics, food – anything that could be traded – was wanted by someone there.

He was trudging along the highway, on his way out after trading some lead sheeting he had found in an old factory, for a dozen packets of dried biscuits and a bottle of oil, and he had only made it a few hundred yards out of the gates when he crossed another intersection and saw the boy.

Anyone with any sense of self-preservation got off the road, hid away in a building, or just kept moving. The roads going into The Crossing were a place to get yourself killed in a second if you hung around too long. In the shadows of the buildings that lined the street, prospective scavengers lay in wait, watching from their hiding places, just for the moment where someone passed by or stayed too long. Jack had seen many a body in the gutters, stripped of all belongings, throats slit, skin turning pale.

And yet here was this small figure, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, rocking backwards and forwards.

Jack slowed as he approached and glanced at the gaping hole in the side of the nearest building. It could be trap, he knew – the child sent outside as bait to draw in some unfortunate victim looking for an easy take, or a fool thinking of offering help. But there was no movement from inside the crumbling building, no eyes watching from the corners, no shadows shifting.

Still, he gripped the handles of his two machetes tightly as he started making his way around the swaying figure, keeping his distance and moving quickly. Yet every few steps he couldn’t help but glance at the child – his thin arms, the dirt that covered every inch of him, his body heaving as he sobbed. These were good tricks for a baiter. But then, as Jack started to move away to leave the boy behind and move on, he noticed that the child had nothing on his feet, and that they were bloodied.

The hairs on the back of Jack’s neck started to tingle. Why was he stopping? Why did he find himself standing, turning to face the small figure, and taking a step towards him? It made no sense. Even if he hadn’t seen watchers in the building, that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Right now there could be a dozen of them creeping around, surrounding him, and preparing to rush in for the kill. He could stand his ground against one, two, maybe even three, but a large gang – the kind of gang that employed baiter tactics to catch foolish, weak hearted folks that might stop to offer help – no, he wouldn’t be able to fight that off.

But there he was, still moving closer. Then he was just a few feet away, looking down at the huddled figure that still hadn’t sensed his presence.

“Why are you sitting here?” Jack asked him, but was rewarded with no answer. The boy just sat there, rocking and murmuring. Yes, Jack could hear the murmuring now… or was it singing? He listened, peering at the child through narrowed eyes, straining to understand. Didn’t he recognise the words from somewhere?

Five green bottles sitting on the wall…

Some sort of saying, or a poem.

One green bottle, should accidentally fall…

The tune was familiar, vague, but familiar. Something from Jack’s childhood that he didn’t want to remember, but he did remember it.

We used to sing it in nursery school, he thought. The recollection was there, even after all these years, but not clear enough for him to picture it.

And he didn’t want to hear it any longer.

“Boy!” he snapped, and the small figure jumped at that, almost falling back as he fumbled to steady himself. The child stared up at Jack, eyes wide and full of terror, his tightly closed lips trembling. At the sight of his fear, Jack’s irritation with the song vanished, and he spoke again, more softly.

“What are you doing in the middle of the street?”

The boy looked at him, eyes still wide, and tried to speak, but for a moment nothing seemed to come out but a quiet squeak.

“They took my shoes,” the boy finally said, grasping his bloodied feet with pale hands, his eyes bright with tears.

Jack wanted to ask if the boy was a baiter, but knew it was a pointless question. If the child was bait for a gang’s trap, it was already too late. Jack would already be caught in it. But there was still no movement in the buildings surrounding them, and no noise but the howl of the wind and a repetitive squeaking noise. A few feet away a rotten sign hung over a door that would once have been the entrance to a shop. The wind blew it backwards and forwards with the same rhythmic motion as the boy’s, as he had rocked backwards and forwards just a few moments before. The screech of the plastic, rubbing on the pole that jutted out of the broken brickwork was long and drawn out, a noise that grated at Jack’s nerves.

The boy was still staring at him, his expression weary. He had dark bags under blood-shot eyes, a stark contrast to his pale skin. The boy looked severely malnourished and quite sickly, and those eyes spoke of many nights of missed sleep.

“They took my shoes,” the boy repeated.

That was three years ago, he thought.

Hunted

The Hunters were so close now that Jack thought he could hear their breathing. Pinpoint spotlights continued to flicker across the room, tracing the corners, the places of darkness, the door opposite, and then the window. The thud of boots on the floorboards. He thought for one moment that he heard talking, muffled and low. The soldiers wore helmets that covered their faces completely, and even at security stations near the inner city, he had never heard one of them speak or seen their faces. Their armour and helmets made them look like robots, almost inhuman. Whatever conversations they were having must have been via radio, and private, only among themselves.

Through the narrow slit that was his only view of the room, Jack saw the dark shape move, slowly sweeping the area and peering through the two openings that led into the other two rooms in his small, rubbish-littered hideout.

He knew that these places had once been called apartments, and he guessed that centuries ago they would have been homes for people, couples, or even whole families. This much he had learnt from the remnants of magazines and books that could occasionally be found among the ruins and from the signs that he had seen on the stairwells of many of the old buildings. If you took the time to look around, evidence of the old days – from before the world collapsed into the chaos that he’d seen for most his life – was everywhere. Tatty old posters, half worn away by the weather, still clung to the walls, depicting people in some of the strangest clothing he had ever seen – bright and sparkling costumes that surely couldn’t have been every-day wear.

Books lying in tattered heaps in the corners of old buildings were also a treasure of tales of the old world. Most of them had been burned for fuel, but occasionally he would come across them, sometimes hidden away where someone hadn’t looked. And the magazines and old newspapers – he loved them the most – not only could he learn about things from the long gone, but there were pictures that showed him what things had looked like back then.

Once, in a run-down office building many miles across the city, out near the Ashlands, he had found an article about the very street that he was on. Some sort of horrible act had been committed. A murder, he thought, but it wasn’t the scene of uniformed soldiers that had interested him. It had been the buildings in the background of the picture. He could clearly see the very building that he was in, and next to it the vast thing that had once been called The Grand Theatre. Jack didn’t know what one of those was, but by the size of the place, he thought it must have been something important.

Two huge towers rose on either side of the main entrance, and a massive board with bright white lettering stood as a bold centrepiece. There were hundreds of people queuing outside the entrance, just yards from a cordoned off area patrolled by men in uniforms. All of those people were waiting to be allowed admittance into the vast building that he knew was now, centuries later, just an empty shell.

Jack had been in there before he discovered the offices nearby, and wondered in awe what the huge room, with the cracked and weathered carpets, was for. In the magazine there was a picture of the interior, with rows upon rows of seats, all filled with smiling people as they waited for whatever spectacle happened at The Grand Theatre. He had presumed that it was some kind of meeting place, and that the stage at one end of the room – now just a hollow hole in the ground with a twisted set of metal stairs leading up to nothing – was where someone important would stand.

So much was hidden away, waiting to be found by those with an eye for searching. So much still left behind but unnoticed. A keen eye could spot the clues that many had missed, and Jack had collected a few almost intact magazines over the years – something considered valuable just for the paper. And as he sat in the wardrobe, watching the figure of the Hunter move through the room, his gaze stopped on the small pile of magazines across the room in the corner, where he had left them, and when one of the tracer lights passed over them, stopped and went back to settle on the top magazine, his heart started to thump harder.

Stupid.

He had left them out in full view, an obvious sign of at least recent occupancy.

The dark shape of the Hunter moved across the room, rifle sweeping backwards and forwards, covering the door, the windows, and the dark recesses as the soldier approached the corner. The figure moved out of Jack’s slice of vision, but he could hear the rustle of paper, pages being flicked through, being disturbed. And then the sound of the same boots again, thudding across the boards, the shadow moving swiftly out of the room and then heading away. They were leaving, treading heavily on creaking floorboards as they moved off down the corridor.

Jack breathed again, still keeping as quiet as he could, but his lungs had been close to forcing the breath out of him, screaming to inhale more air, and it was a relief to exhale and fill them again. Stupid, he thought. Part way through the raid he had stopped regulating his breathing and held it. And he’d held it so long that it was too late to exhale without making a loud noise. If the soldiers had been there for a minute longer he wouldn’t have been able to keep his breath in, and right now he’d be in the back of their vehicle, on his way to wherever they went.

The urge to look out was almost overwhelming. He needed to see if they had taken his magazines. They were his most prized belongings, picked up here and there from various hidden treasure troves across the city – at least a dozen of them, including the one that the boy had left behind. The one the boy had drawn pictures in.

Now Jack felt the ache in his chest, a pain that he had tried to keep at bay for two years, but sometimes it crept over him at the most unexpected moment. He couldn’t think of that right now, mustn’t drift back into self-loathing and thoughts of the past that was lost.

He just stayed there, still, impatience burning in his guts, the urge to burst from his hiding place and scramble across the room almost unbearable, knowing that any noise could bring the soldiers back. He cursed his own foolishness. Why had he not just put them in his rucksack? That was where he normally kept them. He had taken them out to look at, and to add his newest finds to the leather sleeve that he kept them in to protect them from damage. Three new magazines to add, and yet he hadn’t put them away afterwards. Instead he had drifted off to sleep, leaving them in a pile, and only waking at the tremendous noise of the approaching Dropship. In his panic to hide he had forgotten about the magazines and had just run for the wardrobe.

Now he couldn’t see if they were still there, and couldn’t see if the Hunter had taken any of them. The paper was worth money to the right buyer, but not as much as their sentimental value to Jack, and nowhere near as much as that magazine with the boy’s drawings.

There was no price on that one. Could never be. He had scolded the boy, told him off for defacing what was precious to him, and yet, now, the one with the drawings in it was the most valuable thing to him.

The Right Choice

Three years before...

The boy had no shoes on the day Jack met him, and kept repeating that fact as Jack stood there, considering what to do next.

This isn’t my problem, he thought. This is just stupid of me, staying here in full view for too long. I’m an open target. I need to move on.

But what about the child?

I could help him if I chose to, if I was willing to take the burden. Or maybe I could at least take him to The Crossing, and find someone who would want a boy to work for them.

There was no one who could be trusted. Jack sighed. Finally, he decided to just walk away. This was a problem that he didn’t need. But then a memory from his own childhood came to him, because Jack had lived on the inside of the barrier once, but that was so very long ago.

Only Two Tickets

Many years before...

Jack could only have been six or seven years old – he couldn’t recall exactly – and all of his memories of those days were remembered like a small child would remember them. He was very young when he stopped living on the inside of the barrier and found himself walking in a line, following other children. He wore no shoes and they were walking over the hard, gravelled ground, out of the security gates and into the crumbling ruins that was the outside.

The day before he had been at home, in the warmth, playing with his toys and reading his books. His parents had been packing up everything in the house, or at least most of it. He had peered into his parent’s bedroom and saw his mother putting things into a large plastic container that looked like an over-sized suitcase. It wasn’t one of their normal suitcases, the purple ones under their bed. This was different. His mother was putting things into it, and then taking them out, and he thought that she seemed to be choosing what to take with her.

They had gone on what his father called vacations, sometimes. It meant leaving, and it meant travelling on the sub-train for a long time, and then arriving at a place where there was sand and lots of water. They would stay there for a few days and then go home again. But this time had been different. All the furniture was covered with plastic sheeting, and the cupboards – which were normally filled with food – were now empty.

He’d gone back to his toys, not paying attention, preferring to use his crayons to draw stick men with guns shooting monsters, or huge dinosaurs eating helpless victims. But then he heard raised voices from his parent’s room. They were arguing, he’d thought. It wasn’t a frequent thing. His parents were both quiet people, prone to long periods of silence. He couldn’t hear what the argument was about, but vividly recalled one phrase that his mother said.

“But there are only two tickets.”

Those were the only words of the conversation that he’d caught, and it was the last thing he ever heard his mother say. A short while later he heard the front door open, and then shut, and then two men were in the room with him, ushering him out of the house.

Jack knew now that his parents had made some kind of decision that day, all those years ago, and the choice meant that he would go somewhere else. He’d figured that much out for himself. There were only two tickets to whatever journey his parents had gone on, and therefore, he couldn’t go with them. Forty years must have passed, and he still didn’t know where they’d gone. He always thought that you came back from a vacation.

As he’d walked in line with the other children, fear building in his chest as he saw the massive walls that protected the inner city – which had been his home for the entirety of his life – becoming more distant, further behind them with every step that they took out into the ruins. He remembered that his feet hurt on the gravel, and they bled, just like the feet of the boy as he sat at the side of the road that day.

A choice had been made a very long time ago that led to Jack walking barefoot away from every comfort he’d ever known, into a life much more precarious, harsh, and dangerous.

Let’s Get Moving

Two years before...

Why had he made a decision, right then, to not leave the boy without first offering to help? Had he seen something of himself there, sitting on the side of the road? Had he seen that the boy was like him?

“Come on,” Jack said, looking around, scoping the streets and the abandoned buildings for movement. If the boy had been bait, the attack would already have been upon him.

But that didn’t mean they were safe.

Jack started to walk along the sidewalk, his machetes still drawn, eyes flickering over every possible hiding place. But when he stopped at the intersection and glanced back, the boy hadn’t followed him. The child was standing, but not walking. He was just standing there, his tiny, round face screwed up with indecision.

The kid is terrified, he thought, and can’t trust me. He couldn’t blame the child for being cautious or afraid, but alive was always better than dead, and if the boy stayed where he was, he would be dead before morning. Maybe the kid didn’t realise that?

He sighed, impatient but reluctant to leave the boy to his fate.

“I’ve got food,” Jack shouted. “And… we’ll try to find something for your feet.”

The boy’s expression changed at that, a flicker of hope removing the wide-eyed fear from his eyes.

“New shoes?” the boy asked as he took a single, tentative step forward.

“Yes!” Jack said, already beginning to regret what this offer would cost him. “But let’s get moving.” He waved his arm, indicating the buildings around them. “You think losing your shoes is bad? There are worse things that folks will do to you if you stay here too long.”

Jack headed off down the street, deciding if the boy followed him he would help him, at least for a while. But if he didn’t follow, then it was his choice, his life. Jack was already putting himself out, he thought. If the boy didn’t come, then fate would decide what would happen to him.

But the boy did follow, and was soon jogging along beside him, not complaining even once. If his feet hurt him as they travelled away from The Crossing, the child didn’t make it apparent.

Jack’s hideout at the time was a long walk away, at least four miles from The Crossing, and he didn’t stop to rest. It would be dark in a few hours and he wanted to be barricaded in by then, hidden away from what prowled the streets at night.

As they walked, he glanced over at the boy, realising for the first time just how small the child was. He couldn’t have been older than six years old, about the age that Jack had been when he had escaped from the workhouse.

The Workhouse

Many years before...

Even considering all the difficulties of life on the outside, among the ruins of the outer zone with the dangerous things that haunted that skeletal landscape and the gangs of vicious and cold-hearted folk that prowled and picked at the debris for anything edible or salvageable, Jack’s short time in the workhouse near the border had been worse.

After the long walk through the ruins, following the other kids in the chain gang led by a dozen armed and rough looking men, they had arrived at what would be his home for six months.

It was a sprawl of several buildings, most of them crumbling and dangerously unstable, housing over a hundred kids and their captors. For Jack, the place was a shock beyond anything he had experienced in his short life. There was little care taken for those that were held captive and made to work in the derelict warehouse and machine facility, barely a mile from the pulsing barrier that protected the wealthy and the fortunate. Most days were spent working on huge machines, the purpose of which Jack had never really known, and most nights were spent on the cold, hard ground, trying to sleep through nightmares and wondering when the next meal would come.

Jack remembered spending hours upon hours shovelling dirty, black rocks called coal, from the mountainous piles that the delivery ships would dump on the open grounds outside of the main building, into rickety wheelbarrows that were then rushed away by other children. There were no adults working the dumping ground. A few sat around the outside fence, their arms folded, watching intently for a child that wasn’t working as hard as the rest.

He remembered aching constantly from the strain of the work. The small muscles of a child were never meant to haul the loads that they were forced to manage every day for almost the entire time that the sun was in the sky. And on top of the muscle-draining work of lifting shovel after shovel, there was the panicked and rushed moment when a new Dropship would arrive and no one on the ground knew where it was going to dump its next delivery load. For a frantic couple of minutes, the hundred or so children in the yard would stand and watch the sky, waiting as the ship slowed to a halt. And when it released its load, those underneath would run as fast as they could.

Why had it been that way? he wondered, as he always did when memories of the workhouse came back to him. Surely the guards could have called the kids away from the open area while the ship had delivered the next mountain of coal? Surely it would have made much more sense to do that? Then there wouldn’t have been the accidents. People could be cold and uncaring in the outer district, and many were cruel, but none as bad as the men who made the yard workers stay out in the open when the coal was delivered.

He had seen them, the guards, making bets, and had heard names mentioned, though fortunately never his own. Who would be the next to go? – had been the subject of the money exchanged. Who would be the next child killed by falling coal?

The day that he escaped, along with many others, had been one of the times that someone had died under the avalanche of the black rocks. Except on that day it hadn’t been a child that was killed, but one of the guards. No one planned for it to work out how it had, and he thought that not a single kid in the yard had expected the ship to drop early, and so close to the edge of the yard. Maybe it had been a mistake by the pilot, or the crew in the cargo chamber of the ship. Someone could have pulled the lever before they were supposed to and whoosh, away went the entire contents of the cargo hold, plummeting to the ground a hundred feet below.

One moment the guard had been sitting there, smiling, watching the fear in the children’s eyes as they stood, dotted about over the open ground in the yard, looking up at the huge ship approaching, their shovels in hand, waiting to run. The next moment the ship had stopped, and the smiling guard had vanished under a hundred tonnes of black rock which hit the ground and churned out a cloud of thick dust that spewed for yards in every direction. Then the guards were shouting and running towards the fence where their co-worker had been.

That was when he had looked back at the other children around him. Some were looking at him, and some were glancing at the fence, just yards away.

Jack remembered the realisation that crept far too slowly into his mind. No one was watching them. Thirty yards away, the dozen or so guards were either shouting at each other, or pointlessly trying to move some of the coal, even though Jack knew – everybody knew – that the man underneath was dead. Very dead. He’d seen the mess left behind when someone had been crushed.

Among the yard workers was a one-eyed girl that everyone called Squint, though not to her face. She was older than most by maybe two or three years, and had a temper that would spark and explode at the slightest thing. Jack had seen a fair few younger kids hit the ground after a swift slap from Squint, and often for something trivial. You didn’t mess with her, you didn’t cross her, and if she told you to do something then you sure as hell did it.

On that day, Squint yelled just one word at the top of her shrill voice.

“RUN!”

And then she took off in the direction of the fence, a second or so before every other kid. Even before Jack started to run, she was going full tilt, sprinting as fast as she could, and when Jack got to the bottom of the fence and started climbing, she was already over the top and running for the ruins.

The memory of what happened after that day was fuzzy, a blur of starved, feverish moments and nightmares, but Jack clearly remembered the last time he saw Squint alive. She turned back, just before running into an alleyway, grinned at him, and shouted. “Good luck, kiddo!”

Kiddo. She’d called everyone kiddo.

Jack still wondered what had happened to Squint, wondered if she was still alive somewhere in the outer zone.

Talented

Three years before...

As the distant memory of his escape faded, Jack glanced over to the boy once more, and wondered if the child had also escaped the workhouses. There had once been a few of them dotted around the landscape not too far from the barrier, but they were all gone now, so if the boy was from a workhouse it had to be somewhere else. Jack had been back to the workhouse that he’d escaped from, many years later, only to find it deserted, though the open ground at the back of the compound was still, after years, covered in a thick black stain from the coal.

He’d often wondered why the workhouses disappeared, and thought that maybe someone had decided to move them after the mass escape that he had been involved in happened.

The boy could still have been from a workhouse, though, maybe one much further away, Jack thought, and he almost asked the child if he was an escapee, but figured that the kid would probably rather not talk about it.

The boy was called Ryan, Jack discovered that first night, as they sat opposite each other, huddled around a small campfire built from the broken remains of a door that had fallen from its hinges and lay in the middle of the floor, not far from the entrance of their new, and possibly temporary, camp. They’d moved on a dozen blocks away from Jack’s old camp, as he had insisted. He liked to move regularly, but the building they found wasn’t ideal, with at least three entrances open to the wind. Thankfully, the room at the back still had a door that could be shut, which allowed him to light a fire without the light being visible out on the street.

Jack had no idea where they would find new footwear for the boy, and he had nothing of a value even close to the cost of shoes to trade, but he did have some old sack cloth, which he cut and wrapped around the boy’s feet. They both slept after a meagre meal of salted rat meat which Jack had traded back at The Crossing, but it took a while for Jack to drift off.

Instead he lay there, watching his new companion, listening to the boy snoring, and wondered what the hell he was going to do with the child. This was the first time in his entire life that Jack had the responsibility of another person on his shoulders, and if he was honest with himself, he didn’t have the slightest idea how to behave. Was he supposed to teach the kid? Help him learn how to survive out here, like the old man had done for him? Obviously the boy hadn’t done so well by himself, but then, when Jack thought back to his own childhood living rough, he hadn’t always been lucky himself. Sometimes he had barely scratched his way through, nearly dying at least a dozen times that he could recollect. Probably more, if he actually tried to remember them all.

Maybe he should take the kid back to The Crossing? Maybe he should try to find someone there to take him in… no, that was utterly pointless. There wasn’t a single soul in that place that wouldn’t use the boy for some low purpose. Sure, there were folks there that were less terrible than most – some even showed concern for other people occasionally – but Jack could count on one hand the number of people he thought may actually try to help the kid, and not even one of those was a guarantee. The boy was his to watch over, whether he liked it or not. He could always tell Ryan to scram, to leave, but he knew that wouldn’t happen, either. He’d already made the mistake of starting to warm to the boy.

It was with these troubling thoughts that sleep finally took him, drifting in on the howling wind and muffling the worry of what to do next.

In the end it turned out that he wasn’t going to need to do anything. Only a few days in the boy’s company and Jack had already gotten used to him being around. Before Jack had even realised, an entire month had passed as they moved from place to place, each time finding a good camp spot that was well hidden and then scavenging among the ruins nearby.

The boy turned out to be one of the keenest scavengers Jack had ever met, even if his first impressions of the boy’s abilities were all disappointments. The kid was clumsy to begin with, not really knowing how or where to start looking, how to search a place and spot the signs of possible buried treasure. He constantly walked straight past obvious places to check, and was always surprised when Jack pointed them out. But that soon passed, and after the fourth day, while staying overnight in one of Jack’s regular hideouts on the way to The Crossing to find a trader for a rubber tyre that Jack had hauled out from under a pile of collapsed masonry, Ryan crawled out from a hole underneath a smashed up kitchen unit, with a can opener in his hand.

A real, working, not even slightly rusty, can opener. The damn thing was a rare treasure, and Jack stood there for a full five minutes, turning it in his hands, inspecting the clasp joint and the circular blade. It was in perfect working condition.

“You found this… down there?” he asked, with an incredulous expression.

“Yes. Just down there,” said Ryan, pointing at the hole in the floorboards that Jack wouldn’t have even considered trying to squeeze into – hadn’t considered investigating the few dozen times he had holed up in the very same room.

They were on the third floor of a derelict apartment building not too far from where Jack had seen the Hunters for the first time, an area that had been picked clean over centuries. Most days it was impossible enough to find decent salvage of any kind so close to The Crossing, and this place was less than two miles away. Collecting enough wood for a fire was a hopeless task in such a populated and over-picked area, and finding stuff like this just didn’t happen.

And yet here he was, holding something that was impossible to find anymore, ever. A relic from an era that was three centuries dead.

And that wasn’t the end of it.

Jack looked at the can opener, turning it over in his hands, checking for rust spots. There weren’t any.

“This should be rusty,” he said, frowning, and then glancing at the boy. “Just lying around in a dark, probably wet place, all this time. I mean years and years. It should be rusty.”

“It was in this bag,” said Ryan, reaching for a clear, plastic bag lying on the floor. The bag had been ripped open, and a guilty expression crossed the boy’s face. “It was in this bag, but I opened it. Sorry. I found it in the box in the wall.”

Jack’s eyes widened.

“What box?”

“Well. Not a box,” Ryan backtracked, looking a little flustered or even embarrassed.

The boy thinks he’s done wrong, Jack thought, frowning, but he let the boy continue.

“It’s like a big square hole in the wall. You can’t see it from the floor below. I looked. But under there,” Ryan pointed at the hole in the boards, “you can crawl to the bit above the wall, and the top of the box is a bit open. The wall is cracked. I think there’s more stuff in there but I can’t reach any further in.”

“What do you mean, there’s nothing in the room where the box is?”

“I’ll show you,” said Ryan.

Jack followed the boy down the stairs, avoiding the piles of trash. Underneath the kitchen, on the floor below, was a large open room that Jack had walked through many times. There were two entrances, one to the stairs and the other to the front foyer of the building. But the walls were completely bare apart from occasional scraps of faded but colourful plaster.

Ryan stopped in the middle of the room and pointed at the north wall. “Right there,” he said.

Jack walked over to the small hole that the boy was indicating, and peered up into the kitchen above. The same rotten and faded green cabinets could be seen through it.

“This hole wasn’t here before,” said Jack. “I would have seen it.”

“Ah,” said Ryan, looking sheepish.”It kinda gave way when I first climbed inside”. The child walked over to the wall below the hole, reached up, and tapped the plaster. “The box is right here, I think.”

“It’s hidden?” asked Jack.

“Yeah. You can check both sides. If you go under the stairs the wall is bare there as well. But the box is there. I felt it. The top had cracked open, I think, but only a little bit.” The boy held up his hand, using two fingers to indicate a three inch gap. A gap just big enough for a child’s hand to squeeze through. “I felt inside and it was all dry, but I couldn’t pull any of the other stuff out.”

Jack took out his machete and tapped the wall with the back of the blade. The sound was dull. He tapped the area a foot away, and the sound changed.

It was hollow.

“My god. There must be a safe hidden in there.”

And there was. After five minutes of hacking at the aged and softened plaster, which crumbled and fell away in large chunks, Jack took a step back and stared at the secure door of a metal safe, his mouth open. He didn’t know what to say, and was utterly dumbfounded. No one found stuff like this anymore.

Ten minutes later and they had used Jack’s wrench to pull the kitchen cabinets from the wall on the floor above, and pull up the floorboards, then prised open the top of the safe. The metal was a colour that Jack had rarely seen before. New metal. And worth a lot to trade for. It might take a while for him to pull the damn thing out of the wall and break it up, but metal that wasn’t rusty was valuable.

The safe turned out to be mostly full of paper. Currency from centuries ago that was absolutely worthless now, except for the material it was made of. But inside they also found boxes of marker pens that still worked, a bunch of wax crayons, and some faded photographs. But on top of the pile of paper, pinning everything down, was a box of tools. Screwdrivers, cutting knives, a hammer, a chisel set, and more – all of them in immaculate condition. Jack sat in the middle of the room, the tools in his hands, speechless once more. This hoard of treasure was the most valuable he had ever found.

That night they moved camps again, away from the place that they had made so much noise when Jack first hauled the safe out of the wall and then broke it apart. They hid in the cellar storeroom of a collapsed shop two blocks up, hoping that it was far enough away that if someone went looking and even found the recent disturbance, they wouldn’t be able to track who had made it.

When Jack awoke the next morning, there were scrawled crayon pictures across the back wall of the cellar, near where Ryan was sleeping – stick men of various colours, and there in the middle was one tall figure and a smaller figure, holding hands.

Hunted

The thought of those pictures stirred something, a hurt that hadn’t gone away even after nearly two years. He couldn’t wait any longer, and quickly struggled out of the pile of rags, pushed aside the wardrobe doors and fell out onto the floor. He smashed his shoulder on the ground and winced with pain, but then ignored it as he lay there, staring across the room at the corner where the magazines should be, at the spot that was now empty. He stumbled forward, scrambling in the darkness, hunting for anything that may have been left behind, but the corner was empty, the magazines gone – including the one that Ryan had drawn his stick men in the day that they had taken him.

Jack had always worried – back then, when he had been travelling with the boy – that one day they would be caught in a raid. He’d worried about how the boy would react, if he would cry out in fear and give them both away.

And he’d tried to explain to the boy.

If They Come

Two years before...

Months before, during the cold season when they were sitting around a low burning campfire in a warehouse in the old docklands, he had told the boy how to behave if the Hunters came and found them. It was bitter cold on that night, and they were both wrapped up in dusty, mould-riddled chunks of carpet, stripped from an office two floors above. The carpet stank of the ages, but it kept the chilling breeze, which gusted in through the massive holes in the building, at bay.

The fire was barely alive, smouldering, but still managing a visible glow that lit the interior of the tiny loading bay area that Jack had chosen. Lighting a fire anywhere else would alert passersby that they were there, but the overhang of the bay, and the metal stairs that they were huddled under, hid the light of the fire well enough. Jack still barely slept through the night, unhappy that they hadn’t found somewhere to barricade themselves away, but he had to admit the warmth of the fire was a rare gift during the winter months.

He didn’t know why he chose to speak of the Hunters for the first time on that occasion. The boy had been with him for nearly a year and the subject hadn’t come up at all. But then – they hadn’t seen Hunters in all that time. Moving from place to place in search of salvage or food further out in the outer zone did have its benefits, even though they were often weighted against dangers.

“If they come,” he had said, and paused for a minute, wondering if the boy even knew about the raids. “If the Hunters ever find us, you are to stay hidden, and quiet.”

Jack didn’t look at the boy as he spoke, but he could sense his gaze upon him. Even after nearly a year he was still a quiet child. Sometimes he would talk, but it was always about what they had unearthed that day, or what they could make out of the things that they found, even though the boy knew that their goal was mostly to trade the stuff in for supplies. When he did get going he would chatter non-stop for a while, and big plans of constructing flying ships or boats, or fortresses, would spill out.

But most of the time he was quiet.

“Do you understand?” Jack asked, finally looking up at Ryan.

Ryan nodded, but didn’t speak. His gaze shifted between Jack and the wavering glow of the fire.

“Do you know who I am speaking of?” Jack asked. “The Hunters. The soldiers that come in the great ships and take people away. Do you know of those?”

“Yes,” Ryan finally replied. “I’ve seen them.”

“You have?” He was curious. The boy had never spoken of where he had come from before, even though he had asked questions. Ryan always clammed up, stopped talking, and Jack had taken the hint after a few attempts to at prising the information from the child.

Ryan smiled, but it wasn’t a cheerful one. “Before the people who took my shoes,” he said, “I hid from the soldiers in the street, but they weren’t in a big ship. They were in a truck. I don’t know who they were looking for, but they found someone and took them away. I was hiding over the street and they saw me. I ran and ran, and that’s when I ran into the people who took my shoes.”

He looked down at the boots that they had traded for. After finding the stash in the safe, Jack had made it a priority to get the boy new shoes, and it had cost dearly, but had been worth it.

“These are much betterer boots,” said Ryan. “They keep my feet warm.”

“Better. Not betterer,” Jack said, with a grin.

“Better,” Ryan echoed.

“Well, then you know what they do. The Hunters? They hunt people down and take them. And if they find us – find me – you are to stay hidden and quiet. Do you get that?”

Another nod.

“You can’t give yourself away, or cry out. If you do that then they will find you, too.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Then I would be alone,” Ryan said, which took Jack by surprise. He hadn’t considered that a child so young could think of such things.

“Well, you’ll be alone one day anyway,” Jack replied before even thinking about how morbid and pessimistic it would sound. “I’m much older than you, and I will get very old, one day. Too old to travel any longer.”

More silence.

“You hide,” Jack repeated. “And you stay hidden if they come. No noise, and maybe they won’t find you.”

Hunted

After two years, Jack still preferred betterer to better.

He sat in the dust and mould of the apartment, staring at the blank space where the magazines had been just a few minutes before, and listened to the distant sounds of the Hunters heading back to their vehicles. He could feel anger building up, burning in his gut.

An urge to follow the Hunters and take back what was his.

But what good would he achieve? he thought. They will just take you. He knew that no matter how angry he felt, how vengeful, he wouldn’t get up and follow them. He wouldn’t because he hadn’t done it before. He knew that he was a coward, just as he had been that night.

Lost

Two years before...

Jack stood over the boy, towering above him, his voice raised, as he let the anger flood out. He didn’t hit the kid, even though for the briefest of moments that urge surfaced. How dare he? This child that I’ve taken in and fed, and kept alive? How dare he draw his damn stick men in one of my magazines?

Jack looked down at the magazine, at the colourful pictures of the streets of the city whose glory was three centuries dead, and at the stick men that now stood in the street, crayon drawings that Ryan had probably thought would make the place look more real.

And he shouted, not even trying to be wary of others nearby, and the risk of drawing attention.

But then, after a few minutes, he stopped. The boy was staring at the ground, his face flushed bright red with shame. Jack didn’t know what had possessed the child with the idea of drawing in his magazine, but he could see clearly that the boy regretted it. As the flush of anger passed, Jack suddenly felt foolish. What was he doing? Why was he shouting at the one person in the world that trusted him and would follow him anywhere? All over a damn magazine? Hell, it was the latest in his collection, and the damn boy had found it for him. He had come running out of the ruin of the old shop with a huge grin on his face.

And there he was, scolding the child. Suddenly the foolish feeling turned to shame, much stronger shame than the boy must have been feeling. He put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder and spoke just two words...

“Sorry... I...”

...before the roar of the Dropship engines cut the air around them, and the whump of the boosters almost rocked the building they were standing in as it hit the ground nearby.

Jack remembered panicking and darting for the darkened room behind them, heading for their makeshift bolt-hole to hide, expecting the boy to be right behind him. But as he heard the crashing of the doors on the floor below them as they were kicked in, and the smashing of the one remaining window, Jack turned and saw that the boy was not there.

Where the hell had he gone? Where was the damn boy? Jack panicked, looking around, but then he heard the thud of boots on the stairs and realised that the Hunters were upon them, and that in just seconds they would both be caught.

He turned and ran for the bolt-hole, hoping that Ryan had found cover and was already hiding, but Jack didn’t make it to the hole in the floor of the small side-room as the door to the main room crashed open and grey-clad Hunters burst in. Jack darted to the side and crouched behind the rotten and torn sofa at the back of the room, knowing even then, as his hands went to his side, ready to draw his machetes, that the Hunters would find him.

But seconds passed, and the Hunters didn’t come into the side-room. Jack could see around the edge of the sofa that they had moved into the back rooms, where the old pantry and kitchen were, where Ryan must have run.

Don’t let them find the boy, he thought. Please don’t let them find...

A Hunter emerged from the room, pushing Ryan ahead of him. The boy was hustled into the middle of the room as the four Hunters encircled him.

Now, thought Jack. Go now, while they aren’t looking. Attack them from behind. You’ll get the drop on them, and there’s a chance, isn’t there? There’s a chance that you could take one of them out, grab his gun, and shoot the others.

But you don’t know how to fire the gun, do you? he thought. You won’t be able to fight them all off.

He watched, hesitating, hopelessly not acting at the one moment that he knew he should.

But then the boy was shaking his head.

They’re talking to him, he thought. They’re asking him something. What are they asking him?

He heard a voice, low, one of the Hunters. “No one else here? Are you sure?”

The boy shook his head again.

And then it was too late. The Hunters ushered Ryan out of the room and into the hall, and were gone.

Seconds too late, Jack jumped from his hiding place behind the ruined sofa and ran through the rooms of their hideout, rushing down the hall as he drew his machetes, hurrying out into the street only to see the windowless vehicle heading away at an incredible speed, then turning a corner a block away.

Then it was gone. And so was Ryan.

Time to go

And the boy did exactly as you told him, didn’t he? He didn’t give you up, he kept quiet. When all along you thought that your instructions might keep him alive if ever you were caught, that he would stay silent and hide, you never expected it to be the other way round, did you?

You didn’t act that night because you were a coward, Jack told himself. You didn’t act and the boy was taken – Ryan was gone – leaving you to stew over it again and again, every night for two years, to wake up sweating, crying like a fool.

What were you expecting after he was gone? That you could get over it?

In the darkness of the room, in the spot where the magazines had been, Jack finally realised what it was he must do. He’d waited too long – much too long – even though he’d always known what his only real option was. Two years ago the boy had been taken by the Hunters, and for two years Jack had tried to reason with himself, screwed his head up with thoughts of what he could have done – should have done – on that night, but he had never, until that moment, accepted that there was a choice he could make that might give him a chance to get back what was lost.

Jack Avery stood up and walked towards the door.

Pickup

Corporal Markell stood watch at the rear of the Armoured Personnel Vehicle as the last of the new workforce recruits were pushed inside. The corporal then nodded at the last squad as they passed by with no new prisoners in tow. They wouldn’t be berated for not bringing someone back this time. This whole trip out had been low-yield, as her superior officer, Lieutenant Cray had suggested it would be.

It was pointless going back to the same area after such a short amount of time, and Cray had said as much when the target location had been announced an hour before. But they all knew that disputing the target was pointless, and even if they did it would be them that would catch the blame for the lack of worker harvest.

Markell closed the back door and turned to head for the side of the vehicle, glad that the day’s fiasco was over and that they could all go back to their dorms and watch TV, and maybe get drunk.

But there was a figure standing just feet away, in the middle of the street – a man that shouldn’t have been there. Markell frowned, and slowly raised the Assault Rifle.

The man lifted two machetes from his belt, held his hands out, and just as Markell was about to fire, the man – who looked tired and weak – dropped the machetes to the ground.

The man was giving himself up. It was a ridiculous notion, Markell thought. No one ever gave themselves up.

“We have another prisoner,” stammered Markell into the radio, still not quite accepting the man’s actions. Was he mad? He must be – had to be – to make such a stupid choice. It just wasn’t done. Seconds later, the last squad rushed around the truck and encircled the man as Markell opened the back of the vehicle and watched, stunned, as the man voluntarily walked forward, heading for the open maw of the truck.

Markell frowned again as the man stopped at the back of the truck and turned. The man said something, but Markell couldn’t hear him clearly. The words were muffled by the helmet’s padding.

No one ever gave themselves up willingly, Markell thought again. Why would they? Even life out here in the ruins was better than the short life of a work slave, Markell knew that. Yet, here was this man doing just that, the first to do so in seven years of Markell’s military career.

Markell felt a sudden urge to speak to the man, and it was uncontrollable.

I must know why.

Into Darkness

Jack stood at the back of the prison vehicle, about to step up into the open door, but then he turned to the nearest Hunter, the one who had been at the back of the truck as he had approached. He looked at the Hunter directly where his eyes should be – or Jack’s nearest guess – and asked. “Who are you people?”

Then, to his shock, the Hunter reached up and tapped the side of his helmet, which immediately gave a hiss of compressed air before the entire front visor opened upwards.

Staring back at him, from within the armour of a Hunter, was the face of a young woman. He couldn’t guess her age exactly, but thought she could be no older than twenty-five, thirty at most.

Then the Hunter spoke, and she sounded as he had expected, just like a young woman. This wasn’t a robot, or something worse. Hunters were just people.

“Why give yourself up?” asked Corporal Lisa Markell, ignoring the furious chatter on the radio, and the orders to raise her protective mask, immediately.

Jack hesitated, and then looked at the woman. “I have to find a boy that you took from me,” he said, just before he was pushed into the vehicle by one of the other Hunters.

The back doors of the prison vehicle closed and he was plunged into darkness.

I was right, thought Jack. You can’t see out of these things. Shame I can’t tell anyone that.

Why

The vehicle sped through the streets, rapidly heading towards the Dropship, and in the middle compartment – the section of each vehicle that contained the recruitment squad and their equipment – Lisa pulled off her helmet and threw it to the floor.

“Are you mad?” asked Johnson, another corporal in her section. “You never take your helmet off. 101, man!”

“I had to know why,” answered Lisa.

Johnson looked confused. “You’ll be lucky if they don’t demote you for it,” he said.

“I had to know why he gave himself up,” Lisa continued. “It just didn’t make any sense. No one does that. Ever.”

“Of course not,” said Johnson. “Even the irradiated scum out here isn’t that stupid.”

Johnson paused for a moment. “Why did he do it, anyway?” he asked.

Lisa looked over at Johnson, and smiled. “He wants to find a boy that was captured.”

“Oh. Well, tough luck on that one,” said Johnson, shuffling in his seat and then roughly snapping the safety belt into place. “They all die within a month or two, anyway.”

PART TWO

INTO THE JUNKLANDS

Caught

Complete darkness surrounded Jack as he sat on the hard ground inside the back of the prison vehicle. Around him he could hear movement, and a soft whimpering came from somewhere nearby.

Over near the back of the compartment, he thought.

Other prisoners.

Some of them afraid like you are.

All of them afraid like you are.

Jack took a few deep, rhythmic breaths, calming his nerves and attempting to steady himself as the vehicle tore along the streets, leaving behind everything he had known.

He wondered if he would ever see the ruins again, ever visit The Crossing, and he realised that he didn’t really care if he did. The life he was leaving behind held nothing for him anymore, probably never had. It had been a life and that was all it amounted to.

Survival.

Except some parts, and all of that was either gone forever, dead, or somewhere, he hoped, in his future.

This.

This was all that was left.

His search for Ryan had resumed. After two long years of wondering, he had finally given up and actually done something. He’d taken a step towards the unknown but he knew this was where Ryan had gone and where he needed to go, even if he never found the boy again. If this turned out to be a journey that ended only in his death, then at least he would know something, wouldn’t he? At least he could die knowing that he had tried, even if it had taken him two years to commit himself to act.

Jack sat in the darkness, listening to the noises around him, and swore that as long as he lived he would task himself with two things only – he would find Ryan, and somehow he would make up for failing the boy when he had been needed most. Jack knew that he could have done little when the Hunters took Ryan, and he knew that he would probably have died in the attempt, but somehow that seemed to him to be better than sitting there and just letting them take him.

This was what he went through, back then. What Ryan went through after he was taken, and you were left standing in the road, just watching the vehicles speed away.

The darkness, the frightened noises made by the other prisoners, and the not knowing where the truck was heading to.

Now you know this much.

The vehicle turned a corner, violently throwing everyone stuck in the dark prison at the back onto the floor. They sprawled over each other, grasping out at nothing, at anything, just trying to steady themselves. Hands pushed into faces and feet kicked up as people struggled desperately. There were cries of fear as the vehicle swerved again, skidded and then continued on a straight path. For a few seconds the heaving mass of bodies writhed over each other until finally everyone had settled back on the floor again.

Jack tried to picture the streets outside in his mind, playing back the turns they had made, and the directions they were travelling in, and estimated that they were now four blocks from his hideout, four entire blocks in what? A minute? The confusion as the vehicle had turned the corner had thrown his orientation out for a moment, but his mind raced to catch up, to estimate their location.

The roar of the engine brought more cries of fear from the other passengers around him. He tried to guess how many people were in the back with him but it was impossible. The darkness inside the armoured truck was absolute. There was not even the slightest glimmer of light that might allow his eyes to adjust. He could see no shadows or other figures but he could smell them, and that wasn’t very pleasant.

Most people living in the Outer Zone, in the ruins of the old city, didn’t get to bathe very often. Some of them never. Fresh water was a rare commodity and was more than often used for drinking. There were water springs in various places, but they were guarded by gangs, or were in the centre of one of the hovels that littered the ruins, and never out in the open or in a place that was accessible to just anyone. Of all the things that were considered valuable in the Outer Zone, clean water was among the highest.

And right then Jack would do anything for a drink.

He thought of Ryan again, and how the boy must have felt making this journey. This was frightening even to Jack, who wasn’t disturbed by many things after such a long time in the ruins. But to a boy, this must have been terrifying.

Someone shoved him onto his back and Jack felt a large figure move past him, as whoever it was struggled to their feet, and then there was a roar of annoyance.

“Where the hell am I?” boomed the gruff voice of a man Jack figured must have been unconscious for the journey so far. Jack couldn’t place it, but way back and hidden in his mind somewhere, that voice was familiar.

When no answer came, the man pushed forward, and though Jack couldn’t see what was going on, he heard others crying out as the man unleashed his fury on them. Jack was just sitting up when a heavy weight landed upon him. Another man – or a woman – struggled and rolled over him as Jack pushed them off, trying not to push so hard that he would injure the person. It wasn’t a courtesy that most would give but he saw no reason to increase the suffering of those around him. It was as bad for them as it was for him. Worse even.

At least he had volunteered.

“Let me out you—“ the man bellowed, but he was cut off as the vehicle swerved sharply around another corner. Jack heard a loud thud on the side of the vehicle, and then another loud thud, a grunt, and then silence. Jack thought that in the second impact he had heard a cracking noise, like small bones breaking.

Unconscious again, thought Jack, as the vehicle quickly swerved, this time to the left. The fool, whoever this man with the familiar voice was, had been standing with nothing to hold on to, and nothing to counter the gravity of the swerving vehicle. At least he wouldn’t beat on anyone else for a while.

He went back to the movement and speed of the vehicle. Trying to adjust his bearings once more.

We’re into 342nd Street. And now we’re passing the old rail station.

And still the vehicle sped onwards.

We’re getting close to the old pits and the open ground not far from the rail station.

And that was where once, when Jack had been much younger, the slave baron Jagan had kept his camp. It had been where the pit fights, a dark time in Jack’s life, had taken place. A time he tried hard to forget about.

The vehicle slowed, then almost halted, but then Jack’s stomach lurched as it shot upwards, as though climbing a hill.

No hills here. So where were they going now? Had he missed something?

But he wasn’t sure. His mind scrambled over the terrain, recalling everything in the area, searching for a section of high ground. But he knew there was nothing for the vehicle to climb up like this, unless...

We’re going into the dropship.

We must be. There are no hills in this area, only pits. Pits full of the bones of Jagan’s Gladiators. That would be a good place for something as large as the dropship to land.

All that open space.

The vehicle moved slowly now, as though navigating narrow lanes with care, turning left, then right, and then finally stopping. There were more cries of fear from the other passengers, but Jack sat in silence, thinking only of Ryan.

If the boy could survive this, get through it all, then I can. All I need to do is keep my nerves steady, stay calm.

Breathe.

Whatever happens next, none of it matters if it means I end up in the place where Ryan is, or at least where he was two years ago.

They won’t kill us, surely?

Would they? It was possible, wasn’t it? But that would be ridiculous. Why would they go to so much trouble to round up people only to kill them?

Unless they did kill people, maybe the weak ones, he thought. That was also a possibility.

But you’re not weak, are you? Maybe some of these others are, and they will die, but you’re still strong. Getting older, and prone to coughs in bad weather, but still strong. And the boy had been strong, always had been, even though he was slight of build. Ryan had proven time and again that he wasn’t as weak as Jack had first thought when he saw him sitting on the sidewalk the day they met. As soon as the boy had been fed a few times he’d started to become less gaunt and more human. And even though he was still thin, there had been a grittiness to him, a stubbornness that wasn’t just in his attitude.

A thought cut through the silence.

Ryan would be nine years old now. He wouldn’t be as small as he had been back then. He could even be a foot taller. He’d surely be more lean and muscular. He always was a strong kid.

As a hissing noise filled the darkness around him, and a faint mustard smell entered his nostrils, Jack’s mind went back once more looking for somewhere to hide, to a time when they had been together.

Like a father and son. That’s also what he had thought the day they celebrated Ryan’s birthday that first time.

Ant Soup

Two Years Before

They’d celebrated Ryan’s birthday on the anniversary of the day that Jack found him. It was the only day that Jack could use, because Ryan couldn’t remember when his birthday was.

“My parents always told me when my birthday was,” Ryan had said when Jack first asked him as they sat on the flat edge of a warehouse loading bay. “I never thought about it.”

It seemed that an even colder winter than usual was on its way. At least that was how it appeared to Jack. The bitter, cold wind was early by several weeks, and although they had supplies stashed it wouldn’t be enough to last the entire three months of bad weather to come. Jack had known then that they would have to resort to trading something that he didn’t want to part with or they’d be hunting rats. But it wasn’t turning just yet, not quite.

He thought, as they sat there looking out over the expanse of ruins that was the Far Reaches, a place further out from the middle of the city than Jack liked to go, that they’d manage, they would get by, and he was determined to enjoy the last of the fading summer before the snow drifts came.

Every year, when the weather was just turning cold after the blistering weeks of heat that marked the summer months, the ants came out. It always happened at the same time of year. They’d come bursting from the ground, spewing tiny piles of dirt along the gutters and out of the cracks in the broken roads. And there were millions of them. For a day or so the air was filled with flying ants. They got everywhere, even in his clothes and his hair.

Their arrival marked the end of the hot weather and the creeping in of the autumn and the long winter that would bring about the deaths of so many. With little fuel, and nowhere to hide from the chilling winds and the unforgiving snow that would follow, many in the outer areas of the city would perish. Two days before he’d found the boy, he’d been heating a pan of squashed ants over a fire. It had been that time.

You’d think they’d taste foul, but they don’t, he thought. With a bit of added mint and some water, they made a broth that tasted as sweet as the sugar that he remembered from his childhood, though Jack knew that memory was probably not as accurate as he believed.

The first time that he’d eaten ant stew, sitting next to a similar fire, many miles away and a lot of years before, he’d turned the offered cup away, finding the idea foul and the withered old man sitting opposite him even more disgusting. The old man had laughed at him, calling him a fool and telling Jack that he’d soon change his mind. And that old grisly fellow had been right.

Jack was amused to see the very same reaction from the boy even as Jack gulped down a whole cup of the dirty, brown, steaming broth. And he was even more amused a few minutes later when Ryan’s growling, empty stomach made the boy change his mind.

It had been just the same for me, thought Jack.

As he’d watched Ryan grimace with the first sip, then look surprised and gulp it down, an idea hit Jack. It was almost exactly a year that they’d been travelling together, which meant it was sort of Ryan’s birthday.

And that meant that there needed to be some sort of celebration, somehow. Jack had no clue what he would do for the boy, but he was damn sure that he was going to do something.

Caught

The memory of that day faded as the mustard smell filled his nostrils. He tried to cover his face but knew it was pointless. There would be no vent in the back of the vehicle and he already knew that.

Gas, he thought. This is what they do to people that they’ve caught. He knew that at some point they would want to take everybody off the vehicle, and other than forcing them to move and possibly using violence, the easiest way would be to gas them all out. He wondered for a moment why he was even bothering to cover his mouth. The gas was so thick in the enclosed space that there was no escaping it.

Around him, the cries of fear returned, and the sound of coughing pierced the darkness as people succumbed to the gas. Yet he still held his breath, thinking the same mantra that the old man had taught him, over and over. Slow and shallow. Slow and shallow. He pushed his hand against his hood, using it to filter the air. And he knew it was working, to some degree, but not enough. Bright sparkles of light flickered across his vision, stark in contrast to the darkness around him. He started to feel faint and slightly sickened. He wouldn’t throw up but the dizzying effect of the gas made him feel drunk.

Eventually the coughing and the cries of those around him ceased, and he knew that he was the only one still conscious. Everyone else in the back of the truck had fallen. And there was something else familiar about all this. He tried to recall when he had felt it before.

Just as his eyes started to close, and his body began to collapse into a deep unconsciousness, Jack remembered the sharp sting of the dart that the slaver had used.

The Pits

Many Years Before

Jagan was a name that for many years struck terror into the hearts of every living soul that lived in the Outer Zone. He went by other names, but Jagan was what the people of The Crossing had called the slave baron who ruled from his throne in the open grounds east of 342nd Street.

Jack had seen him from a distance, several times during his days in the pits, and was always in awe of the man’s imposing figure. He was easily seven feet tall and was a mountain of pale muscle covered with armour that Jack thought may have been captured from the Hunters. He wore his bright red hair tied in a single braid that hung down his back, and even from a distance you could see his angry eyes glaring outwards at those he commanded.

The day that Jack had been caught, back when he wasn’t even twenty years old, he had left The Crossing after trading and was heading out into the ruins to find a new spot to set up. He’d turned a corner and found a dozen heavily armed men walking towards him. Their armour was hotchpotch, made up of some pieces of the grey battle gear of the Hunters and mixed up with battered pieces of metal. The leading man, who had to be as tall as Jagan himself, wore armour that Jack thought was made from cut up street signs, and he carried a long heavy metal pole with the word STOP on the metal plate at the end.

He remembered seeing the wagon behind the men, pulled along by a dozen or more gaunt figures, but that was all he’d managed to see before he felt the sharp sting in his left shoulder. He’d looked down and seen a throwing dart sticking out of his clothing, and then he looked back up at the approaching group.

When he awoke he was in the back of the wagon, tied to the metal railings. He had been stripped down to just the t-shirt he wore under his coats and the bottommost pair of jeans. Everything else was gone.

Glass Half Empty

Corporal Lisa Markell stared down at the plate of food on the table in front of her and decided that she wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t that the food was bad – quite the opposite in fact. The RAD – Reconnaissance and Acquisition Division – the section of the Inner Zone’s armed forces that was tasked with the security of all salvage and workforce recruitment operations, and of which she had been a member of her entire adult life, fed their people well.

Too well, some said. The plate in front of her was loaded with carbohydrates and high protein, including meat, which was a rare treat, even for the wealthy who lived inside the barrier, and she felt a pang of guilt as she pushed it away.

“You not eating that?” a voice asked, and Lisa looked up to see Johnson eyeing the plate hungrily. They’d only been sat down for a few minutes and his plate was already empty.

“Help yourself,” Lisa said and pushed the plate across to him.

Her thoughts had been miles away, not paying attention to the hum of activity around her as hundreds of RAD officers and troopers huddled around the long tables in the mess hall, ravenously filling their stomachs.  Or more specifically, her mind had been back in the Outer Zone, where she was standing behind the truck as the troopers in her squad climbed back into the armoured personnel carrier after finishing the task of loading the small catch of recruits.

And the man had come out of nowhere, she thought, just appearing a few feet away from her. He stood motionless, watching her and looking behind her into the back of the truck where the captives were.

That had been half an hour ago, and she was still mulling it over. It bothered her. There was something about the way the man looked past her into the darkness of the back of the truck that unnerved her. Unlike almost everyone captured by their raids, this man hadn’t been afraid of her or her troops. She had seen it in his eyes. No fear. And he had just walked up to them, silently, and given himself up.

He’d volunteered.

It had been a first for her, and from what Johnson and the other corporals had said, it was almost unknown for someone to just give themselves up like that. She imagined what she and her troops must look like to those who lived in the ruins. Grey armour over black jumpsuits, a black visor blocking all view of the person inside. When Lisa had first looked in a mirror after donning her battle gear, she had thought that she was looking at someone else. The armour was made to strip all individuality from the person wearing it and was customised to fit. Male, female, thin, bulky – none of those features were obvious from the outside.

The armour was even made to look imposing – frightening even. And it worked for the vast majority of those facing off against them. Sure, sometimes a group of Scavs or some remnant of the old Slave Empire would be among the buildings they were raiding, and they would fight back, but even they had learned to fear the RAD raiders.

Yet this man had calmly given himself up and even climbed into the back of the truck without being pushed or forced. And he’d had the nerve to speak to her.

And she couldn’t get that out of her head.

“What’s eating you?” asked Ellard, another corporal, currently sitting to her right.

Across from Lisa, Johnson stopped eating and grinned. “She got spooked by one of the recruits we picked up.”

Lisa looked up, narrowing her eyes at Johnson.

“I didn’t get spooked,” she said, frowning with irritation.

Johnson shrugged and went back to eating, but Lisa wasn’t letting it go that easily. He’d annoyed her. She turned to Ellard. “This...recruit... He just walked up to us and gave himself in.”

Ellard frowned. “No way,” he said before shovelling in another mouthful of food. “Must be a crazy.”

Possibly, thought Lisa. But she had seen the man’s eyes. And she had caught a lot of crazies in her time, and this guy wasn’t one of them. There had been determination there, she had seen it.

Lisa stood up, pushing her chair back, and left the rest of her comrades to their meal. She knew she’d have to be ready for the Dropship to land at the base in twenty minutes, and be ready to process her catch at the import facility, but that still gave her a few minutes to head back to squad’s ready room. And there would be no one else there.

Two minutes later she shut the door behind her and walked over to the console on the wall at the far end. She hit the catch on the wall below the computer terminal, waited for the seat to pop out of the wall, and sat down. With one tap the terminal came to life, flickering a few times before displaying the identification screen. A flash of green light swept across her face as the terminal identified her before the familiar view of dozens of info panels appeared.

Lisa stared at the screen.

What the hell am I even doing? She thought.

He’d been looking for a boy.

Lisa tapped the screen and pulled up the roster of recruits, shaking her head as she wondered why she was even bothering.

27, 334.

She narrowed the search, selecting filters for juvenile, and male.

5,723.

Lisa stared at the number and frowned. Had there really been so many captured? More than five thousand? Lisa narrowed the search again, selecting only those still alive.

2341.

More than half of them were dead.

Again she questioned what she was doing. There was no way she was going to find the boy that the man was looking for. Stupid, she thought. I don’t even have a name or age.

The door at the other end of the ready room opened and several of the troops in her squad filed in. Lisa tapped the screen, quickly logging off, stood up and hit the button on the wall that would tuck the console and the seat back into the wall.

As the noise of her fellow RAD members resounded off the walls, she thought about the numbers again.

More than half were dead.

Caught

The huge man hit the ground with a grunt, kicking up a cloud of sand and dust from the dry earth. And then he lay there, twitching, as three of the Hunters circled him and then began to drag him away.

Jack squinted, his eyes trying to adjust to the bright sunlight while still attempting to take in the utter chaos around him. Hundreds of captives were standing in groups dotted around the massive yard, most of them, like him, still groggy from the gas, and most of them still and placid. But the huge man in his group, the one Jack thought had become rowdy in the back of the carrier, was now sporting a smashed nose, which looked like someone had hit him with a hammer, and was not co-operating at all. No sooner had he come round, just after Jack, than he was up, roaring and bellowing, and charging towards the nearest Hunter.

Must be an ex-slaver.

The man was smaller than Jack had estimated, probably only a few inches taller than he was, but he was broader in the shoulders and far more muscular. Jack was impressed. The man even managed to get a hit in on one of the Hunters, smashing his fist into the side of the trooper’s helmet and knocking him down, before the buzz of stun sticks cut through the air and three other Hunters descended on him, jabbing at him with the crackling weapons.

As Jack’s eyes began to re-adjust to the bright sunlight, he managed to take in his surroundings. They were in some kind of port facility. Huge, grey concrete buildings rose around them on all sides, and the ground was mostly dry dirt apart from the concrete platform that the dropship had landed upon.

Jack looked back at the armoured vehicle they had just been dragged from and along the line of other vehicles. There were a lot more of them than he had expected, and he estimated that at least thirty of the armoured carriers had driven off the dropship.

And so many Hunters, he thought. There had to be hundreds of them.

He watched as other groups of captives were dragged, unconscious, from the backs of the carriers and unceremoniously dumped on the dry dirt. Some of the other captives were starting to come round, easing slowly out of their drugged state and standing up, looking around and appearing as confused as he felt.

Jack’s gaze drifted back to the huge angry guy being dragged away. The three Hunters hauled him a hundred yards across the hard ground and then dumped him onto some kind of moving, metal platform. The unconscious body lay still as the moving platform carried it away into one of the buildings. He looked up at the sign at the front of the building, which read Conversion Screening Facility, and wondered what that meant.

Then Jack noticed the Hunter watching him from ten yards away and he lowered his head, staring down at the barren ground.

Don’t give them any trouble. Just stay silent and still, unassuming. But he glanced up one last time at the building where the big guy had been taken. He didn’t like the sound of conversion, even though he had no idea what that meant.

The Hunter was still watching him intently, and Jack felt himself involuntarily clenching his hands together, shifting uncomfortably, and looking around at the other people in the same group. He recognised only two of them, an older man and woman that he had seen several times entering or leaving the same building that he had been staying in when he had surrendered to the Hunters. They were a couple, he thought, and lived somewhere on the upper floors of the building. Dozens of others had lived there, each staking their own claim on one of the floors in some corner where no one else was, but just like everywhere else, they tended to keep to themselves and protect what was theirs. Apart from places like The Crossing, where he often went to trade, there were very few communities in the Outer Zone.

No one trusted anyone else.

“Everybody up,” said a metallic sounding voice from a few feet away. Jack turned and saw that it was the Hunter that had been watching him. At that command, several other Hunters approached and encircled the group, which Jack could now see was actually only made up of twenty or so people. The Hunters were waving their stun sticks and pointing in the direction of another large building directly ahead of them. As they started walking forward, guided by the rough hands of the Hunters, Jack noticed the other groups lined up in the yard were also being told to stand. But his group was the first.

It wasn’t the Conversion Facility that they were heading for, and Jack was grateful for that, but as the troop of bedraggled refugees was ushered through the massive concrete doors of the building and into a large open space with white painted markings on the floor, Jack began to feel uneasy.

There were twenty or more entrances leading off one side of the room, and every one of the led into a tunnel that was lit with bright lighting. In front of each entrance was a booth with another Hunter sat in it, and next to that, some kind of metal platform roughly three feet across. The Hunter that had been watching Jack pushed him forward so that he was the third in the queue that was now forming.

In front of him were the old couple, and as Jack watched, one of the Hunters urged the man forward. The old guy was hesitant at first, but the Hunter pointed at the platform and, with a flick of his wrist, the stun stick in his hand hummed to life. Next to Jack, the old woman cried out, telling the old man to go, but the man looked back at her, worried.

“Go,” she said, her voice shrill. “Or they’ll hurt you.”

The man stepped up onto the platform and stood still, looking around at the hundreds of captives now being forced to stand in lines in front of the booths and platforms.

A flash of light almost blinded Jack as the platform flickered to life. Blue lights flowed around the base of the metal panel, swirling clockwise around it until, a few seconds later, the lights turned green. From nearby came a buzzing sound, and Jack looked over to the tunnels that led out of the huge hall. Two tunnels along from where they were queued, a tunnel had lit up green, matching the colour on the platform.

The old man still stood on the platform, confused, and Jack could empathise with him. What the hell did all this mean? What were the platforms for? His heart jumped as the old man was pushed off the platform. The old guy looked at the Hunter that had pushed him, both fear and a hint of anger, maybe even defiance, crossing his face, but the Hunter pointed at the green-lit tunnel, and the old man looked back at the old lady once more and then started to trudge towards the tunnel.

Next, the old woman stepped up onto the platform, and no sooner had the blue lights started flickering than they changed to a flashing red. At this, the Hunter nearest the old woman pointed towards the corridor next to the one the old man had walked down. The old woman stepped off the platform and started to walk towards the second corridor, but as she approached, she looked back and then quickly headed towards the same corridor that the old man had taken. Two Hunters rushed forward and blocked her path, pointing her to the red corridor. She hesitated, but in the end she complied and started to walk down the red corridor.

As Jack stepped forward, heading towards the platform, he glanced across the line of corridor entrances, and saw that they alternated in colour – green, red, green, red and so on. People were being led into a corridor depending on which colour the platform indicated. As he stepped up onto the platform, Jack noticed a young man being directed down the green corridor, and on the next booth another older man, who could barely walk, was being sent down the red.

Jack heard a buzzing noise and felt the platform under his feet vibrate for a moment, and he looked down.

A young man and an old man had gone down the green corridor. The old woman and a nearly crippled man had gone down the red. This had to mean something, thought Jack. Was the platform some kind of decision maker? A technology that could somehow choose who went where? And what were the criteria? Two healthy people down one corridor, and two unhealthy ones down the next.

As Jack looked down, he hoped that the platform would be lit up green and was relieved when it was. He stepped off the platform and started walking towards the corridor with the green archway, and since none of the Hunters tried to stop him, or guide him the other way, he thought that he must have guessed correctly.

The corridor went on for roughly a hundred yards, and was lit on both sides by bright fluorescent lights spaced ten feet apart. The ground was smooth and worn, like many feet had trodden the path that Jack now walked, and he only looked back once as he headed along it. Ahead of him, roughly fifty feet away, was the old man who had gone into the tunnel first and beyond that, near the end of the corridor, he saw the back of the young man moving swiftly away. He had stopped and was leaning against the wall. As Jack approached, he slowed down and stopped next to the man.

“You okay?” he asked. He found it strange to be asking after someone else’s wellbeing for what seemed the first time in years. Other than when he met the boy, Ryan, Jack hadn’t given much thought to others. After all, no one ever did for him.

The old man was breathing heavily and clutching his chest. My...chest.” said the man, his voice strained. “It hurts.”

Jack stood there for a moment and then looked down the corridor in the direction that they had been heading. It ended roughly forty feet away, at a metal gate. Two Hunters were standing the other side of the gate, watching them. Neither moved to help the old man.

I guess I’m not the only one not used to helping folks, he thought. Then leaned forward, about to help the man. But then he caught sight of something that made him hesitate.

Blisters and pustules on the man’s skin. Bright yellow sores surrounded by red, peeling skin.

Plague, he thought. That’s Ratters Plague.

Over the years, Jack had seen many types of illnesses. In the Outer Zone there were few people who could heal, and even fewer who were willing. At The Crossing was an apothecary who sold herbs and salves that could help, but for serious illnesses such as Coughing Fever, Sweats, and Ratters Plague, there was no help. You either died from it or you lived.

Most died.

But Ratter’s Plague was contagious. And Jack had seen just what it was capable of doing when he was barely twenty five years old.

This Old Town

Many Years Before

Just twenty miles from The Crossing, out near the ruins of the Great Stadium, there had once been a small, growing community. Over the years, Jack had seen it expand from the first few settlers, who struggled to fight off bandits, wild animals, and night creatures, to dozens more who started to build defensive walls. They had a water source there, or so it was said, and had even started to run their own market. Then, one summer, just after the cold weather had abated and Jack had found a particularly good haul of junk, Jack realised he was in that area of the new community and decided to go there to trade instead of travelling further to get to The Crossing or Dartston. Both were roughly equal distance away and would take a whole day, maybe more, to reach. But the new place, which folks were now calling New Stadium, was only a couple of miles away and he realised he could be there before dark. He’d been there a number of times before but only because he had been passing. This time he had a reason to head directly there.

But he’d noticed the change even before he got near the outer wall. It was dusk, and the sun was barely a slither on the horizon, and yet the gates were wide open – a thing unknown with all the dangers lurking outside.

And there were no sentries atop the wall.

Jack remembered standing outside the gates, just ten yards from the wall, and staring at the utterly lifeless street beyond.

“You don’t wanna go in there,” said a voice from a short distance away. The wind was howling heavily, a stark contrast to the early breeze he had experienced during the day, and he only just heard the warning. Jack had turned to see a stranger – a man – sitting at the side of the road, outside a shop front on the corner of the street just beyond the gates to the new but now seemingly abandoned settlement. He noticed that he man was wearing a cloth around his mouth, and he also noticed that he carried an axe.

Jack had slowly reached to his side, to touch his machete, but the man had seen it.

“I’ve no bone to pick with you, if you don’t wanna go that way.”

And Jack hadn’t. His hand lingered at the machete for a moment, but then he took it away and started walking over the broken ground to the stranger.

“What happened?” he’d asked as he got closer. He stopped twenty feet away, judging that if the man changed his mind and leapt for him, he’d still have time to draw and be ready.

“Plague,” said the man. “Someone in there, guy called Harris, took to ratting just before I last came by here, bout two weeks ago. Well, I bin in there just now and seen them. It seems they all done caught themselves a nasty rash.”

Jack stood silently for a moment, just staring at the gates.

“Just a rash?”

The man shook his head.

“Much more than a rash.”

“Is there no one left in there at all?”

The man nodded.

“Sure,” he said, placing his axe on the floor and reaching for a pouch on his belt. He started rolling a cigarette. “Three, maybe four left. They’re all infected. So I left them. I asked if they wanted me to, you know, end it, but none of them even recognised that I was there. Only one crazy guy throwing stones. Reckon I should have put them out of their misery, but they didn’t answer me, so I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

The man finished rolling his smoke, and then, surprisingly, held out the pouch.

“Take one if you want, just go easy on the weed, okay?”

Jack had accepted and a few minutes later the two men were sitting at the side of the road, smoking their cigarettes.

As Jack sat there, slowly smoking the harsh, dry tobacco, his gaze drifted over to the gates once more. He didn’t know if it was some form of morbid curiosity, or just a random uncontrollable urge, but he found himself struggling to resist going into the town even with the stranger’s warning.

He stood up, nodded at the man and then started to make his way over the road towards the gates.

“You’ll regret it,” the stranger called after him, but said nothing more. The man must have realised that there was little point trying to stop somebody when their mind was made up, or maybe he just didn’t care.

The gates were built from sheets of hammered car body parts, and as Jack approached he could clearly see the outline of several car doors, a roof, and dozens of hood panels, all hammered flat and then secured together with bolts. The wall itself was mostly more cars, turned on their side and propped up by piles of broken up masonry. Even though it had been centuries, there was still an abundance of abandoned vehicles littering the streets if you went far enough out, away from the sealed off city. The people who built this town had laboured for many months to collect the materials for the wall, Jack thought, realising that he had never considered it before. Scrap metal was low on the list of items he searched for when scavenging.

As he passed through the open gates, Jack looked to his left, to where a rusty old caravan was propped up on bricks just a few yards from the gate. The town folk used it as a gatehouse of sorts, and on the few times that Jack had visited there had always been a guard or two sitting outside the caravan, watching the entrance. Now the spot was devoid of life, and the door to the caravan was wide open.

He looked down the long street that was the main part of the settlement and saw no one, not a single person moving around. The settlement was quite small, and comprised of one long main street and a few alleyways that had been blocked up. Most of the buildings had their windows boarded up on the outside, and the alleyways were built up with salvaged bricks from other nearby buildings so that the outer buildings along the street also made up part of the defensive wall that surrounded the place on all sides. There were probably twenty houses in total, all facing into the street apart from the few farm buildings at the far end.

As Jack moved towards the first house, he noticed something at the end of the street that hadn’t been there the last time he had visited. He walked half way along the street, stepping over cracks and weeds, but then stopped a hundred yards from what looked like a huge pile of dirt. Next to it was a hole, and even from the distance he was at he could see something that made him think twice about going any further.

The people from the settlement had dug a large hole just a few dozen yards from the farm plot, and there, sticking up from among the weeds and grass, was a foot. From where Jack was, that was all he could see, but his own imagination had told him far more than was visible.

It was a mass grave, just like the ones that had been dug on the outskirts of 342nd Street during the reign of Jagan and his pit slavers.

Jack stopped, took a step back, and was about to leave when he heard a noise to his right. Adrenaline kicked in, and Jack turned quickly, both hands going to the machetes on his belt, ready to draw and fight if need be, cursing himself for not just carrying them ready in the first place. But he didn’t draw.

He didn’t have to. The man that had made the noise wasn’t going anywhere fast.

In front of him was a single story building with a porch that was half missing. Most of the wood had probably been stripped away years ago, to be used as firewood, but some of the decking planks and a section of the railing on the right side of the house was still there. The front door was wide open now, and swung further out as the figure – a man dressed in what appeared to be rags – first leaned on the door frame, and then stumbled out onto the deck to collapse onto a bench that was placed against the front wall.

Jack narrowed his eyes, watching the man intently as he struggled to right himself, one hand fumbling to push himself up. Eventually the man leaned back and gave a rattling sigh, and that gave Jack a better view of his face. He was covered in grey and brown pock marks, and his eyes were swollen and puffy.

“Take whatever you want,” said the man, lifting his arm slowly and waving his hand around, indicating the building around them. “Ain’t no one needing anything around here no more. All dead.”

Jack stood there for a moment, his hands wavering over the hilts of his machetes, but then he took his hands away. There was no threat of violence here. Only the dead or the dying.

“Everyone’s dead?”

The man nodded. “Ayuh. Everyone who stayed. Just me alive now, and I’m for the dirt soon, I reckon.”

Jack’s thoughts zoomed back to the last few times he had been at the settlement. There had been families there and several children, probably fifty people in total, maybe more. He vividly remembered a young girl and boy, both maybe five years old, playing in the street.

“Even the kids?” he asked, not sure if he wanted an answer. He glanced along the road again, at the naked foot sticking up in the air, poking out of the grave. Was that a child’s or a woman’s? He couldn’t tell.

“Nah. They got taken off when the first of us caught the pox. That would be Tall Al and his wife Susan’s kids. Al packed up and left and took them all with him. Don’t know where they went. But they dint catch it, I’m thinking. I hope so, anyway. Hope they got away before it caught them.”

The man coughed loudly, and then the cough turned into a heaving fit, until he leaned over and spat out a glob of grey mucus spotted with blood. Jack grimaced. The man looked up and laughed.

“How about we do a bit of trade here?” the man asked.

Jack frowned and opened his mouth to speak but then stopped. He was puzzled. What the hell could the man want? He was a day at most from dying. If any scavengers wanted to raid the village, they could just walk in and take whatever they wanted.

“A deal. If you can manage.”

Jack peered at him warily. “What kind of deal?”

The man coughed again, then he took a few deep breaths, his chest rising rapidly with effort. “Got me a nice weapon back in there, locked up. Single barrel shot and thirty rounds, but the damn thing is in a case and I can’t open it. My hands don’t wanna work the lock. I gave up trying. Look. If you can take the key and take out the gun, you can have the damn thing.”

“And what do you want out of it?” Jack asked.

“An end to this,” stated the man.

Three minutes later, Jack walked out of the main gates and glanced over the street to where the stranger had been. He was still sitting there, and as Jack walked across the street towards him, he saw the man’s hand reach to his belt, to something metal there.

Jack stopped, and raised his hands. “I still don’t want any trouble,” he said.

The stranger watched him for a moment, his gaze jumping from Jack’s face to the shotgun in his hand.

“I heard the shot,” said the stranger, relaxing once more. “Thought that you must have gone into that crazy fellow’s house.”

Jack smiled. “You met him already?”

The stranger nodded. “Yeah. I went in there, took a look in a couple of houses and got to his. Damn crazy ass only started throwing rocks at me from his window. Missed, thankfully. He was raving and waving his arms in the air. So I took off. Figured I’d wait him out instead of risking getting smacked on the head.”

Jack stopped at the side of the road and looked at the shotgun in his hand.

“And you figured if I went in I might save you the trouble?”

The stranger looked up.

“No. No. I did warn you.”

Jack smiled and the stranger smiled back.

“No foul?” the stranger asked.

Jack nodded. “No foul.”

“Good,” said the stranger.

“I’m Jack.”

The stranger grinned. “Drogan,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Caught

Drogan.

The thought of his friend from way back then made Jack feel a pang of nostalgia for the days that had passed and times that would never return, but right then, standing in the tunnel, Jack knew he had to do something about the old guy with Ratter’s Plague before a lot of other people were dead.

He turned away from the man and started forward, hurrying towards the three Hunters that waited at the gate at the end of the tunnel. As he approached, one of the Hunters turned his head toward Jack, then nodded at the other two and slowly drew his stun stick. He stood there, the other side of the gate, watching Jack.

Jack slowed as he got to the gate, and then turned and pointed at the old diseased man, who was slowly making his way down the tunnel. Behind the man, Jack could see several other captives in the tunnel, and a few of them were catching up to the old man.

If any tried to help him, Jack thought. If anyone touches the guy, they’re as good as dead.

“That man,” said Jack, talking to the Hunter that had drawn the stun stick. “That old guy has a disease.”

“Move through,” Jack heard. The voice was metallic and emotionless. He turned back and saw that the Hunters had opened the gate and were stepping aside. The one with the stun stick drawn flicked the glowing bat, indicating that Jack should go through.

“But the guy,” said Jack, turning back again.

“Move through, immediately,” said the voice. Again it was emotionless and flat. Jack turned back to the Hunters and glanced at each of them in turn, realising that they weren’t even listening to him, and started forward, moving between the three armoured figures and out into the room beyond. He glanced back and saw that the nearest captive behind the old man caught up, glanced briefly at him, and moved on, walking past and away from the old guy.

He sighed. It’s not even in people’s nature to consider helping when it could save them too, he thought. He turned back, looking into the room ahead. I would have done the same a few years ago, he thought.

Before you met the boy. That was how things were. You would never have stopped to help the man. But he couldn’t help but feel a little resentful towards both the man who had just passed the stricken old fellow and the Hunters at the gate. Emotionless, all of them. Just like you were, once. If you hadn’t met the boy, and hadn’t learned to care, would you have just walked by the old man? After all, that is what you did anyway. You didn’t try to help him. But he’s diseased. You could have caught it, and then where would you be? You’d be exactly where the old guy will be a week from now. Dying, or already dead, or bleeding from everywhere, just like the man on the porch had been. Bleeding out of your nose, and your eyes, and your ears.

Jack closed his eyes and tried to force the feelings of guilt to pass. You killed him. With his own shotgun. But he had asked you to do it. Yes, he had asked, but you didn’t even hesitate. But that was before. Before. Everything changed with Ryan.

And anyway, it was merciful, wasn’t it?

Ahead of him was a platform of some kind, maybe thirty yards long, with a metal rail along the edge. Beyond that he saw a row of windows lining something that was painted a bright white. He recognised it from somewhere, and tried to think how.

A picture you’ve seen? But when? What was it?

In the middle of the platform was another booth, just like the ones in the huge chamber where people were being... Sorted. That was what they had been doing, Jack thought. They were sorting us. But this one wasn’t. This was different.

A group of three more Hunters stood at the booth on the edge of the platform. One was next to what looked like a metal seat that had wheels on the bottom. Beyond that was a door-shaped opening in the wall of windows.

Jack walked forward and stopped at the booth. The first Hunter indicated the seat, and Jack complied, wondering what was coming next. He had just noticed that all of the windows on the wall next to the booth were blacked out when he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his shoulder. He looked down, staring at the spot where the pain had erupted, and saw another of the Hunters withdrawing a needle of some kind.

It’s just like the pain from the dart. The one that Jagan’s slavers shot you with.

A wave of dizziness swept over him and he felt his feet begin to tingle. The tingling sensation spread rapidly along his legs, up his body and into his arms, then his neck and his face. As it flooded over his cheeks Jack felt the world slipping away.

Will they put you in a fighting pit? He thought.

No. He didn’t think so.

The Pit

Many Years Before

Jack threw his weight to his left, hit the floor and rolled. Behind him, he heard a sharp clang as something hit the ground, hard. He pushed himself up, jumping to his feet, and spun around, instinctively swinging the wooden bat in his hand around in an arc as he came up. But his opponent wasn’t there. Instead, the man was away across the other side of the pit, hopping from foot to foot, almost dancing as he swung the flail around his head.

The crowd above roared their enthusiasm, and Jack made the mistake of glancing up. Above him, maybe fifteen feet from the floor of the pit, was a metal railing attached to a barbed-wire fence, and looking down at him were dozens of faces, all of them wide-eyed, many of them grinning. A cacophony of voices assaulted his senses as the crowd shouted words that he couldn’t decipher.

And it was a mistake to take his eyes off his opponent. Jack felt, more than saw, the man rush forward, and he sensed the flail – a ball of stone attached to a handle by a long chain, swing towards his head. He threw himself sideways again, rolling away, as rush of wind brushed past him.

“Oh! It looks like we found a lively one!” came a booming voice, seemingly from all around him. But Jack was too busy avoiding the man with the flail to locate the speakers that the voice bellowed out from.

He gripped his bat too tight, his fingers turning white from the exertion, and once again threw himself away from his opponent, coming up across the pit again.

This time the man facing him stood still for a moment, his head cocked to one side as he scrutinised Jack.

He’s weighing you up, Jack thought. He’s looking for a weakness. Well, he shouldn’t have much trouble. There are enough of them.

The fight was obviously unfair and intentionally so. Jack had heard of the pit fights, and how those that were part of Jagan’s clan used them as entertainment, and he knew that he was meant to die there. His opponent was armed with a more lethal weapon, and wearing a leather jacket and leather trousers, but he was also wearing a motorcycle helmet with a mask attached, and some shoulder pads made of a material that Jack didn’t recognise. Was it metal? Reinforced plastic? A lot of Jagan’s men wore armour scavenged from the ruins or made from scrap metal. Jack, on the other hand, was wearing what he had left when they brought him in, just the t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans.

Jack stood there, breathing heavily, as the man started to circle around, edging towards him, and still swinging the flail.

One hit from that thing and it will all be over, he thought, also considering his own weapon. It was a wooden bat, and thin. If he tried to use it to hit the man over the head, against the motorcycle helmet, he may dent the helmet, even stun the man, but the bat would most likely break. It already had some cracks in it.

And then the choice was taken away from him as the man lurched forward, jumping the distance between them and swinging the heavy stone ball down towards his head. Jack stumbled, falling backwards, but still he tried to bring the bat up, tried to defend himself. He felt the wind rush out of his chest as he hit the floor, and then felt a jolt in his arm followed by the sound of wood cracking. He rolled sideways, and only just in time as the heavy stone flail came swinging in for a second strike. Again it missed him by inches and bounced off the floor where he had been just a moment before.

Jack pulled back the bat, about to attempt a strike, when he saw that half of the weapon was lying on the floor a few feet away. All that was left in his hand was a foot-long splinter attached to the rubber grip.

His opponent came on again, swinging the flail around his head, and all Jack could do was back away towards the wall. His shoulder hit wood and he realised, with certainty, that he had gone as far as he could. The next lunge would be his end.

And then it came. The man stepped forward and swung the flail low, coming in from the side, and faster than he’d expected, but Jack, unarmoured as he was, was faster. He fell sideways and felt the heavy stone of the flail hit the wall. And then the man’s eyes went wide as the ball smashed through the wooden barrier and stuck there. Jack’s opponent had just half a second to attempt to pull the flail out from the wall, and he heaved on it, wood splintering and cracking, but the flail didn’t move. It was stuck fast in the dirt behind the barrier, and Jack saw his moment. Just as the man let go of the flail, and reached for the knife at his side, Jack lunged forward and rammed the sharp end of his broken bat at the man’s neck.

Luck, it seemed, was with him. The wood splinter burst through the leather around the man’s neck and into his throat. Jack pushed hard, but then let go of the bat, his hands jarring with the impact, as he stumbled back and fell to the floor.

He gasped for breath, heard the crowd above the pit roaring with enthusiasm, and watched as his opponent grabbed hold of the bat and stumbled. Blood poured down the man’s chest and down his arms.

“We have a winner!” came the bellowing sound of the match’s commentator. The crowd above roared.

“Bring him on up!”

But the world around Jack darkened and spun, and he fell forward into the dirt. He was vaguely aware of boots on the ground around him for a moment, but then he passed out.

That had been the first fight, but not his last.

Caught

The darkness of unconsciousness after the fight felt much the same as what Jack now experienced. Except this time, as the world came back in a swirling lack of colour, he wasn’t lying on the floor of a cage, but on a metal bed attached to the wall of a chamber even smaller than the cage he had spent most of his time in down in The Pits. But the walls of this new prison were solid, grey metal, and the only light came from a circular disk in the ceiling.

It took him a while to sit up, and he rubbed his forehead, trying to alleviate the throb of the headache that now pounded on the inside of his skull.

How long have you been out? An hour? A day? It could be any amount of time and you wouldn’t know.

At least the cage in The Pits had a view of daylight.

There was something else. Something, as he sat there on the bed, looking around at the room that was void of any furniture apart from the bed, that bothered him. His stomach was churning and his head felt light.

Motion, he thought. It’s motion sickness. That’s what I’m feeling. I’m moving. Or rather, the chamber that I’m in is moving.

A Trans.

That was what the windows had reminded him of.

The picture that he had once found of the strange, amazing construction that had been created by the people of long ago, and used, somehow, to travel great distances. The magazine from bottom of the dumpster in the old factory north of The Crossing and out towards the Ashlands. It had a picture of such a thing, and a long story about something called a Trans. That was what had been next to the booth in the last hall, and what he had seen before they made him sit in the wheeled chair and injected him.

I’m on a Trans.

But where am I going?

Promotion Demotion

Lisa sat looking at the window of the Trans carriage. Outside, a beautiful sunset raged over the forested hills. A deep orange glow, sliced with yellow and red, covered most of the landscape and highlighted the endless sea of spruce trees that covered the land. Except none of those trees were alive and Lisa knew it. Even if the land above had once been covered with trees, it would be difficult to look at them through the window she faced.

The Trans hummed along the track, barely making an audible sound as it swept along. It was nearly two hundred feet underground, rather than up on the surface, and the dazzling view of sunset was actually a screen display to make the enclosure of the carriage less stifling.

Lisa looked away from the screen and back down to the display pad in her hands. There, in bold type, were her new orders and her new assignment. She sighed heavily and closed her eyes for a moment before continuing to read.

The last few hours had been the worst of her career so far. That something could change so quickly, and for a misdemeanour that she considered so small, was beyond her. And yet, she thought back to the meeting that she had been called to attend with the Section Governor, a big, bearded man called Alderton, and she realised that it was only she that thought it minor.

“So, Corporal...Markell. You were reported for removing your faceguard while out on duty. Do you have anything to say on the matter?” the tall man had said, and Lisa could tell that he was not impressed, and that he wouldn’t treat the incident lightly. But even so, she hadn’t expected it to go as far as it had.

“Your record is exemplary. Top performance, high discipline record. Excellent. Not so high a delivery record in the last couple of months. Hmm...not so good, but that’s common at the moment, so we can overlook that.”

Alderton hadn’t offered her the chance to reply and had merely continued to rattle on.

“We can’t ignore the misdemeanour of removing your face guard, though. I have been advised to use the highest discipline in accordance, but I’m not an unreasonable man, and considering your record, I think the best choice will be to reassign you to a new duty. Take you off the recruitment operation. The alternative is to discharge you, and I’m sure neither of us wants that.”

And apart from some formalities, that had been it. After two minutes of listening to Alderton, she had been dismissed and told to go and wait in her quarters for her new assignment.

That had been just two hours ago, and her new assignment was waiting for her on the system when she got back to the barracks, with instructions to be packed up and waiting at the Trans terminal in twenty five minutes.

Twenty five minutes. That was all they had given her. And the rest of her squad were out of the barracks and on duty, not to return for at least six more hours. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. Instead, she had quickly packed her few personal belongings and hurried out of her room, heading to the terminal and arriving with just five minutes to spare.

Guard duties at the NE7 Resource Recycling Facility.

She’d heard of the place before. It was where they sent a huge number of captives after they were sorted into possible abilities at the terminal. In fact, Lisa knew that on the very Trans she was on, there would be fifty or more new workers heading for that very facility.

Resource Recycling Facility. That was a joke. The place was a rubbish dump, far, far out into the Ashlands across the dead waters. It was a place that killed most of the workers sent to work there. There were stories from many years before, from a long time before Lisa was born, that said the NE7 zone was used as a rubbish tip for the city, a place so far away that it wouldn’t matter what they dumped there. And yet it was now used as a salvage area, where captured workers would sift through the rubbish to find anything of use.

A promotion, the assignment had been called in her note from Alderton. She was now promoted to First Corporal, and would be in charge of expedition security.

And what the hell was that anyway? Expeditionary? It was a damn demotion is what it was, she thought. Bastard decided to get rid of me, send me out into the far away, into the ashes. And probably only because firing a trooper was not the done thing.

Lisa sighed again and wondered what her parents would think when they found out, or her brothers. Her position and pay were the mainstay of her family’s tickets on the next transport off-world. She hoped to hell this wouldn’t damage their chances.

Her thoughts were snapped back to the Trans as a light went on at the far end of the carriage, followed by a repetitive buzzing noise that grated at her nerves. She had been alone in the large, spacious compartment for over two hours, for most of the journey, but now the far doors hissed open and two Trans staff stepped swiftly into the room and sat down in the nearest seats.

“All passengers please be seated for deceleration,” came a metallic voice from the speakers above her head. The voice echoed somehow, or maybe it was just her imagination. The message repeated a dozen times and then stopped. Then there was a loud sound of rushing air from all around her. Lisa felt her stomach lurching, as though it didn’t want to stay where the rest of her was.

The display panel to her left switched off for few seconds, the beautiful forest scene vanishing from view, and Lisa felt a strange pang of regret. But there was no time for her to mourn the loss of a fake scene, for the screen flickered – as did the others in the carriage – and then an image of a very different place appeared, this one very real.

And First Corporal Lisa Markell got her first glimpse of a place that she wished she had never had to visit.

Caught

Jack forced his hands up to the wall, trying to prop himself up as the Trans began to slow down. There had been no warning. One moment he had been sitting in the middle of the room, staring at the blank wall, and the next his stomach had heaved and he slid across the polished floor to bump into the wall. Realising that raising his arms to sit himself up was only going to make him feel worse, he lay flat on the ground and waited for the motion sickness to abate.

Had Ryan laid on the cold metal floor when he travelled here? If he travelled here. That had bothered Jack from the moment he’d watched the huge man being dragged off to the Conversion Facility, to a different place. And then the sorting of people, and the different corridors that led to...wherever they all led. He’d presumed that all captives went to the same place. But the possibility that he would be sent somewhere completely different had become very real.

But maybe he was wrong to think so, maybe Ryan had sat in the very same chamber, wondering where he was going. Jack lifted his hand and traced the outline of a stickman and then a smaller stickman next to it.

All you managed to get the boy for his birthday was a pair of crayons. Sure, they were colours he didn’t have, but it wasn’t much, was it? Had Ryan sat here and drawn his stickmen on these walls?

It was foolish to think that, of course. He knew that. Whatever reasons the Hunters captured people, they would be different for each person, surely? Grown adults who were healthy would be sent to work somewhere, and the sick would be...well...he didn’t know where they would go.

He estimated that it took two minutes for the Trans to stop. Jack had presumed that the other corridor, where the limping man and the old woman had gone, would lead to the place where they dealt with that, but he’d been sent down the same damn corridor as a man sick with Ratter’s Plague. As for children, they would surely go somewhere else.

Jack sighed and tried not to dry heave, but his stomach wrenched with spasms as the motion of the slowing Trans reached its most violent. For a moment, he thought that he would actually be sick, or maybe pass out, but then the feeling was gone. The Trans had stopped.

He lay there for a few seconds, his head spinning, before taking a deep breath and sitting up. His stomach growled loudly enough for him to hear it.

How long is it since you ate, anyway? Three days at least. Has to be. The wheat bread you traded for with those nails, wasn’t it? Damn that stuff had tasted nasty. And that had to be three days, unless you’ve been out cold for longer.

And how fast had the Trans been travelling for it to take so long to stop?

Stupidly fast.

Jack sighed, and sat there in the dim light, wondering how long he would have to wait before the door opened and they ushered him off to somewhere else.

Almost as though someone was listening to his thoughts, the door at the other end of the tiny compartment hissed open and a green light flickered on above it. Jack hadn’t noticed the tiny panel above the frame of the door and cursed himself for it.

Years ago you would have spotted something like that. But he wasn’t given long enough to properly berate himself before a metallic voice spoke from the panel.

“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right.”

Jack frowned.

No guards?

He waited a moment, wondering just what would happen if he sat there and ignored the voice.

“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right,” repeated the voice, and as Jack watched, one of the other captives shuffled past the doorway. The man looked confused and more than a little dazed.

Pretty much how you feel.

Jack rose to his feet, deciding that he wasn’t really so keen on finding out what would happen if he didn’t do as the voice said, and then started to walk towards the door. The old man passing by the door glanced at him.

I know him. That’s the guy with Ratter’s Plague.

Jack stopped, watching the man from the middle of the room. He’d expected to never see the guy again, expected them to cart him off to somewhere, wherever they dealt with nasty diseased people.

Probably a pit.

But then he noticed that the man’s skin was no longer mottled with red pock marks.

Jack frowned, and looked the man in the eyes.

“I’m not sick no more,” said the old man, raising his hands to look at them, his expression that of a child seeing something unknown for the first time. Then he touched his chest. “It don’t hurt here no more,” he said, a grin spreading across his grizzled and scarred face.

“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right,” repeated the metallic voice, but this time it continued. “Ten seconds to purge.”

Purge? What the hell is purge? That does not sound good.

Jack hurried forward. Ratter’s Plague or not, purge sounded a lot worse. He stepped out of the room and stood next to the old man, who although apparently clear of the nasty blotches that came with the disease, still stank like a three-week-dead dog.

The corridor was filled with people now, a few of whom Jack recognised from their brief gathering in the landing area, and as he looked up and down the corridor he saw dozens of open doors spaced a few feet apart.

Then he heard the protests.

“I’m not going anywhere!”

Whoever the man was, he was a few doors up from Jack’s compartment, and on the other side of the carriage. In front of the door, a woman stood frowning at the open door.

“Get out of there, you idiot,” she said, and gestured to the space in front of her.

“Five seconds to purge,” said the metallic voice.

“I said...I’m not going anywhere.”

The woman looked around at the other captives, and then back at the door. No one responded, and Jack could see that she was hesitating.

Was she actually considering going in there after the guy? He hoped not.

And she didn’t, but she wasn’t giving up. “Don’t be a fool. Get out of there.”

But it was too late.

“Purge commencing,” said the metallic voice. And in response, every door along the corridor hissed closed.

“What the hell kinda joke is this anyway?” came the muffled voice of the man now trapped in his compartment.

A second hissing sound filled the corridor, but Jack didn’t see any doors opening. What he did see was a thin wisp of smoke, or steam, coming from under the doorway of the room that he had just left.

There was a short, loud scream from the compartment with the man trapped in it, but that was cut off barely half a second later, and then silence. The captives looked round at each other, none of them – including Jack – knowing what to say. All of them terrified.

No kinda joke is what this is.

Light flooded the corridor, and the sound of more doors hissing open, and the metallic voice was speaking again, urging everyone to exit the Trans through the open doors.

A Trans. That’s what it was called.

Jack trundled along with the others, not sure if he was looking forward to being back outside or if he was dreading what he would see there.

This is the place they take them to. This is where it starts. If they brought Ryan here, then this is where you get to begin looking for him.

Jack stepped out of the Trans and headed down a long ramp, his eyes fighting to adjust to the bright glow of daylight, straining to focus on his surroundings. And when he finally did, he wondered if he would have been better off just staying in his compartment and dying like the other fool.

End of the Earth

Lisa stood on the platform, almost oblivious to the crowd of people being ushered from the prison compartments just twenty yards away, and stared, drop jawed, at what was in front of her.

The facility itself was probably a square mile in size, the Trans station rose from the ground, higher up than the rest of the facility by maybe fifty feet, and that elevation was enough to see beyond the outer walls. Because it wasn’t the rows of prefab buildings that caught her attention. They were common enough in the work facilities across The City and she had seen enough of those in military camps before, including the camps outside of the barrier wall.

It also wasn’t the massive warehouses on the far side of the facility, though she hadn’t expected to see anything quite so big out here. She knew she was being posted out in the middle of nowhere, but the Outer Zone was as far as she had ever gone, and the sprawl of ruins outside of the barrier was familiar to her now but this place was something almost alien.

Outside of the perimeter fence, which was a thirty foot high wall with solid concrete towers and barbed wire that looked like it was maybe three separate fences rather than just one, was an endless mass of junk.

An endless mass that went on and on to the very horizon.

Instead of rolling burned grey hills, like she had seen at the edge of the Ashlands, this landscape was made of trash. Ruined buildings stuck up from the junk here and there, dotting the landscape every few miles like broken teeth inside a rotten mouth, but they were few and scattered randomly.

This was where she had been posted. To watch over mountains of trash.

The histories and rumours that she had heard had been right. It had to have been a dumping ground of some kind, maybe centuries back, but how was there so much of it? This wasn’t just a few square miles of junk. No, this was endless miles of it, and most of it looked like it had just been dropped from a great height to fall in piles that now sculpted the hills on the landscape.

As she stood watching, she became aware of movement around her. Troopers were forcefully guiding prisoners from the other compartments near the back of the Trans and pushing them in droves down the slope towards the first building, a hundred yards across the dusty ground.

And then she noticed a single figure nearby, on the edge of the crowd. The man wasn’t moving. Instead he stood looking out at the junk landscape with an expression of hopelessness.

And she recognised him.

It was him. The man she had picked up just hours before. The damn fool that had walked up to the back of her truck and spoken to her. The one she had lifted her helmet to reply to, cursing herself to be sent out here in the process.

He was here with her.

Both of them sentenced to live at the end of the Earth.

PART THREE

RECYCLED

Junk

Six Months Later…

“Avery!” called an impatient voice.

Most of the workers ignored the tall, stocky trooper dressed in grey, ablative armour as he paced across the dirty floor of the warehouse. They were all too busy keeping their heads down and hoping to be ignored, and busy sifting through the massive piles of junk that littered the huge open space, sorting out the recyclable bits from the trash that needed to be thrown away.

And there was a lot of it to wade through. The warehouse was the biggest building in the NE7 Resource Recycling Facility, and easily stood seventy feet high and several hundred feet across in both directions, and it was probably the only original structure that was still standing. If standing was what you could call it. Every fifty feet or so a thick stone pillar jutted up from the floor, and they certainly weren’t part of the old building, but constructed to stop the rusted and cracked roof from collapsing in on everyone.

The rest of the buildings in the two square mile Recycling Facility were prefabricated, and looked a lot newer, even if they were just as dirty. The original settlement teams had salvaged what they could of the surrounding buildings, but most of them had been smashed into the ground and new prefabs brought in and built on-site. Most of those were enclosed, and some even had air conditioning, but the Goods In building was open to the elements and the polluted air.

The thousands of square metres of cracked concrete ground inside the Goods In building were overflowing with piles of junk delivered from the transport dock at the other end of the building – where the dumpers that made the journey out to the salvager camps each day would deliver whatever they had recovered. There were ten delivery bays and every evening, just as the sun was setting, the trucks would come roaring through the gate, pull up at the back of their designated bay, and unceremoniously drop their contents onto the ground. The next morning, new piles of scrap greeted the weary workers of the sorting crews.

The guard paced around a pile of rubber tires, glared at the worker hauling another tire over to the pile, and called out a second time.

“Avery! Where the hell are you?”

The worker dropped the tire on the pile and pointed down the far end of the warehouse. The trooper glanced in the direction that the worker indicated, seeing only darkness in the corner and piles upon piles of scrap. He frowned, but started over towards the corner. As he rounded a particularly large pile of scrap metal, he spotted a man hunched over what appeared to be a trolley of some kind.

“Avery,” he said, the irritation in his voice obvious.

The man stopped what he was doing, turned, and stood up, scratching his head. The trooper grinned as he noticed the man’s expression turn from one of puzzlement to that of nervousness. He could almost smell the fear and he thought that was good.

Let the scum be frightened, the trooper thought. He’ll be more frightened soon. Look at him. He’s a wretch anyway, covered in dirt and crap like the rest of them.

“You Avery?” asked the trooper, glancing down at the card in his hand that bore the man’s name and designation.

Jack nodded. “Yes…yes, sir,” he stuttered, wondering what the hell one of the guards wanted with him. He’d learned a lot in the last few months that he had been a worker at the Recycling Facility, and one of the most important things was to remain unnoticed, to just get on with what you had to do, and keep out from under the eyes of the guards. People who drew attention tended to disappear and not re-appear.

“Got your re-assignment card here,” said the trooper, holding out the card.

Jack felt a further twinge of fear creep up his back. Re-assignment. That wasn’t good. Where he was, in the sorting plant, he was relatively safe. The area was radiation free – well, low radiation anyway – and he was fed and had a place to sleep. It wasn’t the easiest of jobs, hauling the scrap that came back from the expeditions each day, it was hard work, and he often went to bed at night exhausted beyond that which a normal man could cope with. But at least he wasn’t gradually rotting from poisoning, or out in The Junklands, avoiding a million deadly insects and vermin.

“We have a new vacancy on the north side salvage expeditionary, and lucky you, your number came up.”

The guard stepped forward, stuffed the card into Jack’s hand, and turned to leave, but he stopped few feet away and turned back, grinning. Jack thought there was zero friendliness in that smile.

“Report to the bay in five minutes. They leave soon, and if you aren’t on the truck you can follow them on foot. You’ll need to pack down your gear from your bunk and take it with you. No sleeping in the main compound for you anymore. Good luck with the scabs,” said the trooper, and then turned and walked away, leaving Jack staring down at a card that he suspected might be a death sentence.

He’d seen the condition of most of the scabs. They were the ones who went out on the trucks each week, the ones whose job it was to search among the mountains of trash and debris outside of the facility, trash that had been dumped there over centuries by not only the protected central city, but the cities and people that lived even before the world started dying. The scabs were tasked with bringing back resources, which meant salvage, and because of that they spent most of their time outside of the facility, out in the wastes where radiation could easily spike up and be unnoticed until, well, until it was too late to do anything about it. They were mostly quite sick individuals, covered in scabs, scars and burns, with their hair and teeth quite often falling out. He been told many times by other workers that when the scabs died, the body would be left out in The Junklands, discarded to rot wherever the poor individual fell, and then someone from elsewhere in the facility would be required to replace them.

No one wanted to be a replacement, but there had been at least twenty replacements made in the six months that Jack had been at the facility, and he was also convinced that some of those who replaced the fallen had also gone on to die of sickness.

He rubbed some of the oil from his hands onto his tatty jeans, glanced at the trolley full of machine parts salvaged the day before, and thought of the drying blood he’d found on one of the parts. It had sharp edges, and looked like some sort of blade for a large machine. Whoever had salvaged it had cut themselves, maybe. Was that the drying blood of his predecessor?

Five minutes was all he had, and he had to go fetch his stuff from his bunk or lose it. He headed across the warehouse, towards the western entrance to the sleeping compound. He could see the guard already exiting the warehouse at the other end and followed.

As he walked across the building, he tried not to take notice of the glances that were cast in his direction by the other workers. He knew they all meant well. They felt sorry for him but were thankful at the same time. If he was going, they were off the hook for maybe one more week before another scab died. He’d felt the same. He tried not to think about it and just kept his head up and walked quickly across the open ground.

Jack squinted in the bright sunlight as he stepped out of Goods In and onto the roadway that led around the perimeter of the facility. Across the dirt track was the compound, and he made his way there, stepping around the deeper puddles.

Two minutes later he stepped back out into the light with his sack over his shoulder. It was every possession he still had, though most of what he’d carried with him when he originally surrendered to the Hunters six months ago had been taken away from him, and he knew he wouldn’t see any of it ever again.

Breathing heavily, he took off at a jog towards the expedition building, which was three hundred yards along the dirt track, past the repair centre. Now that would have been the job to get, he thought as he passed the repair centre. The workers in the mechanical department were treated far better than anyone else, and Jack had heard that they even had their own rooms. But, of course, the workers in there, as few of them as there were, were highly skilled, and were able to fix just about any problem with vehicles or machines, and they were also responsible for the upkeep of the entire facility’s electric and water, even the air conditioning in the admin building and the troop barracks. Meaning that the troopers and admin needed them.

Scabs, of course, were treated like what they were – dead men walking.

Five minutes, he thought, probably about two now. And if you don’t get your ass over there they’ll make you walk the road. And that was basically sending you out to die. Everyone knew from talking to the scabs that the trucks travelled ten, twenty or more miles out of the facility each time, and there was no knowing exactly where they were going until the truck stopped. If he didn’t make it, and the guards made him go on foot…well, he didn’t want to think about it. He picked up pace, jogging along the centre of the roadway, and arrived at the expedition compound just as the garage doors of the truck bays were opening.

Six months before, when Jack had stepped off the train and out into the open air of The Junklands, he’d been horrified at the sight. Even the Outer Zone of the city had looked more inviting than the tall, fume-spewing towers that lined the horizon, the sprawl of dirty buildings, and the lines of workers moving to and fro. It had looked like a slave camp, and effectively that was what it was. One of many slave camps in the Salvage Zone. All of those tall, filth-spitting towers were processing plants of some kind, or power stations, or other machine facilities. Everything that the city didn’t want happening near them was out here, manned by armed troopers and worked by kidnapped Outer Zone prisoners. Back in the Outer Zone, no one knew where they took people, and that was because it was thousands of miles away, in a place that no one from the Outer Zone could ever get to, and no one was coming back. Not even when they died.

They’re better off not knowing, Jack thought.

Now he ignored all the sights and ignored the fact that the sky was dark and filled with fumes. It wasn’t worth the worry. He was alive, at least for now. And he hadn’t seen a single sign of Ryan in the six months he’d been at the facility, so maybe that was a good thing. That was what Jack told himself. Maybe being sent out of the place was a good thing.

Jack approached the compound, watching the garage doors open and the trucks being driven out onto the gravel courtyard. A group of four troopers came out of the small office next to the building, and Jack turned and headed in their direction. As Jack got closer, one of them stepped forward and held up his hand.

“Identify yourself,” she said, her voice slightly muffled. Unlike the Hunters that had stalked the Outer Zone, the troopers in the Recycling Facility didn’t wear full helmets that covered their faces. Instead, they wore breathing masks. This meant that you could see their faces, and even after six months Jack still struggled to get used to it.

“Jack Avery,” mumbled Jack. “I’ve been re-assigned.”

The guard lifted her hand to her ear, tapped something on the side of her communicator, spoke a few words, waited, and then stepped towards Jack.

“Arms out straight. I have to check you,” she said, waiting for him to comply. Jack did as he was told, and stood there, bemused, as the guard took a small device from her utility belt, switched it on and started to move the gadget over his chest and down his arms. The device bleeped when it reached his waist.

“What is that?” the guard asked.

Jack frowned, and then looked down. “Oh,” he said, and then unclipped a small wrench from his belt, holding it out. “Just tools.”

“Take it off and dump it in your sack,” said the guard.

When he had dropped the belt to the floor the guard nodded at him.

“You got your assignment card?” she asked, her expression impatient. As he stood there, searching his pockets for the card he had been given, he thought for a moment that the trooper was sizing him up somehow.

Jack held out the card, and the woman took it, glanced at it, and then turned to the trooper standing next to her. He was a tall man, easily half a head above Jack, and he had to stoop down to peer at the card. The man read the details, then glanced at Jack, his eyes squinting.

“They take these goddamn photos and then expect us to recognise these people after months in the dirt,” he scoffed. “Yeah, sure, he’ll do.”

The female trooper grinned behind her breathing mask.

“Go into the compound, through the main doors, then turn left. Find room E2, that’s your new assignment group,” she said. “There’s an empty bunk in there. Dump your stuff and get straight out here. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes, and I presume you know what happens if you’re not on the truck when we go?”

“A long walk,” said Jack, nodding.

“A very long walk,” she said, then she saw how he was frowning and must have read his expression. “Your stuff will still be here when you come back,” she said. “Now get.”

Room E2 was smaller than he had imagined, containing only six sleeping cots, five of which were ruffled and looked slept in. The sixth, right at the back of the room, was stripped of bedding, and even missing a pillow. Jack presumed that this was his, and dumped his sack on the empty frame and glanced around the room. There was a lot more stuff in there than the sleeping compound at the warehouse. Boxes and cases were piled up in corners, all of them shut, and bags of various sizes were stuffed underneath the cots.

These guys get to keep stuff, he thought, and he considered this unusual, considering how little the workers that slept in the main compound were allowed to own.

The room smelt like wet dog and was warmer than Jack expected. There was a window at the far end – furthest from his cot, he noticed – and several air vents in the ceiling, again something more than what he was used to. There was also a large metal box in the middle of the room with what looked like half of a door lying on top of it. The surface of the makeshift table was littered with empty cans and bottles, and a deck of cards that looked well used. Half a dozen crates surrounded the table.

I don’t have time for this, he thought, and turned to leave, ignoring his natural instinct to investigate. He was curious about the contents of every box and bag in the room, and wondered why his bunk was completely bare. The dead man, or woman, must have had possessions, surely. They would in the least have had some bedding.

He hurried out of the room, shutting the door behind him, and headed back out into the courtyard where the carriers stood. The engines were humming now, and dozens of scabs were jumping into the backs of the vehicles through the open doors. He glanced around, wondering which of the dozen or so trucks was the one he should be on, and then saw the female trooper standing a few carriers away, beckoning him towards her.

Jack hurried over, moving between the hurried lines of people jumping into the trucks.

“Get in and buckle up,” shouted the trooper, her voice barely audible over the roar of engine. Jack heard the slamming of heavy, metal doors as the trucks were closed up, locking in their passengers.

He stepped forward, grabbed the overhead bar just inside the back of the truck, and squinted in the dim light. As he stepped up and into the back of the truck, he heard a creak and a bang as the doors behind him slammed shut. The engine roared even louder, and Jack’s heart jumped a beat as he tried to find an empty seat.

“Over here,” a voice said, cutting through the noise of the engine, and as Jack’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he saw five faces looking back at him, and there, just to his left, an empty seat. He stepped forward, turned, and plopped down into the seat just as the truck lurched forward, almost throwing him onto the floor, but he managed to grab hold of the seat as the truck started to move away, his hands searching around him for the safety belt. He thought he could hear laughter from nearby, but ignored it.

“The buckle’s near your head, you eejit,” said a voice, this one different from the first. Jack reached up and found the belt, and feeling a little stupid, he pulled it down and snapped it into place.

Then he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Well,” said a voice next to him. “Talk about a dramatic entrance.”

There was more laughter, this time from multiple directions.

“You certainly cut that a bit fine,” said another voice, this one right next to him. It was deeper than the other voices.

Jack looked around, and found that his eyes had begun to adjust to the light. There were no windows in the compartment, just a trio of dim, blue lights at the front, and they cast a cold light across the faces that he now saw watching him from the darkness.

Sitting to his right was a very large man, with dark skin and long, dirty, plaited hair that Jack recalled were called dreadlocks. He wasn’t sure where he had heard the term, maybe it was something Drogan had said. The man had a burn scar across one side of his face, and Jack could see that one eye was covered with a small patch made of some kind of plastic.

Directly across from Jack was a much older, frailer man, who Jack thought wouldn’t have even been as tall as his own shoulders. The man also had long hair, but his was grey, almost white in places, and he had a beard that almost reached his waist. The man was grinning at him, and Jack could see that he had just four teeth, two on top, and two on the bottom, and the humour in that grin made Jack smile.

There were three others in the back of the truck. A heavy-set of about Jack’s age, or so he thought, who wore a furry hat with long flaps that covered his ears and looked as though it was meant for winter rather than the heat of the Salvage Zone. Another man was entirely bald, with piercing grey eyes and thin, almost chiselled features, and lastly, a man with the strangest face that Jack had ever seen. Everything about the man was disproportioned in so many ways. One of his eyes seemed larger than the other, his bent and crooked nose sat too low down on his face, and his chin appeared to be wider than his forehead.

“So, what’s your name?” asked the dark skinned man with the dreadlocks.

Jack was quiet for a moment, still considering his new companions, and presuming that these were the men that he would be sharing a room with.

“I’m Jack,” he said.

The dreadlocked man nodded, and smiled. “I’m Tyler,” he said. “This fellow over from you is Higgins, the oldest damn scab alive.” At that several of the men laughed.

“Old as the junk around us,” said the man wearing the winter hat.

“You can laugh,” said the bearded old man, “But I’ll be here when you’re all gone, and who will be laughing when I get divvies on your gear?”

That brought even more laughter.

“Fellow over there,” Tyler indicated the man with the winter hat, “is Locks, and not because he has fine hair.”

“Nothing wrong with my hair,” said Locks.

“Apart from you ain’t got much of it under that damn hat,” said Higgins. The old man started to chuckle to himself.

“That over there is Rick,” Tyler said, indicating the gaunt, hairless man at the far end of the cabin. “He’s our watchman. And, lastly, that’s Boots over here. And don’t mind that he looks like he’s been smacked around more times than a pit fighter.”

“Meet ya,” said Boots, twitching his head to one side several times then, almost immediately, his head fell forward and he fell fast asleep.

“He does that a lot,” said Tyler, sighing loudly. “Damage to the brain. So. Seems like you’ll be joining our little band of freaks. At least for a while.”

Jack frowned. “A while?”

Tyler laughed. “Well, we’ll see if you can last it out salvaging. Not everyone can.”

Jack was silent for a moment, while he tried to take it all in.

“What happens to those who don’t?”

Tyler’s cheerful expression turned cold, the smile gone in an instant. “They become a vacancy,” he said, then the grin was back, and he burst into laughter.

Jack sighed, feeling a little out of his depth among these new people. He had not been outside of the facility in the entire six months since he stepped from the transport, and had no idea what to expect. All he had seen so far was the rolling hills of junk and the smog-producing towers in the distance. Now he was in the back of a truck with five strangers, heading out of the facility and miles into The Junklands.

He looked around at the other men.

Strangers.

Strange was certainly the key here.

A View from the Top

A Week Before

First Corporal Lisa Markell blinked in the bright sunlight and looked back through the viewfinder. From the platform on top of the armoured carrier, perched high upon a mound of debris and junk, she could see for miles. Not that it gave her much of an advantage.

She could see even more trash, and that was about it. Endless huge piles of the damn stuff, stretching out into the distance.

It still amazed her, nearly six months after arriving in the Salvage Zone, just how much trash had been dumped out there. Centuries of the stuff, most of it broken machinery, the remains of torn down buildings. A lot of it was rusted metal, dumped there by the civilised world back when there was one. Now that world was long gone and the production of new resources was at a historical low. The Inner Zone officials had decided that it was time to salvage what mankind had scrapped. She’d been told all about the Salvage Zone, and how that entire area of the world had been sectioned off many centuries ago and used as a dumping ground. She had nearly nodded off in the briefing.

She knew that the ark ships, which launched once a year, sending tens of thousands of new resettlers on their fifty year cryo journey to New Earth, needed mountains of metal to construct, and so here she was, overseeing the salvaging operations that made it possible.

Dotted across the landscape were more armoured vehicles, just like the one she now commanded this particular expedition from, and as she watched, one of the vehicles stopped, unloaded its crew of troopers, and then sat waiting for them to return.

Scans, scans and more scans, she thought. The flyby scan had covered an area nearly ten miles across, and had come up with no life signs, but she knew that meant there could still be some. So they had to do it again on the ground, in person, just to make sure. The Junkers were out there somewhere, probably even watching her right now from within their hidden nests, and she had to do whatever was necessary to secure the area before the salvagers arrived.

About a quarter mile away, Lisa spotted a vehicle with its hatch still down, even though the troops had been dropped minutes before. She squinted and frowned, wondering why the hatch wasn’t shut.

“A3, this is Markel, what is your status? Over.”

There was a moment of silence as she waited. And then just as she was about to ask again, a voice replied.

“This is A3. We have a mechanical problem with the door hydraulics. Over.”

“Received, A3. Is the rest of the vehicle functional? Over.”

“Yes, ma’am. All other functions nominal. Over.”

“Okay then, just keep an eye on your entrance, A3. I don’t want any unwelcome visitors. As soon as you are all hands on-board, get back to the service truck and get that sorted out. Over.”

“Affirmative, ma’am. We have two of the squad in the back of the truck keeping watch. Over.”

“Acknowledged, A3. Keep it tight. Out.”

Damn inferior machinery, she thought. It had been something she’d noticed almost within a minute of stepping off the Trans into the Recycling Facility. The equipment sent to them from the Inner Zone was almost always the most decrepit, the cast off trash that had most likely been replaced with something shiny and new. And the vehicles weren’t even the same reinforced armoured craft that they used on the Outer Zone raids. No, these things were Inner Zone standard, and would be unlikely to withstand a hit from an automatic weapon without the crew inside being peppered.

Thankfully the only ones with automatic weapons of any kind around here were her people.

Lisa turned to Reece, her second in command, who was standing just a few feet away, staring out at the vast expanse behind them.

“Are we secure?” she asked.

Reece nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We had some movement a few miles out, which was picked up by the drone, but whatever it was scattered soon after. Thermal scanning hasn’t picked anything up.”

Lisa nodded and looked back out at the vehicle with the faulty door mechanism. The troopers were back, and getting into the vehicle. A few seconds later the last trooper jumped on board and the door swung clumsily before slamming shut.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s get the hauler in and clear a staging area. We’ve got a dozen cans of salvagers due in about four hours and I want this ready.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Reece.

“And get that APV with the crappy door booked in with the maintenance crew.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Reece.

Lisa turned to head towards the hatch in the middle of the platform, but stopped. “Where are we next, anyway?”

“Ahhh…let me check.” Reece took a hand-held, touchscreen device from his utility belt, turned it away from the bright glare of the sun, and tapped it a couple of times.

“Facility reclamation mission,” he said. “The Picking Factory that was raided by Junkers about ten months ago, over near the blast crater.”

Lisa looked relieved. “Nice. We might actually get some activity for once.”

Junk

As far out as you can go.

Jack sneezed as the cloud of dust hit him in the face. He squinted, straining against the bright glare of the sun, as he jumped down from the back of the transport vehicle. Even though he was near the back, he was the last one out, after struggling with his safety belt for more than half a minute. As he’d tugged, and tried to reach for the clip, the others filed past and jumped out into the bright sunlight.

Now he found himself standing on dry, dusty ground in a large clearing, maybe two hundred yards across. Where the clearing ended, the flat dry ground finished abruptly at a wall of junk. All around them, piled tens of feet high in some places, was a mass of trash. Most of it was rubble from broken buildings and large sheets of rusty metal, but as his eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun, even from fifty yards away Jack could see all manner of other things. Rotten wood, decomposing paper and magazines, machinery parts, torn metal structures, and animal bones.

At one section of the junk it looked like whatever cleared the area – probably a digger of some kind, Jack thought – had torn the trash pile away to reveal an open cavity under a huge pile of trash. Inside the cavity were the rusty remains of an old refrigerator, some smashed up cupboards, and what appeared to be a sleeping cot.

Someone had actually lived there. Hidden right underneath the junk. It must have been a long time ago, had to be. Everything looked so old.

Next to him, the armoured carrier shuddered for a moment and then fell silent as the engines switched off. But the surrounding noise was no less deafening, as no sooner had the vehicle’s engine stopped roaring, than a second, much larger vehicle appeared through the roadway carved into the trash. It was a dumper truck, or so Jack thought. It looked like one of the ones used to deliver salvage to the facility, though as it pulled into the middle of the clearing, Jack realised that he had never seen one this close up. The dumpers usually tipped their finds onto the moving platforms outside of the Goods In warehouse, some two hundred yards away from where he worked, and the larger pieces would be sorted and removed before anything even reached the sorting hall.

“Daunting, isn’t it?” asked a voice nearby. Jack turned to see Tyler standing just a few feet away. He had tied back his mass of dreadlocks so that they hung down his back through a hole in his jacket, and he’d also pulled a hood over his head. “We have to fill that thing before the end of each day,” he said.

Jack looked at the massive dumper, with its huge open – and very empty – back. You could fit the armoured vehicle that they had travelled inside, probably twice, he thought.

“Don’t worry,” said Tyler, moving to stand next to him. “It’ll fill up quicker than you think.”

“I don’t see how,” said Jack.

Tyler laughed and pointed at the back of the armoured carrier. He hadn’t noticed the large contraption hooked onto the side of the carrier. “We got a digger,” he said. “Boots drives it and drops the heavier stuff in there, while we sift through the crap, looking for the good stuff.”

They stood watching Boots and Rick unstrap the one-man digger from the carrier vehicle. As the digger hit the dirt, Jack wondered if Boots would even fit into the thing. It didn’t look much bigger than a small car, and it certainly didn’t look like it would be able to haul much weight. But Boots squeezed into the tiny compartment at the centre the digger, and Jack heard some clicking sounds followed by the whir of a small engine, and the thing sprang to life. It was compacted for travel, thought Jack, as the contraption seemed to unfold, changing from a strange upright column into something almost spider-like.

“We’ll be out here for about a week,” said Tyler. “That’s how long we usually stay in one spot before being given a half day out, back at the facility, and then off to the next location.”

“A week?” asked Jack. “We stay out here for that long?”

He’d thought that the expedition groups came back every night, but now he thought of the four hour journey to get to this place and realised that there would be no time to work if they spent most of it travelling.

“But where do we sleep?” he asked.

“In the carrier,” said Higgins, appearing next to them. He had two rucksacks thrown over his shoulders, and dropped one of them at Jack’s feet.

“That’s some basic gear for ya,” he said. “Mostly left over by Brody…erm… Your predecessor.”

Jack looked down at the rucksack lying in the dirt.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It ain’t much,” said Higgins. “We could have kept it all, you know. It’s traditional for the dead’s gear to get shared out, but we dint need what’s in there so you can have it.”

“You’ll pick up gear along the way,” said Tyler. “And anything that the facility don’t need that you find out here is your dibs first.”

Jack frowned. “We get to keep stuff? I mean, they let us keep things?”

Higgins laughed, almost coughing with the effort. “No, of course they don’t let you keep stuff, not if it’s useful to them, anyway. But if we don’t put it in the back of the dumper, they don’t ever knows about it, get it?”

Tyler picked up the rucksack and handed it to Jack.

“What Higgins is saying, is what they don’t know about, they don’t want. And out here, it’s just us.”

Jack looked at the digger, and then the carrier.

“But the drivers of the vehicles, surely they see if you take stuff?”

Tyler grinned. “What drivers?”

Jack frowned again.

“Ah,” said Tyler. “I get it. Come on,” he said. “Come look at this.”

Tyler made his way around to the front of the carrier vehicle, and Jack, confused, hurried behind him, trying to fit his new rucksack over his shoulders.

No wonder none of them wants this damn thing. The straps are both ripped.

“There,” said Tyler, pointing at the cab of the carrier. “You see the door?”

Jack looked at the side of the cab, and then tried to peer over the top.

“No,” he said.

“No, indeed,” said Tyler. “That’s because there isn’t one.”

Jack walked around the front of the carrier, peering at the far side, but found it just the same. A sheer metal wall that ended at the front screen. The screen itself was opaque, but Jack had thought they were just designed that way to block visibility of the driver and the rest of the cab crew from the outside.

“It’s automated,” said Tyler. “They all are.” He pointed at the dumper truck. “They can get at them from underneath, to maintain them, but there’s no person in there, or even room for one, from what I’ve heard. It also means no one can steal the damn thing, on account of there being no controls for a human to use.”

“You mean that there are no facility staff with us?” asked Jack. “Just us? We’re the only ones out here?”

Tyler nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “They remote pilot them, or pre-program them, or something. The carrier will remain right there for five days, and then it just goes back, on its own, after the alarm sounds. And it goes with or without us in it. And the dumper goes back every day and comes back before morning, empty.”

“Not even guards?”

“Yes, there are guards, but they stay at a central camp about half a mile away from here. That’s how they do it. They set up in an area, then they carve out a hole for each of the crews. Now, you see that beacon on top of the carrier? If that starts making one God-almighty noise, you run like hell and get in the back of the carrier, because it seals shut after a couple of minutes whether you’re in there or not.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means that something uninvited has moved into our sector.”

“Like a creature?”

“Like predators, sure, sometimes. Plenty of those out here, but the radar doesn’t look for them and they mostly leave us alone. See, the predators learn faster than people. Usually the siren means that Junkers just got picked up on the radar.”

“I see,” said Jack. “So, what happens if someone wants to just run off?”

Tyler smiled. “Yeah, sure. We’ve all thought about it, at one time or another, until we find what’s left of someone who did run off.”

“Oh. People do, then?”

“Sometimes,” said Tyler. “Even had a guy with us about five years ago, ran with us for six months. Before Rick joined us, this guy was part of my crew. Then he decided to make a run for it and took off into the trash. Didn’t even bother that we were all watching as he went. Course, he also didn’t try to take any gear with him, or we would have stopped him.”

“And what happened to him?”

“We found him about three months later, when we cycled back round to the same spot, after Rick had taken his place. Higgins dug him up while we were salvaging. Found him trapped under a pile of crap with both his legs chewed off. He’d got about two hundred yards.”

“Damn.”

“Oh, yeah. Damn all right. That wasn’t the only thing eaten. He had no hands and no face. The only way we identified him was his tags. Thought it was a dead Junker until Rick spotted the chain still hanging from his neck. Well, what was left of his neck.”

Jack shuddered, and involuntarily reached into his shirt to touch the dog tags that hung there.

“You see, out here,” continued Tyler. “You either have the bugs, or you have the Junkers. Both of which will kill you. And no food. Nothing grows out here, it’s all lifeless and poisoned. We find bodies every now and then, among the junk. I’m guessing some of them are escapees, but who knows.”

Jack nodded, his mind still stuck on an image of a body with no legs sticking out of the junk.

Tyler shrugged. “What I’m saying is. You wanna run for it, no one is going to stop you, but don’t expect to take anything with you. We don’t waste good gear here.”

“I wasn’t planning to run,” said Jack, but wondered if he really was considering it. Six months was a long time to find no trace of Ryan, and he’d looked everywhere he could at the Facility. Maybe out here, he could search, but where would he even begin?

You have to start somewhere, though. Don’t you? But dead isn’t a start.

“Anyways, as I was saying,” said Tyler. “If you hear the siren you run back to the carrier, and don’t stop for nothing.”

“And then?” asked Jack.

Tyler frowned “Hmm?”

“Then what happens?” asked Jack.

“Nothing. We just wait in the carrier until the drone or the troops arrive to remove the problem. Or until it just goes away.”

“What if you’re not inside the carrier when they get here?”

Tyler’s expression turned from amused to grim.

“Then you become a vacancy.”

You Again

Expedition Control Centre

Lisa Markell wiped the sweat from her face and stared up at the mass of twisted metal in front of her. The huge Drover vehicle had arrived just an hour before, trundling along slowly, as they always did after being left behind to catch up. By the time it had arrived, the salvage groups had already left for their individual areas and the camp had gone into overwatch.

“Can it be repaired in the field?” she asked, looking at the aged mechanic standing just a few feet away, and then at the young trooper standing next to her. Hailey Simmons had been assigned to her expedition just a few weeks before, and Lisa hadn’t liked her at first but the young trooper’s can-do attitude soon stopped being irritating, and now Lisa kept her at her side constantly. The girl got things done, or brought things to Lisa’s attention much sooner than they otherwise would have been.

Take this drover, Lisa thought. The driver would have dumped this in the parking ground and walked away, leaving it for what? A day? Two days? Probably three days from now, when I’d want the damn thing hauling along the old roadway and clearing it for us, and we would have been delayed for repairs. Now we get the problem sorted before it’s needed.

“Ah, maybe. Yeah,” said the mechanic, rubbing his stubbled chin and looking at the debris jammed into the Drovers cutter. Drovers were originally designed for cutting tunnels in the earth, or even in rock, but they weren’t the most robust of contraptions, and when one became no longer of use to the mining sector, they were turned into road clearance trucks, and sent out to make long gouges in the hills and mountains of junk out in the Salvage Zone.

“Maybe?” asked Lisa. “Really?”

“No problem,” continued the mechanic, now looking flustered. “I can just cut that out and then we can get in to free the mechanism. Maybe a day?”

Lisa smiled. “Good. Very good. See to it, then. I need this three days from now, to clear a road to an abandoned facility we need to access.”

She turned and headed back to the main control centre, a large construction built from a dozen large trucks that could just park next to each other, lower their sides and become one enclosed building. She was relieved to step out of the blistering heat and back into air conditioned rooms. She headed for the control room, right at the heart of the building, and sat down at her desk.

“Did we manage to re-fill all the group vacancies before we left?” she asked, not even looking round to see if Hailey was with her. Lisa knew she would be.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Hailey. “I saw to it myself, as you asked. I picked out some healthy candidates and wrote out the cards last week. It took them a while to process, but we got the replacements just as we were leaving for this trip.”

Lisa looked out across the control room, which she always thought was surprisingly large considering it only took up the compartments in three of the trucks. A few yards away was a bank of two dozen LCD monitors, watched by two troopers, all showing different views of the various areas currently being worked by the salvage crews in her expedition group.

“Did you want to review the new replacements?” asked Hailey. “I have them right here.”

Lisa was about to say no, but then chuckled quietly. The new recruit was certainly keen to please, she thought, and after how much of a relief she was proving to be, Lisa thought she should at least show interest in the girl’s work.

“Sure,” she said. “Throw them over here.” Then she turned back to the screens again. The screen at the top right corner was flickering, and that would annoy her very quickly.

Lisa took the thin pile of cards that Hailey handed her. There were a dozen. Had she really lost that many scabs in the last few months? It was hard to tell. There were more than enough accidents out there and, of course, the occasional escapee. It couldn’t be helped. But a dozen? That seemed a little high.

She flicked through the cards, checking that the current health status of each individual was marked over ninety out of a possible hundred. Healthy ones, well done again, Hailey, she thought.

It wasn’t until Lisa flicked to the second to last card that she stopped and actually paid some attention to the details. Something had triggered a thought, or a recognition, and it was something on the card before, just as she looked at the last one. Lisa flipped the last card back to the top of the pile and peered at it, curious. What was it about that card that brought back a memory? For a moment she sat there, brow furrowed, just staring at the card, trying to spot what it was about it, or about the individual whose tiny photo stared back at her, that reminded her of something.

The name. Jack Avery. That wasn’t familiar, or was it? She’d heard it before. But why was it so important?

Then she recognised the face. It looked cleaner, less pale, and was shaved, but there was the scar above the eyes, just as she remembered.

Well, well. So that’s what happened to you, she thought.

“Is everything okay?” asked Hailey.

“Yes,” said Lisa. “Fine. Absolutely fine.” She handed the cards back to the young recruit. “Good choices, there.”

Hailey smiled, and inside Lisa also grinned. The girl was genuinely pleased to be helpful, but that wasn’t what made Lisa smile. Jack Avery, the man who had asked who she was, who they were, the man who had given himself up – a thing that no one ever did – and had caused her to remove her visor to speak to him – causing her to be demoted out into this dirty outback – was under her command.

He was one of her salvagers.

I never got answers, Lisa thought. But now I will have them.

Junk

Not Alone.

Jack stepped back from the wall of junk and took a deep breath. If it weren’t for the hood that he’d managed to fashion the night before, from a scrap of dirty cloth that he found in among the trash, he’d have been even hotter. The first day had been fine for about an hour, and then the heat had started to get the better of him.

That was why they all wore hoods, he told himself that evening as he sat in his seat in the back of the carrier, his face and neck red and his head throbbing.

Not one of the other members of the crew had mentioned anything to him, but they were watching him that night as they sat around eating, talking and playing cards on a crate that they hauled out from behind one of the seats.

A rite of passage, maybe? That could be it. That they would put him at risk of heat exhaustion annoyed him a little, but he couldn’t deny that these men owed him nothing, and the junk that was in the rucksack – a few spare items of clothing, a utility belt with a bunch of empty pouches on it, a crude knife and fork – they hadn’t been obliged to give him them, even if they were what remained of his predecessor’s gear.

It didn’t matter. He’d fixed it that first night and hadn’t said a word to any of them about it, and the following few days had rolled by, hard as the work was, with relative ease. Jack even thought that he caught Tyler smiling to himself when Jack stepped out into the relentless heat the next morning with a hood over his head. It wasn’t great, and didn’t really keep any of the heat away, but it stopped the sun from burning his already sore scalp.

Now, on the fifth day, after filling the damn dumper truck four times already, he was starting to get past the tiredness that followed in the evening, and even the aches and stiffness in the morning.

And he’d found the entire crew something rare that very morning, only twenty minutes into the start of the day. It was at the back of the caved in dwelling that had been uncovered when they had first arrived. That had been the first spot that the crew descended on the minute they started work, obviously spotting the potential that the ancient and abandoned abode could hide, and now, having found the old box behind the wall, he understood why.

He’d followed the rest of the crew over, climbed the ten or so feet up into the open cavity, and joined them in their search, but Tyler was cursing their luck within a few minutes and claiming that the makeshift home had been abandoned decades ago. Jack had picked up the half-torn and rotten remains of an old magazine that lay in the corner of the dwelling, but the pages were stuck together and most of the paper started to crumble away the second he picked it up.

“The new guy can have this spot,” Tyler had mumbled, and Jack had taken his cue from that as the crew left the cavity one by one and took up positions around the clearing.

He’d stood there after they’d left, just looking at the strange cavern that had been carved into the junk, and marvelled at how long the piles of trash had been just sitting there. Centuries. And whoever lived in this dwelling twenty, thirty or even a hundred years ago, had meticulously removed and reinforced the outer walls of the cocoon inside the trash. There was no entrance, and Jack presumed that any way in or out must have been in the section of the hideaway that the diggers had already cleared. Along the walls, scrap metal had been almost woven together and reinforced with plastic covered cables and wires. The floor was constructed from sheets of metal hammered flat – probably car or machine body parts – and then, he presumed, covered in scrap cloth and pieces of carpet. The floor was covered in a mashup of something that must have been cloth or carpet but now, after all this time, it had rotted away into a brown, furry mush.

He moved away, climbing back out of the cavity and down onto the dirt ground below, and looked up at the wall of junk that was now his prospect area.

And he realised he didn’t really have much of a clue what he was doing.

I can find stuff, he’d thought. Sure. I can find value junk inside this mountain of crap, but what am I looking for? Well, if what got delivered to the sorting area that had had previously worked in was anything to go by, metal and electronics were the thing. So that was where he started, hoping that they didn’t send something more valuable that he didn’t know about elsewhere.

Two entire days he’d ploughed through the masses of junk, avoiding broken masonry and larger chunks of rubble, relentlessly looking for things made of metal and anything that looked like electronic circuitry. That was their job, it seemed, to crawl among the debris and haul out anything made of metal that could be recycled. It was mindless, and Jack couldn’t help but wonder why the hell the city didn’t just send out huge automated diggers to haul the stuff away. Surely that would have been more efficient? A half a dozen men, picking away by hand, seemed a slow way to achieve what a digger could do in minutes.

On the third day, Jack had to fling himself away from the edge of the junk as the cavity, and what remained of the uncovered dwelling, collapsed. He’d been picking away at the junk wall in the area surrounding the cavernous hole all that time, pulling bits out, discarding some and keeping others, and gradually the wall had weakened. The cloud of arid dust that spewed out nearly filled the entire clearing, and as he stood up and patted himself down, he heard curses.

But then as the dust began to settle he spotted the box, now newly uncovered where it had been hidden underneath the floor near the back wall of the dwelling for whoever knew how long.

But he’d somehow known it was there. He’d sensed it, like he used to sense lost or concealed things in the ruins of the Outer Zone. He’d felt it from the moment he first saw the dark and open maw of the dwelling. There was something secret in that old place, a precious thing that someone had tucked away and covered over and not wanted anyone to ever find. Even after they were long dead.

He looked around, checking that none of the other crew members had seen it, but the dust still hadn’t cleared further across the open ground away from where he stood, and he knew that the nearest to him was Higgins, at least fifty feet away. He hauled the box out from the trash that had compacted underneath the hidden dwelling, looked for a catch of some kind, found it already broken, and slowly, cautiously, lifted the lid.

There was a faint hiss, followed by a musty smell wafting out of the box, and Jack cringed and moved back a short distance, wondering what could make such a stink, but then he peered in, and instead of some nasty, rotten thing in the bottom of the box, Jack spotted a pile of small boxes, each wrapped in a clear plastic jacket and measuring about four inches across.

Cigarettes.

There were twenty packets in all, and they were old, very old.

The box must have been sealed somehow. There was no way that something like that could last that long. How long had it been since cigarettes were made? Hundreds of years? It had to be at least that. He’d heard stories of how, even long after the fall of the old world, a new industrial age had come about in the century before last, and things like cigarettes, canned food, and all manner of more basic goods had started being made again. He’d also heard how that had collapsed because of war. The cigarettes had to have been made then, because for them to come from the old world, well. Did anyone even know how many centuries ago that was? They certainly never came out of the Inner Zone if they were made there. Somehow, he suspected that such things wouldn’t be high on the list of things to make for the people inside the barrier-protected city.

And so, that evening, the carrier was filled with smoke, and Jack found himself the lucky owner of a new shirt, a pair of worn but usable gloves, a tin of actual fruit of some kind, a plastic flask that could attach to his utility belt, a tough belt that he could cut up and repair his rucksack with, and even better, a pillow. He guessed that the things were mostly owned by his predecessor, and that it wasn’t really much of a loss for the crew members to trade them for a share in the find, but he was happy anyway, sitting there, smoking his first cigarette for months and playing a game of cards.

They’d all heard the noise and fallen silent. Boots was the last to stop laughing, and looked puzzled until he heard the shuffling noises of movement on the ground outside.

Jack frowned, but didn’t speak. He looked at Tyler, whose expression had turned serious. Tyler put his finger to his lips to indicate be quiet, and then sat there, listening. The inside of the carrier went silent.

There were more crunches of trodden stones from outside the carrier.

Jack looked at Tyler again, and mouthed the words can it get inside? But Tyler shook his head.

Jack sat in silence. Listening. Thinking.

Some kind of wildlife. Had to be. But what could live out in this waste? People probably do, though, don’t they? Of course they do. Junkers. The ones that they all keep talking about. Mutants. Unclean things. Bugs.

There are a lot of things living out here, you just haven’t seen any of them, Jack. That’s what Tyler already told you. But they probably wouldn’t come near, probably learned from that mistake a long time ago. So what hadn’t learned? Something was out there, and whatever that thing was didn’t fear the carrier or the people inside it.

There was a banging sound above them, and a thud, thud, as something walked across the roof of the carrier. The sound moved above them, over Jack, then Tyler, then arrived at the top hatch, a thing that Jack had never noticed before. He hadn’t even known that there was a top hatch on the carrier.

Another banging sound, and then a groan.

Was that groan made by the thing on the roof? Or was it a noise of something being moved? It sounded metallic, like a rusty box being forced open.

He couldn’t know, and decided he didn’t want to know.

Then the crunching sound of movement came back, and began to drift away. Whatever it was, it had decided to move on.

It probably wouldn’t come back, Jack thought. He hoped it wouldn’t. But he didn’t sleep very well that night.

Unfortunate

Six Months Before…

An overweight weasel.

That was what the man sitting at the desk in front of Lisa Markell reminded her of. She’d seen pictures in books when she was a kid, dozens and dozens of species of creatures that no one had seen for centuries, presumed extinct, and she remembered the funny picture, and had thought that even the name of the creature was comical. A weasel. And this man looked like an over-fed one at that.

Governor Jackson was, even by standards in the city, an overweight man, and he had a nose that defied gravity. Lisa could never like him. She had decided that the moment the man began to speak to her as she stood across the desk from him, her travel bag still slung over her left shoulder and her assault rifle over the other.

“So you will replace the expedition controller – a Corporal Ranold – who we lost in that…unfortunate incident.”

“Why were they all the way out there in the first place?” she’d asked. She hadn’t meant to pry, not really, but sending three squads over twenty miles out of the scanable perimeter to the ruins of a town that hadn’t been visited for centuries, with little backup, seemed like a frivolous waste to her. Of course, she immediately recognised that Jackson had been the one that made the decision, just by the new flush to his cheeks, and she knew she would regret it, at some point.

“I…err…” stuttered the Governor. “We needed to investigate the area. We’re opening up new spots for salvage, and that seemed to be a good place to start.”

But you ignored protocol, and failed to make sure that backup teams and supply lines were already in place, she thought, but didn’t mention it. She’d already over-stepped.

“But that is irrelevant,” continued Jackson, with an irritated glance in her direction. “It was an unfortunate occurrence.”

Thirty-six troopers, three entire squads, nine fire-teams, lost. And he considers it unfortunate. No, she would never like him, and was somehow glad that her assignment meant that she would spend the vast majority of her time nowhere near the foul man and his damned facility.

Abandoned

As she sat in the back of the armoured carrier, just a few hundred yards from the Picking Factory that they were to clear and reclaim, she wondered how many other unfortunate occurrences had happened because of Weasel’s orders. It was easy enough for him, sitting there in his air-conditioned building, barely ever having to step outside into the smog and pollution of the world outside, to spend lives. He never had to see the reality of it.

She wondered if the loss of the Picking Factory was something he considered a small loss, something else unfortunate. Two hundred women and children had been there, and yet the place had been guarded by just one squad of troopers. She’d wanted to read that report again, just to remind herself what she was going into, but had thrown it aside in disgust.

Not a single person left behind. That was what the report spelled out. Two hundred women and children, and a single squad of troopers. All taken by the Junkers. It just didn’t make any sense to her that they should be out there in the first place, let alone so lightly guarded.

Well, if she saw a Junker today, she was going to make sure that at least that one paid the price.

“Perimeter breach in ten,” came the voice of the squad leader in the vehicle at the front of the convoy.

This is it, she thought. My first actual activity in six months. She glanced around at the seven other troopers seated in the back of the APV, and her gaze paused when she reached Hailey, now kitted out in combat armour rather than her usual light armour. She imagined that the girl would look nervous if she could see her face, but they were heading into a potentially volatile area and were now wearing full Hunter armour.

It was a necessity, and Lisa was relieved that at least her troopers had that much. From what she had seen of the other supplies and equipment given to the border expeditions, the Hunter armour was a luxury.

Then the back doors were springing open, and she was the first out, power-assisted boots hitting the floor and propelling her forward as she skirted around the side of the vehicle and took up position at the very front. The carriers had swerved left upon entering the grounds of the factory, as she had ordered in the briefing earlier that day, and now they were lined up, all four vehicles in a row, just a few yards from the perimeter wall but facing the main building.

Lisa reached to the side of her helmet and switched on her zoom scanner as the rest of her squad swarmed around her to take their positions.

The facility was much larger than she had imagined, even when looking at the rough schematics that she had been sent. Eight large factory hangar buildings rose out of the dirt at least sixty feet high, and they were surrounded by old brick buildings, of various sizes, dotted around the outside of the yard.

We could have landed a dropship inside this place, she thought, looking at the vast open space to the east of the warehouse buildings, but then shrugged that idea off. She knew that the city didn’t send dropships this far out. A thousand miles was much too far for them to send one of those precious flyers, and the fuel alone would make it prohibitive.

She scanned the nearest of the factories, searching for heat signatures and knowing that she would find none. It was nearly impossible, with the distortion of heat from the sun.

No easy way, she thought. A night raid and we’d see anything lit up like a candle, but with all this debris it would be deadly.

“Forward,” she said into her microphone, and waited.

Five seconds later and the carriers turned and began to slowly crawl across the yard ahead of the Hunter squads. A hundred yards away and they would reach the nearest building, and she would go in there first, herself, leading her team.

And yet she knew, somehow, that this facility would be empty, completely void of life. And she also knew that she wouldn’t like being the first to discover what had been left behind.

The report said that a scout drone had scanned the facility after the raid. They hadn’t even sent a manned operation to go and look. Any unpleasant surprises were still there, waiting for her.

Junk

Home Sweet Home (Not).

Jack lay on his new bunk in the E2 room trying to get to sleep, but the noise all around him was distracting.

They’d finally finished their five day stint out in The Junklands, and he couldn’t believe how relieved he felt when the carrier halted and the back doors opened up, spilling in sunlight from outside and the familiar waft of dry air.

They were back at the facility.

He had jumped up, hauling his stuff with him, and squinted in the bright sunlight. He’d been five days in the sun, but just a couple of hours in the back of the windowless carrier, with its low light, were enough to make his eyes start to adjust to the darkness.

They had made a good haul, Tyler had said, and he patted Jack on the back as they trudged to their room – to his new room. The tall man was smiling and nodding at Jack now, and Jack took it that he was pleased with his new team member.

Why? Well, after the third day, Jack’s unnatural ability to find what was hidden started to work its way to the surface once more. After discovering the stash under the ruined dwelling, he’d gone on to find several other spots, some not even near his working area, and he uncovered piles of circuitry, some old machinery that looked like it could be rebuilt, and even an old vehicle of some kind, that Jack had never seen before. A tractor, Tyler had said. A whole damn tractor, with the wheels still on it. That thing had nearly filled the dumpster that day, after an hour of Boots struggling with its weight, and after the crew piled a heap of scrap metal into the gaps around the dumpster it was full. All before the sun had even reached its zenith.

And so it went on until the last day. A lot of the time the crew would have to spend hours digging through broken bricks and trash, just to find recyclable metal, but each day Jack managed to cut their working time short by an hour or so, just by knowing where something was hidden.

But now he lay on the bunk, trying to sleep, his head firmly on his new – if somewhat dirty – pillow, and he couldn’t drift off. His mind was swirling.

It’s not the noise that is distracting, though, is it Jack? It’s not knowing where to go next. You hoped to see something out there, didn’t you? Something that would lead you back on to the trail of the boy, of Ryan, but all there was out there was endless miles and miles of junk mountains.

And the Junkers. Who were they?

He hadn’t seen one of them, but they had visited the carrier twice during the five days. Both times the crew had been tightly secured and tucked up inside the carrier, either playing cards or sleeping, and both times the noise had come from above.

He lay there in the bunk, thinking of Ryan and their last times together, and he watched the crew playing cards in the middle of the room.

During the game, Tyler turned to him. “You don’t want to join in?” he asked. “Boots’ got a run going here that we can’t beat. We need some of your talent here, Lucky Jack.”

Lucky Jack. His new nickname, given to him by Higgins after he found the tractor.

“I’m good,” he said, meaning a polite no thanks.

Tyler nodded, and turned back again. “We’re out to reclaim a facility tomorrow morning,” he said. “They took back a Picking Factory that the Junkers stormed a while back, bout ten months or so ago, and they want crews up there to shift all the machines out. You reckon you can do some of that magic out there?”

Jack shrugged.

“Usually some good stuff left behind by the Junkers if we can get at it first,” Tyler continued.

“That the place where all those kids and women got stole from?” asked Higgins. “That old reprocessing and picking plant that was right out in the middle of nowhere?”

Tyler looked at the old man, his expression grim. “I think so,” he said.

“That was a nasty thing, right there,” said Higgins. “Two hundred women and children, all taken. Poof, just gone, overnight.”

Jack wasn’t listening right up until the mention of children. Then, he was listening. Listening very carefully.

“Don’t, man,” said Tyler. “I don’t like to think about it.”

“What?” asked Higgins. “You don’t like the idea of the Junkers taking them, or us going there?”

“Both,” said Tyler. “You know they didn’t find any bodies, apart from two of the trooper squad, and they were even stripped of all equipment. Shot with their own guns, they reckon, which also means some Junker scum out there now has firearms. I don’t know. At least they didn’t leave no dead women or kids behind, but it makes me sick wondering what they did do with them.”

“Yeah,” said Higgins. “Took em all, every last one.”

Jack sat up. “Took who?” he asked.

The rest of the crew turned to him, and Tyler dropped his cards, the game no longer relevant. “The Junkers raid places occasionally, and I mean in force, like, dozens of them.”

“Hundreds, some say,” said Higgins.

“Yeah, well,” continued Tyler. “About ten or eleven months ago there was place way out here, a Picking Factory, where they had a couple of hundred kids and some women, and their job was to sort through all the circuitry and small electronics that gets found. You know, the stuff that gets sorted here first. Well they got sent all the smaller stuff.”

Jack thought about how he had spent hours dumping piles of circuit boards, wires, and small broken electronics into large tubs that were then taken away to a truck, and from there to wherever…to the Picking Factory, it seemed. Now there was a very real possibility, if Ryan had gone there, that the boy may have sorted the very stuff that Jack had packed.

“Well,” said Tyler. “The Junkers usually only raid and grab supplies, and then run for it, but apparently this time they came in force and took the actual people in the factory, all of them. They don’t usually do that. They normally just take stuff and go, often without even having to fight anyone. I mean, if you’re faced with a few dozen Junkers charging down on you, most people just up and run like hell and come back when they’re gone. This time they took everything they could carry and then some. They took the people too.”

“Apart from a couple of the troopers,” said Rick as he lit up yet another cigarette.

“Yeah. Apart from two or three of the trooper squad. They killed them.”

Higgins coughed and jabbed at his chest. “You know, that puzzled me,” he said. “Junkers eat folks, right? So—”

“There’s no proof of that,” interrupted Locks. He’d discarded his furry hat on the bunk at the far end of them room, the first time Jack had seen him without it perched on his head even when sleeping, and Jack could see that he had a large round bald spot on the top of his head. “No one actually got proof that they eat people, and no one has seen them doing it. Anyone found eaten out in the junk could easily have been got at by one of the bugs.”

“Oh but that’s what everybody says,” said Higgins. “Everyone knows Junkers eat anything, including each other.”

“That’s what people say,” said Locks. “And they also say that some of those bugs out there can talk, but that’s absolute rubbish, yeah?”

Higgins shrugged. “Well, maybe. Whatever. But that’s what I’m saying. If they do eat people, then why dint they take the bodies of the troopers? Or just cook em right there?”

“I don’t know, okay?” interrupted Tyler. “And I don’t even want to think about it. And anyway, we get to see first-hand what they left behind, because we’re on clean up and reclaim duty, as of tomorrow.”

That was why Jack couldn’t sleep. The Picking Factory, a place that used to have hundreds of kids working in it, seemed to be the very first sign of any significance that might lead him to Ryan’s trail. If there was a place that the boy could have ended up, it had to be there. Jack had found nowhere else, no other leads.

But the Junkers had raided the place, and that meant another possibility that Jack didn’t want to consider. But he found it too hard not to dwell on it.

Waiting For Time

Lisa sat on top of the armoured truck and watched as the convoy of salvage carriers trundled noisily into the yard of the Picking Factory. They were two hours late, and she had been pacing back and forth for most of that time before finally settling on just sitting and waiting. It was pointless calling anyone, and it didn’t matter what the delay was. They would get there when they got there.

The last truck, the one with the big grey letters E2 painted on the side, was the one she was most interested in. He would be in that one, that much she knew. She hadn’t gone over to the salvagers’ bunk rooms – no, that would have seemed strange. If she’d turned up there just to find Jack Avery, everyone would be talking about it. So she had been patient but made sure that the E2 crew was assigned to this duty, and now she waited.

Next to her, also looking relieved to see the crews arrive, Hailey was busy scribbling on her clipboard.

“Why don’t you use a touch pad?” Lisa asked.

Hailey looked up from her scribbling and frowned. “I don’t have one,” she said.

“Oh,” said Lisa. “I’ll fix that.”

Hailey nodded. “Two hours fifteen behind schedule, but at least they’re all here,” she said.

Trust Hailey to find a bright spot among the gloom, thought Lisa. She stood up, pushing away from the armoured wall that surrounded the flat platform on top of her command vehicle.

“And we’re two hours plus behind,” she said. “They better have a good reason for it.”

Hailey looked up once more. “I’ll find out why,” she said.

Junk

The Past Comes Back.

The officer was watching him, Jack was convinced. It was difficult to tell for sure. The helmet, similar to those worn by the Hunter troops in the ruins of the Outer Zone but more worn and damaged, hid the face behind it, but that blackened and domed visor was pointing in his direction and he could almost feel the gaze upon him as he bundled his gear out of the back of the carrier and threw it over his shoulders.

The scabs stood in an inspection line with Tyler at the front. This had not been mentioned to Jack, but he just fell in line with the rest of them as the crews assembled in the yard next to their vehicles. The troop officer, and another trooper that Jack presumed was a junior officer, walked along the line and then moved away.

That officer definitely stopped at him for longer than the others, he thought, and noticed even Tyler was frowning at him. Curiosity, no doubt. If Tyler had noticed it as well then it wasn’t just his imagination.

But the officer said nothing to him, just stared at him for a few seconds and then moved on. Then Tyler and the other crew leaders were called aside, moving across the dusty yard to stand with the officer. They were speaking, but what about?

He couldn’t hear the conversation, so instead looked away and stood there, taking in his surroundings.

The facility was huge, much larger than he had expected. Though he hadn’t known what to expect, really. The word factory made him think of the coal yard, back when he had been a kid. That had to be it. He’d expected a single crumbling building with a yard and a perimeter fence, but of course this was quite far away from the Recycling Facility, and isolated.

Why would they send so many people so far out? This was Badlands, and uncontrolled. Anything could be – and was – scurrying around out here. Junkers, whatever they were – people of some kind? And bugs. He’d seen neither, but the men on his crew had told him that they were both something to be feared.

“Like some kind of screwed up mutant,” Higgins had said, when asked about the Junkers. “They might have been human once, but they were like, part machine, part animal or something. I saw it from a distance, just before the siren went off, standing right up on top of the junk and looking down on me. It had this thing, a weapon, like some kind of spear but with a nasty blade on the end. I ran for it. Something about that thing. It wanted to eat me, I’m sure of it, and the hell it wasn’t afraid of the carrier or me.”

It seemed hard to imagine that a human could degenerate into something entirely different, Jack thought, but then, he’d seen the Night Ones in the Outer Zone, even if from a distance, and they seemed far from human.

Maybe that was what the Junkers were like? The Night Ones. He tried to remember the time he and Drogan had been caught out in the ruins near the Ashlands. The night they had been chased. The last time he’d ever seen his friend.

Just Run

Many Years Before.

The camp fire was roaring. Drogan had seen to that. Out in the reaches near the Ashlands the air was bitter cold all year long, even when other places were baking with the summer sun. Jack had never liked going that far out, but his friend insisted on it when things were tight and they had found no salvage to trade for a few weeks.

And this was one of those times. They’d searched further and further out in the last few weeks, after heading east from The Crossing, and they’d even gone into areas that neither of them had travelled before, but the picking had been getting harder and harder.

That was the one good thing about the borders near the Ashlands. There was still plenty to be found, for those willing to risk going anywhere near the creatures that lived in the ash wastes. And if you lit a good fire, bright and hot, those things left you well alone anyway.

He’d always wondered why that was. The Night Ones, as many folks called them, were humanoid but far from being living people. Jack suspected that once, centuries ago, they may well have been people, but the pale skinned and rotten creatures that screamed and howled in the frozen ash wastes were nothing like people now.

Until that night, while the fire roared and Drogan cooked the two skinny rabbits that they’d caught a few hours before, Jack had only seen them from a distance.

But the wind was stronger than usual, gusting in across the crumbling ruins and blowing so hard that he’d nearly toppled over several times.

Then, later, when the darkness of night came and the screaming and howling began to resound from across the ash wastes, one almighty gust of wind blew through the broken remnants of the building they had taken refuge in and the fire just went out.

And the next few minutes were the most terrifying of his life.

He heard, more than saw, Drogan hurrying to relight the fire, and Jack scrambled toward the noise and tried to help. But it was no good. The wood that they had found was wet on the inside, and only the outer layers had took light. Now they just couldn’t seem to get the thing to catch again, even when Jack used his body to block the wind, hoping that Drogan could at least get something going.

But Drogan stopped.

“We have to get the hell out of here,” he said, and in the moonlight, Jack’s vision now adjusting to the lower light that only the moon provided, he could see real fear in the man’s eyes. They had travelled for nearly four years together, side by side, scavenging in the ruins and trading at the hovels, and Jack had never once seen Drogan look frightened, even when they had had to face down a gang of rovers three times their number.

But now the moonlight showed Jack a face full of fear.

They scrambled around the camp, grabbing their gear and stuffing it in packs, and a minute later were jogging alongside each other, away from the already chilling campfire.

“This was stupid,” Drogan had said. “I should never have brought us out here.”

“It was only the fire,” Jack had replied. “If that hadn’t gone out we’d have been fine.”

Drogan didn’t rely. He just continued to trudge alongside Jack.

“And anyway,” continued Jack. “We found a tonne of stuff to trade, and we can just go further into the ruins for a couple of miles, find a place with higher walls, and make another camp.”

“I suppose,” said Drogan. “But I still think that—”

There had been a flash of movement from their right that zipped past Jack and slammed into Drogan. The man cried out and went down hard, struggling to his feet a couple of seconds later.

Jack already had his machetes out and stood there, on the spot, next to his friend, turning left and right, scanning the darkness for more movement.

“The hell,” cursed Drogan, finally getting to his feet.

“What was that?” asked Jack.

Drogan shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But let’s not hang around to find out, eh?”

And so they had continued on, moving faster now.

And it was a few minutes later, just as they began to spot the outlines of larger ruins in the distance, the walls faintly lit by the moon, when the scream resounded from just a few feet away.

“Run,” shouted Drogan, taking off at full pelt in front of Jack, and Jack had followed, urging himself onwards as fast as his feet could carry him, his lungs screaming for air and his muscles protesting at every lunge forward.

Jack caught up with Drogan and passed him, but not by much. He didn’t want to push on, didn’t want to split up with his friend. But then, as he ran onwards, he felt, more than saw, movement all around them. There were no more screams, but the gaunt figures that loped alongside them at a distance were not silent anymore. Growls and hisses assaulted his ears.

And then there was another flash of movement next to them, and Drogan vanished with a startled cry, going down onto the hard road with a slam that Jack heard. And he also heard something crack.

Drogan cried out, and then the cry turned into a scream.

Jack turned back, swinging his machetes at the darkness around him, but nothing came near him. There was a mass of movement ahead of him, right where Drogan had gone down, but Jack couldn’t make out what it was.

Figures. Dozens of them, crawling all over each other and pushing, shoving, trying to get to Drogan.

“Run, you idio—” came the last thing Jack would ever hear his friend say, the words cut off as a gargling, bubbling rasp replaced them.

But Jack had hesitated for a moment, not wanting to leave his friend to die. Whatever those things were, the Night Ones, surely he could fight them.

He ran at the mass of bodies, hacking at anything that moved, until a few remaining creatures ran from him, leaving a dozen or more of their kin lying dead. He’d seen red for that few seconds and stormed into the creatures with a rage that he didn’t know he had. Life, death – none of it mattered. Drogan was in trouble.

And then Jack was panting, his chest heaving with exertion as he tried to breathe, but Drogan was on the ground in front of him, and Jack could see there was nothing at all that he could do to help his friend.

So he’d turned and run that night, not even stopping to pick up any of the gear that had once been his friend’s.

Someone else could have that if they dared.

Someone else could find Drogan’s equipment if they really wanted to face the creatures out in the Ashlands. Because Jack vowed that he would never return.

Junk

No. The Junkers couldn’t be like the Night Ones, Jack thought. He hoped. They couldn’t be. Night Ones would never have known how to use a weapon to kill the troopers left behind at the Picking Factory. The things he’d seen that night were no more human than a rabid rat. They had been things twisted beyond recognition, dead but not dead, pale skinned and gaunt, their eyes hollow black pits that were lifeless.

And if there were Night Ones out here in The Junklands, then the people running the Recycling Facility surely wouldn’t have left so many people out here unguarded.

But that doesn’t answer your question does it?

Why had they left all those kids and women out here? It didn’t make much sense to him. It was almost like asking for them to be taken. It had to be…what? Five hours from the main facility. And from what he had heard from Tyler and the others, they had only manned this place with a single detachment of troopers.

And the bugs? Nasty long-legged things that darted over the junk like it’s a flat path, and very fast, or crawling beetle-like things, hidden away deep inside the piles of debris, nesting and waiting to be uncovered. That’s how Higgins had described them, and Jack hoped never to meet either of those.

All these things went through his mind as he stood there in the blazing sun, looking out across the massive facility that they now had to clear. Rows of huge monolithic buildings lined the centre of the vast, dry, open space, and beyond that, where the perimeter wall stood crumbling, with huge gaps collapsed to the ground, smaller buildings stood.

There has to be a hundred buildings here. How are you possibly going to find any trace of Ryan? Had he been out here when the place was attacked? It sounds likely, doesn’t it? This is the place to start looking, after six months of finding nothing in the Recycling Facility. A place to start.

But what if you do find something? What then?

“Okay, listen up,” came the deep boom of Tyler’s voice, drawing him from his daze and snapping him back into the present. “We got dealt the far compound, where the big machines are, and after that we have the living quarters and the outer buildings on the far side. That’s us for the next five days.” Tyler squinted in the bright sun and scratched his chin. “Usual drill, though we’re being told that the carrier will be moving over there.” He turned and pointed at the large open space between the huge central buildings and what looked to be some kind of hangar.

“Five days here?” snapped Higgins. “That long just to clear out a few machines?”

Tyler shrugged. “What do you know?” he said. “I guess there’s more here than I expected. More than just a couple of machines, anyway. Maybe we’ll find something sweet in all the rot? Never know. Let’s get back on board and wait.”

They headed back over to the carrier and Jack stood at the end of the line, waiting to climb on-board. Higgins was muttering something to himself about wasting time, but Jack didn’t catch all of it. He was too busy looking past the crew, over to where the officer and the other troopers were standing.

The officer was watching him again.

You Again

It was definitely him, Lisa thought. He’s less scruffy than he was when he gave himself up, speaking to her that day at the back of the armoured carrier in the middle of the Outer Zone ruins. But she recognised him instantly. He was tall, though not as tall as some of her men, and he was built well. Strong, even though most of the prisoners were underfed.

Now she had found him again, she was unsure of what difference it made. She’d hoped for something, whatever it might be, when she caught up with him again, but she didn’t know what. And it wasn’t like she could just initiate a conversation with him, ask him the questions that were bugging her. It wasn’t the done thing.

I have to just watch and wait, she thought. Watch and wait for the right moment.

The man probably didn’t even know it was me, that I’m the same one he surrendered to. Lifting her visor would have solved that, but she remembered that doing just that was exactly what had landed her this wonderful job out in The Junklands in the first place.

And what about that? She thought that she would be angry with the man when she finally met him again, thought that she would blame him for everything that had happened to her since then. Why had she shown her face in the first place? Why make any form of contact? It didn’t make sense, not to her, anyway.

And now, having met him again, she didn’t feel angry at all. The guy was in a much worse situation than she was. She’d sleep in an air conditioned armoured transport with a bunk tonight, and he would be bunked down with a bunch of stinking scabs.

He won’t have found his boy, either, will he? She thought. All this time, and he has probably found nothing. There were no kids at the main Facility, they never took them there. Most of the ones that came out here were sent to the Picking Factories, like the one they stood in right now.

Had the boy been here?

Damn it, she cursed silently. Why the hell should she care about a boy she’d never met? There were hundreds here when the raid happened, she knew that much. Hundreds taken by the Junkers. And what had happened to them? Dead? Were they killers, these things that lived out in the waste? They’d killed troopers – that much she knew – but children and women? Were those things even human enough to know the difference?

It annoyed her immensely every time she thought about it. Governor Jackson had sent them all out here with just one squad of security, just twelve troopers, and they had been taken, captured by the Junkers. The troopers were either killed or also taken, and that foul creature, Jackson, shrugged it off as unfortunate.

No, he didn’t actually say this incident was unfortunate, she thought. That had been the disappearance of three squads, months before. But she could bet that it would be his reply if she’d asked.

Maybe I can find some clues out here, she thought. Maybe those people are retrievable.

That would be an achievement.

Junk

The Past Comes Back.

He found it on the second floor of the last workshop and just stood there, staring at it.

Three days ago they had entered the first warehouse. As Tyler had said, E2 crew was to do the last three warehouses and then all of the outbuildings on the north side of the facility, and that included a number of workshops and smaller factory buildings as well as the area that had been used as a dormitory.

They’d entered the first warehouse, Jack at the back of the crew, carrying a heavy shoulder load of cutters and some matt sheeting. Tyler was up front with Higgins next to him, the other men following. They’d all stood there for a few minutes, gazing around the massive interior of the dilapidated old building, just looking, in awe of the massive installation that they were apparently supposed to take apart.

The floor was flat concrete and, apart from a few crumbling bits of masonry in the corners, was well swept and barely cracked. The ground was worn and looked like it had been well trodden over the years, and in some spots the bare ground even appeared smooth. If there had been doors on the building then there was no evidence of them now. Huge open spaces, looking out onto the dusty ground outside, let the sun blaze into the interior, and Jack had been surprised that the ground wasn’t covered in sand and dirt from outside. But somehow it wasn’t.

And the sprawling array that was the picking plant sat smack in the middle of the wide open space. Large hoppers lined one wall, with belt-fed conveyors coming out of the bottom and leading across the open ground, splitting in several places before passing raised platforms that lined long stretches of belt.

Where the kids would have stood and sorted stuff, Jack thought.

The raised platforms were rusted and cracked, and behind them, stacked up high, were metal bins with wheels on the bottom. Mini dumping trucks for whatever the kids must have been taking off the conveyors lines.

He stood there, the dry wind buffeting his back and the heat of the sun burning his bare arms, and imagined what the place had been like when it was active, when it was busy with dozens of children sorting through the crap that must have been sent there. In his mind, the conveyors were moving, making a clunk clunk noise as each section bumped over the supporting joists. And he imagined a row of young children, from the very small right up to teenage years, lined along the platforms, poking around in the junk that passed and throwing what they found into the metals bins behind them.

He saw other children, two at a time, pushing the metal bins away to one corner of the warehouse and then pushing another empty into its place.

They were dirty kids, filthy and covered in the grime that rubbed off onto their hands from the junk passing along the conveyors, and their faces were smeared with dust and sand that blew in from the outside.

“Well, we better get started,” said Tyler. Jack looked up, snapping out of his daydream and saw the tall man had turned and was looking back at his crew. “We got to take all this down, cut it up and get it hauled out to the dumper.”

“Dumper isn’t even here yet,” said Rick, coughing into his hand and then wiping it on his shirt.

“No,” said Tyler. “But we may as well get on the go anyway.”

Jack spent most of the three days, until they moved into the workshops along the north side, cutting up the conveyors’ parts and snipping down the sides of the bins, stacking them up near the main entranceway when the dumpster truck wasn’t there. By the time they left the three warehouses, and moved into the workshops, his hands were sore, even through his gloves.

On the third day they moved out of the warehouses and started with the outbuildings, and he was relieved. The heat inside the warehouses was almost unbearable, and the temperature dropped significantly when they entered the smaller, stone-built buildings.

And so it was that, just an hour before the sun went down and they would be due to head back to the carrier and rest up for the night, he climbed the six flights of stairs to the top floor of the workshop that they were emptying.

The building was filled with work benches, lines and lines of them in every room, and on each bench was a mess of mechanical and electronics parts. Wound up spools of wires, cutting tools, knives, snippers, hammers, all manner of tools – a lot of which he knew would never make it into the dumpster and would instead be hidden away inside the personal bags of many of his crew. There was just too much treasure lying around all over the place for it not to.

They’d cleared the bottom floor, moved up to the second, and the rest of the guys, led by Higgins, were busy hauling the contents down to the ground floor with ropes and buckets.

“Why don’t you go check up top?” Tyler had suggested. “Give us a scoop on what’s up on the last floor, ready for tomorrow. Then come down to bottom and grab a smoke.”

Jack had nodded. “No problem,” he’d said.

And so he headed up the stairs and onto the raised gantry that led along all of the north side buildings. It looked like an outer defence platform that spanned most of the north side of the facility, with metal stairwells in between the buildings. He wondered for a moment if they would need to take that down as well. It was, after all, made of metal, and that was the resource most wanted by the Recycling Facility. Metal and electronics.

He shrugged and stepped out of the bright sun and into the huge open interior of the top floor and looked straight at it.

There was an old stairwell at the side of the big room, though it had long since crumbled and collapsed. Inside the stairwell the floor opened up into a drop that went all the way down to the bottom floor, but that wasn’t what Jack saw.

I Need Answers

Lisa watched as the man fell to his knees, but she didn’t rush forward to help him. Instead she stood there, watching, as she had the whole time.

He hadn’t noticed her as he had come up the stairs and out onto the gantry, and she hadn’t expected him to. She was a hundred yards away, near the next building, watching out over the sprawling landscape of junk that began fifty feet from the outer wall, and she was tucked inside an alcove away from the heat of the sun.

Her combat armour protected her from the rigours of the hot sun, from most weather in fact, but only if she was fully suited. And she hadn’t wanted to be at that moment. Sitting up there on the gantry, watching out for movement far away, she preferred to take her helmet off.

And so she’d seen him enter the workshop and realised he was alone.

She glanced down and counted the crew members on the ground in the yard below. It was a full crew except for him. No one else up there. He was alone.

What Jack Saw

There was some flooring inside the stairwell. Pieces of wood that had probably once been the top of the stairs jutted out from the wall like broken and rotten teeth. Just far out enough, he thought, for someone to step round if they didn’t weigh too much. He would have collapsed them with his weight, but a boy, maybe one only six, seven, or eight years old, and thin, would have been able to walk around them like a ledge to the small platform at the back that would have been the eave over the stairs, a spot most likely unnoticed by most people.

But this also wasn’t really what Jack had noticed. That was all small, peripheral detail that flooded in as he stared at the top wall over the hole that would have been the stairs. The wall was a pale colour, and he thought that it was coated in paint that somehow still remained after so many years. It was, after all, tucked away inside a building and away from the wind. And it was a light coloured paint, cracked and dry near the corners and edges of the wall, but the paint covering most of the flat surface was still smooth and clear, even if it was somewhat stained.

Covering most of the surface of the wall were drawings. He didn’t know what they had been drawn with, maybe a piece of charcoal, or something else dark in colour. Even a charred piece of wood could have been used. The figures were all stick men, and they were busy little stick men. Two of them were sitting on a step of some kind with bowls in their hands.

Eating ant soup, he thought.

Another two stickmen were rifling through a pile of trash, and the smallest of the stickmen was throwing bits over its head.

Scavenging in the ruins.

And then there were another two, walking and pushing a cart of some kind, the smallest riding on the front of the cart and the larger one pushing with its back hunched over.

Off to The Crossing to sell the finds.

And there, smack in the middle of the dozens of similar, tiny scenes that were scrawled all over the wall, were the same two stick people.

One tall and one small, standing holding hands.

And that was when Jack’s knees went from under him.

Finally, he thought. Finally I found where you went.

The End of Part 3.

Continued in Part 4 from Glynn James at his Amazon page:

http://www.amazon.com/Glynn-James/e/B004X7VMJO

CHINA

Book 1

of

THE FLENSE series

by

Saul Tanpepper

Prologue

The exact moment when Jamie Peters first suspected that the world was ending — not just this barren remote corner of it, but the whole damn wretched thing — wasn’t when the train crashed in a fiery explosion, scattering incinerated limbs and hair and razor-sharp splinters of bone across acres of frozen Inner Mongolian grassland.

It wasn’t moments earlier when they rocketed past her stop, accelerating to breakneck speed instead of slowing, the startled look of the wizened old stationmaster at Baoyang flashing past in the platform’s sole light, an inadequate oil lamp clutched in his gnarled fist, and a surprised “Oh!” caught halfway up Jamie’s throat.

Nor had she even suspected in the preceding ten or so minutes during which she bore witness to the sickness spreading toward her through the car, slipping from one passenger to the next like some delicious little secret as each one of them, in turn, reached out to transfer the germ to their nearest neighbor.

Of course, she didn’t recognize it then as a sickness. Her first inclination was that they were all playing some sort of game, like a flash-mob type of thing, although that seemed rather unlikely given that so few of these people possessed the know-how to operate the cell phones the company had generously — and, in her opinion, foolishly — provided them. These were children of the Third World, centuries behind the curve when it came to technology. Oh sure, some might find their old customs and beliefs charming. For Jamie, however, the novelty of it all had lost its charm soon after her arrival here eleven months ago. More often than not lately she had been wondering what she had done to deserve being assigned to such a desolate and backward outpost as this.

Because you asked for it.

Had she? She couldn’t remember anymore. Or didn’t want to remember.

It had to be some sort of obscure Baarin custom, this touching thing. That explained it. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have heard of it before now, despite studying up on these people for two years prior to coming out here?

Well, whatever it was, it irked her. More than anything else it made her feel inadequate, left out. She didn’t like not knowing, not being included. Not in control. She worried that when the stupid little ritual game finally reached her end of the car, she wouldn’t know what to do, and everyone would look at her like she was stupid. It’d just underscore how much of an outsider she really was. Already she could imagine the passengers laughing at her, pointing their fingers. Westerners, they’d think. Stupid, arrogant, know-it-all Americans.

She almost decided to close her eyes and pretend she was sleeping.

But there was something too darkly fascinating about it all, about the way their faces changed so suddenly after receiving the touch, that she just had to watch— the light in their eyes flaring, like their bodies had been possessed with some new form of awareness. Their faces shining brightly as the tension built and peaked. Then, not a half second later, the skin losing all its luster, the muscles going slack. It was — well, it seemed, anyway — as if some form of psychic message had been passed from one person to the next. Not really spiritual, rather more . . . .

Electric?

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. It was almost—

Jamie felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and her lips twitched into a slight smile despite her irritation.

Yes, it was almost sensual, wasn’t it?

The cycle repeated as one recipient turned to brush a fingertip across the cheek or wrist of the next, host becoming donor. And so on, individual to individual, edging closer down the length of the car as the train rocked gently over the tracks.

She hadn’t seen it start, just sensed it when the relentless chatter of the people around her diminished sufficiently enough to register in her mind. Was it happening, she wondered, in any of the other train cars?

Finally, the elderly gentleman seated beside her received his touch. Jamie could actually feel the tension spike, then leave his body. The very air about him felt different, fuller, charged. Then suddenly empty.

Her heart raced as he turned and reached up toward her face. She didn’t shy away from his shriveled fingers, scarred and discolored from years of working the stingy soil, of herding and milking the ornery yaks through the harsh, dry summers and bitterly cold winters, like the one she’d just endured.

Her company had done him a favor, she realized. Done all of these poor people a favor by taking them out of the unforgiving outdoors and given them a safe and warm and lucrative place to work and be productive. This made her feel good; it made her feel . . . entitled.

Do it. It’s my turn now! Do it!

She saw now how yellowed his skin was, stained from decades of smoking his homemade cigarettes. He could actually afford real ones now, factory-made cigarettes without all that local crap mixed in with it.

The hand rose to within an inch of her nose, and she inhaled, smelling the musty, sweet staleness of the tobacco. Jamie smiled encouragingly and leaned toward it.

But the arm veered abruptly to the side, as if it had a mind of its own, and grazed the knuckles of the young boy standing in the aisle in front of her instead.

She sat stunned for a moment.

He skipped me! The old bastard skipped me!

She felt as if she’d been slapped. In the six months she’d been assigned to the Goh Li Xhia plant, she had worked so hard, had sacrificed so much to gain the trust and acceptance of the people who staffed it. All those years in college devoted to learning how to speak both Mongolian and Mandarin. Her company, MECH INVIVO, had even hired a private tutor to teach her the many tricky dialectical and cultural differences which she would need to avoid embarrassing herself, to help her assimilate. The tutor had neglected to tell her about this, though, hadn’t he? This stupid, dumb, superstitious ritual, or whatever the hell it was. She was still just an outsider. She would always be an outsider.

It was her own fault for thinking this little adventure might be fun. Better than the Peace Corps and a lot more profitable, that’s what she’d been told. Why had she thought coming to this desolate corner of hell might be better than sitting in a cushy air conditioned office in some Midtown Manhattan high rise?

Of course, the moment of self-pity was quickly replaced by confusion as the train roared through the station. She opened her mouth to protest, but her exclamation never had a chance to exit her throat as she realized that not a single other passenger on the train seemed at all perturbed. And that was certainly unusual, since theirs was the final stop before the long journey to the seaport city of Qinhuangdao hundreds of miles further along the track. Hundreds of mile of nothing but snow and grass and emptiness that would take hours to traverse.

But the young man standing at the doors just kept staring out into the darkness. The bent-over woman across the aisle simply sat there with that idiotic stare on her face.

Jamie recognized her as the local cat lady, the one who shared her little stone house with some fifty or sixty of the mangy animals. What was her name? Zhou. Or Xiao. She couldn’t remember it.

Every village has one, the one crazy old bat.

Whatever game they had been playing was now finished. There was no more touching. All talk had ceased. They just sat or stood there with their blank, black eyes and their pale, placid faces. All of them. Not a single concern.

How strange.

Jamie shivered, and not from the cold this time. The first spark of alarm — real alarm — had taken hold in her gut, sending out that warm low burn. She sensed that something was wrong, though she still could not conceive the full extent of it. Maybe this wasn’t a game. Maybe—

Maybe if she’d been looking out her window and seen the train heading directly toward them around a bend on the very same track, then she might have guessed the larger truth of her fate right then. But she didn’t. And before another thought could pass through her mind, it was over.

What followed was a nightmare of pain and darkness and blood and fire. She found herself lying in a frozen field, the bitter biting wind driving across the steppe and scorching her burnt skin, searing her wounds, fanning the embers which alit upon her face like so many snowflakes. Somehow, she was still alive. But the pain—

Oh, dear God! The pain was immense, as large as the fireball lifting all around her into the oil black sky until it, too, caught and burned.

She managed to extricate her torn body from the wreckage, pulling twisted bits of metal and glass and bone that were not her own from the flesh of her arms and legs. Miraculously, nothing was broken. Her ankle was badly sprained, and it felt as if she’d dislocated her shoulder. But she had remained, somehow, incredibly, intact.

She called out, but there was no answer. No one responded, whether in pain or in fear. There appeared to be no other survivors. By some terrible twist of fate, only she, the stranger in this forbidding land, had survived.

So when she saw him striding toward her, stepping through the rubble and the tempest of flames as casually as if he were making his way down Fifth Avenue in New York, she staggered to a halt and stared at him in awe.

He was a tall silhouette, backlit against the raging inferno. In an instant that defied reason, he crossed the vast distance between them and was standing right beside her, extending his hand in a gesture of warm embrace. The coldness of his skin burned her own.

“I am the man in silver and black,” he told her in a voice that seemed to pierce all the way to her very core. “I am your savior.”

That’s what he said, but the whisper she heard in her mind was, I am the devil, and this is the end of all things.

And that was the precise moment when Jamie Peters finally understood the fate of the whole wide world.

Chapter One

The destruction was worse than Angelique de l’Enfantine had imagined. Even now, three weeks after the tragedy, it looked as if it had just happened days before. No matter where you turned your nose, the air was fetid with the stench of decay.

Mud still covered the streets, calf-deep in some places, and caked onto trees stunted and defoliated by the force of the blast. Flies were in abundance, despite the chill in the midday air and the icy nights, breeding on the corpses of the dead. She instinctively mapped the locations in her mind where the swarms were heaviest, places where the sun warmed the earth and allowed the maggots to fester. Places to avoid approaching too closely.

This is how she threaded her way through the debris, giving the insects rising with their angry buzz a wide berth, leaving the pestilence to resume their molestation of the spoiled flesh.

But the mud sometimes masked the corpses, encasing them so that you were sometimes unfortunate in where you placed your foot. It was inevitable, knowing too late the distinctly unpleasant sensation of stepping on a body part, feeling the slip of the liquefying muscle and the crunch of the brittle bones beneath your heels.

She stumbled upon a blackened, deflated corpse, the desiccated skin pulled taut over a barrel ribcage, and she reeled back before recognizing it as a pig. Partially hidden at the base of a pile of torn lumber and ragged plastic, the carcass was long past the bloating stage and had begun the process of collapsing in on itself again, so she guessed that it must have died during the initial event or soon after. It looked just like so many of the human corpses she had seen since disembarking from the boat she’d chartered to bring her here.

But what troubled her now were the fresher bodies, some newly maggot-ridden and thus only days old. Others harbored full-blown infestations, had become horrifically swollen, like carnival balloons. These were dead a week, which meant that they had survived the initial impact before succumbing to their injuries or the sickness which now must be sweeping across the island. Other corpses, their skin bruised to deep shades of yellow and green and brown. Marbling, she thought with clinical detachment. That’s what it was called in certain forensic circles. Marbling had set in, meaning they had been dead two weeks.

The scene seemed to confirm her suspicions, that disease was taking the lives of the survivors. She’d seen it before, in Haiti, for example. In Indonesia a couple years ago. One of her first assignments. The events had been uncannily similar to this, the earthquake and tsunami. Cholera — the possibility of it, anyway — was what had prompted her to come here.

Cholera.

Seeing the devastation, she still couldn’t believe how clueless the world was about this. How could this have gone unnoticed, unreported for three weeks? The answer, of course, was that it couldn’t, not unless someone wanted to keep it quiet. But who? And why?

She herself had only become aware of the tragedy from a single isolated tweet on her Twitter feed from an account named @VIBRIO, just a seemingly random string of numbers: 28.130347 125.126928. The coordinates mapped to the East China Sea, to a tiny resort playground island called Huangxia, some three hundred kilometers off the coast of Shanghai. An 8.1 earthquake had struck in the region a couple weeks earlier, spawning a tsunami warning. But as far as she knew, the affected islands were all well along in the recovery process by then.

Normally she would have dismissed it, but for some reason this cryptic post clung stubbornly in the rafters of her mind and wouldn’t let her rest. Vibrio, the genus name for cholera, an opportunistic pathogen that often took hold in areas devastated by natural or manmade calamities and where recovery efforts were delayed or hampered. But she hadn’t heard of any such problems in the wake of this quake.

She searched the internet, but found nothing on any of the social media sites, nothing in the usual news feeds. In fact, there was no mention at all about Huangxia Island. It was as if it had dropped off the face of the planet.

On a whim, she searched the satellite images for the past week. The photos confirmed the destruction, same as a few other islands in the region. But what differed here was that there were no obvious signs of recovery activity.

Why the hell not? Where was the Chinese government? Why hadn’t they reported this to the international relief agencies?

It wouldn’t be the first time the PRC had tried to hide something from the world. But those events tended to be politically or militarily embarrassing. Human rights failings or outright abuses. But Huangxia wasn’t some undeveloped, remote place. Or a military asset. Or prison camp. It was a fairly well-established international resort. Hundreds of foreigners came here daily during the summer. Had it not been winter when the earthquake struck, tens of thousands would have died.

“Are you getting any of this?”

Attached to her was a United Nations photojournalist, P. Mark DeBryan. He tilted the camera off his shoulder, moving the viewfinder away from his eye, and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Where the hell is everyone?” she asked.

“Good question. No search and recovery activity at all as far as I can see. No clean up. No demolition. No electricity or clean water. It’s screwed up all right.”

Despite the chill in the air, a bead of sweat trickled down his brow. He wiped it away with a bright red bandana he pulled from inside the front of his parka, then shoved it back in. He didn’t bother zipping the jacket back up again. After shrugging the bulky pack higher up onto his back, he returned the viewfinder to his eye and resumed recording.

Angel stepped over to a set of concrete stairs and climbed them until she reached the top, unzipping her own jacket as she went and readjusting her own pack. She was an attractive woman, tall and slim, though few would describe her as beautiful. Her face was just a little too angular to be considered that, though it did possess quite pleasing proportions. If she were a man, she might be described as handsome. Her breasts were smallish, and she had the hips of a teenaged boy. Her eyes were her most striking asset. The palest of blues, or gray, depending on the lighting, they contrasted with her dark eyebrows and the Mediterranean skin she had inherited from her mother.

The small building which had once occupied the foundation where she now stood was gone, shorn clean off of its foundation by the power of the tidal wave. What had it once been? A home? A souvenir shop? Maybe a cafe.

She could see the stubs of pipes poking up out of the cement pad, the sewer lines, gas and water. A set of loose wires rose from a broken hub in one corner, looking like disemboweled intestines.

Where were the bulldozers? Why the hell were there still corpses in the street? Even the International Red Cross had no record of any operation here. She had requested, and they agreed to send out, an advance team to rendezvous with them.

A couple hundred meters away, a modern ten-story hotel rose up out of the rubble, the bottom twenty meters stripped bare of its external walls. It was a wonder that the building still stood, given the shoddy construction. All of the lower windows were shattered and blown out. That’s how high the wave had been. Above it, the exterior sheathing was largely intact.

“We better get moving,” DeBryan said.

From her elevated vantage point, Angel made one last assessment of the devastation surrounding them. Anyone remaining on the bottom five or six floors of the luxury hotels and many of the permanent residents in their tiny houses would have been swept away by the force of the water.

From oceanographic data, she knew that the wave had struck in the middle of the night, when nearly everyone would have been sound asleep. There must have been alarms though, some kind of advance warning. People would have scrambled to the upper floors, survived. Yet she hadn’t found a single eyewitness account.

She checked her phone for the location of the IRC team’s staging area on the other side of the narrow island, then nodded at the photog. She’d seen enough by now to know which questions to ask. Now she needed answers.

* * *

The kilometer trek through the debris field took them the better part of an hour to cover. At times there was simply no road, either because it was coated in mud or had washed away. The two were forced to climb over piles of wreckage, some several meters high, and through erosion dikes deep enough to swallow small houses. The mounds kept shifting, threatening to avalanche and bury them. Armies of rats scurried out of every heap.

They spoke little, continuing to be shocked at the sights, disbelieving their own eyes that nothing had been done to respond. It wasn’t like this was that difficult a place to bring in the necessary people and equipment. There were two public docking areas sturdy enough to accommodate some very large boats, one on each side of the isle, plus a good dozen private ones. It was to one of the latter that they’d arrived.

Angel thought back to her experience at the State Department in New York three days before, easily one of the most frustrating she’d endured in recent memory. When she first told them where she wanted to go and why, they had granted her an emergency travel visa, just like always. But hours before she was to leave, she received a text telling her that it had been rescinded. They couldn’t give her a reason why. Or wouldn’t. When she went to resubmit, the consular general himself came out to meet her. He told her no and recommended, in very strong terms, that she drop the matter.

They didn’t know how persistent she could be. She contacted the World Health Organization and arranged for a replacement visa through France’s Ministère des Affaires Étrangères instead. Sometimes it helped having dual citizenship. The French system was a lot easier to navigate than the American one, if you knew how and had the right connections. Nevertheless, even that hadn’t been without its hiccups. She knew some backroom wrangling had occurred on her behalf. And some money had exchanged hands. She didn’t really care about that. She could afford it. And her reporter’s nose was really itching by then.

The visa was granted just the day before — an extension, actually, of one that was still valid — and she’d wasted no time booking the flight to Seoul and chartering the boat. That was where she met the UN photog, who’d overheard her trying to get to the island, and he managed somehow to finagle his own paperwork to accompany her. She tried to discourage him, insisting that she worked better alone, yet he persisted, even suggesting that his UN credentials would gain them greater access should they encounter local resistance. He also promised to allow her to break the story, whatever it might be. It wasn’t about the scoop, she countered. It was just a lot easier if she weren’t dragging around dead weight.

She had expected him to get angry and launch into some self-righteous tirade about his qualifications, but he hadn’t. He simply shrugged it off.

Now that they were here, Angel was actually grateful for the company. Something was clearly off about what they were witnessing, and it sent alarm bells jangling inside of her.

“Ange?”

But then he had to go and call her that. It was one of those American customs she could never quite get used to, people she barely knew lopping off bits and pieces of people’s names, like they were extraneous things. David had done it, when they’d first met. The familiarity of it had always irked her.

She frowned in irritation, and considered telling DeBryan that it was either Angelique or Angel. Not Ange. Not Angie. And certainly not Angelica.

“We got company.” He pointed with his free hand, but kept on recording.

They were boys, mostly, no older than twenty, twenty-two. About a dozen quickly coming toward them. Angel guessed that they were locals, though their clothes were new, brightly colored, and almost certainly looted from one of the upscale shops. Rather disturbingly, they carried weapons, chains which scraped and rattled along the ground and pipes that they slapped threateningly against their palms.

“I don’t think that’s a welcoming committee. They don’t look so happy to see us.”

Angel grunted and dug out her media pass, held it up when they got close enough to see it. The boy in the lead gave it a cursory glance as he passed her. He placed a palm over the lens of DeBryan’s camera and pushed hard while shouting something in Chinese.

“English?” DeBryan yelled back. “Do you speak English?”

“What you doing here?”

“We’re journalists,” Angel said. “We’ve come to report—”

One of the boys grabbed her arm and jerked her to the side while shouting in Chinese. Overbalanced by the pack on her back, Angel tripped and fell to her knees, scraping them on the muddy gravel. She let out an angry cry and pushed back, and the boy stumbled. He raised his fist, readying to strike her. Biker gloves covered his palms; his knuckles were crusted in blood.

“Stop!” DeBryan shouted.

He was struck on the side of the head with a pipe and he fell. The camera clattered to the ground. He scrambled to recover it, but a kick sent it skittering across the road. The boy who did it laughed, then feigned attacking him, hoping for a reaction. DeBryan stood his ground. Blood trickled from his temple. The other boys snickered.

“We’re trying to help you,” Angel snapped. She struggled back to her feet and out of reach of the boy who’d grabbed her. She could feel herself shaking, could feel the rage building up inside of her, the fear. The helplessness. Where were the police? The Red Cross?

Where were the UN forces which had been dispatched to the other islands in the region?

“You not help,” the leader said, speaking in broken English. “You only make worse!”

“Where are the CAPF?” DeBryan asked, referring to the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force. He had recovered the camera and now cradled it in his arms. His chest rose and fell as he worked to keep himself under control. He didn’t look scared, just angry.

The lead boy sneered. His lips were crusted white, just like all the others’, and the rancid smell of his breath cut through the stink of the dead. “They gone, dead. Not dead. You leave.”

Not dead? Angel felt a chill crawl up her spine.

“You should not come here or you be dead, too.”

“Look,” she said after a moment, “whatever it is you’re doing here, we don’t care about that. All we’re trying to do is understand why the government hasn’t stepped in to help. I fear there may be an outbreak of disease, cholera. Surely you must be feeling—”

“There no disease! We not sick!”

Angel’s gaze flicked from one face to the next. The signs were obvious, the dehydration in their sunken eyes, in the bluish tinge to their skin. The split and bleeding lips. These boys were sick, and she pointed it out to them. “You need medical care, antibiotics. When was the last time you had clean water? Or a proper meal?”

But the leader just shook his head. Fear flickered across his face. “You go! Now. Before dark.”

“What happens after nightfall?” DeBryan asked, his eyes narrowing.

The leader turned to him but didn’t answer.

Okay,” DeBryan finally said, breaking the gaze first. He gestured at Angel not to argue. “We’ll leave. But it won’t be today. Our boat left and isn’t scheduled to return until tomorrow afternoon.”

The leader of the gang hesitated a moment. He spoke briefly with the other boys, then turned and pointed to a hotel at the other end of the quad. “You stay inside then, in room until morning. No come out.”

Chapter Two

She could sense DeBryan standing close behind her, could feel the heat coming off his body as she stood at the dusty abandoned hotel room window and looked down at the destruction beneath them. She wrapped her arms tighter against her chest and tried not to shiver. It was all she could do not to scream out in frustration.

The room had a good vantage point, once you got past the horrifying aspects and saw what was interesting about it, which came naturally to her journalistic eye. She’d learned long ago how to compartmentalize her feelings, stowing away her fear and horror. It helped her to be clinically objective. Sometimes, though, it was a struggle. Like now. She’d been trying hard to hold it together since the initial shock of their arrival.

The boys were just leaving, down below. She could hear them shouting at each other, laughing, though the sound was muffled by the glass. It was still intact but hazy with dirt. There had been fourteen boys in the group, which meant that three remained behind inside the hotel, undoubtedly to ensure they stayed put inside their rooms until morning.

What happens after nightfall?

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she’d seen a flash of fear in them when DeBryan asked his question. They were scared, and the fear told her that they weren’t killers, just kids playing at it.

A moment later and it was gone from them all, leaving nothing but resentment toward her and DeBryan because they weren’t locals. Because they were more well-off.

On the morrow, they would be escorted back to the dock to wait for their boat, and whatever was happening here would remain a mystery. She couldn’t let that happen. Leaving now would only ensure the boys’ deaths, too.

She turned her head slightly and found DeBryan there, just as she’d expected, not half a meter away. The filtered sunlight illuminated his face, drawing her focus to a vein throbbing in his temple. But he wasn’t looking outside. The dark orbs of his eyes were aimed at her own. He was staring hard, looking worried.

“I’ve been in tighter situations,” she said, turning away. “We’ll figure it out.”

The room was trashed. It had clearly been in use when the tsunami struck, but what had happened to the occupants since then was a mystery. If the visitors had fled, they’d taken little with them. A large tan suitcase was upended on the bed, its contents rifled through. Nothing of any value remained. Takeout food containers, traces of uneaten dinner now spoiled and petrified, littered the top of the dresser.

At least they put us in adjoining rooms.

“I called the contact at the charter,” he said.

She whipped back to him. “How? They took our phones.”

“I always carry two. It’s not the first time this has happened. Or something like it.”

She felt her face burn, and she looked away. “Well, I’m not leaving.”

“Nor am I, but my camera’s busted,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “It’s a twelve thousand dollar Alexa. I had a backup camera as well, tucked away inside my pack, but no way can you hide something like that. Those boys took it and my accessories. They really don’t seem to want any record of this.”

Angel sniffed. “I still have my little laptop. The webcam sucks, but I suppose it’ll do.”

“That won’t be necessary. I asked my people to bring another camera. I want to get pro footage of this.”

“So, you’re not planning on leaving.”

He sighed and finally turned toward the window. She could see his reflection in it, faint and pale, the thin line of his lips. “No, but we still need to deal with the boys. They’re playing a dangerous game.”

“They’re kids.”

“I know, which is why I think their little Lord of the Flies operation here will crumble in the face of a more . . . determined force.”

“Force?”

“I have a friend on the mainland, a guy in Beijing. He’s former CAPF, but now runs a private security firm. Hires out off-duty police. I told him we needed some bodies. Just enough to scare the boys off, let us do our jobs.”

Angel nodded and felt herself relaxing.

“They’re very likely orphans,” he quietly told her. “I imagine they must be in some sort of shock. PTSD or something. They certainly aren’t acting like you’d expect.”

“Shock, yes. They should be in the hospital. They’re sick and need to be treated.”

“And they will be, hopefully soon. But that’s not what we’re here for. There’s a bigger story just begging to be told. I’ve no idea what it is, but we need to figure it out.”

She coughed, shifted slightly. Her cheeks felt warm, though not because of his proximity. She hated feeling helpless, looking weak and dependent, but that’s exactly the position she was in right now. And she could tell by the look in his eyes that he considered it his obligation to protect her simply because he was a man and she a woman. Well, she’d always managed well enough on her own, and in worse situations.

He turned away from her, perhaps sensing her annoyance, and crossed the room. She could hear him tinkering around in the bathroom, checking switches. There was no electricity, and after reappearing he reaffirmed that there was no water, either.

“Dinner’s going to be a little light tonight,” he said, smiling wryly. They’d brought a case of emergency rations on the boat, but had left it at the dock. “I’ve got a bag of airline peanuts and a granola bar. I’m willing to go halvesies on them both for a share of your water.”

* * *

Sleep was long in coming that night. The world outside seemed unnaturally dark and still. There was no wind to speak of, and the shore was too far away to hear the ocean breaking upon it. Angel lay in her mummy bag beneath a layer of moldy-smelling blankets and breathed a ghostly fog into the cold and silence of the room. She wondered if she was the only one still awake, and whether the boys in the hallway outside and DeBryan in the adjacent room had managed to escape their own private insomnias.

The two of them had spent the afternoon reviewing their strategy for the following day, comparing theories as to the reasons why the PRC government had kept the disaster to itself, and why it had essentially abandoned the island’s survivors to succumb to sickness and starvation. But the subject soon exhausted itself and so the conversation inevitably shifted, as it always will do when two strangers are left alone together for any length of time.

DeBryan remained until darkness stole the last of the light away, when it became painfully clear that they’d finally run out of things to say to each other and had no more desire for small talk. Although, to be fair, it was mostly him carrying the conversation by then. She had never been good at social intercourse, even with the people she felt closest to, which lately numbered very few. She had little tolerance for chitchat, especially with strangers, and had zoned out much of what he told her. Later, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, she could only remember bits and pieces.

He’d told her about some of the places he’d been to on assignment, the things he’d seen. He said his first job was as a college student covering the hurricane in New Orleans, and how, because of the people he’d met, he had felt obligated to tell victims’ stories through pictures. He was an only child, and his parents still lived in a tiny mobile home in Palm Springs. “Dad golfs three times a week, and Mom goes to the malls.” This last bit brought an awkward chuckle out of him, as if the admission were shameful, though she couldn’t understand why it would be. It sounded like a nice way to retire.

Then he had to go and ask her about her family, and what could she say? Only an idiot would have missed the gracelessness with which she bumbled the answer, muttering something only half intelligible before hurriedly changing the subject. Thankfully, he followed her lead with the tact of a gentleman, valiantly filling in the spaces she left empty by her stubborn silence with aimless mentions of this or that. But after a while her reticence wore at him, and he excused himself and returned to his own room, gently shutting the shared door behind him but not latching it. She knew he had done it on purpose, just as she knew it wasn’t an invitation of any kind.

He was very professional, almost fatherly. There was none of the tension that sometimes came with working with men who spent months at a time in the field, often in utter solitude, who seemed to carry on in the belief that their female counterparts shared the same carnal needs as they and a willingness to satisfy them at any opportunity. There had been a few times when she might have been tempted, though she never did. Did that make her frigid?

She knew from what DeBryan told her that he wasn’t married, and the absence of a ring on his finger supported this claim. There wasn’t even the telltale groove or pale band of skin signifying a wedding ring had ever occupied a place there. In the end, however, it didn’t really matter. The tragedy outside and the frustration of their confinement simply loomed too large on their minds for there to be room for anything else.

She unzipped her bag and crawled out of it, naked save for a pair of plain black panties and bra. The chill bit at her skin, and the carpeted floor seemed to draw the heat out of her through her feet. But she felt little of this. She went and stood over at the window, her arms crossed over her breasts and her hands absently rubbing the gooseflesh on her elbows, and gazed out into the darkness.

It was a moonless night, clear but for a few wispy clouds. The stars cast their delicate glow upon the island, turning the dew-crusted buildings into shapeless husks. She could almost feel their emptiness. In the distance, the tiny orange glow of a campfire was the only other proof that they weren’t alone.

It was the question about her family which had caused her such distress and kept her from submitting to her exhaustion. She fully acknowledged that, and reluctantly she let the memories of her childhood in Lyon seep back into her consciousness. Experience told her that refusing to do so never ended well. It was best to let the haunting memories come, to let them possess her for a while so that they would return to the catacombs of her mind satisfied, there to quietly molder until circumstance ushered them forth again.

Her father’s stern face floated before her outside the window, like a spirit risen from the grave. At first it was just his visage. Then came the drowning sound of his voice in her ears. The feel of his hard, cold fingers on her young, bony limbs. The strict lessons. The dark bruises. But most of all, the pain.

She wasn’t aware of her body sinking to the floor. Her eyes were blind to the physical world by then, her ears deaf to all, even to the anguished moans which slipped through her lips. The dream-memory took ownership of her and held her captive for the balance of the breathless night, and the world remained innocent as ever of the torment she privately suffered.

When she woke the next morning, as the first tendrils of gray pre-dawn light stole into the room, she found herself quivering in a far corner, a blanket which she had no memory of grabbing slipping off her shoulders, and her skin blue and cold as ice.

Chapter Three

Angel heard the footsteps outside and knew from the scuffling sounds and the angry shouts that the boys left behind to guard them were being forcibly removed. But by whom? Had DeBryan’s friend shown up with his security team? How did they know where to find them?

She was already dressed, so she quickly threw her laptop into her pack and zipped it shut just as the door burst open, splintering the frame. Three men stepped inside, and their insignia marked them as soldiers of the PRC. They held their rifles out before them, ready to use. Blue surgical masks hid the bottom halves of their faces, and their hands were covered in matching latex gloves. Their eyes were cold and hard, and not just from the brisk air.

“Thanks for knocking,” she snapped at them.

If they understood, they didn’t show it.

There was a thud on the door to DeBryan’s room. People were shouting in Chinese, and she tensed up. It didn’t sound good. These weren’t his friend’s people. Angel straightened up, expecting to be grabbed and dragged out of the room. But the soldiers just stood there glaring at her and waited.

They were soon joined by four more uniformed men, who shoved the photog into the room. Somehow, he managed to stay on his feet. He’d been in the process of shaving, and the electric razor was still in his hand, forgotten. One of the soldiers snatched it away and threw it hard to the floor, where it buzzed until it was crushed into silence beneath the heel of a black leather boot.

Nobody spoke for several long seconds. DeBryan gave her a questioning look, asking her if she was all right. She returned it with a quick nod and turned her attention back to the soldiers.

A moment later, an eighth man stepped in. He wore dark slacks and a tan woolen overcoat, but no mask. His hands were tucked inside the coat’s deep pockets. Finally, the interrogation began, though not by him. He stood back against the wall, away from everyone else, and watched and listened.

The soldier’s English wasn’t very good, and his inability to communicate effectively coupled with their own inadequate responses seemed to quickly frustrate him. Angel got the impression it was all a part of some script, but to what end, she wasn’t sure. She kept her eyes on the man in the back to see how he reacted. When she showed the soldier her passport, he snatched it from her hand and handed it to the soldier standing beside him. She quickly lost track of it as it made its way around the room.

“And you?” he snapped at DeBryan. “Where identification?”

“Next door, in my room. My pack’s under the bed.”

One of the soldiers disappeared for a moment, then reappeared with the photog’s backpack, which the interrogator began to sift through.

“Front pocket,” DeBryan offered. “Here, let me help—”

“Stand back!” He was shoved in the chest with the flat side of the stock of the soldier’s rifle.

The passport was located and it, too, was passed around.

“Huangxia evacuated,” the interrogator finally said. “You leave now.”

“You can’t do that!” Angel protested. “Your own government granted the visa.”

“Government say when okay and when not okay. Now not okay.”

“Why? What’s changed? I demand you tell me what’s going on here!”

But the soldier signaled the others to begin gathering up her belongings. Angel tried to stop them and received a push for her efforts. The soldiers weren’t terribly rough with her, not like the boys had been, but they were firm, all business. She quickly gave up and returned to the leader.

“I demand to know why we’re being shut out!” She grabbed his arm and he gave her a dark look before shaking her off. He offered no further explanation.

Throughout the entire interrogation, the man standing in the back had not moved or spoken a word. His face hadn’t changed at all. But now he stepped forward, and the soldiers moved aside for him, making a wide aisle as if they were afraid to touch him. “Thank you, Chief Sergeant Zhang,” he said, addressing the soldier-interrogator. He turned to Angel. “What is going on here, Miss de l’Enfantine, is that—”

“Missus.”

He tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment. “I beg your pardon.” Though he appeared to be Chinese, he spoke without a trace of accent. “My dossier indicates that you were divorced from your husband.”

“Separated,” she corrected, before she could stop herself. She felt her face grow red. “What dossier? Why are you checking up on me? And who are you?”

“All will be known in due time.” There was a twinkle of amusement in the man’s eyes. “But for what it’s worth, my name is Cheong. You may call me Alvin.”

“Never heard of you.”

“I’m not surprised. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a nobody.” He shrugged. “Nobody important, anyway.”

“I doubt that.”

“I can assure you, Missus de l’Enfantine, that in the long run, it won’t matter who I am. The more immediate concern is actually who you are.”

“A reporter. Investigative reporter. And we are here by the graces of the UN and the World Health Organization to find out what the hell is going on here!”

“Well, yes, and in that regard, I can also assure you that Huangxia will be unable to provide you with answers to your questions.”

“I’ll decide what questions to ask and whether they’ve been answered.”

He sighed. “These soldiers don’t want to have to force you to leave, but they will if it comes down to it.”

“Under whose orders? Yours?”

He looked genuinely surprised at this, actually let out a startled laugh. “Me? No.”

“What are they hiding here?” She glared at a couple of the soldiers in turn, and they shifted uncomfortably, but they refused to avert their eyes.

“I can understand the optics. It appears that something is being concealed here, and maybe it is, but it isn’t what you think.”

“What exactly do we think?” DeBryan challenged. “The Chinese government is—”

Cheong waved his hand dismissively. “You have only just arrived yesterday, Mister DeBryan. I, on the other hand, have been following the situation here for weeks, and I can assure you that these men here aren’t hiding some government secret.”

“This isn’t right!” Angel cried. “The media has a right to be informed.”

Cheong exhaled noisily and frowned at her, cutting her off. “Until we fully understand exactly what it is we’re dealing with, the media—”

“The media’s job is to investigate and report!” She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Seems simple enough to me. There was a natural disaster, an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Other islands in the region were affected, and rescue and recovery efforts have been ongoing elsewhere. But not here. Why not? From what I saw, thousands have been killed or died afterward, their bodies left to rot in the streets, in the rubble. There has been no attempt to—”

“Missus de l’Enfantine, I can assure you that there has been a response.”

“Not that I can see! No restoration of power and water, no relief. We were supposed to rendezvous with an International Red Cross team.”

“Which was pulled back.”

“What the hell for? The few survivors left here are suffering terribly. I saw them. Cholera is a very real threat. You don’t need a medical degree or tests to know that dysentery, dehydration, and starvation are all spreading like wildfire among those who managed to avoid drowning. Hundreds have died in the past three weeks, people who survived the wave. These deaths were preventable!”

Mister Cheong raised his eyebrows at her. “They were already dead.”

“Liar!”

He shrugged. “It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind about it. If that’s the case, then what more do you need? Go and report your conclusions, just as you have described. Let the world condemn the PRC government for their failure. But if you do so, the truth will never be known.”

She opened her mouth in surprise, then shut it again.

“You seem convinced that you know better,” DeBryan said. “What is the truth, then?”

“I can’t answer the what,” the man replied. “Not just yet. But I can tell you the where. And it’s not here. You’ll have to travel to the mainland to find answers.”

Angel narrowed her eyes. She thought she understood what he was implying. The truth would be found not in the starving, diseased faces of the casualties here. Rather, he was encouraging her to go to Beijing, to the seat of the government, where she would undoubtedly get lost in a sea of paperwork, tangled up in bureaucratic red tape, and blinded by misdirection. Did he think she was so stupid? But she wouldn’t fall for it. She was a field reporter, and she wasn’t going to leave until she was satisfied she had first exhausted all she could here.

Cheong checked his watch. “It’s time to leave.”

“Those boys,” she said, trying again, “they took our cell phones and my partner’s camera.”

“They will be returned. But I’m afraid these soldiers will have to erase any pictures you may have taken.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, but those are the rules. I have no say in the matter.”

“If you’re not with the army, who are you with?”

He hesitated only slightly before answering. “A group called 6X. We’re private. So, like you, I am here by the government’s good graces. But also like you, they chose to cut short my stay here. It’s only because I promised to collect you two that they granted my request for an extension.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have to make you break your promise to the government.”

He smiled, as if he’d expected her to say exactly that.

“Those boys out there need medicine,” she said, still stalling. “They’re sick.”

“We find them,” Sergeant Zhang snapped. “We take care of them. You no worry.”

But there was something in the way he said it, something in his eyes and the tone of his voice, that Angel didn’t like. “How will you take care of them?” she asked.

“You no worry,” he repeated.

Mister Cheong stepped forward and faced the soldier. “Give them a few minutes to gather their belongings. Then we’ll caravan back to the dock.”

He gave them a brisk nod, told them he’d ride back with them, and left the room.

They formed a line — two soldiers in front, two between her and DeBryan, and three bringing up the rear — and they marched down the unlit emergency stairs in the corner of the hotel. The men kicked aside loose debris that had been washed into the stairwell. They didn’t speak — refused to speak — even as Angel demanded answers.

She wracked her brain as they descended. She tried to remember if she’d ever heard of a group called 6X. Who were they? What were they about? Clearly the man had more influence over the soldiers than he tried to impress upon them. The men obviously deferred to him, despite his claim to the contrary.

But she came up with nothing.

She saw him standing off to one side in the destroyed hotel lobby, a lit cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other. Both hands were gloved, but not in blue latex as were the soldiers’, rather in black leather. His back was turned, and he was speaking to someone. He didn’t acknowledge them as they passed, or the noise of their feet crushing the glass of the shattered lobby windows. He just kept right on talking in some language that was neither English nor Chinese as they pushed out through the empty frames of the front doors and made their way into the bright morning sunlight. It sounded Greek.

The fullness of the smell hit them almost immediately, bringing tears to their eyes and forcing them to cover their mouths and noses with their elbows. Several soldiers, also dressed in masks and gloves, were standing in a circle beside an army vehicle a couple dozen meters away, one with a massive track. Protruding out the front was a beveled plow. One of the men broke off and jogged over to them. He handed Sergeant Zhang some objects in a clear plastic bag, who held them up for Angel and DeBryan to see. “Is these belong to you?”

They nodded. The bag was opened and inverted. Both phones clattered to the ground and were crushed into the gravel. No apologies were made, no explanations offered.

“What about my camera?” DeBryan asked. He didn’t look very hopeful.

Sergeant Zhang turned and spoke to the other soldier in Chinese, who nodded and jogged back. “They will find and return. Now go.”

“Tell them they don’t have to break anything,” DeBryan said. “I’ll give you the memory cards.”

Sergeant Zhang grunted, but didn’t relay the message. He gestured toward a second army truck, also tracked instead of wheeled, and indicated that they were to climb aboard. The tailgate was unlatched and lowered. A soldier stepped up and pulled the flap away, revealing bench seats running the length of the bed. Two more PLA soldiers stood sentinel, one on either side of the truck, and watched them approach with wariness in their eyes. All of them wore masks and gloves.

“My apologies for the rough transport,” Mister Cheong said, startling them with his sudden appearance at their side. He climbed into the bed of the truck and reached down for Angel with his gloved hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she thrust her pack up at him, then climbed aboard without his assistance.

The two reporters chose to sit on the bench opposite their guard, for that’s what he seemed to be, and were flanked by soldiers. He sat alone. “The ride is going to be bumpy,” he warned, and indeed it was. The roar of the engine and the sound of the debris being crushed beneath them made talk impossible, so they gripped the hard wooden rails of their seats and held on, gritting their teeth and watching out through the back as the vehicle bucked beneath them.

Soon after departing, Angel thought she heard a series of gunshots — not the rapid fire sound of a machine gun, but several distinct pops. She counted a half dozen, though there were likely more. But when she looked over at the others in alarm, none seemed to have noticed.

Chapter Four

Estranged.

It had always seemed such a horrid word to Angel, full of negative innuendo and outright accusation. The French equivalent, éloigné, meant literally driven away, and she supposed that much of it was true. She had driven David away with her paranoia.

They had been married two and a half years before separating. More than enough time for him to become aware of the darkness that clung to her. Invisible during their whirlwind courtship, it only became apparent afterward, as if the mind’s eye took time to adjust to a different light, or the act of wedding caused a shift in the psychic spectrum. Ever since late adolescence, the darkness drove a wedge between her and anyone she ever spent any amount of time with, not just him. But after they met, she had fooled herself into thinking that maybe this time would be different, that she had changed because of him. She had never met anyone so passionate, so brilliant.

The day he moved out, he told her he still loved her, but that he couldn’t live with her, with her mood swings, her obsessions. He’d been threatening it for the previous six months, since Jacques moved back into the house with them. He told her, as if he weren’t aware of the irony, that her family estate in Lyon was tearing them apart. Hadn’t she’d resisted his pleas to move there in the first place? Hadn’t he ignored her, even patronized her?

And then, just as Jacques needed her, he insisted that they move back to the States. It was the only way to save the marriage, he told her. So she went, and he’d been wrong because she hadn’t changed. Lyon still drew her to it, and she could not resist its pull.

Of course, her friends misjudged the situation, jumping to the wrong conclusion that David had used her to gain access to her family’s money. But it had been her idea to invest in his fledgling tech company, not his. It was she who had used him, hoping he could somehow help her to sever ties with her own past.

A year ago, on the advice of a lawyer whom David had hired for his company and then soon afterward fired for his poor advice, he had filed divorce papers. He admitted later that it had been a mistake and never pursued the case. Neither had she. The paperwork was a matter of public record, which is probably why Cheong had misconstrued their relationship. It made her wonder, as they rode in the back of that truck through the wreckage of the island, why he’d checked up on her like that. What was his interest in her? What was this dossier he had? What more did he know about her?

But the roar of the engine prevented them from talking, and so all she could do was speculate. It got her nowhere but more and more frustrated.

The smell of the salt sea air grew stronger the closer they drew to the port, though it was never thick enough to sweep away the stench of decomposition. Finally, the vehicle stopped, and Mister Cheong pushed himself off the bench. He held up a hand for them to remain seated. “There’s a boat coming for you,” he shouted, leaning over at them. “It’ll take you to Shanghai, where a driver will pick you up and take you to your hotel. We’ll meet for dinner at—” He checked his watch, carefully pulling back the sleeve of his coat with a gloved fingertip. “Dinner at nine. Instructions will be left for you at the front desk.”

“Why?” Angel yelled back. “What instructions?”

“To discuss your assignment.”

“What assignment? Who are you? You haven’t told us anything! Who’s this 6X group you work for?”

His brow knit for a moment as he considered how to answer. Then he said, “You might say that 6X is an international consortium of concerned citizens.”

“Concerned about what?”

He tapped his wrist impatiently. “I’m terribly sorry for leaving you in such a lurch like this, but I have a very important meeting and my guest will not tolerate being kept waiting. I’ll explain more at dinner tonight.”

“What assignment?” Angel shouted after him as he climbed over the tailgate and jumped to the ground.

“Tonight,” he said over his shoulder.

With a signal from his hand, the truck lurched forward, its motor growling. A puff of black smoke spewed from the stack and whipped behind them as they accelerated away. Angel watched as Alvin Cheong jogged to the waiting chopper, ducking his head as its rotors began to churn the air. The sleek machine was shiny black, meant only to carry a single passenger.

Angel committed the tail number to memory.

* * *

DeBryan hadn’t dared to bring out his spare cell phone sooner, fearing that it would be confiscated by the Chinese Coast Guard sailors assigned to escort them back to Shanghai. But once the patrol boat left Huangxia Island behind and the two reporters had been taken to the vessel’s galley, they were pretty much left alone. He slipped it out of the secret panel in his pack and turned it on under the table.

“Just letting my contact know what’s going on,” he quietly told Angel. “Don’t want him showing up in that situation.” He shook his head grimly. “Whatever the hell is going on, it’s huge. And if the military is involved, who knows what they’ll do.”

“We shouldn’t have left.”

“You can’t argue with rifles,” he muttered. “Or the PLA.”

She watched him for a moment as he typed in a message below the table surface. “What do you think those soldiers did with the boys?” she asked him, clearing her throat as another sailor stepped into the galley. DeBryan dropped the phone into his lap and brought his hands up, resting them on the table with his fingers loosely twined. She watched the sailor warily as he went and helped himself to some coffee from the urn on the table behind her.

“What do you mean?” DeBryan asked. “Sergeant Zhang said he’d take care of them.”

“But what does that mean?” She didn’t wait for him to answer before adding, “I heard gunshots. Right after we got on the truck.”

He frowned at her, but didn’t deny her claim. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know.” She let out a deep breath and slumped in her seat. She was shaking, both from emotion as well as hunger. A warm, beefy smell rose from the ship’s kitchen, and she considered getting up to ask the sailor if they could get something to eat. She started to rise, but stopped when DeBryan whispered for her not to move.

“Just sit tight for a moment.” He kept his voice low and his head tucked down a bit. After a moment, he brought his hands back up and gestured for hers. She slid them over and he gripped them firmly, as if he were trying to console her. The sailor wandered back over and stared aggressively at them as he passed. Steam rose from the cup in his hand. The aroma, though bitter, made Angel’s head swim.

“Do you think we could get something to eat?” she asked him.

The sailor kept staring at their joined hands as he rattled something off in Chinese.

“Soup?” She pulled her left hand out of DeBryan’s and made a drinking motion.

“Coffee?” The sailor grunted and nodded, then said something else, also in Chinese, before pointing at the urn. Then he left in a hurry, probably afraid she’d ask him something else.

DeBryan released her other hand and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. Angel could feel the small object he had left in her palm and guessed that it was either a SIM card or a memory disk. She gave him a querying look.

“I suspect they’ll probably search us before we debark. They probably already know I’ve sent a text and will be looking for the phone. I’ve replaced the card with a blank and will leave it where they can easily find it. Hopefully that’ll satisfy them. If they do a more intensive search, you’re more likely to be able to slip it past them than I am.”

She nodded. “And what’s on it?”

He took a deep breath. “Honestly? I’m not exactly sure.”

Chapter Five

They waited for nearly an hour in the hotel bar before Alvin Cheong showed up and whisked them to a table in a dark back corner of the restaurant. Angel had already downed three martinis by then, very dry, and was feeling the effects of the alcohol. She seldom drank, but under the circumstances, and considering all the hassles she’d endured over the past several days, she was in no mood to care very much.

It helped that the drinks were insanely expensive. Indeed, they tasted that way, although it might’ve been her imagination; she wasn’t exactly the best judge. She could easily afford to pay the tab, but she took a secret pleasure in telling the bartender to add the charges to the room bill, which was under Cheong’s name. The spacious and richly appointed suites they’d been assigned also had to have cost him a mint. Though it helped dull some of the rage, neither they nor the drinks made up for the way he had jerked her and DeBryan around.

She wondered obliquely if the photog was also feeling the effects of the alcohol. He was on his third bar drink, too, but she knew he’d started before her in his room. She could smell it on his breath, the sickly sweet smell hanging about him like a fog when he showed up at her door to accompany her to dinner. He hadn’t bothered to iron his shirt and slacks, wrinkled from being packed tightly away. The ruffled look somehow suited him. She herself had given the room’s service bar only a passing glance, mostly out of habit and knowing it so seldom contained anything of interest to her.

The conversation had been awkward to begin, but once the liquor began to work its wiles on her, it muted her internal censor enough that she found herself actually enjoying his company. As the minutes ticked away and Cheong still didn’t show, she hoped he wouldn’t. His tardiness, however, only seemed to irritate DeBryan, and he started cracking jokes about him.

“What the hell is up with that name, anyway?” he said. “I mean, Alvin Cheong? Really?”

Angel had been studying her nails. She’d noticed that one of them had broken sometime, probably during the truck ride that morning and it kept catching on her clothes. Now she turned her head and blinked at him. Both of these actions seemed to take abnormally long and much more effort than necessary. “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” she said, and snorted, remembering an old LP her ex used to play at Christmas. “They must’ve teased that boy something terrible in school.”

“No way he grew up with that name. It’s too . . . Anglo.”

“That’s a bit racist, don’t you think? You don’t know where he was born. Maybe he grew up in Chicago.”

DeBryan gave her a quizzical look. “Chicago?”

“I don’t know,” she hiccupped. Although she suspected she’d said it because Chicago was where David had been born, and he’d been on her mind a lot lately. “His English is better than mine.”

“No, he was born here in Shanghai. His real name’s Lizhen, Cheong Lizhen. Born and lived here till he was thirteen, then his parents moved to Hawaii. He attended college in Massachusetts. MIT. Studied accounting and made his money in the Chinese stock market.”

“Well, Alvin’s a — how do you say? — a preppie name. He could’ve picked it up there. Wait, you’re making this up, aren’t you?”

He chuckled. “No, it’s all true. I looked him up after we checked in, him and this 6X group.”

Angel straightened up in her seat. “How did—? I looked, too, but I couldn’t find anything on either of them. And that helicopter, I emailed a friend to find out who it’s registered to.”

He nodded appreciatively. “Good thinking. I actually had to dive pretty deep into the ‘Net, call in a few favors of my own. There’s this guy I know in NSA, he told me about his real name, so that helped. I’m not sure how much of it I understand or even believe. It’s definitely a strange little . . . . Well, I guess you could call it a pretty damn good plot twist to this story we’re working.”

“What do you mean?” She placed a hand over the top of her drink to signal to the bartender that she was done, and asked for water instead. The buzz was making her regret the martinis, the sloppy way the alcohol made her feel. She didn’t like not being her sharpest when working.

“The group is named for something called the Sixth Extinction.”

“Sounds like a bad John Cusack movie.”

“There are good ones?” He laughed, but quickly sobered up. “The Sixth Extinction is an event that some folks in academic circles and the press believe is happening right now as a result of human activity. The massive extinction of animal species. I’m still trying to understand how 6X fits in with Huangxia.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. I mean, the disaster there was natural, which would explain Cheong’s lack of interest in it. Although,” Angel mused, “some people believe that human activity is causing more extreme weather events.”

“An earthquake is not a weather event.”

“But sea level rise is a direct result of global warming, and that would exacerbate a tsunami.”

“6X’s main focus is technology — artificial intelligence, robotics, smart bullets, and nuclear war, that sort of thing — with the dangers that inevitably arise from unfettered technological advance, not climatologic dangers. Huangxia, an earthquake-created tsunami?” He shook his head. “That’s not really their thing.”

“Well, our buddy Alvin did say we wouldn’t find answers there.”

“Not the answers he’s interested in, anyway. That much is clear.”

“The answers he and this 6X group want us to find? I wonder what they might be. A way to stop the extinctions?”

DeBryan was quiet for a while, peering deeply into his drink. He looked troubled. “Their manifesto, 6X’s, said nothing about preventing extinctions, just preparing for them, as in our own. They seem convinced that the end of the world is a done deal, like it’s just a matter of time before it happens.”

“Great,” Angel said, letting out an unhappy exhale. “Another psycho whack job with an agenda. It’s 2012 and the Mayans all over again.”

“More like Dr. Strangelove.”

“Never saw it.”

“This is the End? No? Not a Seth Rogen fan either?”

Angel shrugged. She didn’t watch much television anymore, not since David left, and she never went to the movies.

“According to my guy, this group is very well-funded and well-connected. The names of lots of very influential folks popped up. So, the question is, are we dealing with a legitimate concern with this extinction thing? Do they know something the rest of us don’t? Or are they just a rich bunch of Doomsday followers?”

“It could be a religious thing. You know, the Rapture.”

“Eschatology doesn’t seem to be their thing, either.” He shook his head. “No, it’s technology. And it really terrifies me seeing the amount of money pouring into this group. I mean, these people are super serious.”

“Why does that scare you? Let them waste their money playing their little fantasy games, as long as it doesn’t affect me.”

“But it might. Like I said, I get this feeling that they know something’s coming. Or . . . .” He shook his head. “Or that they’re behind it.”

Angel chuffed at him.

“You put that much money into something,” he said firmly, “you expect a return on your investment. I can’t help wondering if 6X is bent on making sure that end is realized.”

“Now you’re saying they want global destruction, that they’re crafting some massive disaster to make a point?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m saying. But money does make the world go round, so I suppose it could just as well make it stop. These people could very well be gleefully driving us toward some apocalyptic precipice of their own making. Self-fulfilling prophecies are the easiest to render.”

“Apocalyptic precipice. That sounds positively grim.” She frowned playfully at him, but the look on his face made her stop and look away. For just a moment, he looked utterly terrified, and it scared her.

He coughed uncomfortably. “Sorry, alcohol tends to take me to gloomy places.”

“Well, you can raise your suspicions with the man himself,” she said, jutting her chin at the mirror behind the bar. “Here he comes.”

Between the cut crystal display bottles of Glenfarclas, Macallan, and Dalmore behind the bar, they could see the reflection of their host making his way toward them across the darkened room. Angel was almost relieved to see him, though at the same time a feeling of dread had settled over her. What if DeBryan were right? Don’t be silly. They turned and stood, and when Cheong reached them he nodded and gestured toward the dining room. He still wore his gloves. He didn’t bother with the courtesy of removing them.

“I’m pleased to see that you’ve made yourselves comfortable,” he said, wending his way between candlelit tables. “And afforded yourselves of all the hotel’s amenities.” At this, he turned to DeBryan with a knowing glance. “You found the business lounge computers to your satisfaction?”

Once more, DeBryan coughed uneasily, but Cheong seemed nonplussed. “Good. It means we can dispense with the formalities and get right down to business.”

He waved at a server, who hurried over to seat them, and ordered three bottles of Lauquen Artes water. “Virgin glasses, please. Standard treatment. No ice. And open everything at the table.”

“Of course, sir.”

“For someone who believes the end of the world is nigh, you spare no expense,” DeBryan said.

“Precisely why I do. What good is all the money in the world after it ends?”

“Bet you don’t believe in rainy days, either.”

Cheong gave him a wry smile. “Let’s just say I’ve hedged my bets on several different horses, including the long shot. Nobody knows when the end will come, just that it will.”

“Might be a hundred years from now,” Angel said. “Or a thousand. Your bones could be dust when it finally happens. Your dust could be dust.”

She silently cursed the way her tongue felt in her mouth, the way her words seemed to trip over each other. She hoped they didn’t notice.

“A hundred years? Possibly. Certainly not a thousand.” He stopped when the waiter brought them their menus and told them the day’s specials. Angel noticed that the server was now also wearing gloves, except that his were white. When he left, Cheong said, “We are on the brink of a great transition, my friends. I believe we will see a massive global event within the next two decades.”

“Bet you use that line on all the girls, trick them into going back to your room with you.”

Angel gasped in shock and threw a hand over her mouth. But Cheong just laughed at DeBryan’s crude remark. “One’s outlook does certainly shift when the end is clearly in sight.”

“So you’re not denying it, the girls, I mean.”

“I am a faithfully married man, Mister DeBryan.”

“With children?”

“No, it would be irresponsible to bring children into such a world, wouldn’t it? But you already know these details about me.”

DeBryan nodded without hesitation.

“Seems fair,” Angel said. “You seem to know a lot about us.”

“It’s standard practice for an employer to do background checks on prospective hires.”

“I didn’t realize we were interviewing for jobs.”

“Well, I was hoping to hire just you, Missus de l’Enfantine, but I’ll take you both if necessary.” He made no apologies to DeBryan, and instead simply gestured at their menus, suggesting that they make their decisions.

Suddenly, Angel wasn’t hungry. She’d been looking at the swordfish, but now she wondered what her host might think if she ordered it. Was he some kind of environmental nut who only ate free-range, non-GMO, organically grown and humanely harvested foods? Maybe he was a vegetarian.

“The Milanese sounds delicious,” he said, referring to the exact dish she had been eying. He lowered his menu slightly and peered over the top edge at her.

“I— I think I’ll just have a salad.”

He shrugged.

After their bottled water arrived in a curious sleeve of black metal and was served, they ordered their meals. Finally Mister Cheong made his proposal. He wanted Angel — and DeBryan, if he were so inclined — to work for 6X investigating a series of mysterious disasters which had been occurring across the globe. “We know they’re linked, we just don’t know precisely in what way or who’s behind them.”

“Why me?” Angel asked, resisting the urge to rub her temples. Her buzz was wearing off, and her head was starting to pound.

“You have a unique skill set. With your medical background and your journalistic mind, you know which questions to ask, how deeply to look, and you’re not afraid to do what’s necessary to uncover the truth, even if it means getting your own hands dirty.”

“I’ve never taken a bribe in my life!” she snapped.

“Apologies. I didn’t mean to imply. I was referring to the article you wrote for Newsweek this last fall, the one exposing Israel’s secret cloning program. That is just the kind of effort and focus we need right now, assertive and keen yet evenhanded, undeterred by political agendas. “He grinned at her. His teeth were yellow and badly aligned, desperately in need of orthodontic work. “Fearless,” he finished.

Angel frowned. There was talk that the article might win her a Pulitzer, but it had also earned her enemies. She was persona non grata right now in the international Jewish community, despite the fact that she’d defended much of the group’s foundational work and believed in their stated mission to alleviate human suffering. It was the militaristic applications which she had criticized. After initially denying the existence of this arm of the program, the Israeli government tried instead to discredit her. But their efforts fooled nobody. Notably, her article had convinced Israel’s neighbors enough to unify them into a rare coalition.

“Undeterred?” she muttered, laughing dryly. “Fearless? Like I was today?”

“Something tells me you haven’t quite given up on Huangxia,” Mister Cheong said, still smirking. “I hope to dissuade you, at least for the time being, not to disprove my judgment of your character, but by convincing you that there is a bigger prize to be had. Huangxia is nothing but a small jewel in a very large, very intricately designed crown.”

“You mentioned several disasters,” DeBryan said. He was feeling a little left out. It chaffed at him that Cheong included him in this conversation only as an afterthought. He felt like a consolation prize. “Which ones specifically do you mean?”

“I have a list,” Cheong said, turning to face him. “I’ve sent it to both your phones.”

“Which were smashed.”

“Ah, of course. Again, my apologies.” He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a pair of cell phones and handed them over. They were the exact same makes and models as the ones they’d lost earlier in the day. “I also have a replacement for your missing camera. I’m afraid it was — ahem — never recovered. Oh, and I’ll have to ask for your burner phone.”

DeBryan sniffed in surprise. After they’d been able to debark from the coast guard boat without another search, Angel had offered to give back his micro-flash card, but he’d asked her to hold onto it for the time being. “And if I refuse?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

DeBryan reluctantly reached into his pocket and handed the phone over. It quickly disappeared into Cheong’s jacket.

The food arrived then, and they waited as the server offered them cracked pepper and grated cheese. Cheong ordered three more bottles of the water. Once more, they were delivered inside the strange black sleeve. Finally, they were left alone again.

“The list details a series of relatively small disasters, a few dozen to a few hundred casualties at most occurring at each, which the group suspects are trial runs for a global event,” Cheong said, testing the firmness of his fish with his fork, though he didn’t take a bite. Angel gave it a yearning look before lowering her eyes to her meager salad. She grabbed another roll from the basket and wrenched it apart.

They better have a damn good dessert menu, she thought.

“I won’t bore you with the details tonight,” Cheong went on. He sat with his hands to either side of his plate, not eating, though he gestured for them to go ahead. “You can look at the list later and do your own cross-checking. Right now I only want to talk about the one which happened two days ago.”

Angel glanced over at DeBryan to see if he had heard anything, but the look of consternation on his face indicated that he was just as much in the dark about it as she was.

“There was a train wreck,” Cheong said, “a few hundred miles north of here in Inner Mongolia, near a place called Baoyang.”

“A train wreck?” Angel repeated. “What was on it?”

“People. Two hundred and twelve, to be precise.”

“Just . . . people?”

“That’s what we need you two to go and verify.” He removed a slip of paper from his breast pocket and slid it over the table to her. “There’s the name and number of a contact. I’d like you to start with him.”

“But—”

He waived the server over and murmured something in Chinese. Then Cheong pushed himself away from the table and pulled his coat back on. “Please, stay and finish your dinners. Order whatever you like; it’s all paid for. I’ll expect your answer in the morning.”

And with that, without taking a single bite of his hundred dollar swordfish, Alvin Cheong excused himself.

Chapter Six

DeBryan stood by his door across the hall and watched her as she slid her card key into the slot in the security mechanism. Angel sensed that paternal instinct in him again, and it both irritated and amused her. The light turned green and beeped. She bade him good night, which he politely reciprocated, and entered her room.

A long entryway preceded the suite, opening onto a large, sumptuously adorned entertainment area. A kitchenette branched off to the left. None of this was visible at the present, as she’d neglected to leave any lights on when she left, a lapse for which she now scolded herself. Behind her, the tiny circle of light from the peephole in the door offered no assistance and instead felt like an accusing eye focusing its laser sight upon her back. In a moment of pique she imagined DeBryan standing on the other side of the door looking in through it, trying to check up on her, and she chastised herself for being so self-absorbed.

The only other light came from the glowing green digital panel on the room’s thermostat a couple meters away.

Angel sighed and unbuttoned the top of her blouse so she could remove her traveler’s wallet from around her neck. The thin pouch held her identification papers, passport, credit cards, and a small amount of cash, mostly American bills, though she still had a handful of South Korean banknotes from her brief stay in Seoul. The damn thing had a loose stitch, and it had irritated her all evening.

Feeling along the wall, at last her fingers settled upon the switch. The panel was one of those with the wide, low-profile buttons set nearly flush with the wall, and she had trouble flicking it on.

She couldn’t blame the alcohol. That had worn off hours before, as she and DeBryan sat in the hotel’s smoky cocktail lounge and talked by the massive stone fireplace. She had cut herself off at dinner, after sheepishly ordering a glass of white wine to go with Cheong’s uneaten fish, which she’d helped herself to, and instead stayed with colas. Meanwhile, DeBryan ordered snifter after snifter of some sinfully expensive brandy and never seemed to show any sign of becoming intoxicated.

After realizing that the lists on their phones required specialized software to open and read, they both decided that whatever it was could wait. Neither of them was all that eager to return to their rooms to retrieve a computer. The relaxed atmosphere in the lounge made it easy to forget the matter entirely. Or at least dismiss it for the time being. After a while, in fact, the whole 6X situation began to feel more and more like some ridiculous prank, the whimsy of a cult of spoiled and disillusioned conspiracy theorists.

Angel found it easy to listen to DeBryan. He had one of those gravelly voices, and he spoke with an easy drawl as he vividly recounted many of his adventures in the wild. He had a way of describing his escapades in a humorous way, which made her feel warm and young and wishing she could be as carefree as he seemed to be, even though he was easily her senior by a good ten, fifteen years. He confessed a secret lifelong fantasy to document some newly discovered or poorly understood Amazonian tribe or Pacific Island culture, though he acknowledged that his opportunity to do so was permanently lost to globalization and technological advancement. “Thanks in part to Google World, I’m afraid there simply are no more great anthropological discoveries left to be made.”

Sitting there with his drink in his hand, deep in thought, he looked more like a philosopher than a photographer.

He did not ask her again about her family, and for that she was grateful. It wasn’t just that it was a dark part of her life that she would rather not bring to light. After Cheong’s mention of the Newsweek article, she feared the subject might be resurrected, inevitably leading to her husband, and that was a subject she certainly wanted to avoid.

Finally, after excusing herself for about her hundredth yawn, she forced herself out of the chair. It was warm and soft and only relinquished her with considerable reluctance. But she was exhausted. And she had to pee yet again. It was half past one in the morning and she wasn’t looking forward to the long trek to the elevator. Or getting up in a few hours. Especially since she still had no plan for what to do next.

As they exited the elevator, she felt she needed to make herself perfectly clear regarding Cheong’s offer. They hadn’t spoken outright about it after the frustration of not being able to open the files, certainly hadn’t made any decisions. Nevertheless, she was pretty sure they’d come to some sort of unspoken agreement not to take the assignment. As a seasoned reporter, to her the opportunity just smelled wrong. Cheong struck her as an over-indulged millionaire with too much time, money, and imagination on his leather-clad hands. But she needed to make sure DeBryan was on the same page.

“I’m going back to Huangxia,” she told him. And he nodded and didn’t look surprised in the least. “So, we’ll decide what to do in the morning.”

“It is morning.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Goodnight.”

“ ‘Night.”

And that was that.

At last the switch on the wall yielded to the pressure in her knuckles and clicked into the ON position. The entryway flooded with light. Ahead of her, the plush white couch jumped out of the shadows deeper in the room, and the lamps and vases twinkled at her. Stepping briskly forward, she found another switch and turned it on, then placed her traveler’s wallet onto the table.

She frowned, sensing that something wasn’t right.

Her eyes shot to the sliding door and the balcony beyond. The curtains were still drawn shut, but they fluttered slightly. Had she closed the door before leaving? She wasn’t sure she had. And as she crossed the space she found herself looking at the gap between the floor and the bottom of the curtain for the telltale tips of an intruder’s shoes. But there was no one there. She pulled the heavy curtains aside and slid the door shut, cutting off the distant traffic sounds and the other noises of Shanghai city eleven stories below.

Everything in the room was in its place— the television on the stand against the left wall, the chairs, lamps, magazines, and fresh flowers were all there. Nothing seemed disturbed. And yet—

She couldn’t place her finger on it exactly, but she could sense it. A faint smell, maybe. The air felt different, disturbed. Someone had been here, maybe still was.

“Allo?”

She turned down the next hallway and glanced quickly into the bathroom.

Nothing. Her toiletry bag was right where she’d set it on the marble countertop. The courtesy hairdryer still resting beside the sink where she’d let it cool. A baggie with her toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste.

The shower was empty. She could see that from the door, could see through the glass enclosure. The towel she’d dropped, still a wet mass in the corner, though it would be mostly dry by now.

Across the hallway, the door to the master bedroom. She pushed it open—

The room was in complete disarray.

Pins prickled the skin on her palms and neck. The sensation spread down her back, breaking her out into a cold sweat. If she weren’t wide awake before, or completely sober, she was now.

Her bag lay on the bed, its contents disgorged. She knew instinctively that her laptop was gone. The cheap little point-and-shoot camera she’d bought in the hotel lobby as a backup for the camera on her cell phone was on the floor, its access panel torn open and its insides ripped out. She hadn’t even used it. Her lithium pills had been dumped out, the plastic bottle tossed carelessly against the wall. Her clothes had been rifled through; all of the pockets had been turned inside out.

She didn’t know what they were looking for, or even if they’d found it, though she suspected what it was. She ran into the bathroom and tore through her toiletries bag, dumping everything out in a mess into the sink. She pulled out travel-sized containers of lotion, makeup, and acne medicine, scattering them across the counter and onto the floor until she found what she was looking for. The tampon looked intact, the ends of the paper still twisted like a piece of candy. She tore at it and threw the wrapper behind her. She ran her fingers along the white cigar-shaped object and could feel the tiny disk inside, exactly where she’d hidden it. She slipped it into her back pocket.

DeBryan!

She was running before thinking about what she was doing, pushing her way up the hall and back into the main room, then up the entryway. She felt slow, like the air had suddenly gotten denser. She yanked the door open, stepped out and heard it click shut behind her before remembering she’d left her card key inside.

The door to DeBryan’s room was shut. Not a sound emanated from within. Angel stepped across the wide hall and raised her fist, but the door flew open so quickly that she nearly fell in.

A shape filled the doorway, and it took her a split second to realize it wasn’t the photographer. This man was younger, mid-twenties perhaps, Asian. His head was clean shaven. Both his scalp and face were darkly tattooed, the design a pattern of black flames which rose from beneath the collar of his gray shirt and a smattering of Chinese characters. The flames swirled around and over his eyes.

“What—!”

It was all she managed to get out before he grabbed her by the collar and shoved away. The air exploded out of her as she slammed into the wall beside her own door. Her head hit and stars filled her vision. The world tilted. She half-slid, half-fell to the floor, and shouted for him to stop. The attacker ran away, bypassing the elevator and slamming through the exit stairwell at the far end of the hall before she could even get back to her feet. A door opened as she stumbled past. She cried out to the woman to call the police, call security.

She could hear him pounding down the stairs, jumping at each landing and coming down hard, gasping for air. She ran as fast as she dared to try and catch him. Down a story, then another, spinning around each flight with her hand locked onto the metal railing to keep her from losing her balance. He reached the lobby level, yet kept going. Down two more flights until he reached the garage. He was three floors ahead when he exited, and she feared she’d lose him now for sure.

The echo of the man’s pounding feet reached her ears when she burst through the garage door and stopped. She heard no car engine, no screech of tires, just that steady drumbeat. A fist crashed into the side of her face, knocking her down again, and as she went she realized that the noise had been her own heart slamming inside her chest.

“What do you want?” she screamed, and lashed blindly out with one hand, protecting herself with the other.

Her attacker wheezed heavily as he kicked her in the side, grunting with the effort. It wasn’t a very strong kick, but it caught her just under the ribs and sent a jolt of pain racing up into her jaw. He coughed and spat a thick wad of phlegm onto the cement beside her. He’d run her all the way down here not to escape from her, but to quickly finish her off in private. By the labored sound of his breathing, she guessed he was sick with some kind of lung disease and knew he wouldn’t be able to outrun her.

He tried to push away, but she had a hold of something. It took her a moment to realize it was DeBryan’s pack. He yelled and tried to wrench it out of her hand, nearly yanking her off the ground.

“Let go!” she screamed.

Instead, he slammed his body into hers, crushing her against the concrete wall of the parking structure. A knife appeared in his other hand. Angel shrieked and raked her nails at him, catching his cheek and neck. And then the blade was a flashing silver arc, rising above them, ready to be brought back down and across her neck.

“Stop!” came a shout.

Her attacker hesitated, his dark, sunken eyes flicking away for just the fraction of a moment. Angel didn’t wait. She twisted out from beneath him and scurried sideways along the wall.

“You there!” the shout came again. “Get away from her!”

And now the man was running, sprinting across the parking lot. Angel tried to locate her rescuer, but the sounds were distorted as they echoed off the walls. “Stop him,” she croaked. Then again, louder. But no one answered.

She stumbled to her feet, collected the knife her attacker had dropped, and gave chase.

Chapter Seven

If the streets hadn’t been as empty as they were, Angel might have lost the thief immediately, but her luck held and she guessed correctly which way he’d turned exiting the parking garage. She remembered being told once that, if given an equal opportunity to turn left or right, an individual in flight would be more likely to turn in the direction opposite his dominant side, pivoting on his strong foot. She didn’t know if it was true, but she did recall that the man had held the knife in his left hand, so she turned right the moment her feet hit the sidewalk outside. A quick glance to the left as she did so confirmed only that the street behind her was indeed empty. But so was the street ahead.

She kept running, accelerating to as much of a sprint as she could manage in her pumps, casting her eyes into each doorway that she passed.

She skidded to the corner and looked right again. Then left. The man was a tiny figure in the distance, running a zigzagged course, his jacket flapping at his sides and his feet smacking the pavement. He was limping slightly and straining to maintain his pace. The pack in his hand was further slowing him down, dragging on him. Adrenaline coursed through Angel’s body and she immediately took off after him. She was certain she could catch up, as long as he remained in sight.

He turned left again at the next corner, as if sensing that he’d been seen, and by the time Angel reached the spot, perhaps fifteen seconds later, he had vanished. Her feet slapped to a stop, and she looked desperately about her, hoping for a sign to tell her where he’d gone.

There was an alleyway here, too narrow and cluttered to allow a car to pass through it. Some of the doors were flush with the buildings’ walls, others were recessed. Some stood atop a handful of steps, some at street level. Only a few were lit by overhead bulbs.

A truck rumbled past on the street behind her, splashing through puddles from an earlier rain. Somewhere off to the right, two or three blocks away, a pedestrian walk signal chirped with merry abandon. She turned toward it and stared, peering into the white mist drifting up from the wet roadway. But the intersection was empty.

Deep in the alley a garbage can lid clattered to the ground. A cat meowed and emerged out of the shadows into the glow of a lamp. Something fluttered in the darkness high above, a pigeon disturbed by the noise, perhaps.

Angel peered balefully at the cloaked doorways and barred windows. The air was laden with warm humidity and smelled of packed dirt, rotten garbage, and fried pork. Beneath it all was a hint of ginseng and clove. The man could be hiding anywhere along the alley’s length. Or he could be long gone.

He’s here. He’s waiting for you.

A neon sign for a massage parlor hummed several doors down, signaling in both Mandarin and English that the establishment was open and taking walk-in customers. She was tempted to check it out, as it seemed a likely route of escape for the man, but warning bells clanged inside her head.

She took a tentative step forward.

The pedestrian crossing signal began to chirp again. Angel didn’t bother looking this time. She knew the street would be empty.

Where had he gone? Why had he broken into their rooms? Did he find whatever he’d been after? The questions were only the latest in an expanding list now crowding her thoughts.

Sighing resignedly, she turned around. It wasn’t worth the risk. And now that she’d decided against it, the adrenaline of the pursuit began to dissipate. Her injuries now drew her attention. The back of her head pounded from being slammed into the wall and her face ached terribly from where the man had punched her. Her whole body throbbed from the force of her blood pulsing through it.

She raised a hand to check the nail she’d torn away from the bed as she tried unsuccessfully to take DeBryan’s pack from the thief, the same one she’d broken earlier. The fingertip was bleeding, coating her hand and the knife, which she still held. She pried her fingers apart and slipped the weapon into the back pocket of her slacks.

A few bumps and scrapes were no worse than she’d experienced in the past. It went with the job sometimes. The psychological injuries would trouble her longer, the pain of realizing how much her safety and security had been violated. She was more than familiar with those things. That pain, she knew, would never quite go away. Her body would heal after an injury, might even scar, but the mind never cured completely. It would always bleed a little from every wound inflicted ever upon it and never fully scab over.

Fine, she thought bitterly, let him have the damn laptop. And whatever else he managed to swipe. She curled her aching fingers into a fist, nestling her throbbing finger tightly inside, and headed back to the hotel.

* * *

An officer from the Shanghai City Police Force stopped Angel the moment the elevator doors opened on the eleventh floor, shouting from the middle of the hallway in broken English not to step out as an active criminal investigation was in progress.

“I know that!” she replied, trying to keep her voice from shaking, and stepped out anyway. His eyes widened at the sight of her, but he didn’t move to block her way.

She pointed at the woman who’d poked her head out of her room as she ran past earlier. The elderly lady was speaking with another officer. Her carefully coiffed hair had begun to unravel and a forgotten cigarette dangled from her lips, ash longer than the talons on her fingers drooping toward the floor and smoke curling in the opposite direction.

Hearing their voices, the man attending to her looked over. He spoke a few more words, and then the woman turned and her face went pale. She nodded anxiously. The officer immediately left her side.

“You know man in room 1137?”

Angel nodded and turned toward him. It was DeBryan’s room. “He can vouch for m—”

The officer placed his hand on his service revolver and said something to his partner. The first officer nodded and demanded to see her papers.

“They’re in my room across the hall. 1138. I don’t have my—”

“What your name?”

She told him, adding that she was a reporter.

“You know man in 1137?”

“Yes. I said I did. Bring him out here. He’ll tell you—”

“He no help you.”

“What are you talking about?”

The officer gestured at her blouse, and she saw for the first time the dark red spots on it, as if she’d spilled wine on it. Her nose had bled, and she hadn’t even noticed. “Why you bleeding?” he demanded.

“I was chasing a man. He punched me. I tried to stop him, but—”

“Why?”

Angel was getting frustrated with the officer not letting her finish.

“He broke into my room and stole my computer laptop.”

“Your room? Why you go into other room? American’s?”

“What? I didn’t. The man, the thief, he was in there.”

“In your room, in other room. Which one? Why you leave? Why you run away?”

“I didn’t run away! Ask that woman. She saw the man. He broke into our rooms and stole things. I was chasing after him trying to stop him.”

The officer turned and translated to his partner, who spoke once more with the woman. She shook her head and said something back.

“She no see man.”

“He was there!”

Angel glanced over his shoulder to where the door to DeBryan’s room stood open. She could just make out the back of a third officer standing inside. Now he turned, and she saw that he was wearing latex gloves and shoe covers.

“Just, please,” she said, but it seemed to her that the world was closing in, the walls crowding her. Her words sounded like they were coming from somewhere far away. “Mister DeBryan will confirm what I’m telling you.”

“He won’t,” the officer replied, and his words also sounded too faint. He grabbed her arm.

“I don’t understand.” But she did, and the officer’s next words only confirmed it:

“American is dead.”

Chapter Eight

The police finally released her shortly after two the next afternoon, following a long, exhausting night of questions.

The detectives had been relentless, asking about her relationship with the murdered photographer, the missing items from their rooms, the reason for their stay in Shanghai. When she told them about investigating the tragedy at Huangxia, they left the room for several minutes, then returned even more suspicious, insisting that she was lying. There was no tragedy on the resort island, nothing reported anywhere about it. She was using the earthquake in the region as a distraction.

“It’s true!”

“There no tragedy on Huangxia!”

She couldn’t tell if they were genuinely ignorant of the situation there or part of the cover-up. When she told them she’d been there herself less than twenty-four hours before and seen the devastation with her own eyes, they screamed at her in frustration, slamming the table with their palms and ordering her to stop lying and tell the truth.

“The place was empty! Everyone’s dead or gone. I saw the bodies, hundreds of them. We both did. The soldiers made us leave.”

It was off season, they said. No tourists, only locals.

She had no photographs, nothing to prove her assertions. Not that she thought it would help. They would simply claim the images were fake. The officers seemed determined not to believe her.

She had considered telling them about the tiny memory disk DeBryan had given her, the one wrapped inside the tampon. The police had confiscated it before interrogating her, along with anything else she’d been carrying or allowed to retrieve from the room, once the hotel manager gave her access to it. It had all been sealed inside a plastic baggie before being catalogued and whisked away. The disk remained undetected. And without knowing exactly what was on it, she decided there was too much at stake to risk letting them have it. She knew she was innocent. She had to have faith that her innocence would eventually force them to release her. Surely the hotel security cameras would substantiate her story.

“Camera video will be checked,” she was told, “once we have warrant. It not like United States. People have rights to privacy. Must follow protocol.”

DeBryan’s backpack had finally been recovered in the alleyway, right where she’d told them the attacker had led her. It was covered in blood, which she was certain their analysis would show belonged to him. “And blood on knife we found in pocket?” they demanded.

“I don’t know! I suppose it might be his, but also mine.” She showed them her finger.

“Blood on clothes?”

She was certain that belonged only to her. She had bled, she told them, not from a struggle with DeBryan, but with the attacker.

“Laboratory test will prove if you are telling truth!”

The rest of the pack was of little help. It had been emptied of everything but a few useless notes, DeBryan’s identification papers, and a pair of dirty socks. Several more items were found in a trashcan a block away, but when they were shown to her, Angel couldn’t confirm that any of it was his. Neither laptop had been located, nor the phone Cheong had given DeBryan to replace the one he’d lost on Huangxia.

At half past one the chief of the Criminal Investigations Division interrupted the interview to tell her she was free to go. Hotel security cameras confirmed her story, he said. He spoke quietly but with emotion.

Exhausted, hungry, and slightly hungover, Angel wanted to lash out at him. Why had it taken so long to review the camera footage? How had hotel security been so lax? What were they going to do to recover the missing laptops? But before she could say anything, the chief brusquely pushed his detectives from the room before shutting the door behind them and turning to her.

He stood for a moment and studied her with such intensity that she found herself unable to move. Finally, he threw the bag with her belongings onto the table and told her that he wanted her out of his city that very day. “I don’t care where you go, just leave.”

“But—”

He leaned in over the table and spoke in a near whisper. “You will also not speak of Huangxia again. If you do, we may decide to reanalyze the evidence collected this morning and I am certain it will implicate you in your colleague’s death, you and no one else. I will then do everything in my power to make sure you answer for the crime. I don’t care who you know or where in the world you are.”

Angel was livid. How dare this man, this Inspector Liu, threaten her? How dare he censor her? He had no right! “The United States has no extradition treaty with your country,” she told him.

“But France does,” he replied, just as assuredly.

“The agreement was never ratified,” she countered. But the conviction had gone out of her. Despite the failure of the French parliament to ratify the treaty the president signed nearly a decade before, she knew it wouldn’t stop the police and the government from acting under the principle of aut dedere aut judicare if the Chinese demanded it. The subject had been in the news a lot lately, but mainly in regard to the extradition of terrorists and those accused of economic and cybercrimes. With some bitterness, she had to admit to herself that her own government would capitulate to a request made by Beijing. The French, her own people, more than deserved their reputation as pushovers.

Of course, she could easily avoid being sent back here if it ever came to it, but that would mean never going home again, never seeing her brother. And that just wasn’t possible.

The chief investigator pushed himself off the table and nodded once, briskly. “One of my officers will escort you back to your hotel, where you may recover the rest of your belongings. He will take you to the airport and wait with you until you are on the airplane.”

She got up to leave.

“We know you did it,” he said, and he looked at her with deep contempt, as if he truly believed that she was no better than a common thief. Then he spun on his heels and left the room.

* * *

Alvin Cheong was waiting in the lobby when Angel arrived at the hotel. She saw him the moment she stepped through the front doors. He pressed his cigarette into the crystal ashtray beside him and stood up to meet her. He nodded once and, without a word being spoken, her police escort immediately dropped back. Angel was surprised when the officer didn’t board the elevator with them, as the CID chief had instructed.

“How did you know I’d be released?” she asked.

“Chief Inspector Liu is an acquaintance,” Cheong explained, leaning forward to press the button for her floor.

“Acquaintance,” she mumbled. “How convenient.”

“He takes a particular interest in my activities.”

“You mean 6X’s activities.”

Cheong shrugged.

“He disapproves.”

He laughed in surprise. “No, my dear.”

Angel was silent as the elevator passed between the third and ninth floors. No one got on with them, but at this early hour of the afternoon, she knew that there were probably more guests checking out than in; the elevators would be filled going down. She’d noticed, for example, how the hotel lobby had been lousy with businessmen, all standing about in their tight secretive groups, smoking their cigarettes. There had been only one family present, and they looked like they were heading out for an afternoon of shopping or sightseeing. The absence of police, indeed of any sign of last night’s mishap, was conspicuous only to her.

“I’ve been ordered out of the country,” she said, turning to him. “I’m sorry, but—”

“Liu requested only that you leave the city. You do not have to leave China.”

Angel gave him a sharp look.

He sighed. “This whole affair has been a rather unfortunate distraction, drawing more attention on you than I would have preferred. It would have been easier for you to start your investigation without the spotlight. Alas, the photographer’s death will—”

“You didn’t want DeBryan anyway. And now he’s out of the picture. Funny how it worked out that way.”

He frowned at her, but didn’t rise to the challenge, which only made her more suspicious of him.

“In the matter of your release,” he quietly told her, “I had to pull some strings, smooth some ruffled feathers. The police were ready to process you.” It was a veiled threat, and Angel readily saw through it.

The bell rang, indicating they’d arrived on her floor. The doors opened onto an empty hallway.

“I’m the victim here,” Angel whispered. She didn’t know why, but it felt wrong to keep shouting, just a few meters away from where her colleague had died. “I didn’t do anything to DeBryan. Why would I? I barely knew the man.”

“That’s exactly what I told Liu. It was just a random crime; that’s what I said. You just happened to get caught in the middle.”

“It wasn’t random.”

He ignored her. “It took some convincing, but I finally managed to assure him that you were innocent.”

“I am innocent!”

“According to him, the blood evidence was quite compelling, telling a very different story.”

“That’s not true!”

“As I said, he was ready to charge you.”

“He said the hotel video confirmed my story.”

Alvin sighed. “Perhaps it did, but it won’t help you now. I’ve just been informed that the video has gone missing.”

“In the space of an hour?”

“It happens. The City Police are overworked and understaffed.”

He stopped and turned to her. “But enough about that. It’s immaterial now. You are free, and the police have suspended any charges against you. There is, however, still the matter between us to be addressed.”

Angel felt the hair on her scalp prickle, which it did when she sensed someone was railroading her. She didn’t know what this man’s intentions were beyond getting her to look into a mysterious train derailment in Inner Mongolia, nor could she figure out how it might be related to a group of crazies who were convinced that the end of the world was coming. She didn’t think he’d tell her if she asked.

More tellingly, she found she just didn’t care.

“You expect me to work for you now, after all this? How can I even trust you?”

They arrived at her door, and Angel couldn’t help but stare at the one across the hall. There was no police tape on it, no indication that a man had died here less than twelve hours before. What exactly had happened in there? It seemed pretty clear that DeBryan had interrupted the intruder and gotten a taste of the man’s blade for it. But had the man been anything more than just a common thief, as Cheong suggested? It was just too coincidental to be dismissed.

She also wondered what might have happened if they’d returned just a few minutes earlier. Would she now be the one zipped inside a plastic bag and slid into a refrigerated drawer in whatever passed for a police morgue in this country? Somehow, that just didn’t seem to be part of the script.

And what exactly is the script?

She wish she knew.

She sucked in a sharp breath when the door suddenly opened and DeBryan stepped out of the room dressed in one of the hotel’s plush robes. Except, she realized a half second later, it wasn’t him but a tall elderly Chinese gentleman.

He nodded once at them, avoiding eye contact, and hurried down the hall toward the elevator, his thongs slapping the bottoms of his feet as he went.

“Things happen for a reason, Missus de l’Enfantine,” Cheong quietly said. “I truly believe that. Mister DeBryan would only have distracted you from your work.”

Distracted?

She spun on him. “I think you dismiss the dead too easily, Monsieur Cheong! But then again, what is one man’s death when you’ve already written off millions? Or billions? That’s what 6X is doing, isn’t it? Writing them off? Writing us all off! You make me sick.”

“You would not be so flippant if you knew the things we know.”

“I don’t care! I’ve already decided not to take your offer. We both had. We were going to return to Huangxia, but that’s clearly off the table now.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Mister DeBryan texted me last night. He had every intention of working for us. Of course, it was contingent on you agreeing. He indicated that he would work on changing your mind.”

“That’s a lie!”

“See for yourself,” he said, holding out his phone.

She slammed her cardkey into the slot, then rammed the door open with her shoulder. “Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to collect my things and I’m going to leave this screwed up country of yours. I believe that’s what your acquaintance, Chief Inspector Liu, wanted me to do.”

Cheong sighed and shook his head. “Very well, but when you change your mind—”

“I won’t.”

“When you do, you’ll find my number already programmed into your phone.”

Chapter Nine

She almost chickened out and booked a flight to New York instead of Charles de Gaulle, but with her brother on her mind, she decided she needed to spend some time at home. Despite the terrible childhood memories that the family estate held for her, they were tempered by her concern for Jacques. She’d neither seen nor heard from him in over a week, since she’d come across that random tweet about Huangxia, and knew that he could sometimes get himself into trouble if she didn’t remind him every couple days to take his medicine. Her calls from the airport had likewise gone unanswered.

She boarded the plane feeling agitated. She didn’t like the feeling of retreat, of unfinished business. It troubled her being forced to look away from the Huangxia situation, troubled her equally that it upset her more than did DeBryan’s death. But, she reasoned, she had only known the man for a few days, and they all knew the risks of their work. Reporters died on assignment from time to time. The riskier the job, the more likely it was that an accident would occur.

She tried to distract herself by doing the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine. A previous passenger had started it, but then gave up after the third clue. Soon after the plane departed, however, she passed out from exhaustion, and so the next ten hours slipped by her in a sort of blissful oblivion, even if her sleep was filled with disturbing visions.

Arriving by taxi at the family house, she wasn’t surprised to find the place empty. She called Jacques’ name, but all was silent save for the echoes of her voice off the Calacatta marble walls and floors of the expansive entryway.

Feeling lost and helpless, she wandered into the kitchen. It was designed for preparing meals for large gatherings, and when her father had had it redone, he’d had all of the appliances replaced with stainless steel. The modern look clashed with the old in a way that always set her teeth on edge.

The milk in the fridge had soured but not yet clumped. She dumped it down the sink and rinsed the glass bottle before setting it aside. The dishes in the basin were crusted in a petrified layer of something unidentifiable, which looked like her brother had prepared it himself. Angel made a mental note to give the service a call and ask them to do another shop and cleaning. They were supposed to come weekly, but sometimes Jacques would send them away.

There was no note for her, no message on her phone or email to tell her where he’d gone. Or when he’d be back. She muttered under her breath that he was fine, trying to convince herself that he really was, then forced herself to prepare some tea. But she only got so far as to set some water on the stove before she broke down and hurried upstairs to check that he wasn’t in his room lying in a pool of his own vomit.

She knocked, and by the hollowness of the sound she sensed the room really was empty. When she tried the knob, it yielded, confirming her suspicions. He always kept the door locked whenever he was inside.

She checked his bathroom next and found the line of medicine bottles on the counter, all in a row. Everything seemed in order.

Some months before, after he’d finally relented to her pleas that he go see a new doctor, she’d gotten him a pill organizer. There were so many different kinds of medicines now, so many different ways that they needed to be taken, that she had feared he’d make a mistake and regress. They’d worked so hard to get him to this point, to where he was able to begin to function halfway normally again, that it felt like standing at the top of a high narrow ridge with the wind howling about them, constantly shifting, testing their balance. She kept expecting to fall. One moment of lost concentration and they would.

And Jacques would be right back where he was a year ago.

He insisted that it wasn’t her job to hold him steady, even deeply resented her for it. She told him that no one else would catch him if he fell. But he just shut her out more the harder she tried.

She flipped open the lids and saw that the pills from Sunday through Tuesday were gone. It was now Wednesday, which meant either that he was precisely on schedule or he’d missed an entire week’s worth.

The dishes in the kitchen sink forced her to accept the less favorable possibility that her brother had indeed relapsed. The last time it happened she’d found him lost and wandering around in the city unable to remember who he was or where he belonged. Lyon wasn’t a terribly unsafe place, not unless you were an obvious tourist and unaware of your surroundings, but it still held the usual hazards, even for locals. And if her brother was off his meds, then he could get too wrapped up inside his own head to recognize the risks.

With a vague sense of resentment and a creeping sense of dread, she placed a call to the local Préfecture de Police, as well as to several of the hospitals in the area. They were familiar with her brother’s case, but none reported seeing him in recent days.

“Oh, Jacques,” she said, cursing him in French. “As if I don’t already have enough to worry about.”

* * *

The accident had happened more than three years ago, a few months before she and David returned to Manhattan. It was like the place was cursed, as much for Jacques as it was for her. Whether or not she wanted to leave, Lyon kept drawing them both back, sucking the life out of them both.

Had it not been for David, would she have ever returned at all? She wanted to believe that her flight to the States, her medical schooling and licensing there would have been enough of an anchor to keep her there. But maybe not. Maybe it was inevitable that she came back. Maybe she blamed David too much.

Shortly after marrying, he’d begged her to give it a go. He loved the idea of life in “the old country,” as he put it, not realizing how much that description grated at her. David was an incurable romantic, attacking everything he did and believed in with religious zeal, whether it was a scientific pursuit or some entirely impractical one.

So that was how they’d taken up residence in the family house that July four-and-a-half years before, his countering her resistance with the promise that it would only be for the summer. But a few weeks turned into a couple months, and before long he was suggesting that they make it permanent. “Places die if they are left empty,” he’d told her with macabre solemnity. “Walls collapse without people to fill them and the sounds of their existence to hold them up. Laughter to buttress against the eroding effect of silence.” She had once thought of him as much poet as scientist, had fallen in love with the dichotomy he presented. But from that point forward, it had become something about him to resent.

How could she argue? The house had stood empty for some time. Her parents were buried over a year by then, and Jacques had officially left two years before with no desire to ever return, just like her. For all practical purposes, her brother’s claim to the estate had ended long before, once he became old enough to attend lycée at Saint-Étienne, about sixty kilometers away. Their mother had begged him to live at home, to which he always replied, “How can one write on the plight of the bourgeoisie if blinded behind the gilded walls of a citadel?”

He immersed himself completely in the concerns of the common man, choosing to take up residence in a crowded boarding house with several other students in his literature program. He could have taken a private room anywhere, lived in the type of luxury he had grown up used to. But he had soured of it. They both had.

The house should have made the perfect setting for a writer’s pursuits — quiet, expansive, filled with history — but Angel knew that it was history which chased Jacques away, just as it had her. After receiving his baccalauréat, he moved even further away, settling into a small apartment in the Reuilly arrondissement of Paris.

He would never have returned either if she hadn’t married David.

David, her David.

Of course, her ex had no such history with the place. He could not know the indelicate position he was putting Angel in. She tried to tell him, but he was intractable on the matter, deaf. “It’d be a shame for Chèvrefeuille to turn to dust and the gardens overgrown with brambles.”

Chèvrefeuille.

It gave her the creeps hearing the name her parents had christened the place slipping so fluently through his lips. And now, the echoes of his voice seeming to sound more like her father’s.

She should never have relented! If she’d just refused from the beginning, Jacques would not have fallen.

They had been arguing, she and David. She couldn’t even recall exactly how it started, nor could she even be sure if her growing unhappiness was the cause. But she did remember clearly telling David that she couldn’t live another week in the place. The memories were just too painful.

They were in the master bedroom at the top of the grand staircase, the room Jacques now called his own. David was begging with her, pleading, convinced that she was blowing it all out of proportion, and she had run blindly out of the room, not expecting anyone to be standing there. Jacques had come to pay them a surprise visit. It was the second anniversary of their parents’ passing.

Had that been what triggered the argument, put her into a black mood? The moments leading up to the accident eluded her.

He’d had his hand raised to knock when she hit him with the full force of her body, sending him reeling across the landing.

Never would she forget the surprised look on his face as he tumbled over the railing. Or the sick, wet smack of his body hitting the floor four meters below. She screamed then and ran for the stairs. But by the time she came around the corner enough to see below, convinced that he was dead, Jacques was already struggling to stand up.

Somehow, he’d hit with his feet first. The impact caused his knees to buckle — luckily in the anatomically correct way — and then he landed on his side. His head hit too, but by then the majority of the energy had been lost. The cut on his temple was small, the bump nothing to worry about. Miraculous. Or so they’d all believed.

“I’m okay,” he’d insisted, and refused her attentions. She remembered chastising him, telling him to stop being such a child. And of course he’d responded by telling her he wasn’t her little brother anymore, that he’d grown up and was an adult now.

After that scary episode, the fight had gone out of the both of them. The subject of their leaving was dropped.

But the fall had been more serious than they’d realized. Jacques’ spleen had been ruptured, and he’d proceeded to lose blood over the course of the next several hours. If they hadn’t all gone out to dinner and been in the middle of the city next to a hospital when he collapsed, he would not have survived.

The fluid loss had been severe. And coupled with the concussion, he suffered a series of small strokes over the next three days which robbed him of much of his memory and physical control.

The recovery was long and difficult. It was still not complete, not psychologically anyway, and she feared that it might never be. The old Jacques was in attendance more often than not, as long as he kept to his strict regimen of self-medication. But every once in a while, he’d stop or forget a dose, and he’d become a different man. Then she’d have to intervene.

She had learned to recognize the early signs of these changes by reading his blog posts. The writing would shift, grow dark. A timely phone call to the service she employed to help watch over him would often be all that was needed. The blog was a convenient window into her brother’s mind, one which she kept secret from him.

But the posts weren’t an infallible oracle. Every once in a while, his writing would veer without warning onto some disturbing tangent, and she’d know that the madness had taken control of him.

She hoped that wasn’t what had happened to him now.

Chapter Ten

A loud crash startled Angel awake several hours later. It was raining hard, and the wind wrestled in the eaves. She could hear the torrents of water rushing down the roof and collecting in the clay gutters, rattling down the steel downspouts. Another ground shaking boom quickly followed, this one arriving almost immediately on the heels of a flash of lightning which lit up the darkened library where she’d drifted off, casting the old, dusty tomes and artifacts in stark shades of white and gray.

She had come in to use the computer but had gotten sidetracked looking over some old papers left out on the desk during her last visit. It seemed ages ago that she’d been in here, three or four months now. Jacques rarely, if ever, visited the room, and he certainly didn’t bother with the desk. She doubted he used any of the rooms other than his own, the bathroom, and the kitchen. And the once-a-week housekeeper would have simply left the papers where they lay, not knowing where to file them.

As for the computer, he had built his own from parts scavenged in second-hand shops in town. She knew that he constantly tinkered with it.

The papers were just medical reports. She remembered that she’d had them out to check on Jacques’ medications. She’d wanted to make sure he understood which dosages of which pills were to be taken at which time. It was all so very confusing, prompting her to buy him the plastic pill calendar now sitting on his bathroom vanity. He’d refused to use it at first, so she was glad to see that he’d relented.

The library’s wooden and leather desk chair was very large, very old, and much too luxuriant to have been of much practical use when her father had it made some four decades before. But then again, he had always been a large man. Now the abused cushion wheezed deeply whenever she sat in it, folding over the sides of her legs like it intended to swallow her up.

She pushed herself up with a grunt, unhappy that she’d fallen asleep, and made her way to the door.

The library sat at the terminus of a long hallway that branched off the left side of the front entryway, and as she passed along it, light from the lamps lining the walkway outside flung shadows against the wall. The sharp smell of the storm was fuller than she expected, and so she knew that it was in the house with her.

The entryway floor glistened with wetness, reflecting the glow which came in through the open door from the mock-gaslights outside.

She wasn’t scared. Not bodily, anyway. She knew, seeing the tracked puddles, that there was no physical threat to her. Of course, it was incongruous given how much this place threatened her. And considering how recently the intrusion at the hotel in Shanghai had been, and the consequence of it to DeBryan, she had every right to feel terrified. After all, a person had entered her house unseen while she slept unaware, had come in out of the dark night, and left the door wide open.

Unseen, perhaps, but not unknown. Anyone with malicious intent would not have deposited a sloppy trail of rainwater across the vestibule and up the marble stairs.

Brother Jacques is home.

Stepping carefully over the puddles, she made her way slowly up the stairs, gripping the railing so tightly that she could feel the bones in her hand compressing the thin flesh which sheathed them.

“Jacques?”

Frère Jacques, frère Jacques . . . ?

She knocked gently on his door. “It’s Angelique,” she told him in French.

Dormez vous? Dormez vous?

“I arrived this evening.”

There was a rustle of sound and something that might have been a cough.

“Je m’inquiète pour toi.” I’m worried about you.

She tried the knob but found it locked. She wasn’t surprised.

“Qu’est que c’est je te peux faire?” Is there anything I can do for you?

Non. Jacque’s thin voice. Vas t’en.

Go away.

“Est-ce que tu vas bien?” Are you all right?

Vas t’en.

She squeezed her eyes tight against the tears.

Go away.

Go away.

It was always the same between them.

She could hear the clack of his computer keyboard and knew that he was writing, probably exorcising another social evil he had newly encountered. Pushing him, especially when he was in such a state, would extract no information and only sharpen his resentment at her; he would talk to her only when he was ready.

She made a mental note to recheck his blog in the morning.

Outside, another clap of thunder shattered the steady rasp of the rain, but this one sounded farther away than the others. The storm was moving on.

“Make sure you dry yourself off,” she told him, and pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. This old house felt damp and cold. The sweater, from the closet in her room downstairs was one she rarely wore. It smelled of mothballs. She didn’t remember putting it on, but was glad she had it now. “You’ll catch your death.”

The grandfather clock at the end of the hallway chimed quietly: Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

She knew the time it showed would be wrong. She always tried to remember to wind and reset it when she was here, but Jacques rarely bothered to do it. When she stepped over to it, she saw that the hands pointed at just past eleven. It felt later than that.

“I’m going to warm myself up some soup,” she told him, once more passing by his door on her way down. “Feel free to join me.” She paused, then added, “I’ll go shopping in the morning. There’s barely anything here to eat. You haven’t called for a delivery in a while.”

She was relieved that he had come home again, but not relieved enough to stanch that slow, simmering irritation that always came with worrying about him.

“You left the front door open and let the rain in.”

She waited several more seconds, but all she received back was the frantic rattle of his fingertips weaving his muddled thoughts and sending them out into the world for all but her to see.

* * *

The bread was dry, as was the cheese, but both softened up readily enough in the hot soup. Angel took the tray from the kitchen, pausing at the base of the stairs in the now-illuminated and mopped entryway and listened for a moment before heading back into the library. She couldn’t hear him writing.

Dormez-vous?

If Jacques was awake, he was probably reading.

Rain was still coming down, though the storm had moved on. The steady drone of it against the roof and running along the gutters was soothing. Through one of the floor-to-ceiling length windows, she watched it for a moment turning the drive into a flat gray sea. Had it not been for the unkempt hedges just beyond, one could easily imagine that the house had been lifted entirely from its foundation and floated away.

Everything beyond the drive was darkness. Even the town down below was invisible.

A chill still clung to the air in the library, despite her turning on the heater. It was much cooler after the warmth of the kitchen, and she wrapped the sweater around her again and shivered.

The loss of her laptop in Shanghai was not a significant blow; she was more irritated with the phone. With all the travel she did, she knew it was a matter of time before something like that would happen. Theft, confiscation, and hacking were constant possibilities. No matter how secure she tried to be, how aware of the risks, it was inevitable that she might find herself without the computer, which is why she always backed everything up into the cloud. And from there, she made sure to keep a separate backup on a server she rented from a company in Seattle.

The laptop she kept in the Lyon house was only a couple years old, but noticeably clunky by the standards of the day. The operating system and software appeared to have finished updating since she’d turned it on that afternoon.

She set the tray on the desk, sliding it to the left and out of the way of the auxiliary keyboard, then settled herself back into the overstuffed monstrosity of a chair. As always, it gave out a noisy puff of air and a dusty, slightly moldy odor. She carefully extracted the tiny memory disk from the roll of hygienic cotton and inserted it into the card reader slot in the front of the machine. A spinning hourglass icon appeared on the screen.

As she waited, scenes from the past few days tripped through her mind. It seemed such a senseless thing, DeBryan’s murder at the hands of some common street thug, not that she believed for a second that’s what he was. Nothing about the break-in felt random at all. So the question was, why had they been targeted? Her instincts told her that the government was hiding something at Huangxia, despite Cheong’s assertions to the contrary.

Finally, the spinning hourglass icon disappeared and a dialog box popped open asking her if she wished to view the photographs. She did.

There were only about a dozen picture files, and most appeared to have been taken from the window of DeBryan’s room on the island. The images accurately depicted the destruction which had been wrought on the island, proof of what she’d told the police. Would the Chinese government kill to keep them from being published?

What lengths would PRC officials go to in order to keep a secret? Would they murder an American journalist? Their failure to respond to the tragedy would have been an embarrassment in the international community, but no more so than so many of the other failures the press reported on year after year after year. What was different about this time?

She came to the last file and waited for it to open. Finally, it popped up onto her screen, and she realized why it took an inordinately long amount of time. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t a photo but a short video. It showed a sweeping view of the rubble in near-darkness, but according to the time stamp, it had been recorded in the pre-dawn hours the next morning, when the day’s first light was beginning to flush the darkness out of the sky.

She watched it once through, her chin resting on her hand, before straightening up in surprise. Now she leaned forward and stared hard at the lower left corner of the screen as she replayed it. This time, an icy cold chill passed through her, freezing the blood in her veins.

Three more times she watched the clip, each time focusing on the same corner. The quality of the video wasn’t great, and given the dim light it was shot in, the image was quite pixelated. But what she saw was unequivocal.

With shaking fingers, she removed the disk from the laptop and dropped it on the desk as if it were contaminated with some deadly virus. Then, after a very long time had passed, she picked up her cell phone and dialed. The call connected almost immediately.

“I’ll give you a week,” she said.

Chapter Eleven

An icy wind howled across the grasslands and knocked the car from left to right and back again. Between the gusts, the sorry state of the roads, and the inadequate shock absorbers, Angel felt her organs had traveled well beyond the land of the bruised. After Shanghai, they may have started out that way, but they’d since crossed over the border into the realm of the battered and abused, and were now solidly situated somewhere east of tenderized.

Twice she’d bitten her tongue, once when the right front tire slammed suddenly into an especially deep pothole which then launched her to the car’s roof, and once when the entire vehicle rode a swale that felt as if the tarmac had turned into a marshmallow the size of a swimming pool. After an hour of complaining, she gave up asking Jian, her driver, to slow down and settled back in her seat with her carry-on pack clutched tight against her chest and her teeth clenched until her jaw cramped. The peril to her tongue was too great to risk opening her mouth to speak.

She had never seen any landscape as monotonous as the eastern steppes, and she knew it was only going to get more desolate and more cold as the day wore on. She was glad she’d packed thermal underwear.

The temperature upon her arrival in Beijing had been moderate. It was a cloudy day, but without a breeze. Soon after leaving the city behind, however, the air grew chilly and the wind picked up. As the minutes ticked away toward late afternoon, the sun faded to a dull seeping pustule resting low on the skin of an albino sky. Ice formed on the corner of her window. Gray became the predominant color of the landscape.

“How much longer?”

“Two hour,” Jian said, holding up three fingers. Precise quantities seemed to defy him. His age was impossible to tell. As far as Angel could guess, he was anywhere from fourteen to forty. “We passing Bairin Zouqi,” he said, and he pointed at some low slung buildings off to the right. “One time was capital Chinese Liao Dynasty.”

The car skidded briefly on the shoulder, and he wrenched the wheel back until the tires hit pavement once again.

Angel took in the dismal scenery. They had passed what appeared to be a small town, some brick buildings and maybe more beyond, difficult to tell for sure in this low-contrast gloom. The few structures she saw closer to the road were made of cement and gray stone and appeared to be small shrines. There was also the occasional yurt or ger randomly situated, but little else. No people, lots of sheep and goats, a few camels. The variety of things to see was severely limited.

Bairin Zouqi.

The name whispered to her in her head, sounding vaguely familiar. She had a faint memory of an earthquake happening in the region, maybe ten, fifteen years before. If she remembered correctly, the event might have turned out to be one of those unremarkable things, of no particular interest to people elsewhere in the world, except that the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, had clashed with the government, not outright accusing but rather hinting that it was underreporting the severity of the trembler’s aftereffects. International news sources claimed that some twenty-five thousand homes had been damaged versus the sixty or so Beijing officially stated. The reasons for the discrepancy were never made clear, but it seemed to be yet another example of misrepresentation by the government, as if it were embarrassed by events it could neither have predicted nor prevented.

Such conduct had become so commonplace that the world had long since stopped taking the “official” reports at face value, which was why it was so important that people like her be granted access.

Was that the case with Huangxia? Until roughly sixteen hours ago, she had been sure the government was simply engaged in another cover-up of a natural disaster there. After what she’d seen on DeBryan’s video clip, she wasn’t sure it had even been natural, or even that the island had been hit by a rogue wave. By all appearances, it certainly seemed that way, but how could she trust anything now, even her own eyes?

“Wenbai coming next,” Jian told her. “One hour.”

“That’s where the factory is?”

He nodded. “Goh Li Xhia factory.” He slipped a hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a photo and handed it over. Angel unfolded it and held it close to the window for light.

“This is recent?”

He nodded.

The three-story cement structure sat on a small hill. It had been built with modern construction materials. The corners were sharp and precise, almost painfully so. Angel made out a line of solar panels on the roof, their surfaces angled toward the bleak winter sun. The wall facing the camera was smooth and unbroken save for a single small door in the right-hand corner, and a lone window just above it. There was no parking lot, no signage. And the grounds around it had never been finished. Construction rubble and frozen dirt had simply been left in heaps all around.

“Not very inviting, is it?”

“Make secret parts for American company.”

Angel rolled her eyes. It was the same old story. Jacques had even written about it once, in fact, though he’d never actually been out here. He did the bulk of his research online from his room in Lyon.

Technology companies, he wrote, built their factories in the remote parts of China, exploiting the local cheap labor in their systematic rape of the land by removing rare earth elements, using the uneducated workers to staff their assembly lines. A few years would pass and people would start developing strange health problems or suffer from repetitive injuries. The worksite would be quietly shuttered and a new one would open somewhere else under a different name. No one would report these happenings. In its own drive toward economic superiority the Chinese government would be fully complicit, and so guilty of the abuses. The world simply didn’t seem to care enough to bring such atrocities to light.

“What kinds of parts?”

He shrugged. “Machines. Little computers.”

“Laptops?”

He shrugged.

“Will we stop there?”

Jian shook his head. “Not allow. We go on further to Baoyang village. You spend night with family, stay with Jian. Tomorrow, village have burial ceremony for dead. You stay in house. Then, next day, if okay, you go see train.”

* * *

Angel hadn’t realized at first that Jian meant for her to be excluded from the burial ceremony. “I’ll stay out of the way,” she promised, when he refused her request to attend. “No pictures. You won’t even notice me.” But despite her appeals, he was adamant that she remain out of sight during the entire observance. Furthermore, she was not to go anywhere near the makeshift morgue that had been set up on the outskirts of the village, at least until the day after. “Is not allow,” he told her. “Only yaschin allow during preparing bodies.” It was when he told her this last part that she finally understood the cultural significance of his request.

A couple years back she had traveled to Tibet to investigate an outbreak of pneumonic plague in one of the northern prefectures, and it was during her stay there that she became familiar with the Buddhist practice of sky burial. She had forgotten that many of these customs were shared in some form by the Mongols; indeed, the term yaschin — bone man or bone dealer — was the same one the Tibetan Buddhists had used.

The lamas taught that the body functions as a vessel for one’s consciousness, which transmigrates into another after death. Having outlasted its usefulness, the remains of the deceased are placed on a hill or mountaintop, where they are typically consumed by carrion-eaters, namely vultures. Thus, the body is recycled back into the earth while providing one final act of generosity to those still living.

It was the yaschin’s responsibility to prepare the body, sometimes hastening the defleshing of the bones by slicing into it beforehand with special knives, sometimes even going so far as removing the muscle and organs.

Days later, after they had been picked clean, the bones might be collected, then crushed into powder and mixed with flour to provide further nourishment to the animals. Sometimes this mixture was given to the yaks for feed.

No one else is allowed near the body during preparation, and even those individuals closest to the deceased are encouraged to keep their distance. This is because it takes a while for the spirit to accept that the body has died, and in such a vulnerable state, it longs to possess another and may attempt to enter a body already occupied. It is the monks’ job to help guide the spirits to their next home.

She remembered being initially appalled by the whole idea of excarnation, the body left on some exposed rock where it could be picked over by scavengers. The custom ostensibly fulfilled important spiritual functions, teaching that life is impermanent, and that we can still show generosity and compassion for all living creatures, even after death. She did not, however, share the lamas’ sensibilities.

But folklore and traditional practices oftentimes have their beginnings in worldly considerations, and, as she learned, it turned out that sky burial was no exception. In many areas where it is followed, timber for funeral pyres was scarce, and the presence of permafrost or shallow bedrock made excavating a grave impractical. These were things she could understand and accept.

Standing at the door of the family’s empty yurt and peering out into the silent village early the next morning, Angel realized that she truly was alone out here, and would be, at least according to what Jian had indicated, for nearly the entire day. The bodies would not be placed on the mountaintop until nightfall, after which there would follow a period of quiet mourning.

She wondered, had even the youngest, oldest, and most feeble survivors gone to pay their respects? It seemed they had. There wasn’t a soul left in the village.

But then movement caught her eye. A shadow passed between structures, the darkness rippling over the ground. Soon after, a dog appeared and trotted across the gravel ruts of the village’s main road. It paused a couple times to sniff at something and once to scratch its belly before disappearing further away. The animal was thin but healthy, not starved. She didn’t think she’d find any abused animals here, as it was not the custom of these people. Last night, for example, she had noticed a bowl set on the ground just outside the door. Empty then, it was now filled with a thin, bluish milk.

It had taken them longer to arrive to the village than Jian had calculated, even assuming he’d meant the full three hours his fingers had indicated. A flat tire and no jack for the spare had added to the drive, and it was only by incredible good luck that a farmer passed and helped dig a hole deep enough so that the offending wheel could be replaced. Then, another pothole had loosened the sole remaining headlight on the car, which started to wobble. Only then did Jian slow down.

By the time they saw the first buildings, rectangular mud and stone houses, night was fully upon them, and the headlight was pointing too far to the left to be of much use, like a lazy eye in a face where its twin had gone blind.

She caught glimpses of the yurts as they materialized out of the darkness, looking like giant squat mushrooms sprouting from a moonscape of scrub and gravel. She realized with a sinking sensation that these would be her accommodations for the next few days. Though she had roughed it before, she hadn’t expected it to be quite this rustic, even though Cheong had warned her as much, adding also that she should expect no cell phone service, no internet, and no espresso machines. In fact, there would be no electricity at all.

When she asked Jian to confirm all this, he nodded, but added, “All people working at Goh Li Xhia factory have phone given by company. No signal except in factory or city.” He shook his head, as if it were the most absurd thing he’d ever heard. It very well may have been.

Getting out of the car had not been easy for Angel. She was stiff and sore from the ride and the bruising she’d previously received in Shanghai, but she was grateful to stretch her legs. Her discomfort quickly gave way to wonder as darkness swept in to embrace them once Jian extinguished the headlight. The haze from the day had since dissipated, and the air was sharp and crisp, almost crystalline in its clarity. The wide valley glowed with a ghostly hue from the starlight above. There was something magical about the place which made the long drive almost worth it.

Jian’s family stayed up just long enough to meet her and answer a few questions, then the central fire was extinguished and everyone retired. Angel was given a spot on a carpet of yak pelts which carried a strong, though not unpleasant, musky odor. And though the ground was hard and the air frigid, she awoke the next morning warm and more refreshed than she had in a very long time. Her dreams had not been troubled. Her abused muscles felt better. And the wonderful aroma of yak milk tea filled the tent and woke her appetite.

Breakfast consisted of cheese and a dense, dry flatbread. Soon after, the family departed for the daylong ceremony, leaving Angel to fend for herself.

The rising sun was just beginning to breach the saddle between two low rocky hills rising a kilometer to the east, lighting them ablaze with a brilliant yellow glow. She wondered if that was where the villagers would go. Wherever it was, she knew that the charnel grounds would be among the holiest of places and probably kept secret from her. Their pain would be especially immense and raw at this time, given that so many friends and family members had been lost so tragically. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonize them with her intrusion. At the very least, it would close their minds to her as an outsider and prevent her from investigating the accident and looking into Cheong’s suspicion that it had been caused by the sudden spread of some mysterious new disease.

She had challenged this claim during the call from the house in Lyon. He deflected it by asking her what had changed her mind, and she muttered something about curiosity but didn’t bring up DeBryan’s video.

Now, standing here after her brief conversation that morning with Jian and his family, a medical connection made even less sense. If some sort of sickness had swept through the train, then why hadn’t it spread after the accident?

The villagers likewise dismissed the idea, though for their own reasons. They believed the tragedy had been wrought because the Baarin had betrayed their own customs by going to work at the factory. “We herders, not making machines in modern factory.”

“And what about you?” she asked Jian. “Do you think those people died because they abandoned their faith?”

He didn’t answer her right away. She could tell that he had mixed feelings on the matter. On the one hand, he appeared reluctant to disagree with his family. There had been tension between him and his parents and siblings the night before, and Angel guessed that in their eyes Jian was guilty of a similar betrayal by leaving the village to live in the city to pursue a nontraditional path.

After some hesitation, he finally admitted that it could be possible that a disease might be to blame, and he gave as his reasoning the presence of men at the crash site dressed in special protective suits.

“You were there? You saw?”

“Jian not supposed to be. Villagers not supposed to.”

He described the suits as plastic and blue in color, covering the men’s bodies from head to toe. A small, clear plastic window permitted them to look out.

They were hazard suits, she’d told him. It was standard protocol, both to avoid contact with any harmful chemicals which might have been spilled, such as diesel or gasoline, as well as biological fluids. They also helped protect the integrity of the crime scene. It didn’t mean anything and certainly wasn’t proof of a biological agent.

“Besides,” she added, “if there really is some kind of disease, then why haven’t the yaschin shown any unusual symptoms? They would have had the most contact with the victims and thus been the first to be sickened.”

“Yaschin protected,” he told her. It was clear that, despite his break from tradition, he still clung to some of the old beliefs and superstitions. “Cannot get sick.”

It didn’t matter to Angel. Whether biological or not, she had come prepared. No way was she taking any chances. In her luggage was her own biohazard suit, and as soon as she could get to the accident site, she intended to use it.

Just in case.

Chapter Twelve

The traditional fur-lined yurts outnumbered by ten to one the smaller, newer rectangular mud and clay houses, most of which had been recently built on the encampment’s perimeter or along the road Jian had driven them in on and which Angel now walked. The dried mortar had been sloppily applied, with much of it oozed out like warm wax between the stones before hardening. A few of the houses were painted, but most were not. The yurts, in contrast, were clean and bright, the pelts painted white with simple geometric patterns of blue and gold.

Jian had told her that the village was growing, mostly from an influx of Baarin people from further west and north, and the newer structures were easier and faster to build. “Many elders not like them.” They worried that they would simply crumble and fall in a heavy rain.

According to him, the only cinderblock building in the area was the train station, and it was not considered a part of the village proper. It had been constructed about a half kilometer past the last home along the road, and could be found at the end of a narrow footpath worn into the ground by the feet of the factory employees on their daily trek to and from their commute. The trail bent around a pair of low slung hills, which hid the station from view.

Coming up over a rise, Angel spied the tracks for the first time, two sets of them. They ran along a raised seam of ground left to right, like an angry welt on the land. From her elevated vantage point, the rails appeared to slice through the grass with surgical precision, the thick, dark wooden ties suturing the edges together. It was an unending scar marring the flesh of the steppe.

She headed across the low scrub toward the stationhouse, mindful of the occasional yak patties and the numerous smaller piles of shiny black pellets, which she guessed were pika. Other than a few birds, she’d not seen any wildlife.

The morning breeze was still bitterly cold, raking its claws against her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. Where the sunlight could not reach the ground during its daily swing across the sky, shallow tongues of snow persisted. Elsewhere, tiny wildflowers were starting to bloom. Yet despite the chill, the short hike up the low rise winded her, so she unzipped her parka but left it on.

The station stood alone, maybe three or four meters off the tracks, a small concrete block of stolid gray and a matching roof of corrugated steel. The covering extended over an area of compressed gravel, providing protection from the sun and rain. She was approaching from the back side, in which a single wooden door gave entrance into the building and a lone window provided some light inside of it. As with the rectangular houses, the station gave the appearance of having been hastily built. Hardened mortar bulged from the seams, and the walls were left without adornment.

The door was unlocked. She stepped inside, found the room empty. The air was blessedly still but icy. The door in the opposite wall had been propped open.

The structure was little more than four walls and a roof. The floor was smoothed cement, clean except for a few concentric blooms of rust which had dripped from holes in the ceiling. There were no chairs, no benches. Not even a rock to sit upon.

Along the wall closest to the tracks, beside the second door, was a narrow shelf, and beneath it was a small package wrapped in paper and held together with twine. An army of Chinese characters marched over the wrinkled paper surface and tumbled over one side. Tucked beneath the string was a thin stack of mail. A lantern hung on the wall, and below it on the floor sat a can half filled with fuel.

She straightened up and looked around. The doubt was returning, and she wondered once again what she’d been thinking agreeing to come out here.

Cheong had tried to get her to commit to working for 6X on a more long-term basis, traveling to the other sites on the list for reasons he would only allude to but not provide any details on. He clearly expected her to do her own research. But she’d told him no. She was eager to get back out to Huangxia, though of course she hadn’t told him that and still had no idea how she would manage to do it. She owed DeBryan at least that much for the video he had taken. Coming here was a convenient launching point for another attempt at the island.

Or so she’d thought.

But now, standing out here in the grasslands hundreds of kilometers from the nearest airport and even further away from the coast, she felt more remote and separated from Huangxia than she’d felt when she was back home in France, as if that were even possible.

It came to her that it might have been Cheong’s intent all along, to get her out here and away from Huangxia, and the thought filled her with rage.

She circled the room again. There was nothing here for her to investigate, no clues, no one to talk to. No reason for her to be here at all. Yes, there had been a terrible accident and lives were lost. Jian had confirmed that much. It was surely a tragedy, but not one with a medical cause. There was no possible link to disease. How could there be? It was a waste of her time and Cheong’s money, if he were genuinely interested, to send her out here to look into it. What he needed, if he honestly wanted to know the truth, was a mechanical engineer, a railway safety inspector or accident specialist, not a medical expert. Someone who could spot a mechanical defect or sabotage.

With a shake of her head, she exited and circled the building. Some thirty meters up the track stood a small wooden shack, about the size and shape of an outhouse. A fuel tank, painted pastel green, was mounted on a short pedestal beside it, again on a base of poured concrete. Moving closer, she saw that a hose passed from the tank and into the side of the wooden structure. A squat chimney poked up out of the roof.

Angel unlatched and opened the door and found the generator she expected inside. It seemed a bit out of place, out here in the middle of nowhere, and something of a puzzle. What did it provide power for? There were no crossing lights here for the tracks, and she had not seen lights of any kind inside the station save for the gas lantern. Not even any electrical outlets. No gate or warning bell. No switching station. No need for power whatsoever.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she spotted a small shelf above her head. The space was empty, but using the light from her cell phone, she saw from the absence of accumulated dust the footprint of something which had recently occupied the space, an object several centimeters wide and a quarter meter long.

On the floor of the tiny shed, she found a loose power cord. One end plugged into a small voltage converter, similar to the one she had for her laptop, and this was in turn plugged into the generator. A second cord lay in a loose heap beside it, a communication cable by the looks of the free end. It trailed down the back corner and through the wall.

Angel carefully followed it along the gravel and over to the metal track, where it was tucked underneath the metal lip of the rail and ran back toward the station. She lost it when it disappeared into a plastic pipe into the ground, but regained it when it reappeared out of another plastic pipe at the base of the station where two walls joined. This she traced up into the eaves to where it finally ended at a small satellite receiver she hadn’t noticed before.

So, either Jian and Cheong had been mistaken about there being no mobile phone and internet service, or they had lied. She doubted Jian knew, but Cheong? The whole setup, from receiver to the generator itself, looked like a fairly recent addition, and perhaps Jian simply hadn’t been aware of it.

But that begged several questions. What happened to the wireless transmitter? What purpose did it provide and for whose convenience? Who had removed it and why?

Returning to the shed, she found a sticker attached to the electrical transformer. It was marked simply with the word QUANTEL and a serial number. Fumbling her phone out of her parka pocket again, her fingers now numb from the cold, she managed after a couple attempts to snap a clear picture of it. The name meant nothing to her, but she assumed it was a telecommunications company. She had some people she could send the image to who might know.

A gust sent the wooden door banging against the fuel tank. The metal latch sent out a shrill clang. Straightening up, Angel pulled the door shut and gasped in surprise to see the figure of a tiny, shriveled man standing in the shadows beneath the station’s overhang.

“Fils de pute!” she muttered under her breath. Her heart was racing. “Where the hell did he come from?”

The man appeared to be watching her, and Angel felt her face grow red. Who was he? Why wasn’t he with the other villagers?

Angel waved, and the man shifted slightly, but didn’t return the gesture.

“Allo?” She immediately winced and regretted not having learned a few basic Mongolian words, not even the equivalent of a greeting. She should have asked Jian during their drive.

“Are you waiting for the train?”

Argh! Stupide!

She gestured up the tracks, but refrained from making chugguh chugging sounds. She already felt ridiculous enough as it was.

This was not like her, feeling so uncertain about herself like this. As a reporter, she’d learned to be confident, unapologetic. Her actions often rubbed people the wrong way, but they were always taken in the pursuit of truth. She’d earned her share of enemies because of it, enough to form a fan club large enough to fill a football stadium. Generally, she didn’t care. She had a job to carry out, and she’d do whatever it took.

But for some reason, she felt especially sensitive about not upsetting Jian’s people. She found that she sympathized with him in particular, torn as he was between two worlds, the traditional and the modern. In a distant way, she shared his struggle, or at least a similar one. The forces pulling at her were quite different than his, but the effect was the same.

The man still hadn’t moved. He looked — felt — as if he were waiting for Angel to move first. Did he want Angel to leave? Was that it?

Before departing for the burial ceremony this morning, Jian had once again reminded Angel to remain out of sight. He hadn’t explicitly told her that she was to stay inside the yurt, or even in the village, but that had been the implied message, hadn’t it? So why had she defied him?

“Allo?” she called. “I was just looking—”

Now the man moved, stepping and turning. Silent as a ghost, he drifted across the platform and entered the station through the open door, pausing only once to look back. He didn’t seem angry with her. In fact, it seemed the man wanted her to follow.

She hesitated a moment, then secured the panel and jogged back to the station, but when she got there, the building was empty.

“Allo? Anyone there?”

She stepped across the room and out the other side. The trail leading to the village was now in full sunlight, and it shone like an exposed white bone against the mossy ground to either side. But the man wasn’t there, either. Angel ran around the stationhouse. The wind whipped across the land, still cold though not as frigid as it had been. She brought a hand up to wipe the tears away from her eyes.

When she blinked again, she saw the old man walking away along the track. The distance he’d already managed to cover astonished Angel.

He stopped, turned, and beckoned once again, then continued onward.

Angel started to run.

Chapter Thirteen

Her feet were not used to the uneven ground, and more than once she stumbled as she tried to catch up. The air was too thin, still so cold that it burned her lungs and stung her eyes and made them fill with tears.

For a while Angel tried to jog between the rails, but the spacing of the ties was all wrong, either too close or too far apart for her stride. She called out several times to the man. Sometimes, the wind snatched her voice away, scattering her cries across the heath. Sometimes, they seemed to carry on forever. Either the old man didn’t hear her, or he ignored the calls.

He remained far ahead of her, never turning around to confirm that Angel was following. But it seemed he knew she was there. He was leading her somewhere, and there was only one thing out here that it could be.

Angel gave up trying to catch up, though she kept her pace at a brisk walk, amazed at how the man could keep going in such rarefied air. It didn’t matter what Angel did, how fast or slow she went, he somehow always remained the same distance ahead of her. It was more than uncanny, it was unnerving.

They walked on for the next forty minutes before the man stopped. Angel saw that it was at the point where the two sets of tracks merged into one. The man gestured, then stepped away from the berm and headed out across the grass, disappearing a few minutes later between a set of rocky knolls.

When Angel reached the spot where the man had stepped away, she could find no trail. The grass was neither broken nor pushed aside. Nevertheless, she set out, heading off in the new direction.

The ground rose steadily over rocky terrain toward a dip in a low ridge, and Angel climbed it expecting to see her quarry on the other side, but when she topped it, the grasslands fell sharply away, spreading out before her as empty as the land behind her had been, kilometer upon kilometer with nothing to break the dull monotony of the land save for a single road far below.

She felt something brush her hand and let out a yelp and stumbled back. The old man was standing there not a meter away. Angel had almost begun to believe she had followed a vision, but clearly she hadn’t. The old man was as solid and as real as anyone she’d ever met.

He gestured with his fingers for Angel’s hand, and when he had it, he placed a large stone into her palm. The skin on his hands was tough and wrinkled, yet warm. Bending stiffly, the man plucked another stone from the ground and added it to the first. He did this once more, then pointed to an outcropping on the adjacent knoll, grabbed Angel’s sleeve, and tugged her toward it.

Angel recognized the ovoo immediately, the ceremonial shrine to which the Buddhists gave thanks. The small oblong stone mound took the shape of the hilltop, and in the center was a tent of colorful ribbons tied to a desiccated branch and set precariously into its peak. The man nodded and gestured, throwing his arms forward in a casting motion.

The Tibetan lamas had taught her the custom of casting stones, and so Angel threw the rocks onto the shrine while the man closed his eyes with a look of serenity spreading over his face. Angel completed the ceremony by circling the ovoo three times in a clockwise fashion, just as she’d learned, stepping awkwardly over the unstable ground before coming to a stop once more beside him.

“Is this for the train wreck victims?”

The man did not answer. Instead, he bent down again and scratched a pattern into the face of an exposed rock with a sharpened point of stone. It was a circle with many lines radiating outward.

“The sun?” Angel pointed into the cloudless sky.

Once more instead of answering, the man grabbed her hand and traced a gnarled finger over the line of her veins on the back.

Sun? Lifeblood? Angel didn’t understand. She sighed and shrugged. “Why did you bring me here?”

The man jabbed his crooked finger once again at the drawing.

“I don’t understand.”

But this time the old man only raised a hand to silence her. Then he closed his eyes, indicating that Angel should do so as well. So she did. And they stood on the top of that hill while the chill wind spun around them and the strips of cloth fluttered. Angel didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She guessed maybe listen, but if the world whispered its secrets to the old man, it did not share them with Angel right then.

Finally, she opened her eyes and looked about her. The man was gone, and the ground at her feet was nothing but bare rock. The drawing and the ovoo were gone. Angel let out a cry of dismay and raised her hands to her numb face. Was she going crazy? Her fists were clenched, and when she opened them she found that she was holding a scrap of cloth, its edges torn and burned. She recognized it as being from the shrine.

Far below, a large truck rumbled along the road, the sound of its engine a thin tremulous whine fighting against the wind. Unable to form coherent thought, unable even to breathe, Angel tracked the movement with her eyes until they came to rest upon the very edge of a scorched and barren piece of earth.

There was the crash site.

Chapter Fourteen

The track ran straight for another kilometer or so before curving gently around the base of a hill. Angel saw the first of the train cars there. It was lying on its side some ten or twelve meters off the rails to the right. The scar it had left in the land still bled with what appeared to be oil or diesel fuel. She kept on walking.

A second car emerged into sight, still incredibly attached to its neighbor by a single black cable. Only half of the car was visible, the rest blocked by a jagged edge of shredded metal. The car sat upright, though it had obviously flipped onto its side at one point before coming to rest again on its wheels. The windows were smashed, the empty spaces resembling gouged eye sockets marked by soot, telling a tale of a terrible fire. The paint had darkened and peeled away.

There were no more cars to see, nothing recognizable as cars anyway. What she found instead as she drew closer was bits and pieces, heaps of twisted and burnt metal spread out over an expanding swath of land. The cleanup crew had already begun bulldozing it into piles for removal.

Angel stopped and tilted her head to listen for the sounds of machines, but she heard nothing other than the lonely moan of the wind. It had died down somewhat in the past half hour that it took her to reach the site from the hilltop. The day was warming up, and she was sweating inside her parka. In that time, she had managed to convince herself that the man and ovoo had indeed been real, despite both having vanished. Perhaps she had walked to another hilltop while in some sort of trance state. If she went back, she was sure she could find them. After all, what other explanation could there be for the scrap of cloth in her pocket?

She shook away the distraction and focused once more on the scene before her.

Where are the people?

The place appeared deserted.

She drew closer to the train car, which loomed up before her like the hollow carcass of some ancient behemoth frozen in rigor, its insides completely eviscerated and dragged away by the carrion-eating machines. The latter now sat dormant nearby, as if in some hibernating state.

She realized the parallels here: the scene before her was, in a sense, a kind of sky burial in its own right.

One of the wheel sets had been wrenched away from the frame and now stuck out at an odd angle. Angel skirted the car to the side opposite the tracks and gasped to see that most of the base had been peeled back. A few passenger seats littered the earth ahead, their upholstery consumed by a fire now extinguished and cold. Little remained other than a few coiled springs and tangled metal tendons. The air stunk of burnt steel and plastic, a caustic chemical tang.

Her eyes drifted immediately to the ground, searching. But she saw no bodies. No body parts. They had already been systematically removed.

Not that there would have been much left, judging from the extent of the destruction. Much of what hadn’t been immediately vaporized would have been incinerated afterward by the fire that swept through here.

The vultures will not be eating well tonight.

She shuddered and chastised herself for having such a morbid thought.

The front half of the second car was gone, amputated by the force of the crash. It now lay on the cold ground, flayed completely open, everything not metal burned away. Many of the parts were warped beyond recognition.

Where are the people, the cleanup crew?

Just past a heap of rubble stood a crane, its arm extended out over a smaller mound, but its claw frozen open and still. It swung slightly in the wind, creaking eerily. The cab was empty. A dump truck sat inert beside it. Then several more vehicles, similarly quiet. Over in the middle of everything was a supply truck, a ramp leading up to the bed and a handcart leaning against the side. The door was rolled three-quarters of the way shut. A forklift was parked beside it.

Yet another truck had a refrigeration unit mounted above the cab. Angel wondered if it had held the bodies.

Parts, not bodies.

She placed a hand on the crane’s radiator grill and was surprised to find that it was still warm. People were here— had been here recently. But where were they now?

A gust of wind brought a strange, vibrating sound to her ears. Tracking it to its source she saw a tent staked tightly into the ground. The sides bulged outward, and its ropes thrummed in the stiff breeze.

Positive pressure enclosure. It was meant to keep the outside air from entering.

She edged around the site, moving toward the back of the tent, where she confirmed her suspicions. Over the hum of the air compressor and filtration units, she couldn’t tell if people were inside, but she had to assume so when the smell of coffee came to her. She had lucked upon the recovery effort during a break.

The scene on Huangxia flashed through her mind, the soldiers with their rifles intimidating her and DeBryan. She had been similarly threatened on at least a half dozen occasions over the past few years, been subjected to tear gas and immobilized by concussion grenades meant to disable aggressive protesters, so she was no stranger to the use of force. Once, while covering a story in Mexico City, she’d even been shot at with bean bags. A colleague of hers suffered a hit to the thigh, and while it hadn’t broken the skin or bones, the bruise stretched from her knee to her hip. In general, police and other security forces in an area tended to treat the media as non-hostiles, but it was never a guarantee, and the situation could become quite fluid very quickly.

It was the private security forces which scared her the most. They acted aggressively all the time, often without concern for the rights of the press and private citizens.

If it was any consolation, there did not appear to be any security personnel here, whether private or otherwise.

She didn’t have her credentials on her anyway. If she’d known she was coming out here, she would have been sure to bring them, along with her personal protective hazard suit.

The thought of not having her gear almost forced her to go back.

You’re here now. It would be a wasted opportunity.

Her eyes shot over to the supply truck, and an idea took shape in her mind. She’d need to get to it unseen, and the fastest way to it was over open ground. Circling around, using the piles of scrap and debris to conceal herself would be safer, but it would take much longer.

Quickly unzipping her parka, she squeezed it into a tight ball and shoved it into a narrow space between one of the air pumps and the tent, remembering first to fetch her phone and the ribbon from out of the pocket. The bright colors would easily catch someone’s attention, and anyway, with what she was planning, it would just get in her way. Then she sprinted across the field heading straight for the truck.

Ten meters out, fifteen, and the whine of the air pumps behind her changed. People had entered inside the airlock, the tunnel leading outside. In seconds they would be exiting. She didn’t bother looking back, just picked up her pace.

The ground was an open lesion before her, scraped and scarred by the bulldozers and made uneven both by the rocky composition and the tracks of the heavy machines. Large chunks of debris still lay scattered about.

Angel stumbled, flailed her arms and tried to catch her balance. But she was going too fast and her feet tangled. She landed hard, rolling in the dirt and scraping both arms. Spinning her head around, she caught a glimpse of the first people exiting the tent a hundred meters away. They were wearing the blue suits Jian had described.

Angel froze, instinctively pressing herself down against the dirt.

More men poured out, but they simply gathered by the exit and stood there talking. She could hear them, the muffled sounds of their voices. A few broke off, headed away from her, and disappeared around the far corner of the tent. The rest remained in a huddle.

Fifteen meters of ground separated her from the truck. Fifteen meters which she might be able to cover in about six or seven seconds.

Two more men peeled off the group. They turned and headed directly toward her. Angel was stuck. If she stood now, they would see her. If she ran, she’d look suspicious.

They’re going to find you anyway.

She started to push herself up when one of them stopped and grabbed the other’s arm. After a moment’s hesitation and a few words exchanged, they pivoted on the plastic heels of their hazard suits and headed back. Angel was on her feet and running before they’d even finished turning. She angled for the side of the ramp and swung her body onto it, then rolled beneath the lift gate in time to turn around and see four more men emerge from behind the side of the tent. Two had large silver tanks on their backs and long metal nozzles in their hands. The other two carried shovels. They all headed across the open field toward her.

Angel lay in the darkness panting, watching the men spread out. The ones with the shovels began pacing along the area she’d just crossed, their eyes cast downward, presumably searching for items important for furthering their investigation. They moved slowly, carefully, covering the ground in a grid pattern. Every so often they would stop and poke at something with their shovel or flip it over. Then they’d move on.

After a few minutes the familiar growl of the crane’s engine came to her, and soon after that came the crunch of the claw digging into the pile of scrap. There was a gut-wrenching crunch as it released its cargo into the bed of the dump truck. The low growl of the bulldozer grew louder as it edged closer, then drew away to the opposite side of the site. The cleanup crew’s work had resumed.

Angel sat up and looked around her. The supply truck was stacked high with metal crates, all painted light blue and labeled with their inventory. Each was latched tight with two snap clasps, but not locked. She started going through them, not sure if she’d find what she was looking for.

There were the usual spill cleanup kits, body bags, decontamination supplies. She found the spare hazmat suits hanging in an upright locker near the back, but no helmets. The suits would be useless to conceal her without them. Even with a full suit on, she’d still be limited in where she could go. She was beginning to question the sensibility of her plan.

She pulled aside several large jugs of water and a stack of smaller plastic tubs of some pink liquid, which she confirmed were chemical disinfectant manufactured in East Hemlington, New Jersey.

A truck rumbled past the opening, spewing blackened dust. Angel stepped over to check and watched it disappear out of view to the right. There again were the two men with the tanks on their backs standing at the very edge of the scorched field, getting ready to spray the ground, probably with some sort of chemical neutralizer.

Angel returned to her search for the helmets. They had to be buried inside one of the other cases, but which one?

She pushed further into the gloom, once again using her phone for light. Strapped in against the back wall were a half dozen fifty-five gallon drums sealed with heavy-duty tamper-proof tape, three on either side of a sliding door which led to the cab. She almost ignored the containers, but stopped when she recognized the warning symbols for flammability, corrosion, and poison. Bending down, she squinted at the paper label affixed below them. Among the words she read were naphthenate and palmitate. She tried to remember what those chemicals might be used for. When an image did come to mind a moment later, it sucked the breath from her chest.

Napalm!

There was enough here to incinerate the entire accident scene, maybe more.

She scrambled back to the door and peered out into the daylight. The two men were working the field, slowly spraying the ground just as she’d expected. But what came out of the ends of the nozzles wasn’t liquid. Instead, it was ten meters of white-hot flame. These people weren’t investigating an accident. Nor were they cleaning it up. They were sterilizing the scene, erasing any evidence of what may have caused it.

She sucked in a sharp breath. Cheong had been right to be suspicious. This was yet another cover-up.

That didn’t, however, mean he was right about it being caused by some disease. The suits in those lockers, the same ones worn by the men outside, weren’t biohazard suits, they weren’t even strictly airtight.

Propped up on her elbows so she could hold her phone steady, Angel began to collect a video record of the scene. She started with the crane as it worked its pile of incinerated rubble and panned over to the men with the flame-throwers. When she angled back, her heart nearly stopped. A man was walking out from behind the tent. In one arm, he held her parka. He waved his other at the men with the shovels, trying to draw their attention.

In a lull in the racket she heard him shout in English, “Who does this belong to?”

Chapter Fifteen

“Americans? They are Americans?”

It explained the labels on the crates, the sources of the material.

Angel scrambled back into the darkness, quickly stuffing the phone back into her pocket.

“Merde,” she whispered. “This is not good!”

The men out there weren’t here on behalf of the railroad or the government. They were company people, and it was clear they intended to hide something. If she were found, they would first question her, maybe even torture her. Finally, after they decided they’d learned enough from her, they would make her disappear.

Don’t be ridiculous.

She could hear the crane still digging away, and the intermittent growl of the flame throwers burning the air. The bulldozer was scraping rubble into a new pile. Two more men with flamethrowers stood nearby, ready to ignite it. She still had a few moments before they realized the parka wasn’t any of their own. A few seconds after that, they would decide to search the area for its owner. It was time to go.

But how? The supply truck was right in the middle of the site, and there was too much open ground around her. Surely someone would see her.

Desperately, she pulled one of the hazmat suits out of the locker and exhaled in relief as she realized the collapsible helmets were already attached at the back. They’d just been hidden from view. She stepped into it, fumbling her fingers into the gloves and putting a small tear in the leg as it caught on one of the metal clasps of the case at her feet. Then she quickly zipped the suit shut over her chest. Peeling away the protective adhesive strip, she pressed it hastily closed, sealing her inside. Finally, she swung the helmet over her head and sealed it, too. It sat slightly cockeyed on her shoulders, probably enough to be noticeable to someone standing close by. She didn’t plan to get near enough for anyone to see.

Going out through the loading door was not going to work. It was too exposed, and anyone seeing her would be suspicious if she crawled through it. Pulling the door fully open would draw unwanted attention. She stepped back into the darkness, past the drums of napalm. Exiting through the cab was her only real option. She had to hope the crane driver would be too distracted to notice. He was the closest, and had a direct line of sight to her. She wrapped her fingers around the handle and pulled.

It didn’t move.

She tugged harder, but it was stuck. Or locked.

No, no, NO!

She bent down to inspect it, but the lighting was too poor. Her phone was in her pocket inside the suit. And there was too little room to stand aside to let in more from outside.

Looking back across the bed of the truck, she could just see the man with her parka talking with the men with shovels. One of them pointed to her right, to the men with the flamethrowers.

Angel turned back to the cab door. It was awkward moving around in the cramped space, and the helmet was too skewed and kept blocking half her view. She tried again, pushing the handle now from the lower vantage point, cursing when it wouldn’t go. Then she saw the safety catch.

Her gloved hands were too clumsy to work it. The catch was just a small tongue of metal, dangling on a swivel and preventing the handle from inadvertently opening during driving. But she couldn’t get her fingers behind it to move it out of the way. The damn thing just kept falling back!

“Damn it damn it dammit!” she growled.

She realized she couldn’t hear the flamethrowers anymore and quickly scurried forward to check. The men digging in the field had stopped their careful pacing and were looking off toward the right, watching something. One of them suddenly turned around and pointed at the supply truck before throwing his shovel over his shoulder and moving off to the left.

“Oh no. No no no. Please!”

Angel tried the latch again. But still her gloves were too bulky, too stiff to pull the safety clasp away.

Spinning around again, she could see that the remaining digger had now been joined by the man with her parka and one of the napalm burners. They were marching across the field toward the bulldozer operator.

The second burner was heading her way.

Chapter Sixteen

”Hey! Stop!”

The man with the flamethrower making his way toward Angel’s hiding place turned stiffly around to face the shouter. The tank on his back tugged heavily on his shoulders, and despite the chill in the air, Angel knew that he must be sweating inside the thick plastic of his chemical hazard suit. He lifted his hands in the air, as if to say, “What now?”

“Norstrom says we got less than four hours to wrap this up and get over to the other site, so pick it up!”

“Four hours? What the hell happened?”

“Aston’s got a bug up his ass as usual,” came the reply. “He wants it to look pretty.”

“Screw that rat bastard!”

The first man waved a gloved hand in Angel’s general direction. “Just get what you need and finish up over there ASAP!”

He turned around and started heading for the other end of the field, Angel’s parka in his hand. What he intended to do with it was pretty clear to her: He meant to find out who had left it stuffed behind the command center tent and probably chew him out. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out it didn’t belong to any member of the work crew. And when he did, he’d realize the site had been compromised and everyone here would drop everything to come looking for its owner.

The man with the tank jogged a few experimental steps before resuming his slow plod across the field.

Angel threw herself forward onto the floor of the supply truck and reached out with one of her gloved hands. She could feel the blunt pressure of the hasp of the closest container press against her wrist, and she jerked it quickly back. The tough plastic of her own chemical suit caught, just as she’d hoped it would, but it didn’t tear.

She tried again, leaning closer and hugging the box against her chest so that her arm pressed painfully against the metal. But the result was the same. The material was too thick and smooth. It resisted tearing just as it was supposed to do.

Precious seconds ticked away. The man coming toward her would reach the truck in another minute or so. She edged forward another half meter, risking exposure through the open gate, and tried again. If it didn’t work this time, she’d have to unzip the suit and peel it off. The sound of the adhesive separating would probably be loud enough to catch someone’s attention.

The man had crossed another seven or eight meters. If he happened to raise his head, there was no way he’d miss her.

Angel focused on the container. Once more, the sharp corner of the hasp dug into the meaty part of her forearm. This time she felt the unyielding edge bite into the muscle. She pressed as hard as she could, putting all of her weight into it and squeezing with her other arm. The plastic caught, snagging on a fold. She yanked, uttering a soft, desperate cry as pain tore into her arm.

The plastic scored but still didn’t tear.

No no no! she whispered, and tried again. Then again. She was near tears.

On the fourth attempt, the metal finally pierced the rubbery plastic and the material began to split.

Her breath was a hurricane inside the helmet, a harsh, humid, terrible roar that deafened her and fogged the plastic window. With shaking hands, she repositioned the new edge of the plastic on the metal and tugged, now bracing the container with her feet. Sweat dripped into her eyes, further blinding her, and the tears she’d been holding back now gushed out.

It was too late. She had been too slow and was going to get caught. Why the hell hadn’t she just waited at Jian’s house back in the village?

The material split suddenly, nearly pulling the sleeve in half. Scurrying back into the shadows, she jammed a thumb into the opening and pushed on the lower part with all her strength. The rip expanded around her arm. But the sewn seam refused to separate, preventing her from freeing her hand from the glove.

Hurry!

She kept expecting to feel the truck rock beneath her as the man mounted the ramp . . . the loud rattle of the chain as the gate pulled all the way up . . . the flood of sunlight. She could imagine the look on his face when he saw her sitting there. The confusion. Then alarm. Then the realization.

Hurry up, damn it!

She might be able to jump up and knock him out of the truck. She might be able to run.

And then they’ll shoot you in the back before you even reach the edge of the crash site.

Or mow her down in one of the vehicles.

There was nowhere inside the back of the truck to hide. The cab had been her only hope, but without her fingers free of the glove, the door’s tiny safety clasp may as well be a kryptonite lock; she just couldn’t manipulate it out of the way to open the sliding panel.

Slithering further back, she tugged one last time at the compromised sleeve, putting all of her might into it. With a reluctant snap! the rubber-coated stitching finally gave. She yanked the glove off and spun around toward the door.

The clasp lifted easily out of its notch. She pried it up and out of the way, simultaneously pulling on the door handle and releasing the metal to prevent her fingers from getting pinched. But the tiny flange slipped and fell back into place too soon. The handle jammed against it with a thud. She forced the panel back closed with her shoulder and tried again.

Please. Please please please!

Her whole body was trembling. She couldn’t seem to make her hands do what she wanted them to do, couldn’t seem to control them. One pried, the other pulled. Everything seemed to catch and nothing worked and—

The door slid an inch. Pain exploded in her hand and shot up her arm. She jerked her smashed fingers out from between the metal teeth and stifled her cry. But the door was open! She threw her body into the cab, spun around and rolled it shut again, pressing her back up against the panel and sobbing with relief.

A flash of blue in the side mirror caught her eye, and for a split second as the man appeared beside the truck her heart nearly stopped. What if his destination was actually the cab?

But then he disappeared around the back, and a moment later there came a series of thumps as he stepped up onto the ramp. This was followed by a rattle and a very loud bang when the gate slammed fully open.

Ouf, she whispered, slowly letting out her pent-up breath. Already, her trembling was starting to subside as her sense of self-preservation once more took control.

In her four years of freelancing, she had done some terribly risky things, some even downright stupid. She had gotten herself nearly imprisoned on a half dozen occasions and actually tossed into a cell once. She’d gotten caught between stone-throwers and shooters firing rubber bullets. She’d been tear gassed, wrestled to the ground by a city gang member in Atlanta. The boy had probably not even been old enough for middle school, much less know any better what he was doing. She’d been accused of libel. But none of those situations had ever had the potential for harm as this one did. Never had she been as scared for her life as she was at this very moment.

The idea that she should consider giving up the assignment should she manage to escape crossed her mind. But she immediately dismissed the thought. It made no sense to plan for a contingency when the chances of even having the option seemed so remote.

Une chose à la fois. One thing at a time, Angel. First, get the hell away from here.

She pushed herself away from the door, her senses once more on high alert. She tried to calm her breathing, tried to slow her racing heart.

To the right, the crane was just visible through the passenger window, the crook of its long metal arm sweeping back and forth as it lifted a load and dumped it and returned to scrape at the scorched piles of rubble and earth for more. From his elevated position, the crane operator had a direct line of sight to her inside the cab. If he were to turn and look over his right shoulder, he’d see her.

Angel whispered a silent prayer that he didn’t. The crane released another clawful of the sterilized material into the bed of the dump truck. The burnt metal and rock rained down with a clatter.

Are they going to bury it? Where are they dumping it? Why?

What were they trying to hide, that was the question. What clues were these people so meticulously trying to erase?

For a moment, she wondered again about Cheong’s claim of a disease, but almost immediately dismissed the idea. The hazard suits these men were using were the wrong type. They were meant to protect against physical contact with solids— possibly even, if at least transiently, against splashing fluids, such as corrosives. But they were totally inadequate against inhalation threats. The helmet wasn’t airtight and lacked any sort of self-contained rebreather or filtration system. And all the activity here would undoubtedly raise enough dust to suspend an infectious agent into the air.

Unless it’s unstable when aerosolized. Or inactive when inhaled. Or . . . .

She shook her head at the various possibilities. If there was one thing she’d learned from all the assignments she’d covered, it was that cleanup crews tended to err well on the side of caution when it came to disease agents and aerosolized hazards. The suits told her these men expected neither.

So what were they afraid of? What were they incinerating?

Her crushed fingers throbbed. She raised her hand to the faceplate of her helmet, flexing them distractedly as she tried to make further sense of her predicament. The tips of the first and second fingers were an angry purple, and her whole hand pulsed angrily. She was surprised to see blood on her palm, but the skin on her fingers was unbroken. She traced the blood up a long scrape to a triangular-shaped and discolored puncture wound. She’d cut herself trying to tear the suit.

A drop fell to the floor, splattering into a fat red asterisk.

Could’ve been much worse. If I hadn’t been able to get the damn glove—

She jolted upright, the blood freezing in her veins as she remembered the glove on the floor on the other side of the door. It was right there for the man to find. How could she have been so stupid!

Her heart was beating so loudly that it drowned out everything else in her mind. Another truck rattled past, not three meters in front of her, but she didn’t hear it, didn’t notice it until it eclipsed the windshield and its shadow darkened the cab. Angel shrunk down as far as she could go while it passed, her gaze skimming wildly over the interior surfaces of the cab for a solution to her dilemma.

It came to rest on the keys in the truck’s ignition.

Drive away! Just go!

But no, she couldn’t. Not while that man was still inside the truck. Not with the ramp hanging off the back; driving off with it down would draw the others’ attention faster than anything else. And even if on the off chance the man were somehow to leave without seeing the glove and stowed the ramp and pulled the door shut as he left, the moving truck would almost certainly raise someone’s alarm. Who was driving it? Where was it going?

By then, they’d probably already know the parka didn’t belong to any of them. They’d spare no effort to come after her. She had spied several other vehicles on the site that were considerably faster and more capable of moving over the rough terrain. It wouldn’t take them long to catch up with her, even with a head start.

Besides, where would she go? There were too few roads in this remote part of the country. They’d find her sooner rather than later, since the only place around for fifty kilometers was the village.

She hated the idea of bringing attention to those innocent people. They’d already suffered so much.

It’s too late for such regrets.

She didn’t want to admit it, but once the men figured out the site had been compromised, they would come looking for her in Baoyang Village straight away.

Well, she’d just have to make sure they didn’t. It was as simple as that. But how?

She pressed her ear against the sliding door and listened. She could hear the man shuffling around back there, could feel the vibrations created by his movements. What was he doing? There was a sudden loud crash, and she froze as he cursed out loud. Then another crash, this one more deliberate sounding.

Slowly, Angel unfolded herself from her spot on the floor and inched her way forward between the seats. Her eyes gravitated to the key ring once more, but she suppressed the impulse to jump behind the wheel and start the truck up.

Through the passenger side window, the crane operator had turned his cab around and was facing the other direction as he worked the opposite side of the heap. It was the perfect opportunity for her to leave.

And there, between her and the crane, was how she meant to do it.

Without stopping to second guess herself, Angel reached over to the keys and slipped them out of the ignition, upsetting a pile of papers stacked in the center console. One sheet caught her eye, a familiar logo in the top corner. She grabbed the paper and quickly folded it up. Then she slid over to the passenger seat and pried the door open as quietly as she could.

No one was in view on the ground, just the crane and dump truck drivers, but neither of them was looking her way. She stepped out.

The next thing she knew, she was dangling half out of the cab, the back of the suit caught on the seat adjustment lever. The truck rocked. She scrambled to regain her footing.

Without waiting to see if the man in the back had noticed the movement or noise, she unhooked herself, then let herself down and quickly and silently guided the door shut behind her. She stepped briskly across the open field, hiding her ungloved hand, the keys, and the folded sheet of paper beneath her other arm. The hazmat suit shushed loudly in her ears, as if announcing to everyone, “She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!” But no one stopped her. No one called out in alarm.

She climbed up inside the empty cage of the forklift and prayed the key was on the ring she’d brought from the truck, but found she didn’t need it as a second set was already in the ignition. She could feel her body betraying her again as a wave of shakes threatened to fold her into a heap. Her heart battered against her ribs. Just keep going. You can do it. Almost there.

A twist of the key and a thumb jammed against the red button in the console fired the engine up. The exhaust stack belched several puffs of black smoke before the engine’s rhythm smoothed. She aimed for the gap between the two train cars. The forklift jerked over the rough terrain, forcing her to grab the controls with both hands.

Behind her in the dusty mirror, the crane operator continued filling the bed of the dump truck. Its driver sat slumped over in the cab and didn’t look up.

So much for picking up the pace, she thought.

Angel pressed harder on the accelerator, gradually increasing her speed. Fifteen long seconds later she angled the forklift toward the still-upright train car. Only then did she glance back.

The field burner was stepping down the ramp of the supply truck. He was limping noticeably and holding his leg. The tank was gone from his back. She couldn’t tell if he’d found what he had gone in there for, but he didn’t come out empty-handed.

As soon as his feet hit the dirt, he started to hobble quickly off across the field, a glove-shaped scrap of blue plastic in his hand.

Chapter Seventeen

Jian’s angry scowl kept flashing through Angel’s mind as she sped in his car over the unpatched road. She was heading for the city of Bairin Zouqi. After all he’d done for her, picking her up in Chifeng and driving her the two hundred kilometers to Baoyang Village, putting her up in his family’s tiny home, she felt bad for forcing him to act against his wishes and the wishes of his parents. Against centuries of his people’s customs and dogma. But she had no choice, not now. Not after the things she’d seen and heard just a few hours ago.

Hours? Has it only been that long?

It hardly seemed like it was even the same day.

Time was of the essence. She glanced up at the sky over the hood of the car, but the afternoon blue was completely unmarred — maybe a touch deeper in hue was all — and the sun was still too high overhead to judge the passage of time by any change in its location. Her cell phone was no help; she’d turned it off to save what little power remained in her battery. The charger in Jian’s car was just another thing that didn’t work.

But when she happened to glance out her window, she was alarmed to see how much fatter the car’s shadow had grown beside her. Time was slipping away much faster than she hoped.

Hurry, Angel. Vite!

The puddle of darkness sailing silently over the ground beside her seem to draw her eye. It felt almost predatory, like some rapacious thing ready to strike and inject its toxic venom. She shuddered and tried to shake the image from her mind and focused on a moving spot roughly a hundred meters down the road.

Despite managing to blunt the sharp edge of terror from her morning’s escapade, a vague disquiet remained deep inside of her. Danger, it whispered. Danger.

She pressed her foot down on the accelerator and clenched her teeth against the bone-jarring impacts as the tires slammed through the potholes. She prayed the car didn’t disintegrate around her.

She knew how lucky she’d been to escape the crash site without being seen, ditching the forklift as soon as she wrestled it behind the last intact train car.

Intact is a funny way to describe it, she thought distractedly, then winced as a swell in the road caused the bottom of the car to scrape the pavement.

She realized that escape had really only bought her a little time; it hadn’t diminished the threat to her at all. Sooner or later, those men would arrive in the village looking for her. That was why she needed to get to the city, not to escape or hide, but to go public with what she had seen. It was the only way she was going to get them to acknowledge the accident and come clean about what they were doing. By uploading the video she’d shot onto the Internet, she’d have an insurance policy against the men who would want her dead or those considering retaliation against the village.

You should have warned them before you left. They deserved to know.

And what, cause a panic? Or worse, turn them even more against her. No, she’d done the right thing by keeping it to herself. She’d created the problem and she was going to fix it. The villagers had enough to worry about tending to their dead.

She had only mentioned to Jian that she’d seen the crash site, omitting nearly everything else, including the parts about the old man and the rock shrine she’d seen along the way. She also didn’t tell him about the hazmat suit she’d stolen out of the supply truck or the jacket she’d left behind.

She had doffed the plastic gear at her earliest opportunity after slipping away, burying it beneath a pile of stones for later retrieval. The hill where she’d left it was unique enough to easily recognize, teeming with the prettiest purple flowers and topped by an odd shaped pillar of granite that looked a bit like a giant finger pointing upward. She was confident she could find it again when the time came. It and the paper in her pocket were all the evidence she had to prove the video’s validity.

For the dozenth time, she wrestled with her feelings over the old man and the ovoo. Was he real? Was he imaginary? It was strange how she kept flipping back and forth between those possibilities, unable to make up her mind; unwilling to fully trust her memory. Before arriving at the crash scene that morning, she’d convinced herself that both had been fully real, despite their disappearing without a trace.

Afterward, as she made her way back to the village along those very same tracks, the realization struck her that she’d been incredibly lucky to escape from the crash site. But she’d done it on her own by keeping her wits about her. There had been no divine provenance, no spiritual guidance. The visions had been nothing but products of her overwrought imagination and the high, thin air.

Except you knew where the crash site was. He led you there.

But that could be easily explained away, too. Jian had mentioned to her earlier that the location was a few kilometers along the tracks. He didn’t specify in which direction, but it seemed pretty self-evident.

The strip of fabric in your pocket. Is that a figment of your imagination, too?

Of course it wasn’t. Nor were the singed edges and the dark spots on it, which she now recognized as blood. But it was possible that it had blown along the tracks from the crash site and she’d merely picked it up along the way. Just some chance thing. And who was to say, maybe it had nothing to do with the accident at all. It was old and dirty. It could have come from anywhere, including some dumb tourist who’d spent a lot of good money to come all the way out here for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to milk a yak.

But then there had been a moment, as she was driving the forklift away, she’d looked into the mirror and for just a split second she thought she’d seen the old man standing there in the middle of the field. Now, thinking back on it, she was sure that’s why she’d turned around to look. But of course, all she’d seen was the flamethrower man coming out of the truck.

Such was the turmoil in her mind when she finally reached the village that it took her a moment to register all the people busily tending to their animals and preparing their midday meals. She’d assumed they would be gone the entire day, at least until after nightfall, but that had clearly not been the case. Her initial response, after getting over her surprise, was to feel grateful for her good fortune. Jian would be back, giving her a chance to ask about driving her into the city so she could upload the video.

But from the moment she entered the yurt he was yelling at her, accusing her of disrespecting him and his people. “Where you go? I tell you stay here, not go outside! I say stay in house, you go wander around like lost sheep!”

She had run long and hard from the crash site, and her lungs felt as dry and brittle as paper, so it took her a moment to catch her breath. She tried to tell him about the video, what it meant. “I need to go to the city.”

“No! I go to burial hill later. No time!”

Angel knew not to press him while he was angry, so she sat with them to eat and hoped the meal would temper his fury. But he seethed the entire time and tore his bread into such tiny pieces that most of it ended up on the ground in crumbs.

“Jian,” she told him, “they’re hiding something. I have video proving it. I’ll show you.”

But he refused to watch the clip, slapping her phone out of her hand before she had a chance to turn it on.

His mother’s attempts to calm him down only set him off again. He jumped to his feet, waving his arms about while she chased him around the yurt. “Miss Angel show disrespect! She—“

“Jian!” The old woman needed only to raise her voice a little bit to stop him in his tracks. He bristled at her intervention, but he held his tongue.

Angel had noticed the tension between them the night before, after their arrival, and she initially worried that it stemmed from their distrust of her as an outsider. It wasn’t the Buddhist way to judge strangers, but this was a community torn apart by change and tragedy.

At some point, she recognized that she was only partially correct. The strain actually had less to do with her personally than with the world she represented, the world which shunned tradition and embraced advancement, both of which were responsible for taking away so many of their neighbors. Because Jian was also a part of that world, much of his family’s displeasure was aimed directly at him.

Poor kid.

He had chosen a path that strayed from the one his family wished for him. He had set aside his customs to live in Chifeng, to study mechanical engineering. He wore Western clothes. He drove a car. He was a man with one foot in both worlds and probably felt he belonged to neither.

It happens in every culture, Angel thought yet again, as her teeth clacked together over an especially rough section of the road. She hoped the spare petrol cans in the trunk didn’t come loose and spill over her suitcase. Old ways get pushed aside, become obsolete. She had seen it before, the people she’d met in Mexico. It was that way even in the United States, the clash of old thinking and the new. Times of transition had a tendency to tear people apart.

“Jian not leave,” he quietly told her in a clipped voice, once his mother had finished scolding him. “Is time of grieving. Go to city tomorrow, after take to crash site.”

“There will be nothing left to see at the crash site, Jian. Don’t you see? It’s all being covered up.” She sighed, and when he didn’t answer, she said, “Fine. I’ll go alone then. You don’t understand how important it is that I post this video, and I simply can’t do it from here. Not just for me, but for the people in this village. Let me use your car.”

She knew she was backing him into a corner. She knew he’d never allow her to go alone. If not because Cheong had likely instructed him to give her what she needed, then because of his own calculation of the risks to her. There was always a slight chance she’d encounter bandits on the road. More likely, a mechanical breakdown would strand her out in the middle of nowhere. And then there was the fact that she knew neither Mandarin nor Mongolian. How would she possibly find her way around without a translator?

In the end, he had allowed her to drive, but not to go alone. Although, by the way he was sulking in his seat beside her, she might as well have. Just shy of two hours into the ride and he still hadn’t said more than a dozen words to her, despite her solemn oath to have him back in time for the burial ceremony.

And now they were finally arriving on the outskirts of Bairin Zouqi, and she could see the taller buildings up ahead. She swerved to avoid another pothole, and he reached out to brace himself against his door. His scowl deepened.

“You drive like crazy person,” he muttered.

Angel smiled as she picked up her phone off the car seat and thumbed it on to check for a signal. There was none yet, but at least he was speaking to her again.

Chapter Eighteen

We may have a problem.

Alvin Cheong raised his seat back and took in a deep breath as he considered the array of possibilities the “problem” might be. The exercise tired him, and he shut his eyes for a moment.

Al? You there?

He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at his feet stretched out before him while silently counting to ten. He hoped — really hoped — that this wasn’t about Missus de l’Enfantine. He liked the woman in a vague sort of way, and wanted her to succeed. From a more objective standpoint, he needed her to succeed. So he hoped that his suspicions about her were wrong.

Al?

He could still hear the caller’s voice clearly, even though he’d lowered the phone to his lap. It never ceased to amaze him how good the connection could be, even out here over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thirty-five thousand feet in the air. Technology had brought such wonders to the world, had changed it in so many positive ways since he was a child. And he greatly appreciated the vast majority of those changes. But not all were beneficial.

We bravely wield the swords of progress, he thought idly, and slay the dragons of constraint. Then he winced as the second part of the adage slipped unbidden into his mind: But in our reckless haste, we sometimes find ourselves impaled upon those blades.

His parents had been poor factory workers at a time when the most advanced machines inside those factories still ran on steam and coal and belched poisonous smoke into the air, and the fastest way to assemble anything was by brute force manual labor. They had both died young, in their late thirties, when he was still in his early teens. Cancer had taken his mother, most likely caused by the high concentrations of benzene and phthalates she’d been exposed to, chemicals that were used to treat the synthetic fabrics which were then woven into clothes to be worn by the unsuspecting and unprotected poor of the world.

His father had been crushed beneath a colossal industrial punch press whose rotting wooden base had collapsed under its own weight. Lizhen, as he was still called then, had gone to live with an uncle fifty kilometers away in Suzhou. The man was a well-known celibate who spent his days in silent contemplation in the beautiful gardens of the Humble Administrator. At night, this seemingly placid man terrorized the hapless boy with an unending rain of blows from a bamboo switch soaked in vinegar. On especially warm days, the old scars still itched terribly. He escaped the brutality by finally running away. It was a preferable alternative to killing the old man with his bare hands.

At fourteen, Lizhen was back in Shanghai, living and dealing drugs on the streets and selling his body to tourists, the majority of whom were in town at the behest of their companies. It was the height of the tech boom and there was a lot of money being thrown around, a lot of drugs being bought, and a lot of lonely or drunk men seeking companionship. Technology had brought the world so much good, but it had also ushered in so much bad.

Al? I think I may have lost you.

He cleared his throat and shook his head as he raised the phone to his ear. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

It’s about your girl. We believe she may be in trouble.

He sighed. “Explain.”

There’s no signal from the tracker in her phone.

“It’s possible she turned it off to conserve the battery.”

She was at the crash site when it stopped updating. We registered it with thirty percent power remaining.

Alvin leaned forward. “She made contact? Already? I thought the burial ceremony was tonight. My boy was supposed to take her to the crash site tomorrow at the earliest.”

The ceremony is tonight, Al. We’re not sure why she went early. With the villagers gone, it’s possible she went off exploring on her own.

“And she hasn’t turned her phone back on? Can you try a remote startup?”

We did try. If the phone were anywhere within the two kilometer range of the box, it would have powered up. It didn’t. We’re helpless and blind until she’s either back in range or—

“Hold on,” Cheong interrupted, as his phone chirped again. “I’ve got another call coming in.”

He checked his screen, then returned the device to his ear. “Never mind,” he told the caller. “It’s her. Can you locate the signal?”

There was a pause, then: Bairin Zouqi.

Cheong’s eyes widened in pleasant surprise. “Um, that’s good. That means she’s uncovered something. I’ll call you back after I speak with her. Oh, and next time call sooner.”

He terminated the connection before a response could be made and answered Angel’s call. “What have you got for me?”

I’m not sure. The Americans were at the crash site and I couldn’t—

“Americans?” He shook his head. “No, the Ministry of Transport has custody of the site; they’ve already sent out a medical team to coordinate with the locals and put the proper health precautions in place. The Baarin representatives are overseeing the removal of the bodies for their religious rites; the crash investigation starts tomorrow, after tonight’s ceremonial burial. You were to meet with a . . . .” He quickly pulled up a file on his tablet. “A Mister Wang Jingping, the chief accident investigation agent assigned to the incident. They’ll be cataloging the collected samples and—

Well, unless the Ministry is now operated entirely by Americans, I’d say your country’s people have been— How do you say in English? Punked? And good luck finding anything now.

Cheong sat stunned for a moment. “How did you— I don’t understand, how did you end up going today? Jian was supposed to take you tomorrow. What changed?”

That’s what I’m saying, Monsieur Cheong, she replied, not answering his question. He could hear the urgency in her voice, which matched the new urgency rising up inside of himself. The Americans are there right now sterilizing the scene. Tomorrow will be too late.

“Sterilizing?”

Erasing evidence— not of the crash, of course, since it’d be impossible to restore the scene to its natural state. Instead, they’re removing clues to what happened there. All of the wreckage is being dismantled, swept up, incinerated, and trucked away. They have men with flamethrowers combing the entire area, scorching the earth down to the bedrock. If I had waited until tomorrow to go, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. Your Ministry, once they arrive in the morning, will likewise find nothing.

“No! That’s not right!”

I’m just telling you what I saw.

“I’ll send someone to check immediately, then.”

Go ahead, but I’m telling you, it’ll be a waste of time. I overheard one of them say they were going to be gone by . . . by now, actually. In fact, I’d advise you to be very careful. I’m pretty sure if I’d been caught, you’d never hear from me again.

“You think they’d hurt you? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Maybe I am being ridiculous. I don’t think so. In any case, it’s a theory I’m not eager to test out.

Cheong was silent as he mulled this over. “Then this suggests that we are correct, that there was some kind of biological factor associated with the crash.”

I don’t think so. The men I saw weren’t decked out for biohazards, just standard chemical protection. Physical barrier suits with splash helmets. I managed to sneak one out. No self-contained air or filters. I can’t be positive, but I don’t think they even had decontamination showers, not unless they were inside the tent.

“Tent?”

Their command center.

“If they were so dangerous, why did they let you go?”

They didn’t know I was there. I took some video.

Clever girl, he thought, and smiled despite his surprise. He was beginning to appreciate her initiative.

But they know now. Or that someone was there, anyway. I’m afraid they’ll go to Baoyang Village looking for me.

He frowned. “You think the villagers are in danger?”

Yes, I do. That’s why I’m calling you, Monsieur Cheong. I’m going to send you a couple video clips. I need you to post the first one everywhere you can find on social media, news sites, YouTube. See if HuffPo will publish it. I’m at a local internet cafe in Barin Zouqi, but I can’t get past the government firewall to access the necessary sites to post the videos.

“What’s on them?”

See for yourself. It’s proof of the cover up. And Monsieur Cheong? It’s very important that this goes live immediately.

“Alvin,” he told her distractedly. “Yes, I heard you. Okay.”

I’m sending them both now. The second video is for your eyes only, at least until I can figure out what it means. It’s a short clip that DeBryan took while we were on Huangxia, and I need you to take a look at it.

“Yes, yes. Of course. Okay. But—“

I can’t stay and chat, Monsieur Cheong. I’m in a bit of a hurry. I have to get Jian back before sunset for the burial ceremony. I’ll call again soon.

“Where are you going now?”

To the hospital.

The call disconnected before he had a chance to ask her why. He stared at the phone in his hand for a moment before realizing he was being scrutinized by the man in the seat facing him.

“Was that her?” his companion asked.

Cheong nodded.

“What’d she say?”

“She . . . .” He blinked a few times at his screen as the two video files finished downloading. “She sent me a couple clips. One is from the crash site. She says that it’s being sterilized . . . by the Americans.”

The other man gave his head a troubled shake. “So, they got there first. I told you it was a possibility. The guy at the Ministry was acting all dodgy.”

Cheong nodded and sighed. “You did.”

“And the other video?”

Cheong thumbed it open.

“It’s yours.”

The man whom Angel knew as photographer P. Mark DeBryan, who had supposedly been murdered in Shanghai, nodded. “Good. It means she trusts you now.”

Chapter Nineteen

The hospital was housed in a nondescript building of sand-colored brick located in an older part of town. The structure stood maybe three stories tall, though it was hard to tell, as it possessed only a single row of windows near the roofline. Long and narrow, it was indistinguishable from the surrounding structures, save for the small plaque beside the main entrance. To Angel, it could just as easily have been a warehouse, or perhaps a factory. In fact, from what she’d seen, most of the buildings in the city shared the same boxy industrial style characteristic of the 1940s and 50s, although she doubted these structures were built much before 1970. China’s growth boom hadn’t really begun until the very late 60s.

If such a boom had happened here, then it seemed that many of the city’s residents had subsequently left. A good portion of the buildings stood empty and unused. Even the automobiles parked on the streets looked old and abandoned.

Given all this, it seemed a minor miracle that they’d been able to find an internet cafe soon after confirming that the cellular service wouldn’t allow Angel to connect to the Internet. But luck was a fickle mistress, for while the country’s firewall prevented her from uploading the video to social media and forced her to resort to asking Cheong to do it, it was while they were at the cafe that they learned of the possible crash survivor.

On a whim, she’d had Jian ask the cafe’s owner if anyone in town had heard about a train crash up north. The man nodded and said something, and when Jian followed up for more information, he became quite animated.

Jian relayed his replies to Angel as best he could. Apparently, there had been rumors of something happening, either a terrorist attack or explosion, though nobody could provide verifiable evidence or firsthand accounts. It was somewhere way out in some remote area, and nobody cared enough to make the long trek out there to check.

“He say many American men pass through about same time,” Jian told her. “Maybe one, two day later— he not remember exactly . They tell him they not know anything about explosion.”

Remarkably, when they were asked where they were going, they refused to say.

“Doesn’t that seem rather suspicious?” she asked.

The old man shrugged and muttered something. “He say men not like to talk,” Jian relayed. “Sometime see businessmen come, go to factory at Wenbai. But these men not like other businessmen, not wearing fancy suits.”

“What were they wearing?”

“Dirty clothes. Not drive expensive shiny car. Come with big machines and trucks.”

“The demolition crew. They were heading out to the crash site already to clean it up.”

The man said something else to Jian. They exchanged a few words, and Jian shook his head.

“What did he say?”

“He ask if we here to see woman at Buddhist hospital. Come in couple day ago, after men. Badly hurt, many cuts and burns. Bleeding a lot.”

“A factory worker from the train? All the way here? That seems unlikely.”

Jian shrugged. “He say she not Chinese, but speak Mandarin. I tell him she probably not from Goh Li Xhia factory. Maybe teacher kidnap from Chifeng and escape. Sometime happen to Westerner, especially women. Gangs sometime bad around there. Nobody know for sure because she not speaking.”

Angel thought about this for a moment. It seemed impossible that this woman was linked to the factory or the crash, but the timing did seem a bit suspect. Jian could guess what she was thinking because he shook his head and reminded her that she promised to get him back.

“I know,” she told him. “But we’re already here.”

“Is too late already, Missus Angel,” he said, tapping the watch on his wrist.

“It’ll only take a few minutes. Then we’ll head straight back.”

She pushed until he finally relented, though it did cause him to become angry with her again.

She parked up the street from the hospital’s entrance, slotting the car into a space barely large enough to accommodate it with an ease that surprised even herself. And when she caught Jian eying the job from the sidewalk, she knew he’d been impressed, too.

They found what passed for a reception desk and asked about the woman. The attendant gave Angel a guarded look. She and Jian exchanged a few words and Angel feared that he might be telling her to deny them so that he could get back into the car and drive back to Baoyang. But the woman finally referred to a sheaf of papers. After a minute or so, she nodded, said something and pointed down the hallway.

“She say woman with many cuts and burns come three or four day. She not know name. Nobody know name. Not know what happen or how get hurt.”

They arrived at the door to a long and narrow room with a very high ceiling. A dirty yellow light filtered in through the windows, supplementing the paltry light given off by the dangling fluorescent fixtures. Jian nodded to indicate that it was the one the woman had noted, and they went in.

Beds lined either side of a central aisle, their white enameled frames yellowed with age and badly chipped and scuffed. Garbage cans overflowed with paper, bandages with deep brown and yellow stains draped over the rims. The rank tang of infection hung in the air, mixed with the weaker scent of disinfectant and antibiotics. There were maybe three dozen beds in all, separated with movable curtain dividers; less than a third were occupied, most by coughing or wheezing bodies.

A monk slowly walked down the aisle toward them from the right. A nurse in a white outfit stood beside a bed off to their left. She looked up at them, then returned her attention to the patient she was with.

Angel turned to the right.

In the last bed was a woman covered in bandages, her coal black hair cropped short. It appeared to have been cut without any consideration for style, and Angel realized with a start that it was because much of it had been burnt off. She did not look Chinese, though there was a hint of Asian in her features. She was very young.

“Allo?” she asked, stepping over to the side of the bed.

The woman — not much older than a girl, really — didn’t respond. Her eyes remained shut. Her breathing maintained its slow, deep, steady rhythm. But something about it felt fake to Angel. It was like she was pretending to sleep.

“I don’t know if you can understand me, but I’m an investigative reporter looking into a . . . an incident about a hundred kilometers from here.”

The woman’s eyes fluttered open.

“Can you understand me?” And then, when she didn’t respond, “Were you in an accident? Did someone kidnap you?”

The woman shut her eyes.

Angel turned to Jian. “Ask her if she was on a train.”

The woman’s eyes immediately flew open, and her face went from gray to white. Something passed over her visage, a darkness, like a curtain being drawn over a window, and her lips moved, forming words.

She’s terrified, Angel thought. “Were you on the train?”

Her lips moved again, but not a sound came out of her mouth.

Angel turned to Jian. He shrugged. “I think she say méiyou,” he told her. “It mean no.”

“She knows English. She understood me when I mentioned the train.”

“Méiyou!” the woman said, this time louder and with greater urgency. She tried to shake her head, but winced in pain. “Méiyou!”

“We leave,” Jian whispered nervously. The nurse looked up at them, a flicker of annoyance in her eyes. “I tell you, she not from factory. She not on train.”

A clear plastic bag was tucked into a space in the bedside table. Angel pulled it out and opened it. The clothes reeked of diesel fuel and smoke. She reached in and extracted a pair of jeans, caked stiff with blood and mud. One leg had been cut off with scissors. There was also a jacket, sky blue. This was likewise in tatters.

Angel removed the scrap of fabric from her pocket and held the two together. Jian gasped when they matched perfectly. Seeing this, the woman’s eyes grew even wider.

Angel leaned down, and the woman cringed and tried to pull away. “It’s okay! It’s okay,” she whispered, placing a gentle hand on the woman’s arm. Her heart was pounding hard and fast at the significance of the girl’s presence. With the crash site gone, she was the key to understanding what had happened! “I’m here to help.”

But her assurances weren’t calming the woman down any. She was clearly terrified beyond reason, perhaps still in shock.

“Listen, you’re safe now. The doctors here—“

“No! Leave me!”

Her shouts rang through the ward and, for a few seconds, everything was silent.

“If you were on that train, then I really need to talk with you. Were you an employee at the factory? Are you American?”

Angel turned to Jian. “Did you hear about any Americans at the factory?”

He shook his head, shrugged. “Some time ago, I hear about American come and live with woman name Nur Zetian. She live alone in one of new brick house on outside of Baoyang Village, no children or husband.” He shrugged. “Sometime I hear about American woman working at factory as interpreter, but I never meet her when I come back.”

“I think you just have.”

His eyes turned to the woman in the bed.

“My name is Angelique de l’Enfantine.” Angel kept her voice low and soothing as she spoke. “I’m a journalist. You’ve been in a train accident. Do you remember that?”

The woman’s shaking only grew worse. Tears slipped from her eyes. “Méiyou,” she moaned.

“Shh,” Angel urged. “It’s okay. Do you remember what happened? Do you remember your name?”

“She in shock,” Jian said. “She scare.”

But Angel didn’t think it was shock, not entirely. She thought about the men at the crash site and wondered, Is she hiding from them?

“Please, I’m trying to help. Can you tell me your name?”

“J-jamie,” she finally answered. “Jamie P-peters.”

“Okay, Jamie. Do you remember the accident?”

She gave a tentative nod. “I-I was the only—“ Her voice broke into a sob.

“How did you get here? Did someone bring you?”

The girl turned away for a moment. The lump in her throat bobbed up and down several times before she spoke again. “I should be dead. The old man, he was supposed to touch me, but he didn’t. They were touching each other, but they skipped me.”

Angel frowned. “What?”

“I th-thought it was a game.” Tears ran down her face.

“Game? I don’t understand.”

“I c-can’t tell you! If they find out, I think they’ll kill me. He told me not to tell anyone.” She moaned and turned away. “But I think— I think it’s already too late!”

“Who told you this?”

“The dark man. He said he was saving me, but he lied.”

“Dark skin? African? Is that how you got here?”

“No! Not his skin! Dark inside!”

Angel shook her head. “How did he lie?”

The trembling had gotten so bad that for several seconds Jamie was unable to speak. Angel waited, then asked again.

“He said he was saving me from something terrible, but he was wrong. He’s saving me for something terrible!”

She sat bolt upright in the bed, causing Angel and Jian to flinch back. The movement slammed the headboard against the wall. “No,” she whimpered. “No! Go away! He said they’ll kill me if they find out. They’ll kill me!”

“Who will? Tell me! I need to know.”

“Please!” She turned to Jian and started to babble. At first he frowned, then he backed away, his own eyes widening.

“What’d she say?” Angel asked.

The nurse called over at them in alarm, but remained at the other end of the ward.

“Méiyou!” Jamie screamed. “Méiyou!”

Now the nurse was hurrying over, whispering loudly and gesturing with her free hand for Angel and Jian to leave. Jian went over and cut her off, speaking to her quickly in Mandarin.

Angel felt her arm being grabbed and she looked down. “Don’t tell them about me!” Jamie pleaded. “They can’t know! Please!”

“Why not? Who?”

“They don’t want anyone to know the truth! They’ll kill me! And they’ll kill you, too! The dark man told me!”

The nurse was arguing with Jian, getting angry.

“What truth?” Angel hissed. “What do you know?”

Jamie’s eyes flicked fearfully over toward Jian and the nurse. They widened, and Angel’s heart skipped a beat as she realized why. “Jian!” she yelled. “Don’t tell her anything!”

He turned and blinked uncomprehendingly at her.

“Don’t tell the nurse her name. Don’t tell her anything about the crash!”

“But—“

“Please,” Jamie begged, pulling Angel’s arm and squeezing it. “You have to protect me. He’s going to come for me!”

“I can’t do that,” Angel said. “You’re injured. You need care.”

“You don’t understand! It’s inside of me!”

“What is?”

“I know what they did to those people,” Jamie growled. “They put it in them, but not me! That’s why they skipped me!”

“The other people on the train? Who? I don’t—“

The girl screamed then, and the sound of it curdled Angel’s blood. The scream faded, and Jamie started to babble, sending the bed skittering away from the wall with her paroxysms. Angel had to hold her down to keep her from falling out.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, her body went rigid. A hand snaked out from beneath the sheet and latched onto Angel’s wrist and squeezed it so hard that the bones ground against each other. Angel cried out in pain and tried to pull away.

“They’re inside of me!” Jamie groaned. “I told them to take it out, but they didn’t do it fast enough! They were too late!”

“Take what out?”

“DOWN THERE!”

Jamie kicked off the blankets, reached down and pulled up her gown. She was naked underneath. “Here!” And she tore away the bandage from her thigh, exposing an ugly gash. The edges were blackened and peeling away, exposing new flesh underneath, bright pink with healing. Angel tried to cover her back up.

The nurse was pushing on Jian, appealing to him in a voice that was getting louder and louder. But in his shock he blocked her way, which only made her angrier.

“The bone! They took out the bone and threw it away! But they got inside of me! Doing things to me! Get them out! Get them out of me NOW!”

She clawed at the wound with her fingernails, digging them into the muscle until the delicate new skin tore and fresh blood bubbled out and ran down her leg, soaking into the sheets.

The nurse tugged at Angel. “Líkai!” she shouted, pointing toward the door. “Líkai!”

Angel felt Jian dragging her, pulling her away from the bedside. “She want us to leave now!” he said.

So she let him take her, leaving the screaming, shaking, terrified—

insane

—girl behind.

Chapter Twenty

Angel couldn’t seem to shake the intense dread that had fallen over her since leaving the hospital. Even now, more than an hour later and the city of Bairin Zouqi far behind, the encounter with the accident survivor affected her deeply. It had clearly left Jian shaken as well.

He was driving now, had not even offered her the option of taking the wheel, and she was grateful to just sit in the passenger seat and let him deal with the mechanics of getting them back to the village.

Anyway, she had too much to sort through in her mind to focus on the road. For example, had the video been posted? Was it going viral? Was Cheong sending someone out to investigate the cover-up? But despite all that, her mind kept drifting back to the girl in that bed and the way she’d acted. Had it been insanity or terror?

Was there really a difference?

A couple of times the uncertainty nearly prompted her to tell Jian to turn around. Twice, she got as far as opening her mouth and saying his name, but she stopped herself before going any further. It was unfair to ask him to sacrifice more than he already had. And she doubted he’d listen anyway. There was no way he was going to drive her all the way back now and miss the final part of the burial ceremony.

But she also felt horrible about leaving Jamie there, and in such an emotionally fragile state, even though she really had no choice in the matter. The hospital wasn’t going to allow them to stay. In fact, the nurse herself had told Jian that she was going to call the police unless they left immediately. The last thing Angel wanted was to attract anyone’s attention, much less the wrong people’s, to the fact that Jamie was there.

You could have brought her with you.

Not in her condition. Not with that nasty leg wound bleeding all over the place and all those other cuts and bruises. It was obvious that the one on her upper thigh had gotten infected at some point. Though the skin around it had a healthy shine to it, there were darker lines radiating away, up toward her abdomen and down toward her feet.

Angel hadn’t seen any IV, so she wasn’t sure how she was getting antibiotics, but she had to be. The wound would also require continued therapy, including debridement to remove the dead and burned tissue, removal of the drain, suture removal . . . .

The other injuries, individually, did not appear to be nearly as bad, but cumulatively, they suggested the girl had suffered a great amount of trauma. She needed rest, liquids, and food to recover. Most of all, she needed a stable environment with some form of psychological help. It was doubtful she’d receive the latter, but perhaps as her body mended, her mind might also find its own way out of whatever dark labyrinth she seemed to be lost in. Some of the things she had been spouting just sounded—

“Crazy,” Jian muttered to himself, almost as if he’d been aware of Angel’s thoughts. “She crazy.” They sped along the empty road, skidding slightly over a drift of fine sand carried there by the wind. Dust rose into the air behind them. “She say thing not make sense.”

Angel looked over at him, frowning. “She’s been through a lot.”

“She say crazy thing, say bad spirit inside her body, come through her leg.”

“I think she meant shrapnel. From the accident.”

“She not say that, she say bad spirit inside, all over now, growing.”

Angel sighed. “She’s in shock.”

He turned his disappointed stare at her, but didn’t answer. He wasn’t ready to forgive her yet. And, frankly, Angel knew she didn’t deserve it. But if they hadn’t gone into the city, they never would have learned about her.

The situation at the hospital had, unfortunately, gotten much worse before they left, and Angel knew she was partly to blame. Jian had dragged her nearly out of the ward when she stopped and pulled away from him and stepped back inside. She hadn’t wanted to leave the girl. Something inside of her told her not to.

She spoke Jamie’s name, but at the sight of Angel standing there, the girl immediately resumed her screaming, forcing the nurse to come over to calm her again. And then, when she didn’t settle down, to resort to sedating her.

Jian had tugged at Angel, begging her to just leave, but in her horror, her feet had seemed nailed to the floor. She didn’t know what was worse— the screams that gushed out of Jamie’s mouth or the incomprehensible babbling and accusatory finger being pointed at them.

The screaming, now joined by the frantic cries of the nurse, had triggered some of the other patients to begin shouting out as well, raising a cacophony that still rung in Angel’s ears. Then, suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, Jamie’s body went slack and she fell back to the bed as she succumbed to the sedative. Almost as quickly, the ward likewise quieted. The nurse, now red-faced and disheveled, told them once and for all to leave.

The sun was now straight ahead of them, blinding them with the glare off the car’s faded and dirty hood and the surface of the road ahead. To Angel, the diffuse white orb seemed to be slipping out of the sky with alarming speed. Jian was affected by it, too, as with each passing minute his mood grew more dour. Judging by their speed and the distance left to cover, Angel guessed that they would make it back to Baoyang Village in time, but only just, and that was assuming nothing slowed them down.

The memory of Jamie lying comatose in her bed came to Angel’s mind, her head lolled to the side. Instead of looking peaceful, she’d looked dead. Angel shuddered at the memory as another wave of impending doom swept over her. What would happen once Jamie woke? Would the nightmares and the screaming resume? Would she try to flee from—

the dark man

—the hospital?

There is no dark man, Angel.

If not, then how had she come to be there, well over a hundred kilometers away from the crash site?

Even more troubling was the sudden certainty that she would never see the girl alive again.

“You told the nurse nothing, right?” she reconfirmed with Jian. “Not her name or anything about the crash.”

He scowled out through the hazy windshield and nodded. “I don’t say those thing. You tell Jian not to, I listen. I listen to Missus Angel. Missus Angel not listen to Jian.”

By now, the sun’s bottom arc was hovering a finger’s width above the horizon, and they still had an hour left to go.

Angel reached over and laid a hand gently on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “You’re right.”

He gripped the steering wheel tighter, but didn’t reply.

“Everything will be okay. I promise. We’ll get there in time.”

She hoped she was right on both accounts.

Chapter Twenty One

The sun had already set when they arrived at the village, though daylight had not yet fled entirely from the sky. As Jian feared, the yurts were empty and dark inside. He quickly lit a lamp, his movements conveying the bitter anger inside of him.

“I’m sorry,” Angel apologized yet again. “They probably only just left.” She pointed to the glowing heap of charcoal in the pit in the middle of the floor. Smoke curled from the embers, and the water inside the clay pot next to it was still warm. “I’m sure you can catch them if you leave now. Just drive—“

“I not drive to burial ceremony!” he snapped.

He stomped around the yurt, managing to look deeply affronted by the suggestion, and gathered up his parka and a handful of flatbread.

“I didn’t think we’d be so late.”

He grumbled something, then pushed out through the door without a warning for her to stay inside the yurt. At this point, she thought, he probably figured it’d be a waste of breath. But even without it, she had absolutely no intention of going anywhere. Out here in the darkness, without street signs or other markers, she’d likely get hopelessly lost. And besides, where was she going to go?

In the deepening gloom, she watched him jog a hundred meters or so down the road, then cut off between yurts in the direction of the hills. After a few minutes, she thought she caught his shape out past the edge of the village, a slightly darker form bobbing away across the gradually sloping plains. She strained her eyes, but the distance and poor light eventually forced her to give up.

“It’s not your fault,” she told herself in her native French, and went back inside the hut. While she knew it to be true — even believed that Jian didn’t blame her for the delay, either — it didn’t stop her from feeling a pang of guilt. She had pushed her luck once again and lost.

Their way had been blocked by a logjam of sheep nearly twenty kilometers up the road. If anyone might have predicted such an unlikely event, it should have been Jian. Maybe he had; it would explain the depth of his anger with her, as he’d already resigned himself to the fact that it would be too late by the time they arrived. The herd must have numbered close to a thousand, and the shepherd had been in no hurry to move them off the road, despite Jian’s impatient honks.

“Not my fault,” she muttered to herself again.

She spent the next ten minutes or so restacking the wood in the fire pit and getting it burning again, as well as igniting another pair of oil lamps. She hung one on the central pole and took the other to situate by the door.

Nearly all of the light had fled from the sky by then, though a thin smear of orange and blue streaked over the distant hills, illuminating an approaching bank of clouds. She noticed that the wind had picked up, coming from the north, and it was bitingly cold. She hoped Jian got to the burial grounds in time, and she wondered how long the ceremony would take. She feared it might begin to snow before they returned.

* * *

It was sometime later when a rumbling sound filled the yurt and shook the ground beneath her, rousing Angel from a deep sleep. It quickly passed, so that in her state of mental and physical fatigue, the disturbance slipped out of her mind as quickly as it had intruded. Just thunder, she thought as the noise faded away, and she drifted off again.

She’d been dreaming of her childhood. The memories this time were of a happier period in her life than the more typical dark days of her teenage years. In those days, her father’s security firm was still growing at a manageable pace. The money had been good and steady. Their lives had still been happy, as it was before he’d taken on the major government contracts that would eventually drive him into the ground from the stress, creating a monster along the way that preyed on the soul of the family.

They had taken holiday in Marseille, renting a villa right on the Mediterranean coast for nearly the entire summer. Her father, Gaétan, was flying back and forth to Paris and the United States, working on several new projects, and his comings and goings became welcome disruptions to the blissful but otherwise unrelentingly repetitive routine of lazy days filled with sunshine, rich food, and bathing in la mer. That was the summer Angel turned so brown that the tan remained with her all through the following cold and dreary winter, so that it almost seemed as if her skin had permanently assumed the darker hue. She was eleven, which made Jacques four and still in his socially outgoing and lovable phase. He was the apple of everyone’s eye. Or, as the French prefer to say, the plum.

In the dream they were on the beach with their mother, all of them seated in the shade of a lime green umbrella and eating watermelon soaked in lemonade from a crystal bowl. Her mother had had those cats-eye sunglasses, the ones that had been ever so fashionable back when her grandparents were kids; the style was staging a major comeback. White-rimmed and studded with plastic rhinestones that gathered then scattered the light into a million prisms. Angel could remember thinking how she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and that she was the luckiest girl alive to be her daughter.

She watched Jacques waddle down to the water’s edge with a plastic pail half his height banging against his heels. He was still sporting the majority of his baby fat, which he wouldn’t lose until he was a year shy of finishing école at seventeen, when he did nothing but grow, both vertically and intellectually, as well as emotionally, from the linear boy he had earlier been.

From their vantage point up the slope of the beach, the waves appeared to tower over him. In fact, the waves in this memory were even higher, the sea colder and grayer than they had ever been in real life.

Pourquoi es-tu inquiet, ma cherie? her mother asked.

She was reading a book. In her mind, Angel could see the cover, a Simone de Beauvoir, though in truth she couldn’t recall if her mother had ever read anything more profound than Sylvie Lainé.

I’m not worried, mama.

But she was, at least in the dream. She watched Jacques as he built his sandcastle, hoping that it was far enough above the waterline to avoid a rogue wave which might come and wash his masterpiece away. A kind of anxiety roiled just below the surface of her mind, as if she knew something bad was about to happen, yet was resigned to the truth that there was little she could do to prevent it.

The castle grew higher and more elaborate, with turrets and ramparts and a thick sand barrier protecting Jacques from the marauding sea. Protecting him from everything. The walls circled around and enclosed him, and the day wore lazily on.

Eventually, the sun went down and night came, and the heat seeped away from the beach and left her shivering. Yet they all remained, her mother’s nose buried inside the pages of that scandalous book. Jacques piled the sand higher and higher. Angel could no longer see him at all. The stars were out and the sea beyond the castle glowed with a cold green fire. And out on la mer was a massive black shadow, silent and still upon the waters, just sitting there as if it were waiting for morning to come before it showed its true form.

The sudden pop! of a piece of wood in the fire yanked her once more out of the dream, and she lay there for a moment panting in the darkness. The yurt had grown cold, and both lanterns had burned through their supplies of oil. The distant drone of the wind filled the night.

Angel stood up and checked her phone for the time. It was close to midnight. Surely the mourners would return soon. She was frankly surprised that they hadn’t already.

Aware of the mess she’d made from her impromptu meal of boiled potato, yak cheese, and mutton jerky, she added wood to the fire in preparation for tidying up. She gathered her belongings and placed them into her pack, pausing to check her phone again on the off chance that a signal had mysteriously appeared. But of course there was no connection, and she regretted once more not having remembered to check in with Cheong before they left Bairin Zouqi. She had to trust that he had done as she’d asked and that the video she had sent him was now spreading throughout the Internet. By morning, there would be no way for the Americans to deny the accident or the cover up.

Noting how little of her battery remained, she turned the phone off and stuffed it into her pocket. When she was finished cleaning, she settled down again onto the sleeping mat to wait.

Over the drone of the wind, she noticed a new sound, a bit like the wind, yet different. It grew louder. Something about it felt artificial.

Pourquoi es-tu inquiet, ma cherie? whispered the memory of her mother’s voice.

The constant tension inside of her once more flared. Something wasn’t right. Unable to sit still, Angel rose and shuffled over to the door and pulled it open. Darkness and cold swept in, pressing the fire down against the ground. Wood shifted, sending a cloud of sparks spiraling toward the ceiling and out through the vent.

Before her, the village lay as silent and still as always. She stepped out and turned her gaze toward the hills to the west. They would be invisible, of course. Except they weren’t; their tips were tinged with the orange of morning light. Puzzled, she wondered if the time on her phone had been incorrect, or if she’d accidentally fallen asleep without realizing it since checking.

For several seconds more, she stared at the horizon without comprehending, but then the droning sound grew suddenly louder and the ground began to shake. Behind her in the yurt, objects rattled and fell to the ground. A giant, dark shape suddenly appeared above the yurt, blanking out the stars. It screamed toward the hills. Angel ducked instinctively and watched as the airplane passed over the village.

A half minute later, a tiny thread of light appeared, a bridge between the glowing orange hills and the now distant object in the sky. The light began to expand and pour down the slopes like lava.

Angel cried out in horror as she realized the truth before her: The burial ceremony and all the villagers were being incinerated.

Chapter Twenty Two

Angel stumbled back into the yurt, hitting the center post with her body and falling to her knees and scattering the fire. A thousand thoughts entered her mind, a thousand accusations, a thousand questions. How could they do this? How could they just go and kill hundreds of innocent people? Why would they?

It’s your fault.

She pushed herself off the ground with a strangled cry, as if the act would distance her from that terrible thought. No no no . . . . She didn’t want to believe she’d brought this upon these people.

The glow from the distant burning now filled enough of the sky that it leaked in through the door, a wan flickering sheen which flared briefly before falling away again. The plane had circled and dumped another spray of napalm. She scanned around her, though she wasn’t sure why or what she was hoping to see inside the yurt. Nothing would change what was happening out there or reverse the horrible truth that the people of the village were all dead.

The reality of her own danger slammed into her with the shock of ice water. They weren’t going to stop, those men out there. They would come here and burn the village, too, knowing that there might be witnesses. She needed to run, to save herself.

The droning sound grew fuller, and she ran once more to the door and fell against it as her heart slammed into her throat and her breath hitched in her chest. The plane was curving off to the right, still quite a distance from the village. She watched it circle around, then disappear out of view behind her. It reappeared several moments later around the other side, flying low along the fringe of the community where the outermost structures stood. She thought it might return to the hill, when a streak of fire arrowed to the ground two hundred meters away, spewing from beneath the airplane. Even from this distance, she could feel the heat as the flaming chemical hit the ground and incinerated everything it touched.

Yurts and pens, everything went up in a blaze, popping from the heat, exploding. Fences caught fire, and the flames raced along the dry wood as if they were fuses. Animals, already panicked by the high whine of the engines, broke through their cages and stampeded away. Some of them carried the fire on their bodies as they streaked across the grassland, spreading the destruction.

Angel grabbed her pack and ran. She weaved her way through the scattered yurts, quickly losing her orientation. The plane circled around for another go, and she cowered in the shadows as it passed, hoping to not be seen. Hoping she weren’t caught in the middle of the plane’s next drop zone.

The car! Get to the car!

But which way was it? She couldn’t seem to remember where the road was anymore, or where Jian had parked it. Had they driven in from the right? The left? She spun around, whimpering. The droning grew louder again. And then she saw the vehicle, parked beside a rack of drying yak pelts at the edge of the village, and suddenly everything fell back into place again.

She started to sprint toward it, but the smoke was burning her throat and eyes and she tripped. The backpack flew from her grip. Stumbling back to her feet, she held her arms out before her and tried to run again, then tripped over her pack. She grabbed it, scrambled once again, stood.

Which way!

She’d gotten turned around. She couldn’t see!

There! Go!

The smoke thinned and there it was. She’d get in and drive away, that’s what she’d do. No lights and no brakes, just a dark shape on the ground. Drive and hope they didn’t see her or the dust she kicked up. There was already enough black smoke that she stood a chance of getting away.

And yet, at the same time, she knew that there was no chance of that at all.

Another load of napalm was dropped, closer by a hundred meters. The smell of it burned her lungs, nearly doubled her over with pain. She staggered the last several meters to the car.

She wrenched the door open and threw her bag in and followed it with her body. “Keys!” she shrieked in terror. She’d forgotten to look for them! Her heart exploded in her chest, and yet it felt as if she was being crushed at the same time. The car was useless without the—

In the glow of the burning yurts, she saw Jian’s keys glinting in the ignition. Crying out, she twisted them and pumped the accelerator. The engine roared to life, coughed, and very nearly died.

Smoke was pouring through the village now. In a moment it would blind her. Without bothering to shut the door, she shifted into gear and the car lurched forward. The smoke thinned again, pulled up in a cyclone, and she had a momentary glimpse of the plane in the windshield as it loomed right above her. With a bone-shaking roar, it passed overhead. Had it seen her?

A wall of binding white light rose up behind her, a blast of such intensity that she feared the car would explode. She slammed over something, knocking her teeth together. The door banged shut. The mirrors filled with nothing but flames, a flash of white light that felt as if the interior of the car had ignited. The fire reached high into the air and curled its fingers toward her like a wave, before collapsing inward again. The scene was worse than any hell, both real or imagined. Yurts burned like roman candles shooting flames into the air. And somewhere in the middle of that maelstrom was the one she had just escaped out of.

Chapter Twenty Three

A thick blanket of snow covered the car’s windows, masking the arrival of morning. The sleepless night had seemed to drag on forever, the terror a never-ending ball of fire in Angel’s belly so intense that she could do nothing but withdraw inside of herself. Finally, she became aware of a thin, gray light filtering through.

Her first impulse while driving away had been to flee from this place, flee China entirely, to just take the car and herself to the airport. She could see herself getting on the plane, going home to New York, cowering beneath the blankets of her bed in her little two-bedroom apartment. And when she finally managed to calm her shaking body long enough to call Cheong, she’d tell him he could take this assignment and give it to someone else. She never wanted to see him or this place again.

But her inner journalist fought back, resisting the idea and chastising her for her cowardice. You’re an investigative reporter. You took a vow to expose the miscarriages of justice, no matter where or what they might be, no matter the personal risk to yourself.

But how could she do that? She couldn’t fight people who clearly wielded such power over governments and held such disregard for life that they could get away with murdering hundreds of innocent people, all to protect their commercial interests.

And what interests might those be, Angel? What exactly are they protecting?

For a long time, those questions dangled like carrots before her mind’s eye, taunting her. And in the end, Angel knew that the only way she could go on without regrets was to stay the course. And that meant going back to the hospital and speaking with Jamie Peters.

She crazy. The ghost of Jian’s voice taunted her. She say crazy thing.

It had been thoughts of Jian that made her turn around and drive back to the decimated village soon after fleeing from it. What if he were somehow still alive? What if there were other survivors? It had taken nearly every fiber of her being to fight her impulse to keep going. With a strangled cry, she turned the car around, cursing herself aloud.

As she topped the rise overlooking the valley, she could not see the plane for all the smoke and the glare of the flames, but she could hear its incriminating buzz, so she pulled off the road and parked behind an elevated outcropping of rock. It was far enough away to be out of sight and out of the plane’s line of flight. But still she’d felt so very exposed, and so she’d gotten out and run across the rock-strewn grassland to another outcropping a half kilometer away. There, between two boulders, she huddled and watched the murderers finish their grisly chore.

Line after line of incendiary was laid out over the village for the next two hours, every square meter methodically carpet-bombed with the exact same precision that the men at the crash site had exhibited. Too wired with emotion and grief, she’d been too scared to even shut her eyes.

An hour after the last pass, with the drone of the plane’s engines no more than a hum in her memory, as the fires continued to burn and release black smoke into the even blacker sky, she finally accepted that the pilot had been satisfied with his job and would not return. Half frozen and stiff from the night’s frigid temperature, she made her way back to the car to await morning, only realizing sometime later that it had begun to snow. She was grateful for it, as the flakes erased the horror in the valley from her view.

But now it was morning, and she had no doubt that the men would return to check their work and verify that there were no survivors. She needed to get down there herself first and then be away.

She flicked on the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work. She could hear the electric motor clicking as it strained to free them from their nests beneath the hood. The windshield remained blanketed.

With tears running down her cheeks, Angel laid her exhausted head back against the seat and shut her eyes.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

Chapter Twenty Four

As it turned out, the covering on the windows hadn’t been snow, but a fine powdery ash. The dust of the dead, Angel thought morbidly, as she stepped out for the first time that morning into the unmelting powder. The ash blanketed the car and the ground around her a half inch thick. The carbonized remains of kilometers upon kilometers of decimated grasslands. Of three or four hundred yurts. All that had been blackened by a fire which had spread far beyond the boundaries of the village, aided by the winds and the panicked animals in their mad, fatal flight.

Angel was alarmed to discover that the edge of the fire had come to within a hundred meters of the car. She hadn’t seen it, though not because she had slept. She was certain she hadn’t. But rather because the ash had concealed it from her, blinded her from the crime whose aftermath now spread out before her in the clear early morning light.

What she saw was an alien moonscape, monochromatic and barren, devoid of all life. No breeze came to sweep the ash away; the air was as still and cold as a morgue’s. But with each step she took, the gray dust lifted delicately, curling into the air before settling again on the tops of her shoes.

In the distance, morning sunlight was just beginning to pierce a notch in the opposite hills and spill over into the valley. The sky was colored sepia by the soot that still hung in the air. Much of the land remained in shadow, and it was difficult to discern any details.

Nothing moved; nothing caught her eye. If any animals had escape unharmed — and Angel doubted many had — then they were long gone, fled into the neighboring valleys and beyond. All that remained on the ground were humps of smoldering rock and mortar and the burnt chemical stench of the fire. Any corpses would be too small to identify.

But she had to be sure. Of course, this carried a great deal of risk, especially now that morning had broken. That the men who had done this hadn’t already returned only seemed to suggest that they were overly confident of their success and that the formality of checking required no such haste. More importantly, that they weren’t still here further indicated that no one had witnessed her driving away.

Maybe her run of bad luck had reached the end of its course.

She cleared the windows, then got back inside and started the car. Checking the gauges, she saw that she had just under a half tank of petrol remaining. The cans in the back provided an extra ten or so liters, more than enough to get her back to Bairin Zouqi, but probably not enough to make it all the way to Chifeng.

She steered back toward the road, gently guiding the vehicle over the uneven terrain. The pavement was evident only by its relative flatness. The tires left a telltale trail of crushed ash behind her, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Entering the village, she was struck numb once again by the utter destruction. Nothing had been spared. It had all gone up so quickly, the fire so utterly thorough and hot and fast, that little remained still smoldering.

She stopped and got out, and the ground was cold to the touch. Nowhere did she see any tracks in the ash. There were no survivors, of this she was now certain. Nevertheless, she made her way around the edge of the village, driving as fast as she dared and hoping the tires hit nothing sharp enough to puncture them. The circuit brought her to the point closest to the hills, yet she saw nothing to suggest that anyone had come from that direction.

The sun was now high enough to illuminate nearly the entire valley. With her heart and the taste of death sharing space in her throat and tears of despair running streaks down her cheeks, Angel returned to the road and left Baoyang Village for the last time.

* * *

She didn’t realize she was weeping openly until she tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. How long she’d been driving like that, numb on the outside yet filled with such pain and anger inside that all she could do was focus on the road ahead of the car, she had no idea.

With a start, she recognized the unmarked turnoff which Jian had pointed out two days before, the road which would take her to Wenbai and the Goh Li Xhia factory. She wrenched the wheel to the left, realizing that it was the next logical place to look for clues, and the car slid onto the gravel road. Pebbles pinged against the frame.

The road slowly ascended toward a distant rise, wending its way between the larger stone outcroppings. Halfway there, she came to a railroad crossing and a small structure, the twin of the station back in Baoyang. She guessed that this was where the workers must have disembarked at the beginnings of their shifts and then returned when they were finished. The factory could not be far beyond. Feeling exposed and deaf inside the car, she pulled it around to the back of the structure and parked it in the shadows beneath the overhang, then returned by foot to the road, backtracking a ways to make sure the vehicle wasn’t visible.

The road continued for another half kilometer before reaching the top of the rise. A heavy chain had been strung from one side to the other, blocking vehicular access. A metal sign dangled from the center. The notice was in Chinese, but the large red circle told her everything she needed to know.

Below, not more than a kilometer or so and situated on a low hump in the center of the valley, stood the factory. It appeared to be deserted.

Seeing it, she knew she should just go back, get in the car, and drive to the hospital in Bairin Zouqi before committing to doing anything else. Alone, she was ignorant of what dangers might lay before her. Jamie Peters would be an immense help, with her familiarity with the building, its layout and operations, and she might even be able to provide a way in.

Still unwilling to leave, Angel tested the chain’s firmness, as well as that of the anchor posts on either side of the road. Without a key for the padlock, nobody was getting through. And the ground beside the track was too rocky and uneven to go off-road around the barrier, not without doing some serious damage to the bottom of Jian’s car. If she broke an axle or ruptured a line, she’d be stranded out here in the middle of nowhere and likely a sitting duck for the men she’d escaped from back there. Getting caught wouldn’t help her or Jamie one bit.

She stood there a few more minutes looking down at the silent building. Then she stepped over the barrier and began her descent.

Chapter Twenty Five

Stasey Norstrom jumped from the passenger seat in the cab of the truck and waited for it to move past him before marching stiffly to the tent that contained the command center and the man from whom he took his orders. To say that he was troubled would be a serious understatement. Disturbed would be closer to the truth, though still far from accurate. He was beyond disturbed; he was . . . . Well, to put it bluntly, he was furious enough to skin a wildcat with nothing but his bare hands and teeth.

In all of his years working situations such as the one here in China, he had never had a breach in containment. Yet, not only had there been one, there had been at least two, quite possibly three in the past twenty four hours.

That damn incompetent horse’s ass Aston.

What was worse, he’d come to find out that such breaches were becoming a theme with the damn company, with at least a half dozen other screw-ups happening before Norstrom’s team had been brought on board six weeks ago. What the hell was wrong with these incompetents? Why couldn’t they get their act together?

You warned them, he thought angrily. You told them there were too many ways things could go south. But not only did they brazenly insist that it was all under control, they put an incompetent prick in charge of calling the shots.

“Just give me leeway to do my job,” he’d told them, because he knew those fat cat corporate types would find some way to screw things up, and he didn’t want to be around when it happened. Well, it had. And boy was this one hell of a screw up. Not that they’d ever admit it. And no amount of I-told-you-so would make any difference, though it sure as hell would make him feel better.

He stopped outside the tent and braced himself for the inevitable chewing out. Then he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles sharply against the clipboard hanging outside.

“Come!”

He pulled aside the flap and ducked as he entered. Coming in from the blinding light of the day, the interior was stiflingly dark. A single lamp focused its glow downward onto a drafting table, illuminating a mess of papers strewn all over the surface, maps and manifests, names of people, who knew what else. All of it highly incriminating. The air was chokingly hot and dry from a portable gas heater that hummed softly by the entrance behind him.

“Aston?”

“Over here.”

Norstrom turned and squinted into the darkness, and in the back right corner he located the elephantine form of Mabry Aston sitting in a folding chair, his elbows on his knees and an unlit cigar between the sausage fingers of his right hand. One end was a flat gray stub, the other a sloppy, tattered mess turned nearly black by the man’s overzealous gumming.

Aston spat onto the ground beside his feet, then delicately plucked something off his tongue with fingers that reminded Norstrom of stumpy white turnips. “Got a light?” the fat man asked, his voice gurgling out of his throat.

For the briefest of moments Norstrom imagined using one of his flamethrowers on the man’s face. He’d always disliked taking orders from clueless idiots, and most of the corporate people assigned to oversee his contract operations usually were, especially the lawyer types, but he absolutely hated taking orders from soft rich pricks who romanticized the dirty work he got paid to do while fancying themselves as some sort of inscrutable character out of a ridiculous Humphrey Bogart movie, the kind of guy who always got the girl in the end.

“Sorry,” he replied, shaking his head. He had a lighter in his pocket, but he’d be damned if he was going to share a closed space with anyone exhaling that crap. His lungs still hurt from the crap he’d inhaled last night in the cockpit of the 88.

Aston sighed, pocketed the cigar stub in his two-hundred-dollar olive drab canvas shirt, which contained enough fabric to make a small pup tent, and heaved his three-hundred-pound mass out of the chair. The thing almost seemed to groan in relief. He waddled over to the table and into the puddle of light looking like a giant, vaguely human-shaped water balloon filled to bursting. His pale skin was hairless and smooth and he smelled of lavender soap, yet despite the obvious primping, his comb-over had a perpetually greasy and disheveled look to it. Norstrom looked down at the top of the man’s matted hair and privately shivered in disgust.

Aston cleared his throat. “This had better be better news than yesterday’s clusterfu—“

“Might I remind you, Mister Aston, that it never—“

“I don’t need a reminder of anything!” Aston interrupted his interrupter. He looked up with watery eyes. His chins waggled as he tried to fetch back control over his emotions. Sweat rolled down his forehead, down his cheek, into his collar. Some of it fell away from the cliffs of his jowls and spattered onto the table. “You have news about the woman then?” he demanded.

Norstrom stood motionless and stared at the short man. He waited until he began to fidget before giving him an answer. “My crew was assigned to finish the cleanup on schedule — ahead of schedule, actually, which they did — not chase after your loose ends. We still have the other site to—“

“That’s not what I asked you, Norstrom. Damn it, man!” He picked up a pen, inspected it a moment as if contemplating what to do with it, then hurled it back to the table. It made an unsatisfying clatter before disappearing into the shadows of the tent. Norstrom didn’t react to the pitiful display of indignation. “I asked about the woman!”

“We’re still dealing with that. I told you I needed unfettered access to the lab at the factory and—“

“Not without one of my men! I told you that!”

“—also your sign-off on the clean up before I can even begin to shift resources.”

“Resources?” Aston sputtered. “Is that what this is about? Money? You think you’re not getting paid enough?”

“It’s about protocol.”

“To hell with your damn protocol! This isn’t your precious military! Just do your damn job, Norstrom. Think for yourself for once, or I’ll find someone else who can!”

Norstrom didn’t answer. He simply gave his head and eyes a barely perceptible dip toward the requisition on the table.

“Christ, all right, I’ll sign. Are you absolutely sure you’ve wiped out every trace of evidence? It’s all burned away?”

Norstrom pulled a pen from his pocket and handed it over and watched as Aston scribbled his name on the paper. With the form now notarized, Norstrom tucked it away; he didn’t bother asking for his pen back.

“The crash site has been fully sterilized. So has the hill.” A muscle twitched in his cheek, the only sign that anything bothered him. “And the village has been cleared, too. You can be assured of that. I am very good at my job, very thorough.”

Aston harrumphed. “Thorough perhaps, but also careless. You allowed someone to infiltrate the crash site. You let someone break into your supply truck and steal a hazmat suit and escape in a god damn forklift! That was sloppy—“

“Mister Aston,” Norstrom said, keeping his voice low and steady, “I told you to stay away from the site until we’d finished. If you hadn’t shown up when you did, hadn’t demanded that every single one of us waste a precious hour of our time to hear you prattle on about some useless thing, that site would not have been left unguarded.”

“Prattle?” Aston squealed indignantly. “Don’t tell me it— It was not useless!”

“I am telling you, because you seem incapable of grasping what it means to let me do my job.”

“A job you may not have for much longer!”

The two men stared at each other. Aston’s face was bright red, writhing with emotion, whereas Norstrom’s showed none whatsoever. Yet despite his stoicism, the former Army Ranger managed somehow to convey the promise of violence, like a long-dormant volcano overdue for an eruption. This was one of his many attributes, a sense of agitated placidity, even at times of extreme duress.

His time as a prisoner in Syria several years back at the height of the ISIS insurgency had more than prepared him to deal with the worst anyone could imagine. He’d endured torture, both physical and mental. Yet he’d learned to hide it so as to deny his captors any satisfaction.

He had killed the bastards escaping, an act which caused him to lose no sleep whatsoever. He’d killed both before and after that incident, killed to protect himself and his men, to protect secrets. He had even slaughtered innocents, women and children and the elderly. Collateral damage, all in the course of that work. Those deaths, however, did occasionally haunt him.

But last night had been the worst he’d ever been asked to do. It bothered him deeply. He had never been required to do anything like that before, the outright murder of so many people. It tormented him. But he would never let anyone know that it had, especially this bastard.

“You checked that there were no more . . . witnesses?”

The muscle in Norstrom’s cheek jumped. He stared hard at Aston and didn’t reply.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re sad for those people! You knew exactly what we were paying you to do.” Aston waved a hand in disgust. “Nothing more pathetic than a mercenary with a conscience!”

When Norstrom had been given his orders days before, he’d been told that the villagers would be long gone, evacuated on some pretense to another valley far away, but of course he had always known that it was a lie. There had to be no loose ends. Then, sitting in the co-pilot seat of the World War II-era Junkers Ju 88 as it lifted into the air with a fuselage full of illegal incendiary meant for a hillside littered with hundreds of people, he’d wondered where exactly the line was that he wouldn’t cross. But it was only with a sort of inevitability and disappointment that he watched during the plane’s approach. There had been an opportunity to stop the release, but he hadn’t taken it.

“Well?”

Rarely did his heart rate tick north of seventy, but it was certainly there now.

“Gone,” he said through clenched teeth. “All of it. Everything and everyone. Just rubble.” He felt the tic in his cheek again. “My men returned for the final check soon after first light. But . . . .”

Once more, it had been because of Aston’s interference that he had been caught flatfooted, and that had opened the door to yet another piece of uncertainty. Aston had shown up at their briefing area before dawn demanding a full report, including a review of the video recording of the air bombing. That had put them more than an hour behind schedule. He’d also taken the opportunity to publicly chastise Norstrom and his crew of their screw up at the crash site, which none of them really needed after the stress of the work. He’d almost had a mutiny on his hands.

“We found fresh tire tracks at the village,” Norstrom said. “A small car. Someone went there after the bombing and before my men finally arrived this morning. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“Why the hell would I—?” Aston’s eyes widened at the accusation. “It wasn’t me!” And then, jumping to the next conclusion: “You were seen? God damn it!”

Norstrom had hoped it was him, though in his heart of hearts he knew it wasn’t. The size of the footprints was right, but he doubted the man would have gone there in such a small car with bald tires.

He didn’t bother mentioning that his men had tracked the car’s point of origin to a small outcropping a kilometer and a half or so from the center of the village. The spot where it had been parked was free of ash, so it had been there already when the burning started or had arrived soon after. The ground around it was covered in size seven footprints, which he now had to assume had been made by a woman, possibly even the American they were still not sure about. There were no tracks leading to the car, only around it, so whoever had made them had been inside it when the ash fell. They would’ve had a perfect vantage point to witness the bombing.

And now they were gone.

“The car was driven down into the village,” he said, “then around it, likely just after first light. It then vacated the area. We lost the trail when the ashfall thinned away to nothing. The car was heading northeast.

“Could it be the American?” Aston sputtered through his anger. “The owner of the parka? Is it the same person?”

“As far as we’ve been able to determine, Miss Peters didn’t own a car. None of the villagers did.”

“But you’re not sure. The parka—“

“With your man assisting, the DNA testing on the samples has been . . . . It’s still on-going. We’ve managed to rule out over ninety-two percent of the employees so far. But the reference samples we had for the last eight percent, including the American, were mishandled. The tests need to be repeated.”

Aston either ignored the implication that his own man had been responsible for the delay, or he didn’t pick up on it. He simply frowned as he struggled to understand this. Finally, his eyes narrowed and his face grew red. “So, you’re telling me that we still don’t know who the hell we’re looking for? We still can’t say with absolute certainty that every single person on that train is dead? How many are we talking about? Twenty? Thirty people? Christ! Are you actually telling me that there might be dozens of them walking around out there with—“

He stopped himself short.

“With what, Aston?” Norstrom asked.

“Nothing! Just do your job! Find out who’s nosing about!” He was practically screaming by now, except that his voice kept cracking and he was wheezing so badly that every inhale was a snort. “And if it’s that American girl, I want her ashes in a box!”

“I think we have to assume,” Norstrom calmly replied, “at least for the time being, that more than one person somehow survived the crash. We know the American was on the train. The security camera at the station at the factory confirmed that she boarded with the other passengers that day, all two hundred and eighty-seven. Unfortunately, what we don’t have is video at the crash site.”

“Well of course we don’t, you idiot! Why would we?”

“We should also move forward assuming that it may not just be survivors, either, but someone else — a member of that village or another, a passerby.” He shrugged. “At least until the remaining genetic tests have been rerun.”

He waited for Aston to tell him what to do, but the little round man just stood there, the skin on his face, save for a red patch on his cheek, gone waxy yellow again.

“I sent one of my men back to the factory for new tissue samples. Along with one of yours.”

“Oh, why not just do whatever the hell you want?” Aston snapped.

“I advise that we begin checking hospitals within a couple hundred clicks of here,” Norstrom said, ignoring the taunt. “As well as villages, known shaman, anywhere a person might go for medical help.”

Aston blinked stupidly for a moment before nodding. Then he seemed to collect himself. “Don’t bother me with the inane details! I’ve got enough on my plate dealing with your screw-ups. Just take care of this latest mess, Norstrom.” He pointed an accusing finger at the taller man. “Take care of this or so help me . . . .” He began to sputter. “Dismissed! I said get the hell out of my tent!”

Norstrom spun on his heels. The prick was lucky he didn’t make him stay any longer, as he might do something that he’d later regret. Of course, he could always make it look like an unfortunate accident, choking on a twenty-dollar cigar stub, for example. Who knows, it might still happen.

“Your fault!” Aston screeched at his back. “You hear me, Norstrom? I am not taking the blame for this! And you damn well better not forget it, so if you know what’s good for . . . .”

As Norstrom walked away, the man’s tirade descended into an inchoate babble.

Yeah, he thought. He was sure that before all this was finished, something bad was going to befall that sad little man.

Chapter Twenty Six

The loose gravel slipped from beneath Angel’s feet and she stumbled, hitting the packed ground hard with her hip and skinning the palm of her hand. She sat on the worn walking path for a moment to catch her breath, the grass on either side brushing against her shoulders. Sunlight dappled the valley and distant hills, blending golden and green and gray. Shadows raced across the face of the land like the spirit armies of the ancient khans. And in the middle of it all stood the factory, an imposing concrete fortress whose silent walls dared her to be breached.

She was shaking from hunger, yet she was not hungry. The horror of the village bombing, witnessed in the stark black and white of night and confirmed by the undeniable light of day, had stolen away her appetite. She didn’t think she would ever be hungry again. How many innocent lives had been lost? How many people had died to keep a secret? The factory below her seemed to taunt her with its stony arrogance.

She pushed herself off the ground and began to walk again, but her hip hurt and her head swam. She staggered and almost fell again. Whiteness crowded her vision. A dull throbbing roar pressed against her ears, and she thought she might be sick. She lowered herself once more for another rest, placing her head between her knees and taking long deep breaths until the dizziness subsided.

The break gave her another opportunity to question what she hoped to accomplish by going down there. Did she think she might find a way in? What good would it do to walk around the outside of the building? What could she possibly hope to learn?

She lay back on the trail and sucked in long, deep breaths through her mouth. The cold hurt her teeth and the glare of the brilliant sky burned her eyelids. She felt an urgency to move again, but it was a distant sort of thing, seeming as far away as the clouds streaming swiftly by high above. The winds violently shredded the shapes the clouds took and reformed them. She realized that this was how she felt, numb on the surface, yet unsettled and full of static charge.

The sound of a door slamming shut brought her immediately back to herself, and she jerked upright onto her elbows. Two men were circling the factory, walking close to the side in shadow and heading away from her. They wore faded jeans and dark windbreakers. One had a rifle strapped across his back, the other a holster on his hip. In their gloved hands, they carried shallow trays, from which a sort of white steam fell and quickly dissipated.

Dry ice?

There was no door on this side of the building, just a tall mound of construction debris about fifteen feet away.

Where did they come from?

Angel watched them until they disappeared around the corner. With the loss of so many workers, she had assumed that the factory would be empty, but the appearance of the men told her that was incorrect. But was it still in full operation? She had no way of knowing what was going on inside. There might be a hundred people working away. Maybe several hundred. Or it might just be a few individuals.

In any case, she realized that even one was too many. She had wasted precious time coming here.

This time when she drew herself up to her feet, the ground did not shift, and her head didn’t spin. The sight of those armed men had been like a tonic, sweeping away the fog of her exhaustion. She turned and hurried back up the path, glancing often over her shoulder, ready to throw herself to the ground again.

She’d only gone a short distance before she heard the grind of a car engine, and she dropped, pressing herself flat on the trail. The tips of the thin grass along the path fluttered in the breeze just over her head. The stalks brushed her cheek. Would they be enough to hide her?

The engine sound grew steadily louder, and in a moment it was nearly on her. She could feel the mechanical thrum of the motor and the crunch of the tires through the ground. Afraid that they’d see the movement, she closed her eyes and remained frozen with her nose pressed against the dirt.

The car raced up the hill, its engine whining in low gear and the tires churning up a cloud of dust behind it. Only after it passed did she cautiously raise up her head. It stopped briefly at the top while the passenger got out to unlock the chain, then it disappeared over the other side. Minutes passed, and when she was sure it wouldn’t come back, she slowly stood up.

Chapter Twenty Seven

In the hour or so that it took her to reach Bairin Zouqi, Angel tried to take stock of all the information she had about the factory. It was pathetically little. According to Jian, the facility employed workers from his village, but he’d never mentioned if there were workers from other places. If so, was it possible that they might also be in danger? And what about the American girl, Jamie? He hadn’t been able to say much more than that she’d lived in the village and might have been an interpreter, which left Angel wondering about the extent of her involvement in the company.

It seemed reasonable to think that Jamie was some sort of liaison between the workers and their American employers. Most of the villagers probably spoke not a lick of English and many, if not all, would likely be illiterate. As the facility’s translator, she might have assisted their interactions with those in charge, communicating procedures, assisting in their training. Did she perform a similar role for any Chinese nationals who might be higher up in the corporate chain?

In such a capacity, Angel imagined that Jamie would be exposed to a lot of privileged information, perhaps even some that was proprietary. She might have been present during discussions between executives and other decision makers, been privy to their negotiations. She would know, regardless of any question about her sanity, the minutiae of what went on there.

And that would put her at particular risk with those who wished to keep anything untoward quiet.

So, what exactly did go on inside the building? Jian said that the factory made computers or computer parts, but that was pitifully vague. Was it simply an assembly plant, or something more? Such an operation wouldn’t necessarily require educated people, just a lot of hands and eyes doing the same tasks hundreds of times each day, day in and day out.

But if it were indeed such a site, then where were the supply roads? The narrow and rocky path connecting the factory to the main road was narrow, steep, and rocky, hardly sufficient for truck traffic. And Angel hadn’t seen any other roads.

Finally, how was the accident tied into all of it? Had the crash been intentional? If so, why? If not, then how would it have been possible for the Americans to respond as rapidly as they had, assembling a crew and equipment to remove all traces so quickly and efficiently? And, of course, that lead to the most important question of all: What were they so afraid of letting the world know?

Just as she had suspected on Huangxia Island, it seemed that the Chinese government had to be involved in some way, or at least it was aware of the situation and intentionally looking the other way. How could it not be? They had to know.

Did Cheong? She remembered that he had told her the accident investigators from some ministry of such-and-such were supposed to be on site. Today, in fact, Angel reminded herself. They’re supposed to be there today. She was supposed to meet with some guy named Jingping. She now believed that that this so-called ministry and the visit were a complete sham. Why would they wait a week before sending people out to investigate? What were they planning to do once they reached the site and found it bereft of wreckage? Wouldn’t that raise more questions?

She concluded that Cheong had to be in on it, too. Which meant that the bastard had knowingly sent her into the situation blind and at great peril. She should have trusted her first instinct and walked away. She certainly should not have sent him the video.

And yet, she realized, she’d really had no other choice, had she? He had been her only option for getting the video out. Now she was sure he’d done none of what she’d asked and instead had likely notified the Americans straightaway of what she’d witnessed and had proof.

With a sense of crushing finality, she realized that she really was on her own. Furious with herself, she slammed her palm against the steering wheel, causing the car to swerve onto the shoulder.

DeBryan knew, she thought, as she guided the tires back onto the pavement. That’s why he gave me the video in secret and didn’t show it to Cheong.

He knew that there was something fishy going on at Huangxia Island. Cheong must have found out, or at least suspected, and had the photog’s murder arranged in Shanghai. Perhaps he’d intercepted DeBryan’s communications. Or maybe he just didn’t like DeBryan’s internet snooping, digging up his past and his associations with 6X, getting too close to the truth.

And yet, the more she thought about it, the less it seemed to make sense. Cheong wasn’t being fully honest with her; that much she was certain. He was a dangerous man. But how it all fit together — Huangxia, the factory at Wenbai and the people of Baoyang Village, the apocalyptic prepper group 6X, and the crash — she just couldn’t seem to find the wires connecting them.

Get to Jamie. The girl must have answers.

This cycling of her thoughts back to the young woman caused her throat to constrict. She wracked her brain to remember if she’d mentioned her to Cheong. She was pretty sure she hadn’t, that all she’d said was that she was going to the hospital, but not why. Would Cheong have figured it out?

What if he got to Jamie first?

Angel arrived on the outskirts of Bairin Zouqi just as this last thought entered her mind.

Ten minutes later, she parked behind the hospital. The spot was much smaller than the one she’d found the day before, and in her distraction it had taken her several attempts to maneuver the car in. She thought of Jian and knew he would have been amused by her feeble attempts. The image of him laughing at her only made her feel angry and betrayed.

A different girl sat at the front desk this time, and when Angel tried to tell her the room, pointing and gesturing, the poor girl just got more and more flustered. Finally, Angel pulled out her IAFJ card. The girl took it and studied it for several seconds before handing it back with a half smile, a tentative nod, and a shrug of one shoulder. Angel doubted the journalist ID meant anything to her, but it probably looked official enough. The girl went back to her paperwork, apparently hoping Angel would just go away, anywhere, just as long as she didn’t keep talking to her in words she couldn’t understand.

Angel obliged, hurrying to Jamie’s ward, and the girl didn’t stop her. She breathed a sigh of relief when she found a different nurse working the floor. The woman looked up just long enough to register Angel’s presence, then turned back to the bed she was making. Angel turned right and hurried down the aisle.

But the bed Jamie had been in yesterday was now empty, and the bag of clothing in the side table was gone.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Angel made her way over to Jamie’s bed, numb with disbelief. It was freshly made up, the sheets clean, though worn. The edges were tucked in tight beneath the lumpy mattress, ready for the next patient. The trashcan stood empty.

She spun around and quickly scanned the other beds, scurrying down the aisle with growing alarm. She didn’t see the young woman in any of them, although curtains had been drawn around three, so it was possible that she might still be here, just relocated to another bed.

Angel went to one and the nurse gave her a puzzled look and asked her something in Chinese. Hoping to avoid another scene, Angel gave her head a quick shake and moved to pass her. Behind her was a young boy wearing a monk’s sa?ghati. He stepped lightly out of the way, bowing to Angel as she stumbled past.

“English?” she asked. “Do you speak English? Français?”

The nurse shrugged and shook her head.

“There was a girl— a woman, I mean. American?”

The nurse said something, again shaking her head, a look of helplessness on her face. “Duc— uh, duc tore?” she said.

“No, not a doctor! I’m looking for a woman, a patient!” Angel pointed at the empty bed. “There was a woman. She was here yesterday. Badly hurt. Cuts?” She poked at her thigh with a rigid finger.

The nurse turned to the boy and said something. He replied. Then they both turned to her and smiled. The boy pointed to the chair beside the nurse’s tiny work station and invited her to sit.

Instead, Angel hurried back down the aisle to the bed, gesturing for the nurse to follow. The young monk trailed them both. Angel patted the mattress with her palm, then pointed her finger at the pillow, and at last the nurse finally seemed to make the connection. A wide grin took over her face. She nodded vigorously and started jabbering away.

“Did she leave?” Angel asked, holding up her hands in a gesture of confusion. “The girl— woman, I mean. Is she still here? Hospital?”

She didn’t know if the nurse understood any of it or not, but by the way she was nodding and gesturing at the door, it seemed she had finally guessed that Angel was here to see someone. She pointed toward the door.

“She left? When? When did she leave? Was it with a—“

dark

“—man? Did she leave on her own?”

The poor woman could do nothing but just stand there and shrug and smile at Angel. Worry had begun to crease her brow, concern over Angel’s growing agitation. Her eyes flicked to the side, taking in the nearby patients. Angel noticed that a couple of them were now sitting up, their faces turned toward them. Some were scowling at the ruckus, probably recognizing her from the day before. They started to mutter.

“Does anyone in this place speak English?”

There was no response.

Angel was at her wit’s end what to do. She needed to know for sure if Jamie had left on her own or was taken. It seemed unlikely she’d just walk out, not in her state. And Angel didn’t know what kind of sedative she’d received the day before, or the amount, though she thought it unlikely that the young woman would have regained consciousness before nightfall. She’d probably be groggy for several more hours afterward, too. But could she have snuck away in the early morning hours?

The nurse didn’t seem to be acting as if that were the case.

She touched Angel’s elbow, drawing her attention back, and indicated the door once again. Reflexively, Angel began to step toward it. First Jian, she thought. Now Jamie. How could she have been so cavalier about everything? If she had just forced Jian to stay yesterday, then Jamie would have been safe with her. She could easily picture the woman dead somewhere, probably by strangulation or a broken neck, her body dumped into a shallow grave where it would never be found.

And Jian would still be alive, too.

They reached the door, and the nurse pointed down the hallway toward the back of the building, crooking her finger to the left. Angel frowned. Was she telling her to leave out the back way? She didn’t see a door there. But just then, a patient in a thin gown and her attendant appeared from that direction, and Angel realized that there was another room back there.

“She was moved? She’s in another ward?”

Again, the nurse gestured, pointing directly at the pair of women walking toward them.

The two were slowly making their way up the hall. The patient leaned heavily on the arm of her attendant, who wore a hospital smock over her clothes. The former’s short, dark hair hung lifelessly over her face, hiding it. Her feet were clad in tattered slippers turned gray by repeated washings. Her arms and legs were clear of injuries.

“That’s not her,” Angel said. “That’s not the woman I’m looking for.”

The boy took her by the arm and guided her toward them.

“I’m telling you, that’s not her! Where are you taking me?” she demanded. “Parlez vous français?”

But he didn’t answer.

They reached the pair and the boy bowed in deference to them, then they continued on. His gentle hold of her wrist never faltered.

Finally, they reached the end of the hall, and Angel saw that it wasn’t a room but an alcove. The space was stuffed with laundry bins and canisters of trash. The air smelled strongly of chlorine. The boy pointed at a windowless door on the far side of the space, and only then did Angel realize what he and the nurse had been telling her. “She’s in there?”

Of course, the boy didn’t reply, so she nodded and stepped forward and laid a hand on the door handle. But still she didn’t go inside. She didn’t know why, but she felt afraid all of a sudden of what she might find. Would Jamie start screaming at her again? Would she start talking about being possessed by bad spirits? Angel turned around and looked at the young monk. With one hand, he gestured for her to open the door. With the other he waved her on.

The steam hit her first. The room was filled with it, condensing on the walls and ceiling and dripping down. The harsh sounds of running showers and flushing toilets and distorted voices assaulted her ears.

“Jamie?” she called. The door shut behind her, reverberating past her.

The tiled floor beneath her feet was slick with water. Many of the small white squares were missing or cracked; the grout between them was stained dark gray. Pale green tiles coated the walls; runners of mold colored the cracks and seams near the ceiling and floor. There were numerous stalls, half of which were in use, their occupants hidden by plastic curtains drawn shut.

Angel strained her ears for Jamie’s voice, but none sounded like the young American’s, nor did she recognize any of the words being spoken.

“Jamie Peters?” she called. “It’s Angelique de ‘lEnfantine. I visited you yesterday.” She walked deeper into the room and passed an open stall where an elderly lady sat slumped on a toilet, her head fallen forward. She appeared to have been forgotten. “Jamie?”

She bumped her thigh on the rim of an unused tub and let out a pained grunt. More stalls opened up past it, but they appeared empty.

“Jamie? Are you—“

“You left me.”

Angel spun around, her breath hitching in her throat, both in relief and surprise. “Oh, mon dieu! Thank God you’re still here.”

“You left me. I told you not to leave me. I begged you to take me with you.” The woman grabbed Angel’s arm and once again there was that unnaturally strong grip. Angel could see something in the girl’s eyes, and she thought back again to what Jian had said about her being crazy.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—“

The girl let go, flinging her away. Only then did Angel realize she was naked. She gawked at the dripping body in the inadequate light and shuddered at the collection of cuts and bruises. She couldn’t tell if they were significantly diminished since yesterday, but she was less alarmed by their severity. The wound on her upper thigh had scabbed over, covering a web of new sutures. The skin around it was pink and healthy looking.

“You see it, too.”

“What?” Angel asked, tearing her eyes back to the girl’s face.

“It’s not natural.”

Angel opened her mouth to reply. But she didn’t know what to say? She didn’t even know what the girl was talking about.

Jamie turned and limped back to an open stall and reached inside for her towel.

“Where are your clothes? I checked in the room, by your bed and—“

“Thrown away. Today’s trash day.” She thrust a thumb behind her and laughed hollowly. “Once a week, whether it needs it or not.”

“You need clothes, Jamie. I’m going to take you out of here.”

“You should have taken me yesterday. It’s too late now.”

“I-I’m sorry. I know. But I promise, I won’t leave you behind again. You— I believe you now.”

The girl rolled her eyes at her. “You believe? And what exactly is it that you believe?” There was a hard, unforgiving edge to her voice.

“Everything. I mean, I don’t understand any of it, but I do know that something’s very wrong here. I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Are you well enough to walk?”

“Why?”

“Because we need to leave.”

“No, I mean, why did you come back?”

“Because I need your help in figuring it all out.”

Jamie chuffed and turned away. She stepped inside the stall and dropped the towel, not caring that she was naked once again and fully exposed. Water still spotted her shoulders and arms. It dripped out of her hair and down her face and neck. Her skin was a sickly shade of green, due to the wan light reflected off the tiles. She reached for the clean gown that had been set there for her and pulled it open.

“You need street clothes. You can’t leave in that.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Jamie said.

“Don’t say that.”

“No? Look at me!” Jamie spun around, sending a spray of water from her hair. “Look at me! Look at what they’ve done to me! Don’t you see?” She pointed at her leg.

“It’s healing,” Angel said, resisting the demand and instead kept her eyes locked on Jamie’s. “You’re getting better.”

“Better?” she shrieked. “You just don’t get it! I’ll never be better!”

“Listen, Jamie, I didn’t want to say it before. I didn’t want to scare you. But there are some very bad people out there looking for us, and they might come here.”

“Here?” The girl barked out a laugh. She turned to face Angel, and there was something dark and dangerous in her eyes. “Here or there or anywhere. It doesn’t matter where I go. The dark man will find me. He told me. Don’t you see? I’ll never be able to escape!”

“Yes, you can. We’ll go to the French Embassy. We’ll leave the country.”

“You’re not listening! He’ll find me. I’m like a candle to a moth now.”

She’s hysterical.

But the look in the woman’s eyes wasn’t madness. If anything, they seemed to possess a fierce clarity, an absolute certainty of what was real. It sent a shiver down Angel’s back.

“Just stay here,” Angel told her. She stepped toward the door. “I’ll go find you some clothes. We’re leaving.”

“They’ll kill you, too.” She didn’t move to stop her, just watched her go. “As long as you’re with me, you’re in danger. The dark man will get you, too.”

Angel pulled the curtain closed on her and hurried for the door. I already am in danger, she thought.

The cooler air in the hallway felt like a refreshing slap, and she welcomed it into her lungs. She hadn’t realized how tight her chest had been. Then she stepped toward the trash containers.

“How am I going to find anything useful in this mess?”

She grabbed a bag and squinted through the partially transparent plastic, then tossed it aside. She repeated this until she reached the bottom of the can, then moved onto the next. It was all just useless trash.

From out in the hallway, she heard someone speaking Chinese in a loud male voice. She peeked past the edge of the wall and gasped when she saw two men standing at the front. Both were wearing jeans and dark windbreakers. No guns were in sight, but the bulge beneath their jackets told her they were carrying.

“Peters,” she heard one of the men say, along with a few words in Chinese. “American. Jamie Claire Peters.”

Chapter Twenty Nine

Angel snatched a pair of hospital smocks hanging on the hook on the wall, along with a laboratory coat, then stepped back into the shower room. She found Jamie just inside the door, her gown wrapped around her and her hair dripping. “They’re here!” she whispered.

“Who?”

“Americans. At the front looking for you. We need to go now! They have guns!”

Jamie’s face blanched. All of the earlier bluff and bluster was gone, as if she’d only half-believed the things she’d been saying just moments before. Now she looked like a scared little girl. “You brought them here!”

“Not now, Jamie! Those men are in the hallway right now, and in another minute or two they’re going to find out you’re not in your bed and— Vite! Vite! What are you waiting for? Hurry up and put this on!”

But Jamie just stood there with a stunned look on her face. The smock fell to the wet floor and began to soak up water.

Angel snatched it up again and began to pull it over Jamie’s head. “Is there another way out?”

After a moment’s struggle, the girl began to dress herself. Angel could see her trying to think. “I don’t know! The front—“

“Too risky! Can’t just walk right past them. There has to be another way!” Angel thrust her arms through the sleeves of the laboratory coat, then drew her hair into a bun behind her head before tying it with a strip torn from a towel pulled from the laundry hamper. It might be enough to fool a person for a moment or two, long enough to buy them a few seconds before they realized she wasn’t Chinese.

But Jamie shook her head. “It won’t work.” She stopped getting dressed.

Angel saw that she was right; her smock was too small, and it was stained with something dark that might have been tea or wound exudate. And with the hospital gown hanging out the bottom, she’d draw more attention than deflect it.

“I’ve got an idea.” She pulled Jamie out the door into the alcove. “Get into a hamper. You can hide. I’ll push it out.”

Jamie shook her head. “And what about you? They’ll see you, stop you. You don’t speak Mandarin. They’ll know right away you don’t belong in this place. Give me the lab coat.”

“I don’t have time to—“

“You’re right. You don’t. Now climb inside the hamper. At least I look a little Asian.”

She turned to an attendant who had come out of the showers and was staring at them, a young girl of maybe fourteen with large brown eyes and a port wine stain mark on her neck. Jamie told her something which Angel couldn’t understand. The words came out in a tumble, tripping over each other and sounding almost as if she were scolding the girl. But the girl nodded and pointed further down the hallway.

“Get in the hamper!” Jamie whispered. “She says there’s a door to the outside back there, where they take the trash.”

Angel stepped over the side of the hamper and transferred her weight inside. The flimsy fabric bag stretched beneath her feet, but it didn’t tear. She crouched down as low as she could, and Jamie covered her in wet towels, soiled sheets, and dirty gowns. The smell was horrendous.

Once more, Jamie spoke in Chinese. Several seconds passed, and Angel began to worry that she had left without her when she heard her ask if she was ready. “I sent one of the girls out to check. One of the men is still at the front. The other just went into the ward. We need to go now!”

The hamper tilted on its uneven wheels and began to roll. One squeaked; another rattled. Jamie grunted as she pushed it out of the alcove and into the hall.

Somewhere nearby Angel could hear a man shouting, his voice growing louder and more terse. It was joined in alarm by a second male voice. Then a woman tried to answer, but she was shouted down. The cart rattled along, and the voices grew further away.

“What’s happening?”

“Shh!”

Then came the sound of running feet and the squeal of rubber soles on the wet floor. The door to the showers slammed open somewhere behind her. The men’s voices turned into hollow echoes.

As soon as the door shut, Jamie began to run, grunting against the effort of pushing the hamper. Angel felt it start to turn, then slam into the wall. Jamie let out a pained cry.

“Jamie?” Angel whispered as loud as she dared.

A hand reached down between the dirty laundry and grabbed Angel’s arm and pulled. “Hurry!” Jamie grunted. “We don’t have much time!”

Angel nearly fell climbing over the side of the cart. They were in another alcove at the very end of the hall. Opposite them was a metal door, which had been propped open. Beyond it stood a sort of storage space. The walls were gray-green and grimy, stained with rivulets of lime and rust. The floor was covered in soggy garbage. Full trash and laundry bins lined both sides.

“Back door,” Jamie said, pointing. A sign warned them to stop.

“The alarm—“

“I doubt there is one. More likely the door will be chained from the outside. That is, if we’re lucky.”

“If we’re lucky?”

“The building’s old, the hinges rotten. Together, we should be able to break through. We better hope so anyway.” She started to head over to it. Angel noticed that she was wincing and holding her side.

“You’re hurt.”

“Just pulled a muscle. Nothing I won’t recover from. Come on!” But a spot of blood began to bloom beneath her fingers as she clutched at her side. She was tearing holes in her own skin with her fingernails again.

Just as Jamie had said, the latch was rusted through and useless. Angel expected the door to snap against a chain, but there was none. In fact, it yielded easily, swinging wide open against the force of their combined weight and banging against a rusted metal railing.

They stepped out onto the landing, blinking against the sunlight just as a loud bell began to clang. The sound echoed down the street and into the building behind them. Through the clamor came a distant shout.

Jamie pulled Angel out of the way, then swung the door shut and wedged a board beneath the handle. She gave it a hard kick just as someone slammed against the other side of the door. The two women jumped back against the railing. Jamie turned to Angel, and grabbed her. This time, her grip felt weak and shaky. “Please tell me you have a car nearby.”

Chapter Thirty

Alvin Cheong stood with his back against the door and slowly peeled off his gloves. It was always a relief to do so, and so rare outside of the safety of his own home. But it was an unusually warm day, and the shut-up windows and turned-off air conditioning made the apartment hot and stuffy. The backs of his hands itched terribly, but he resisted the temptation to scratch them.

He looked around him appreciatively. The apartment was well-appointed, simply and tastefully adorned with high-end materials and furniture, though perhaps a tad messy: a tumbler on a side table, its contents long since drained or evaporated away; a crystal ashtray beside the stove, the twisted stub of a hand-rolled cigarette in it. He didn’t need a closer look at it or a sniff to know that it wasn’t tobacco. His report had already told him that the apartment’s renter occasionally got high.

Then there were the pieces of clothing placed randomly about, a trail leading from the couch to the bedroom door — a shirt, a pair of black stockings, a brassiere — though he got the distinct impression that the pattern signified nothing of an erotic nature, rather a careless lack of attention. A light jacket was folded casually over the back of a chair in the kitchen.

He noted that the table contained only two chairs. One was pulled out, the other tucked in. The one that was pulled out had a stack of papers on it four inches thick.

He let his eyes wander about the place as he stepped carefully around the edges of the room, his gaze jumping from one object to the next, to whatever drew it. He tried to block out the noises from the surrounding rooms, the men conducting the detail work. He focused instead on the apartment as a whole, how it was set up, how it was decorated, trying to understand its occupant more fully. He tried to block out any thought of what the men might find during their search, hoping to avoid anything that might color his impressions of the woman’s home.

But no matter how hard he tried, his thoughts kept coming back to that nagging question: Was Angelique de l’Enfantine more than they thought she was?

To be honest, he didn’t know what to expect from this intrusion. Proof, maybe. Evidence that she was exactly who she said she was and nothing more. Evidence to the contrary.

A laptop sat on top of the bar. It had been shut when they entered, but it was now open and turned on. One of the tech guys had managed to gain access and was cloning it onto a flash drive for later analysis. While the disk copied, he sifted through the stack of mail on the counter, zipping open an occasional envelope using a small device in his kit and quickly scanning the contents before replacing them and resealing it. He looked over as Cheong approached and gave him a quick headshake.

The order to recruit Missus de l’Enfantine had come from higher up in the 6X food chain. Cheong had no idea how high, nor exactly why someone had specifically requested that he bring her on board. With the few hours notice he’d been given the other day, he’d barely had enough time to gather a minimum of background information about her before sending his man to intercept her in Seoul, and even less time to prepare a recruitment strategy.

But clearly it hadn’t been enough prep time, had it? He’d been caught off guard on at least one detail, and it angered him that his aides had provided him faulty information on such a basic point as the woman’s current marital status. He hoped his discomfiture during their dinner meeting hadn’t shown. Regardless if she noticed or not, he’d wasted no time chewing out the individual responsible for feeding him the incorrect data. He hated being seen as anything but in complete control, especially when just a little more digging would have easily ferreted out the truth.

Well, he’d taken pains to rectify that, and any other potential insufficiencies since then. This was just another step in that process.

In a way, that singular, seemingly innocent, error had piqued his curiosity. He wanted to understand why his bosses picked her to be the one to investigate the category III global threat events which he and his team worked so diligently to identify, the sort of events which they believed were preparatory to category IV, or extinction-level, disasters. After all, he could easily come up with a list of a half dozen or so other investigative reporters with equal or better credentials. What made this particular one stand out?

A little more digging had rewarded him with some intriguing possibilities. First and foremost was her former husband — scratch that, her estranged husband — David Eitan. The American-born and educated scientist had impressive early career credentials: a doctorate in synthetic biology from Princeton, a genius fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation at Stanford. But after abandoning a failed start-up just prior to his marrying Angelique and launching a second one on her family’s money, he seemed to have faded into obscurity in recent years. His company’s website, SynGencia Bio, was still active, but it was little more than a landing page and some investor information. There wasn’t even a contacts page, and cached versions going back no further than two years ago provided nothing else.

The last scientific publication in Eitan’s name was four years old, a methods paper on the development and intracellular introduction of reprogrammable gene-editing molecular scaffolding. Based on his citation score, the article had received scant attention. Apparently, the technology was of little interest to either the academic or tech sectors; it was probably too undeveloped to even be considered for potential medical applications.

By all accounts, it seemed that the man had simply flamed out.

Even so, Cheong needed to make sure, which is why he’d sent his best man to dig up more on him. Eitan’s last known address was here in Manhattan, but though the apartment was current on its rent, a quick visit told them it hadn’t been occupied in months. Instead, a clue led them to DC. Cheong was eager to get the update on the man’s status, if only to set his mind at ease.

Then there was her father, Gaétan H. de l’Enfantine, a self-made multimillionaire in the high tech industry. His niche had been internet security systems and protocols, firewalls and local area intranet codex structure and multi-layered protective algorithms. His company, which had been sold off a few years after Angelique left for medical school in the States, had developed a novel method of iterative learning that allowed servers to recognize typical user activity and distinguish it from those attempting to access it for malicious purposes. The technologies had been incorporated by private companies and government systems around the world, and next-generation protocols based on his original specs were still employed in many places, including the International Alliance of Internet Service Providers, a grandchild of the original ARPANET.

Both Gaétan and his wife, Sophia, had died tragically in a car accident in St. Moritz during the summer between Angelique’s second and third years of residency at Stanford Medical Center. The tragedy had so shaken her up that she’d immediately dropped out of the program. It was about this same time that she met David.

As far as Cheong knew, the woman’s parents were both buried on the family estate in Lyon, which was his next destination after this. Angelique had moved back there about a year after the tragedy to study journalism, and now occupied the house alone, maintaining a small staff of occasional helpers to keep the place clean and stocked. She split her time between there and here in Manhattan.

Finally, there was Angelique’s brother, Jacques. Of all of the people close to her, he was either the most mysterious, or the least. Seven years her junior, Jacques had attended university in Saint-Étienne to study literature, but after receiving his baccalaureate and a brief residency in Paris, he simply fell out of sight. All Cheong’s men had been able to find on him were some medical records from the local hospital in Lyons that indicated he’d suffered a terrible accident some two years after their parents’ deaths. But other than a couple brief notations of follow up visits in the ensuing weeks, there were no more records, at least none that his men could hack from the national health network.

Strange, Cheong thought, how the people in her life have a tendency to disappear.

The sound of the laptop lid closing drew him out of his thoughts. The technician stood up out of his chair and shook his head again. “Nothing obvious here,” he said. “But we’ll analyze every single file, her search history, her accounts, ghost files. If something comes up, we’ll get it to you ASAP.”

One by one, the other team members emerged from their various searches and assembled around Cheong. He still hadn’t donned his gloves, not yet willing to sacrifice this small pleasure just yet. Instead, he buried his hands into the pockets of his jacket and listened to their reports. They found nothing suspicious. By all appearances, the woman was single and a freelance journalist, just as they’d thought. But they still had several hundred photographs of every inch of the apartment on their phones to analyze.

Cheong checked the clock on the kitchen’s microwave. The entire operation had taken them eight minutes. “Where’s Tom?”

They turned to find the last team member slipping up the darkened hallway toward them. He extended his hand, as if to offer Cheong the object in it, though the exchange didn’t happen. “Found it at the bottom of the bathroom trashcan.” He rotated the prescription bottle in his fingers so that the label faced up.

“Lithium carbonate?” Cheong took a step back, and his shoulders slumped as he saw her name on the bottle.

“What’s it mean boss?”

“It’s a chemical,” Cheong replied, “used for depression, bipolar disorder, and sometimes schizophrenia.” He shook his head. “It appears that our girl may be undergoing treatment for some mental . . . conditions.”

Chapter Thirty One

”You need to tell me what the hell is going on,” Angel said. “What the hell are they doing in that factory back there? What were those people who died on the train doing? What did they know?”

“It’ll be easier if we go back to Wenbai.”

“The factory?” Angel shook her head. “That’s the first place they’ll be looking for us. Those men back there— I can’t be absolutely certain they’re not the same ones I saw back at the factory this morning, but they’re dressed the same way, and they were armed. Now that they know you’re alive, they’re going to do whatever it takes to find you. They’ll assume you’re going to head for the factory or the village.”

Jamie shook her head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense. My gut is telling me to run in the opposite direction, to escape. They’ll know that, so that’s what they’ll expect me to do.”

She gestured out the window and winced from the movement, then pressed a hand to her side again. Angel was relieved to see that when she drew it away, there was no new blood soaking through the shirt she’d dug out of her spare bag in the trunk. Whatever wounds she’d reopened at the hospital, they’d clotted shut again.

“They’ll be expecting me to run to Chifeng,” Jamie continued. “That’s where they’ll be looking for me. There, or possibly Beijing. Not Wenbai. Besides, you said you wanted my help.”

Angel turned to her and frowned. “I do. But after what happened back there, I don’t think going back is the wisest thing to do right now. Whether or not you know anything, or think you know, they’re not going to take any chances. They’re going to want you quieted.”

“And you, too.”

“I’m not the one who knows something.”

When Jamie didn’t take the bait, Angel sighed. “That’s your cue to start talking.”

“I can’t,” Jamie whispered. “I mean, I’m not exactly sure of anything myself, that’s why I have to go back. I have some theories . . . .”

Angel huffed in frustration. “Theories? I thought you knew—“

“I tried to explain it to you back there,” Jamie said. “I saw the look on your face yesterday. I saw the way that boy that was with you looked at me. I know it all sounds crazy, but I am not crazy, I swear to you.” She stopped, as if suddenly realizing something, and frowned. “By the way, who was that boy?”

“One of the villagers. He was my interpreter.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s dead. They killed him.”

Jamie blinked in surprise.

“You see how serious this is?”

“Is it because of . . . because—“

“Because of all this? Yes. Those men— I told you they’re bad news.” Angel gripped the steering wheel and focused as hard as she could to keep her voice from breaking. “They murdered the entire village. Everyone. Just . . . gone.”

Jamie let out a strangled cry. “Just like the people on that train. But— How? Why?”

“How? They incinerated it. Firebombed it by air. They burnt it all to the ground. They even torched the burial site last night. I saw them the day before sterilizing the crash site with napalm. They’re trying to get rid of evidence.”

“I— I guess I always suspected,” Jamie whispered, “but—“

“What don’t they want anyone to find?”

“Me.”

“Besides you.”

“No, you don’t understand. What they’re trying to hide, I’ve got it. That’s why you have to take me to the factory.”

“I have to get you someplace safe.”

Jamie slapped the window hard with her palm, then lurched forward in pain, clutching at her stomach. “I told you,” she groaned. “He’ll find me no matter where I go, the dark man. He’ll know. He’s probably with them. If that’s true, then I’m already a dead girl, unless . . . .”

“Unless what?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

“Then tell me exactly how are they going to find you?”

Jamie winced as she lifted her bottom out of the seat and pulled down the sweat pants Angel had given her, exposing her thigh. She pointed at the wound. For a moment, it looked to Angel as if it were smaller than she remembered it, even since their escape from the hospital a half hour before. But she knew that couldn’t be.

“The scar?”

“What’s inside of it!” Jamie shouted impatiently. She raised her hand again, but stopped herself from hitting the window. “That’s how they got them inside of me! The bone. It infected me!”

Ever since yesterday, and then again during the strange encounter inside the shower, alarm bells had been quietly ringing inside Angel’s head, but now they were jangling at full blast. Once more, the girl was spouting nonsense. What the hell could she be talking about? First it was bad spirits, then something infecting her. Which was it? And what did it have to do with the Americans finding her?

Angel tried to remain calm. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either, not exactly. Not even yesterday. But I’ve had a lot of time to piece it together over the past few days. The game on the train, the touching. And then, when I saw my body in the shower . . . .” Her voice trailed off. “That’s when I knew for sure. They’re inside of me, doing things to me.”

“You suffered from a horribly traumatic event. It’s understandable that you might not . . . that you might not be thinking clearly.”

She was afraid Jamie would get angry again, but all the girl did was nod and gesture at her body again. She seemed almost to deflate. “I should have died a week ago. I thought I was lucky, managing to escape the crash without any broken bones. But I lost a lot of blood, more than should have been survivable. And I’d hit my head hard enough that I was in and out of consciousness.”

“You were lucky that someone found you and brought you to the hospital.”

Jamie’s face twisted. “I don’t remember much— stumbling through the wreckage, calling out. Flashes of memories. And then the . . . the dark man.” She lifted the shirt again. “I had massive bruising to my abdomen, possibly even organ damage.”

Angel drew her eyes away from the road and glanced quickly over. Yesterday, there had been large patches of yellowish-green discoloration on the woman’s torso, though it seemed that they were less colorful now. She hadn’t given it very much thought at the time, especially given the confusion, but even if she had, she would have guessed that they weren’t a result of the crash. After so few days, any such bruising would still be dark purple or, at best, brown, as the bilirubin in the leaked blood began to be broken down and reabsorbed by the body.

“I don’t think so,” Angel said.

Jamie rolled up her sleeves and showed her arms. They were deeply bruised. The lacerations were still raw, and some were still crusty with clotted blood and lymph. “Four days ago, my stomach looked as bad as this,” she said.

Angel frowned.

“You still don’t believe me.”

“I have a degree in medicine, Jamie. The human body just doesn’t heal that quickly, particularly fatty tissues of the trunk. Massive bruising — abdominal bruising — would take weeks to clear and the color to fade. It’s been barely a week. The timeline doesn’t fit.”

“Exactly. Pull over.”

“But—“

“I said pull over.”

They were on a rather long, flat stretch of road heading toward Chifeng with good visibility for miles in either direction. After checking the mirror and confirming that they were alone, Angel guided the car over to the side of the pavement and pulled the hand brake. She didn’t shut off the engine.

Since leaving Bairin Zouqi, she’d been keeping an eye on the fuel gauge. They still had a long way to go to get to Chifeng, and she was beginning to fear that they would need petrol before getting there. She still had some yuan in her pocket, but they would also need to buy some food.

She turned fully toward Jamie, and was startled to find the girl climbing out of the car. She reached over for her but missed. “Get back in here! Where are you going?” She pushed her way out through her own door and hurried around the front.

By the time she reached the girl, Jamie had already shed the pants and shirt Angel had given her. Being several sizes larger, they’d come off easily. Now she stood in the dirt, completely naked except for her socks. Her skin was crisscrossed with scabs, a patchwork of pink flesh and mottled bruises. Goosebumps spread over her as the chill wind blew. She spread out her arms.

“What are you doing?” Angel shrieked. “Put those back on! Get inside the car!”

“No!” Jamie shouted. “Look at me! What do you see? Look at me!”

Angel stumbled to a stop. Jamie had turned so that they were now facing each other. Then she slowly turned around, not stopping until she’d done a full circuit. Apparently satisfied with the shocked look on Angel’s face, she nodded once, then bent down and plucked the clothes from the ground and put them back on. Without another word, she climbed back into the car.

After a minute or so, Angel walked back to her side, got in, and pulled out onto the road.

“No,” she muttered to herself. “There has to be some sort of explanation.”

“There is,” Jamie replied. “And we’ll find it at the factory.”

But Angel kept shaking her head. It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t natural. And yet how could she deny what she’d just seen? The pattern of healing had been all too clear. The cuts and bruises closest to where the bone had gone into her thigh were healing faster than those further away.

“How can that be?” she whispered.

“There was something in that bone that infected me,” Jamie said. “And whatever it is, it’s helping my body heal faster. Whatever it is, they put it in those factory workers, and that’s how it got inside of me. I believe that’s what they’re trying to hide.”

Chapter Thirty Two

Mabry Aston lifted his considerable frame out of the back seat of the car and told his driver to stay close behind; he didn’t intend to go very far into the village, certainly nowhere the car couldn’t go. Then he shut the door and started to pick his way through the rubble. He wanted to see Norstrom’s handiwork firsthand, up close, without a pane of glass in the way. He wanted to smell the scorched earth. He wanted to feel the charred remains crumbling beneath his feet.

He needed to be absolutely sure.

The phone in the pocket of his baggy slacks was a ponderous weight, bumping against his inner thigh with each step and reminding him that a call from the Ministry of Transport agent assigned to investigate the crash site was due at any moment. They’d spoken through a translator earlier that morning, when the man had offered to pick him up at the airport. Aston had declined the ride, claiming that he was already on his way after arriving in Beijing on an overnight flight. He stated that he was eager to assess the damage and determine if anything could be salvaged.

“You understand, don’t you?” he’d told the interpreter, hoping some measure of the fake contriteness in his voice managed to get through. “The company’s on my back. They want a preliminary idea of the losses before the insurance adjuster comes up with his own estimate, which will undoubtedly be lowball.” He’d chuckled, as if sharing some private joke. But the translation either failed, or the agent had no sense of humor, as he hadn’t responded in kind.

“Anyway,” Aston went on, feeling a bit put out, “we’ll try and streamline things for you guys so you won’t have to be out here any longer than you need to be. In fact, I plan on having a full materials manifest for you when we liaise around noon. But it’s the people we lost that deserve our attention, isn’t it? God bless their souls, and thank God there were no more casualties. I’ll personally visit each of their families — the conductor, brakemen, engineer, and fireman; I believe that’s it. You’ll find that we’ll take proper care of them.”

In fact, he’d already been out to the site that morning, both the real one and the staged one. He had to reluctantly admit that Norstrom and his team had done a bang up job of making the alternate site look pretty damn authentic. Now Aston just had to convince the investigators that it really was the true crash site and hope that they didn’t get some wild hairs up their asses and decide to check further up the track. Even the twenty or so miles separating the sites didn’t seem near far enough for his comfort, though Norstrom, in his supremely arrogant way, told him not to worry.

As far as convincing the agent to accept their assessments at face value, he knew he had his work cut out for him. He was a field agent, a low-paid worker who was unlikely to be accept his explanations out of hand, if only because he didn’t speak the same language, a language which usually included words like dollars and prostitutes and other expensive trinkets.

That was in contrast to the high up muckety-mucks in the Chinese government who were highly fluent in such terms. Oh, those idiots had expressed bitter outrage with the Americans for waiting four days before informing them of the crash. He’d personally tried to tell them that they had only just found out about it themselves and even went so far as to blame the port supervisor in Qinhuangdao for not reporting the missing freight when the train failed to arrive there on schedule. There had been a lot of accusations thrown about, the typical bureaucratic belligerence, all for show and serving to lay the groundwork for the ensuing financial discussions.

On a more practical note, it gave the clean up team time to do its job. He hoped Norstrom was grateful for that, though he doubted it.

In the end, the bribes had been sufficient enough to buy Aston the time he needed to sterilize the crash site of incriminating evidence and eliminate any witnesses. He was sure the Chinese government knew exactly what was happening, although those in positions of decision-making were happy enough to be kept in the dark as long as their pockets were well enough lined.

But this investigation agent, a certain Wang Jingping, was a pushy little fellow. He simply wasn’t high enough in the food chain to have gotten the message. For all he knew, he was there to investigate the derailing of a freight train filled with hazardous materials.

Once again, Norstrom had assured Aston that the staged site would quickly lead the agent to the conclusion that train had jumped the rails where two sections had come misaligned. “Winter upheaval,” he said. “Happens all the time. The ground freezes, swells. The rails are under a lot of tension. Then something snaps.”

The plan was that Jingping would be in and out in a couple of hours. The bodies would be collected. And Aston would assure them all that the Americans were fully prepared to clean the site up and restore it to its natural state. Further remunerations would be made. Perhaps a few dollars would slip into the agent’s own pockets, small change compared to what his bosses had coming to them. That was how things were done here.

“None of this is visible from the main road?” he called out to the man standing behind him. He didn’t bother to turn around to face Norstrom, not caring to know exactly how close he was. The man moved liked a ninja, which made Aston hate him all the more.

“We’ve got men ready to block the road leading here and the one leading to the crash site. The only way anyone’s going to find either of these places is by air or on the back of a mule. And, frankly, all they’ll see is a couple large scorched patches. They’ll think lightning strikes and wildfires and never give it a second thought.”

“They can think whatever the hell they want, for all I care, as long as it’s not the truth.” Aston turned around and waved the driver over. “Let’s go. I want that road blocked off before anyone has a chance to make a wrong turn and screw everything up.”

They both turned for their respective cars just as their phones began to ring. Aston gave Norstrom a frightened look before answering his. He watched the other man take his call, lowering his voice and turning his back so that he couldn’t see him.

Mister Wang Jingping, came the tinny voice of the translator on the line, will be there in about twenty-five minutes. We just passed Goh Li Xhia factory at Wenbai.

“Um, good. That’s good,” Aston replied, still watching Norstrom. Something about the way the man’s muscular shoulders stiffened did not give him the happy feeling he so desperately wanted. “We’ve just arrived ourselves, but we’ll wait to do the walkabout together.”

Mister Wang Jingping would like to know if the reporter is there yet.

“Reporter? What reporter? I didn’t authorize any reporter!”

Mister Wang Jingping arranged it himself.

Aston squeezed the phone in his meaty hand. The last thing he needed was a snooping reporter. “Fine,” he said, his voice turning cold as ice. Norstrom had damn well better be right. “I welcome any opportunity for openness.”

In front of him, Norstrom pulled the phone away from his ear and pocketed the device. Then he turned and began to walk back toward Aston’s car. A muscle in his cheek kept twitching, drawing Aston’s eye. It was the only thing about the man that betrayed the emotions beneath his stony exterior.

“She’s alive,” he said. “The American woman. My men tracked her down to a Buddhist-run hospital in Bairin Zouqi, but she got away.”

For a moment, Aston said nothing. All he could think was, This isn’t happening.

“I’ve sent teams to Chifeng and a man to the American consulate in Beijing. We’ll get her.”

For a brief moment, the tic flared.

“Is that all?” Aston asked. His voice sounded suddenly too small, as if the incredible breadth of the sky above them were somehow attenuating the very air.

“She had help. The nurse at the hospital described a white woman speaking English who came to visit her just before my men arrived. She snuck her out the back door and into a car. They’re looking for them now.” He paused, then added, “I warn you: I suspect this is only going to get worse before it gets better, Mister Aston.”

The heavy man’s face grew redder than it already was. “How so, Mister Norstrom?” he asked, his voice rising in pitch. “How could it possibly get any worse?”

“Apparently, the doctors removed a bone fragment embedded in the woman’s leg when she was brought in several days ago. Fortunately, my men were able to recover the shard from the waste. It exhibited some unusual properties.”

Aston’s eyes narrowed.

“He’s no doctor, but to his untrained eyes, it appears that the bone fragment had already started to remodel. How does a supposedly dead piece of bone do that?”

Aston didn’t reply.

“Well?”

“Like you said, he’s untrained.”

“Even so, I just sent him to Wenbai for a closer look.”

Aston stepped forward. “You’ll do no such thing!”

“You listen to me,” Norstrom said, not backing away. “What your company did to those people is none of my business. But now we’ve got a girl running around out there who may have been exposed to it, maybe transmitting it.” He held up a hand to silence the other man’s protest. “What is my business is the danger you may be putting my men into. So, you need to start telling me exactly what was going on in that place.”

Aston’s face burned, partly with hatred at the man’s composure, partly with anger at how this whole situation seemed to be blowing up in his face, but mostly with fear that he was going to lose more than just his job. “There is no risk to your men, I can tell you that truthfully.”

Norstrom didn’t move. “I usually don’t ask for details. In this business, it’s better not to. But I’m going to make an exception this time. Tell me what I need to know, or else find yourself someone else to fix your mess.”

“Fine,” Aston finally said. He gestured to his car. “Get in. I’ll tell you what I can. And maybe then you’ll understand exactly why we need to get that girl back.” He stopped and turned. “And why we need her destroyed.”

Chapter Thirty Three

They arrived at the train stop up the hill from the factory at just past noon, and Angel went ahead on foot to check below. The place appeared as deserted as before, but as she’d discovered that morning, the impression had proven wrong. Jamie assured her that, other than the villagers, there had only been a few employees to oversee the daily activities on the work floor. “A couple medical people and a foreman. Most of the time I escorted the workers between the work floor and the nurse, though I wasn’t allowed inside the lab for their weekly medical checks, even though I was the only one who could interpret for them.”

“What else did you do?”

She had shrugged. “Most of the time, it was . . . boring. I sat at my desk and played video games.” She managed to look embarrassed.

Angel returned to the car several minutes later to find Jamie lying on the seat in a fetal position and moaning.

“Jamie?” she cried in alarm. “ What’s the matter? Jamie!”

“Just a cramp,” the girl panted. “I don’t know. They’ve been coming and going for the past couple of hours, since we left the hospital. I thought it was just something from the crash, but this seems—“

She cried out in pain and fell back onto the seat.

“Let me see!”

“No! Just get me down to the factory,” she growled. “There isn’t time!”

“You’re bleeding internally. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Jamie pushed her hands away and struggled back upright. Her face was pale and clammy, and her breaths came in hitches. But she shook her head. “It’s the infection.” She gestured at the road ahead. “There’s a laboratory inside with a microscope, a few machines. You need to find what’s inside of me.”

“I can’t, Jamie! Not without—“

“You said you were a doctor, right?”

Angel nodded. “But without an x-ray machine, diagnostic equipment, I’m helpless. A microscope is useless for viruses and nearly as useless for identifying bacteria.” She exhaled in frustration. “Assuming I can somehow, miraculously, figure it out. What then?”

“Then you fix me! And if you can’t . . . .”

Angel’s face went ice cold. She shook her head. Once more, she was beginning to wonder if the girl was mentally unstable. But then the image of her standing before her on the side of the road came back. If anything didn’t make sense, it was that, and yet she’d seen it with her own eyes.

“Just get us inside.”

“How?”

“K-keypad,” Jamie replied, and squeezed her eyes shut against another wave of pain.

“But you can’t even walk. It’s at least a kilom—“

“Just drive through the damn chain!” Jamie screamed. “It doesn’t matter anymore! Just do it!”

She’s dying, Angel suddenly realized, and she knew this with a certainty she could not explain. It didn’t matter what she did now. Something had happened back there at the hospital. Maybe a suture came loose. Maybe an aneurysm burst. A slow leak in her spleen widened. Something. She didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the girl, but it was obvious that it was bad.

“We need to go back, find a hospital—“

“No time,” Jamie whispered, and collapsed back onto the seat. “They did this to them. They must have some way to stop it. It’s in there, I know it. In a file somewhere, a fridge. Please, Angelique, I don’t want to die.”

Angel started the engine and began to drive toward the crest of the hill, and when she reached the chain barrier, she didn’t stop. The motor whined as the chain tore into the grill of the car. One of the headlamps exploded in a shower of glass. The tires slipped on the rocky surface of the road, spraying pebbles and dust out behind them. Smoke began to rise from the engine. She pressed harder on the accelerator, even as a new scream rose from Jamie’s throat. It peaked before fading away again, leaving in its place an angry machinegun rattle coming from beneath the hood.

“It’s not going to—!” Angel shouted, but with a sudden pop the post on Jamie’s side tore free of the ground and whipped around the front of the car. It swung back and slammed through the window behind Angel. Both women screamed. But the car was already moving again, leaping down the road. As they passed the crest of the hill, the loose post was yanked back out of the car. It took the rear window with it, along with a chunk of the door frame. Angel’s scream turned to a cry of desperation as she tried to regain control. They spun to one side, hit a rock and bounced. For a moment, it seemed to her that they were going to roll. She twisted the wheel around and righted the vehicle, bringing the front end around again.

Black smoke was pouring out of the engine compartment by the time they reached the flat area surrounding the building. With little time to despair over the damage to the car, Angel drove them around the other side and skidded to a stop. It wasn’t worth hiding it at this point, as the damaged barrier would immediately warn anyone arriving that they were here.

“What’s the code?”

She hurried over to assist Jamie, but the girl kicked open her door and stumbled out on her own. She wasn’t quite able to stand fully upright.

“Let me help you.”

“I got this!” She brushed Angel’s hand away and staggered over to the panel and punched in her access code. There came a beep and a distinct click from inside. Angel grabbed the handle and pulled it open, bracing herself for the possibility that someone might be standing there. But the entryway was empty.

Everything was painted the same flat gray. The walls were unadorned. The only light illuminating them came from the window behind them. Two doors, one in the right hand wall and the other straight ahead, gave access to the interior of the building. Both also required a code for entry.

“Which way?”

Jamie gestured weakly to the one on the right, and Angel helped her over with an arm around her waist. Once again, the girl entered her code, and again Angel was surprised when the lock disengaged.

“The other door gives access to the work floor,” Jamie explained. “This way goes to the offices.”

The door pulled away from the frame with a hiss, as if the hallway beyond were pressurized. Jamie reached over and flicked a switch, and the lights came on. To Angel, the air smelled strongly of paint and plastic, but there was an organic undertone as well, something she couldn’t place.

They made their way down the short hall and came to the end without meeting any doors. They turned left. Once again, the walls were plain, though someone had taken the opportunity to paint the upper halves in a sort of beige. It did little to brighten the mood. Instead, it just seemed to strengthen the impression Angel had of being inside a submarine. Without windows, the hallway felt claustrophobic.

“Where’s the lab?”

“Second door on the right. Third, I mean. Third door.” She grunted from the effort, stumbled, and fell to her knees beside the first office.

Angel tried to hold the girl up, but she ended up slipping to the floor with her. A small name plaque with Jamie’s name on it was pasted just above the knob.

“Tell me what you think we’re going to find.”

“Something . . . . I don’t know. Antidote. Medicine.” Her voice was fading, as was her strength. “Have to . . . figure out—“

She lurched forward and gagged, but only a thread of drool dripped out of her mouth. The water she’d taken in along the way had already been absorbed into her body.

Angel placed a hand against the girl’s abdomen and pressed and was alarmed at how hard it was. If there had been any doubt before that she was bleeding internally, it was now gone. She needed a transfusion. She needed surgery to repair the leak. But she was going to get neither, which meant she was going to die.

“Are you sure your code will work?”

Jamie didn’t answer at first, just remained there on the floor on her hands and knees with her mouth open. After a few seconds passed, she pushed back to a sitting position and rested her head against the wall. “I-I don’t know. I think so.”

Angel stood up. “Stay here. I’ll give it a try.” She looked down at the girl, alarmed at the swiftness of her deterioration, and was ashamed at herself for not doing what she knew was right and taking her somewhere for help. If anyone knew the seriousness of her condition, it was she, with all of her medical training. But the promise of answers was a much stronger pull, and she knew that this was likely to be her last chance to get them.

Better hurry. She’s not long for this world.

She ran down the hall, her feet padding softly on the thin carpet. She had watched Jamie typing in her code the previous two times, so she had the number memorized. She punched it in to the new keypad with shaking fingers and waited, but nothing happened.

Slower. Take a deep breath—

She tried again.

And again nothing happened. The code didn’t work.

Her gaze drifted back down the hallway to where Jamie was slumped against the wall, but stopped short when her eyes caught on the door jamb, just below the plaque with the words MARIA SORVINO. There were deep scratches beside the knob. Tiny spirals of gray paint still clung to the metal. Angel bent down for a closer look, and when she did, her shoulder bumped the door. It swung open with a soft crunch. The door had been jimmied, the latch broken.

A soft noise from inside the room jolted her upright. She swung around to see a man sitting behind a microscope at the bench in the center, maybe three meters away. He looked just as surprised as she was, but he was quicker to react. He pushed away from the stool, which clattered to the floor behind him, and stood to face her.

Angel immediately recognized him as one of the men from the hospital. Before she could move, the man swung his hand up. In it was a pistol, and it was aimed directly at her forehead.

Chapter Thirty Four

”The train crash was planned?” Norstrom asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

The tires juddered over an exceptionally rough patch of road, making an immediate response impossible. So the two men sat side by side and stared at each other, one smug in his superior position, the other showing the first cracks in his stony exterior. Aston took satisfaction in the look of surprise on Norstrom’s face, in knowing that he had finally struck a nerve in the otherwise emotionless man. Oh, but he’s so goddamned righteous in his indignation, isn’t he? The man has probably murdered ten times as many people as me, and yet he sits there all high and mighty and thinks I’m some kind of monster for speaking the truth.

“You’re telling me this was part of some planned . . . experiment?”

“The accident was planned, yes,” Aston replied. “But the extent of the destruction wasn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be so . . . devastating. Something happened that we hadn’t foreseen. We’re still not sure what.”

He exhaled heavily and shook his head, as if he personally felt the weight of each death on his shoulders. He did honestly regret that so many people had perished, though not for the souls that had been lost; rather, he lamented the time and data the company would never recover, and the millions they had spent on setting it all up over the past sixteen months. Going forward, the miscalculation was likely to set their R and D program back by weeks, if not longer.

“There were never supposed to be any casualties,” he explained. “Or, rather, not many. A few were to be expected.”

“You . . . expected people to die?”

“We accepted that there was uncertainty in the experiment and that death was a possible outcome. We did our best to calculate the effects of the train’s speed and momentum, the number of people in each car, etcetera, etcetera, but we couldn’t control everything. The randomness of their positions— where they were sitting or standing, for example. We could have erred on the side of caution and designed the crash to avoid all fatalities, but then we wouldn’t have been testing for the full range of trauma, would we have?”

“The full range of trauma?” Norstrom sputtered in disbelief. His mask had completely fallen away. “You designed the crash to test trauma?”

Aston rolled his eyes impatiently. It was clear that Norstrom was simply incapable of seeing the Big Picture, much less the intricacies of such a large scale undertaking. Nevertheless, he was determined to try and explain it to him as much as possible. After all, the experiment had been his personal brainchild. And, privately, he hoped Norstrom would eventually see the genius in it and be forced to accede that he’d misjudged.

“We needed a large test group with a full continuum of injuries ranging from minor bumps and scrapes to broken bones and lacerations. We wanted to see organ damage, even serious head trauma and amputations. A crash was the quickest and most efficient way to achieve it at this scale.”

Norstrom’s jaw dropped. It was a primal reflex in a moment when he was completely unaware of himself. He suddenly realized that he was breathing the same air as a true madman. Those victims were nothing but lab rats to these people! He wanted to wrap his hands around the man’s fleshy neck and squeeze until his eyes popped out of his skull. Instead, he quickly collected his thoughts and forced his mouth shut. It took all his strength to turn away.

“We had always planned to validate the efficacy of our product under real-life conditions.”

“And what exactly is your product?” Norstrom asked, his voice now flat. “I was told you manufactured computer components.”

“Oh, that’s what we tell people. But the truth is we make revolutionary medical devices to improve human health. The specific details are, of course, completely confidential. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” He chuckled wetly as Norstrom stared at him, the stone-faced mask now firmly back in place. “Joking, of course, but I am under NDA not to divulge any specifics. You understand the necessity for secrecy, I’m sure.”

“Is it a field trauma system?” Norstrom pushed. “Is that what you’re talking about? I’m just trying to understand the scope, as you say, Aston. And why not use animal subjects? Wouldn’t they have worked just as well?”

“Five minutes, sir,” came the voice of the driver over the intercom. Aston flicked off the privacy switch to thank him. Then he turned it back on.

“Animal tests wouldn’t provide the answers we need. Besides, the product is designed and coded for humans. It would take years to reengineer it for another species.”

They had been on a secondary road for the past ten minutes, a cut-off from the main highway bisecting the northwest part of Inner Mongolia from the southeast. Norstrom had become quite familiar with this stretch of it, having spent the better part of the past four days traversing it while prepping the second site.

At the road’s end was a small, remote settlement of abandoned yurts, and just beyond the village were the railroad tracks. This was where the fake crash had been staged. The structures were now occupied by a dozen people, each one fully prepped for the inevitable questions the Chinese government’s accident investigator would ask them.

“Look, Norstrom,” Aston said, “all you need to know is that the fatalities weren’t planned. They were an unfortunate, although not entirely unforeseen, consequence of the nature of the experiment. The crash itself was necessary.” He paused for effect. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, especially without possessing all of the key details. Very few people would be able to, certainly not the general public. That’s why your particular brand of expertise was required, to keep it from getting out to the general population. If word got out, they’d come here and shut us down in a heartbeat, and that would be a terrible setback for all of us.”

They came over a rise and looked down into a valley. Smoke curled out of the roof openings of several of the yurts. About a hundred sheep foraged in the grass to the right, tended by a young boy. The scene would have been postcard perfect if not for the wreckage that lay beyond.

From the elevated vantage point, the mangled cars and strewn freight painted a scene that lent itself to a single interpretation: the train had derailed at high speed. Both the directionality of the crash and its point of origin were starkly evident. The two men were still too far away to see the smaller details. The crumpled tracks themselves were hidden from view, but the ground bore a series of very convincing scars that could be seen for miles.

A refrigerated truck resolved itself from the wreckage. Stored inside were five charred bodies, the remains of the phony train crew. In actuality, none of the men had ever held a job within China’s railway system. They had all been casualties pulled from a warehouse explosion in the port city of Qinhuangdao that had coincidentally taken place just days before. They were among the dozens of bodies that would never be recovered.

Norstrom had wondered several times if Aston or his people had had anything to do with that particular incident. The port city was at the other end of the very same railway line that had serviced the factory.

“Looks like our Mister Wang Jingping has already arrived,” Aston remarked, eyeing the half dozen official vehicles parked just short of the crash. Several people were standing about, and one man could be seen picking through the rubble. He turned and started to head back when Aston’s driver honked.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” the large man said, drawing Norstrom’s attention back to their conversation. “The people who died. But they signed up for this, all of them. They knew the risks. They signed legally-binding releases.”

But how many of them knew exactly what they were signing away? Norstrom wanted to ask. None, I bet.

“Great leaps forward always require great sacrifice,” Aston concluded.

Yeah, Norstrom thought. Just not from you.

Chapter Thirty Five

They pulled to a stop beside the other official vehicles, and the driver got out. He circled the car and opened Aston’s door. For once, the large man accepted the assistance, allowing himself to be pulled out of the seat. The door shut, leaving Norstrom alone to gather his thoughts.

He watched the man for a moment making his way over the uneven ground, then pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the screen. It had started vibrating a few minutes before, and now there was a single text from his man at the factory instructing him to call ASAP. He thumbed to connect and waited.

How soon can you get here?

“We’ve only just now arrived at the staged site. The Chinese investigators are here early. Are you in the lab?”

Yeah, but I’m not the only one. There’s a woman here, sounds European. Says she’s a reporter.

Norstrom sat up in surprise. He’d been expecting him to call, but not about this. He was eager to learn if something had been found in the bone fragment the doctors had removed from the American’s leg.

Keeping the gruesome relic had been a hunch. After days of destroying evidence of a completely unknown nature at the crash site, evidence he had initially thought would be chemical or technological in nature, proprietary, he had began to suspect something much more sinister, especially as there had been nothing at the crash site except bodies. Now, after Aston’s confession, he was eager to know if his hunch had been correct.

It appeared he’d have to wait to know.

“Reporter?” he said. “We’re supposed to meet a reporter here.”

I believe it’s the same one. She says they’re expecting her. Claims that if she doesn’t show up, someone will come looking for her.

“Sounds like bluster. Do you—“

HEY! GET YOUR HANDS UP WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!

A female voice rose in the background. Norstrom couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like she was pleading.

Okay, she’s handing me some kind of . . . looks like identification. THROW IT ON THE TABLE! STAY THERE! It’s, uh, it’s just a press badge. MOVE! OVER THERE! AGAINST THE WALL!”

“What’s her na—?”

DOWN! SIT DOWN ON THE FLOOR! I SAID SIT YOUR ASS DOWN!

Norstrom pursed his lips. This was not what he needed right now, more people sticking their noses in where they didn’t belong. “Make sure she’s alone.”

Checking now. There’s something else, something you should see for yourself.

“What is it?”

The bone they pulled out of the American woman. You wanted me to look at it.

“Yes! You found something?”

It’s . . . . Well, you know I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to be looking at.

Norstrom’s gaze sought Aston out. The man was greeting each of the crash investigation team members now, individually shaking their hands. He managed to look solemn enough, sweeping an arm over the area while wiping a tear from his eye. He reached into the leather portfolio beneath his arm and extracted a bundle of papers and handed it to a middle-aged man with graying sideburns and a weathered face. Norstrom guessed that he was the lead agent. He wore a hard hat, leather gloves, and a green windbreaker with bright orange lettering on the back. The man standing between them appeared to be the interpreter.

Aston looked over at the car and gestured for Norstrom to join them.

Boss? What were you expecting to find?

“I’m not sure. Did you look under the microscope?”

Yes. And I think maybe you should come up and take a look for yourself.

“What do you mean?”

It’s just . . . . I think the damn thing’s still growing. Or was. It’s changed since we picked it up.

“How?”

I don’t know. The edges. They look like they’re healing.

“That’s not possible.”

But the conversation with Aston replayed in Norstrom’s mind, especially the part about testing trauma. What sort of technology were these people dabbling in?

Maybe you should have Aston take a look.

“No! Not Aston. It’s probably nothing to bother him with.”

Norstrom stared hard at the group outside and wondered what Aston was hiding from everyone. What was the connection between the bone and the factory workers? He needed to find that out without Aston running interference.

Okay, you’re the boss.

“Look, I’ll try and leave here as soon as I can,” he said at last. “But I’ll have to come up with an excuse. Aston’s not happy about you being there on your own, breaking into his precious lab. They’re being unusually protective about something, so keep an eye out. I’ll head straight out as soon as I can get away.”

What do you want me to do with the woman?

“Just sit tight. Restrain her. Whatever means possible, just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. And see what you can get out of her. Nothing extreme. I’ll interrogate her myself when I arrive, but get started.”

Got it. See you in a few.

“I’ll call when I’m on my way.”

Chapter Thirty Six

”Shut up,” the man snapped in reply to Angel’s demand to tell her who he was. “You don’t ask the questions.”

He edged his way over to the door and cautiously stuck his head out. After quickly checking the hallway in either direction, he glanced back in at her seated on the floor. The look on his face told her that he didn’t see Jamie. She must have heard the man talking and realized what had happened and slipped away. But to where? Did she go back to the car? Did she leave? How far would she get in her condition?

The man stepped back into the room, hesitated for a moment, then circled the bench toward the spot where he’d been sitting when Angel surprised him. Keeping his gun trained on her, he reached over the bench, snatched his phone up off the surface, and slipped it into his pocket.

“Who were you talking to just now?” she asked.

“Are you deaf or simply stupid? I said to shut the hell up.” He started rifling through the drawers, yanking them open and slamming them shut again.

“He said not to hurt me.”

“I swear, if you don’t shut your damn mouth, I will! You’re in big trouble coming here, you know that?”

He pulled a coil of thin, clear tubing from a drawer and shook it loose. IV tubing, Angel realized. She guessed what he was planning to do with it.

“On your stomach,” he snapped at her. “Now! Hands behind your back.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Oh, that’s right! I could just let you walk right on out of here so you can go report to the world everything we’re doing.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Lie down!”

Angel did as he ordered, but she kept her eyes on him as he put one end of the tubing in his mouth and tugged the other with his free hand to test its strength. The gun lost its bearing on her, as did his eyes. But she didn’t dare move. There was no way she’d reach the door before he shot at her. Plus, she couldn’t leave without knowing what had happened to Jamie. “Why are you interested in the bone?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he stuck the gun into the back of his waistband, then stepped over and drove a knee into her back, knocking the breath out of her lungs. “Move and I will slam your goddamn head into the floor.”

“Look, I’m a medical doctor. If there’s something about that bone—“

“Shut up! Shut the hell up, for god’s sake.”

The tubing bit into her flesh as he wrapped it around her wrist, and she cried out that he was cutting off the circulation. He grabbed her other wrist, brought it to the first, and viciously wrapped it even tighter than before. When he was finished, he gave the works a few tugs, wrenching her shoulders painfully in their sockets. Angel bit back a cry.

“You think that hurts? I was being gentle.” He started to pat her down, jamming his hand up into her armpits, underneath her belly, between her legs, searching for any weapons.

Angel didn’t care about the physical and emotional discomfort. She was too focused on figuring out a way to escape.

He found her cell phone and removed it. There was a pause, then he flung it onto the benchtop. “Dead as a doornail. Who else knows you’re here? Tell me now!” He pulled her head back by her hair, twisting it until she cried out in pain.

“No one! I mean everyone!”

Finally, the weight on her back lifted away. “Don’t move!” he warned, and he resumed his search through the drawers.

“I won’t run. I promise. I can help. I’m a—“

“You’re a liar is what you are!” He looked down at her, his eyes narrowing for a fraction of a moment. “First you’re a reporter, but now you’re a doctor? You really should get your story straight.”

“I’m b-both.”

He barked out a laugh. “And I’m Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

“It’s the truth,” she said, panting. It was hard to breathe. “I’m a medical investigative reporter. I came here because there was some kind of infectious disease on the train that crashed.” She had to strain her neck far enough around to see his face, but even at that awkward angle she saw his look of surprise. “If those people were sick—“

“Shut up!”

He hurried away from her and out of sight, but she could hear him shuffling around on the opposite side of the room. Water ran into the sink. She realized she’d gotten under his skin with mention of the infection.

“You were at the crash site, weren’t you?” she asked. She knew she was pushing her luck again, but she doubted he’d do much worse than kick her. He might get angry enough to break a rib, but he wouldn’t kill her just for talking.

You hope.

“Those hazard suits you were wearing wouldn’t have protected you against a biological agent.”

“Quiet,” he growled.

“Which one were you, the flamethrower? Crane operator? I hope for your sake you weren’t one of the men walking around on the ground, searching through the dirt. All that exposure, at such proximity—“

He suddenly appeared around the bench, though he didn’t look as upset as she expected. “You would’ve been exposed, too.” He studied her face, and a smile began to crease his lips. “I knew it! How stupid could you be to leave your coat where someone might find it? It’s like you were begging to be found.”

She met his gaze with as much defiance as she could muster, but she didn’t reply.

“I’m only going to ask you this once more,” he told her, the smile evaporating just as quickly as it had appeared. “Who else knows you’re here?”

“Everyone. I sent a video of what you people were doing onto the internet. You should check. I’m sure it’s trending right now on Twitter.”

His face blanched for a moment, but that was the extent of his physical reaction. “And your partner?” he asked. “Where is she? The other woman?”

Angel couldn’t help it. She jolted in surprise, and the smile returned. He stood up again, nodding. “We know where she’s heading. My partner went after them. Yeah, we know she took that American woman from the hospital and are heading south. Where are they going? Chifeng? Our guys will catch up with them there, if not sooner.”

Angel swallowed her surprise, trying not to show her relief. He thought Jamie was on her way to safety with someone else. He didn’t even suspect that she was here or that Angel was the one who had rescued her from the hospital. “What do you want with her?” she demanded. “The American. Why the bone?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a scared little girl who happened to survive a train wreck.”

He was searching through the drawers again. “Oh, I’m sure she knows plenty, being an employee of the company and all. But that’s none of my business. My job is to make sure there are no survivors, no witnesses.”

He appeared again, this time with a small piece of laboratory equipment in his hand called a vortex mixer. From Angel’s college research experience, she knew that it was quite heavy, being nearly solid cast iron. Nestled inside was a powerful motor that drove a rubber head, causing it to vibrate. The device was used to mix solutions in test tubes. “No survivors,” he repeated, and raised it up over her. “No witnesses.”

Angel tried to pull away, expecting the blow, but it never came. Instead, when she opened her eyes again, she saw that he had pulled out a pocketknife and was cutting through the power cord. It fell to the floor next to her face, coiling like an angry snake.

With a snap, he shut the knife and put it back into his pocket. Then he set the ruined vortex mixer onto the benchtop again. “Feet up!” he ordered. But he knelt down beside her without waiting for her to comply and began to wind the cord around her ankles. Then he wrenched them up and bound them to her wrists. She realized in that moment that escaping out of the bindings would be next to impossible. The power cord wouldn’t stretch like the IV tubing would.

“Please,” she begged, “at least remove the other one. It’s cutting off my circulation.”

He stood beside her for a moment, then pulled the knife out again. He placed a foot on her back and yanked at her wrists. Pain sliced through Angel’s shoulders. Her thighs began to cramp. She felt him cutting through the plastic, grunting as he did. After a moment, a few pieces of the tubing fell to the floor.

“Now,” he said, bending to one knee, “that should hold you while I go check the rest of the building.”

Angel mumbled something into the floor.

“What’s that?” he snarled, bending down closer. “Speak louder!”

She turned her head toward him. “I said, you should have done that first.”

He frowned at her. But the look was gone a moment later, when the mixer slammed into the back of his head and drove him unconscious to the floor.

Chapter Thirty Seven

Jamie screamed in pain as she dropped the vortex mixer and clutched at her belly. Even through the loose shirt, Angel could see how distended her stomach had become. She couldn’t imagine the willpower it must have taken for her not to cry out in pain while hiding, waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack.

She collapsed to the floor beside the unconscious man and screamed again. Eventually, the cries turned to sobs. Then those, too, faded.

“Jamie, can you untie me?”

“You have to get them out,” Jamie whispered. “Please, just get them out.”

Angel struggled with the bindings, but it was no good. The cord simply had no give to it, and her struggling only seemed to be making them tighter. “You’ve got to untie me, Jamie. I can’t get them out myself.”

The man had landed face-first, hitting the tiled floor hard enough to break the skin on his brow. Blood had begun to puddle beneath his cheek. She watched it expand toward his nose, then touch and merge with it. A bubble formed beneath one nostril, popped, formed again.

All at once, the tension left Jamie’s body.

“Jamie?”

“I’m . . . here.”

“I can’t help you unless you untie me. We need to get out of here before he wakes up. And more men are coming. Jamie?”

Slowly, painfully, the girl raised herself up off the cold floor. She sat for a moment, swaying, her eyes unfocused. Finally, she nodded. Her lips were badly chapped and tinged gray with severe dehydration and, in that moment, Angel remembered the boys on Huangxia Island, how sickly they had appeared. The breath coming out of Jamie’s mouth smelled just as bad as theirs had been.

Angel urged her on, reminding her that they didn’t have much time. And so Jamie tried, taking the most direct route, which was over the man’s body. The effort quickly drained her, and she had to rest before resuming.

At last, the bindings loosened. And then Angel’s wrists were free. She straightened her legs, wincing as her thighs cramped up.

She went straight to the man. A large bump had formed on the back of his head where Jamie had hit him. The skin was broken there, too, though the wound had already begun to clot. He’ll live, she thought, but he’s going to wake up with a terrible headache and probably a concussion. She didn’t intend to be around when that happened.

She rolled the man onto his side and propped one arm under his head to cradle it. The other she used as a brace to keep him from rolling forward again so he wouldn’t suffocate in his own blood or vomit. Then she bent his top leg forward so he wouldn’t roll back and choke on his tongue.

Finally, she stuck his pistol into her own waistband. It was a SIG-Sauer P226. Or a reasonable Chinese clone of one, anyway. She recognized the shape and knew how to fire it, but the markings were different.

“Let’s go. You need a hospital.”

The girl lay still on the floor, her eyes rolled back into her head and her hands held her belly. Another spasm passed through her.

Angel tried to lift her up, to get her back onto her feet, but she was a dead weight, once more unresponsive and unaware. Blood soaked through the shirt where she’d reopened the wounds on her abdomen.

Seeing her dead phone on the countertop, Angel dug through the man’s pocket and found his. She sent a quick text message to the man who’d called twenty minutes earlier, hoping to delay his arrival. Then she removed the battery, fearing that it might be trackable.

Finally, she pulled Jamie by her shoulders out of the room, stopping only briefly to question whether she should tie the man up.

No time! Just get out of here!

The urge to run was overwhelming, and with Jamie fighting her, the window for escaping was rapidly closing. “Stop second guessing yourself and go!” she hissed.

She draped the girl’s arm over her shoulder and tried to lift her up. After stumbling into the wall, she managed to get them both moving. Jamie bore none of her own weight, but at least her legs were moving instead of dragging behind.

Out at the car, Angel laid her down on the back seat. Then she jumped into the front and turned the key, which she’d left in the ignition. The gauges woke. Cold air blasted through the vents, still strong with the stink of burning plastic and metal. The starter motor churned. The car rocked as the engine tried to catch. And failed.

She turned it again, slamming her foot hard onto the gas pedal, pumping. But the result was the same.

Any moment now, he’s going to come through that door!

She gave the engine one last crank. This time, the starter motor ground to a halt and went silent.

His car! He must have a car somewhere here!

“Stay put, Jamie!” she shouted, jumping out. “I’ll be right back.”

She sprinted down the length of the building with the berm of rock and dirt on her left. She hadn’t seen a car on their way in, so she figured it had to be around the back side. Her feet slipped on the loose gravel, yet she stayed upright.

The berm dropped away at the corner, opening up a view of the valley below. Sunlight glinted off a tiny stream where it had carved a shallow notch along the bottom. The dark, shiny ribbon of water was bordered by a dense, dark green sedge.

But there was no car.

She spun around the corner, resuming her sprint, and reached the next corner fifteen seconds later.

Debris lay in piles all around, most of it half-overgrown with grass. Beyond them was the hill with the road to the train stop. And there! A hundred meters away, nearly hidden from view, was the car.

Gasping for air, her head pounding, she ran, slamming into it. She hooked her fingers under the door handle, pulled, slipped, and fell on her ass.

“What the hell?” she cried, picking herself up. “Who the hell locks their car in the middle of nowhere?”

She checked the other doors and found them similarly locked.

When she arrived back at Jian’s car, the back seat was empty. All that was left was a small splotch of blood and a trail of it leading to the factory door.

“Jamie!” Angel cried in frustration. “I told you to stay put!”

Her fingers slipped over the bloody keypad, hitting the wrong buttons. On the third attempt, she wrenched the door open and stepped in, then made her way quickly over to the inner door. She could hear Jamie screaming in pain on the other side.

Hands shaking, she carefully pressed the numbers this time, flicked the handle, and stepped through. “I told you—!”

“Not another step!” The man they’d left behind was awake. He had a hold of Jamie, one arm crooked around her chest, the other up near her throat. He pressed his knife against her neck. “I’ll kill her.”

Angel froze. But after seeing how much he was struggling — to hold Jamie up, to focus his eyes — and the amount of blood glistening on his face and shirt, she knew he hadn’t fully recovered from the blow. She stepped toward him.

He jerked the knife. “I said stop!”

But she had the gun out by then, relieved that it hadn’t fallen out of her waistband when she was running.

An ex-Albanian on the Lyon Police Municipale had once shown her how to fire the P226. He’d had quite the collection of handguns, but the SIG-Sauer was his favorite, as it was the weapon of choice by ECTLO, the counter-terrorist and hostage rescue squad of the French Navy, to which he aspired. “It’s big enough for my hands,” he’d bragged. “And has no safety.” Then he wrapped his beefy arms around her to help her aim. “Big and ready to go. Just like me.”

She had liked the feel of the weight in her hands, though not his arms around her, and despite his clumsy attempts to bed her, he’d never succeeded.

Angel pointed the gun at the man’s head and took a step forward.

“I told you to stop!” he told her.

“And if I do, she will die. If I don’t, you’ll kill her anyway. I have nothing to lose, nor does she. But you . . . .”

Doubt flickered in his eyes.

“She needs medical attention. I intend to see that she gets it. Now let her go, and I promise I won’t shoot you.” She took another step.

The man pressed the knife deeper into Jamie’s neck, stifling her cries. A line of red appeared at the edge of the blade. Angel hesitated.

“You’re not leaving here,” the man shouted at her.

“I am. Please, don’t make me shoot you.”

“You’re a doctor. You took a vow to do no harm. I’m thinking you won’t.”

Angel sighted the gun. Her hand was shaking badly, and she was having trouble breathing. Very little of the man’s body was exposed to her. If she missed . . . .

She took a breath and held it. “You might want to rethink that,” she said, and squeezed the trigger.

Chapter Thirty Eight

Norstrom watched the investigation team spread out over the crash scene. They had all donned white protective suits of thin plastic, which billowed and flapped in the brisk wind. The hoods were pulled up over their heads and cinched tight. None wore masks. Aston had convinced them that there was no risk of toxic exposure, claiming that any hazardous chemicals had already burned away. Norstrom was certain they wouldn’t find anything more toxic than diesel, since his team had planted nothing more than that.

Three cars lay on their sides in a tangled mess, including the engine, and the men were beginning to work their way around and through them, photographing the scene from every possible angle on the ground for their analysis. One man was preparing a large copter drone to get views from the air, but it didn’t look like he’d be able to fly it in this stiff of a breeze.

The cars appeared to have been torn open by the force of the crash. Their contents lay strewn over the ground. Most of it — junk — was burnt beyond recognition, just piles of molten plastic and twisted metal and ashes. Two more cars, still partially intact, rested upright on their wheels. Norstrom’s men had filled them with crates of cheap computer casings and useless components. Those were for show. They had made it appear as if the blaze had gone out before it could destroy the entire lot. After all, there had to be something for the team to find.

But there would be nothing else, and that was the point. Just what the company wanted the investigators to see and nothing more. No fancy staging. The simpler the scene, the faster the agents would reach the desired conclusion, that this was nothing more than an unfortunate accident caused by an act of—

man

—nature. They would conclude that the train traveling along this section of rail would have been going full speed, somewhere just north of eighty miles an hour. It hit a gap where the track had become displaced by ground swell. It derailed, crashed, burned. All five men, the standard crew complement for a freight train of this size, would have died immediately upon impact. All of the bodies were burnt beyond forensic identification.

The desired conclusion, with no room for any other interpretation.

But now, Norstrom wasn’t so sure he wanted them to reach it so quickly. He almost hoped the investigator would find something else, something . . . suspicious.

A mercenary with a conscience? Aston’s voice mocked. Second guessing yourself now? Isn’t it a bit late for that?

He dropped his eyes to the second text message he received from his man at the factory. It said that the reporter had escaped, though didn’t describe how. She was heading for Chifeng, and he was in hot pursuit. He’d report back when the situation was back under control.

Norstrom rubbed his cheek, hoping to massage that nagging twitch out of it. He would be glad when this job was over. It just kept getting worse and worse. If he had known it was going to be like this when he signed on . . . .

What? Would you have done anything differently?

He sighed and shook his head at himself.

Aston was going over the materials manifest with the lead investigator, their heads bowed over the clipboard trying to block out the wind. The agent didn’t seem to be very pleased about something. He spoke in a loud, clipped voice to his translator, giving Norstrom the impression that he wasn’t buying Aston’s explanations.

All three men looked up as he approached. Relief flushed over Aston’s face. He took the opportunity to change the subject, introducing Norstrom as his assistant. Norstrom shook hands with Agent Jingping and the translator, a short, plump fellow by the name of Andrew Tan, who had unusually large hands and ears for his stature.

“Can you run Mister Jingping through this?” Aston asked.

Norstrom shook his head. “I’d like to. But I just received a call about the reporter.”

Aston’s eyes widened. “Oh?”

“Seems she was held up in Immigration.”

Mister Tan relayed the message.

“I offered to . . . meet her in Chifeng.” He made a show of checking the time on his phone. “I’ll need to leave now if I’m to rendezvous with her.” He gave Aston a pointed look. “That’ll save her an unnecessary trip out here. You don’t need her getting into the middle of—“

“Mister Jingping says he will like to speak with her,” Mister Tan interrupted.

“No no! She’ll just get in the way, contaminate the scene,” Aston replied. “Maybe tomorrow?”

Once more, the exchange was translated. Mister Jingping stared at Aston for several seconds without giving any clue to his thoughts. Then he turned back to the manifest and grunted something incoherent, after which he spun on his heels and headed over to his team. He began shouting orders and gesturing. Mister Tan stumbled after him.

“That guy’s a real hard ass,” Aston growled. “Are you really going to meet her in Chifeng?”

“She showed up at the factory. My man was holding her.”

“Was?”

“She got away and is headed back there. He’s going after her.”

“Incompetent fool!” Aston sputtered. He waggled a finger in Norstrom’s face.

“I’m going to lend a hand.”

“Well, you damn well better catch her!”

“There’s a lot of road between Wenbai and Chifeng. We’ll catch them.”

“Them? There’s more than one reporter?”

Norstrom thought back to the way the text message had been worded: THEY ESCAPED. ON ROAD TO CHIFENG. STAY THERE. WILL CALL WHEN CAUGHT. They, rather than she.

“He didn’t exactly specify, but I have reason to believe the American was with her when she showed up at the factory.”

Aston paled. “Why the hell would that woman go back there?”

“Why indeed.”

Norstrom waited for an answer, but none ever came. Instead, Aston’s mood seemed to shift, apparently lightened by a new thought. “When you catch them, I want you to dispose of the reporter. Permanently. No, make it look like an accident, a car crash on her way here. I don’t care how, just do it.”

“And the American, the factory girl?”

“I realize I was thinking about her as a liability, but I’ve since changed my mind. I want to understand what made her return to the factory. Call me when you have them. I’ll send for my chopper to meet with you as soon as we’re done here.”

There was something in the man’s eyes that Norstrom didn’t like, something that danced and played like a tiny black spark over a pool of gasoline.

Aston gave him a cold smile. “I told you that this will all be over soon. Looks like I was right.”

Chapter Thirty Nine

The concussion from the gunshot disoriented Angel for a moment. But it was the force of the recoil knocking her onto her heels that jolted her back to her senses. She cursed herself for forgetting her range practice and locking her elbows.

A small puff of dust and a hole appeared inches to the right of the man’s head. He flinched as a piece of the cement from the wall cut a thin line across his cheek.

“Next one goes through your forehead,” Angel warned, striding toward him. The suddenness of her advance took him by surprise, and before he could move, she was standing only a meter away. “I can’t miss from here. Even if I wanted to.”

She could sense him trying to decide what to do.

“Drop the knife.”

“When this is all said and done,” he told her, as he slowly released the pressure of the blade from Jamie’s throat, “you’re going to wish you hadn’t wasted that bullet.”

“I said drop the knife and let her go.”

Jamie’s screams had died away, and her body went slack. She looked like she had fainted. But the man continued to hold her up, leaning back with her body draped over his own as a shield. He also continued to grip the blade.

“Do as I say. Let her go. We’re leaving.”

“It’s too late for that, and you know it. She’s going to die. It’s obvious. There’s nothing you can do to help her. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

Angel’s eyes narrowed. “And you do?”

“Look, I’m not—“ he started, then seemed to struggle with his thoughts. “All I know is we were brought in to clean up a crash site, take care of any witnesses. Whatever the company people are doing here, I’m not at a high enough pay grade to know, but I can sure as hell guess that it’s something bad.”

“Guess?” Angel spat, glowering at him. “Of course you know nothing. “You’re just the . . . the . . . le nettoyeur, the cleaner person. How do you say? The man who takes out the trash and cleans the toilets.”

She could see him struggling to hold Jamie up. His arm was quivering from the effort. He had his fist pressed up against her sternum, just beneath her breasts. If he were to let go, Jamie would slip and impale herself on the knife he refused to let go.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’m a janitor. Just a guy doing a job.”

“It changes nothing! You’re still a murderer.”

“I’ve killed no one!”

“Hundreds of people died!”

“Not by me! They were already dead. We didn’t—“

“I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about the village! I watched you people burn it and the villagers. I was there!”

“I wasn’t!”

“I don’t care! You murdered them, and all for what? To hide this?” She waved her free hand around to include the factory. “You are going to tell me right now what is going on here. You will tell me what all those people had to die to keep hidden!”

“I’d like to know that, too.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

Jamie’s head lolled over his arm. She let out a moan.

The man shifted her, redistributing her weight to his other hip. “Look, I’m not hiding anything,” he panted.

“What about that bone in there? I heard you mention it to the other man.”

“The doctors removed it from her leg. I was told to collect it, to bring it here and check it out.”

“For what? What did you find?”

“I’m not qualified to say. All I know is that it didn’t seem . . . natural.”

That last word pounded through Angel’s mind, though in Jamie’s voice rather than his. She had said the exact same thing when they were at the hospital.

“It has to be what’s wrong with her,” he said, nodding at Jamie’s slumped form.

“What’s wrong with her is the crash,” Angel snapped. “It has nothing to do with a piece of bone! She’s bleeding internally and needs surgery to fix it. And the longer we wait, the less likely she’ll survive. Let us go, or you’ll have her death on your hands, too!”

“This isn’t bleeding!” he cried back. “Look at her! Even I can see that. Whatever is happening to her, it’s not natural either! You say you’re a doctor, then you go take a look and tell me what you think.”

“I’m not—“

Jamie’s body went rigid, causing the man to lose his balance. Angel stepped forward, but he thrust the knife out at her, warning her to back off. Then he pressed it back against Jamie’s neck again. A bloodcurdling scream rose up out of her throat, and she clutched at her stomach, bunching up the shirt and drawing it over her abdomen.

Angel was horrified at the sight of her skin stretched taut over those odd protrusions. Gasping, she took an involuntary step back, nearly dropping the gun. “What the hell?” she whispered.

“The answer is back in that lab.”

Jamie writhed in his arms, moaning and crying out. In a brief moment of lucidity, she opened her eyes and reached out for Angel, begging her to help her. But then she was gone again, lost once more in the terrible abyss of her pain.

Angel took a step forward, and the man flinched. “For the last time,” she said, “let her go. Let us go!”

She knew he wasn’t going to be able to hold her much longer. Sweat poured down his face, getting into his eyes, darkening his collar. And where his skin wasn’t covered in blood, she could see it had gone pale. His whole body was shaking. But it was the look of desperation in his eyes that impelled Angel to act before he could. She stepped forward without warning and swung the gun up, then down before he could even react. The butt of the grip connected with the side of his head with a sickening thud.

He crumpled to the floor, releasing Jamie.

Angel caught her and pulled her away, cringing with disgust at the hardness of the swellings pressed against her own belly. It reminded her of an exercise her anatomy professor had made her go through her first year at Sorbonne. They’d been required to learn the names of all the bones in the body, as well as their identifiable processes, not just by sight, but by feel. To challenge his students, he had placed a dozen plastic bone models inside each of several pillowcases and required them to list all twelve bones and their parts correctly.

That’s what Jamie’s belly felt like, a bag filled with bones.

The man lay moaning on his side. She’d hit him on the temple, aiming for the nerve bundle called the parotid plexus. Theoretically, it was supposed to overwhelm him. Even so, it had surprised her how easily he’d gone down.

But he obviously wasn’t going to stay down for long. He hadn’t even lost consciousness.

Quickly removing the laces from his shoes, she bound him just as he’d done to her. Just as she should have done the first time. Then, for good measure, she yanked off his socks and stuffed them into his mouth to keep him quiet.

By the time she’d finished, he was fully awake again. There was no misinterpreting the hatred in his eyes.

“Si les regards pouvaient tuer,” she muttered at him. “If looks could kill.” Then she spat in his face.

Chapter Forty

The private jet spearing its way toward the coastline of mainland Europe had encountered a patch of rough air, forcing Alvin Cheong to return to his seat and belt in on the advice of the pilot. He watched helplessly as the stack of printouts on the table slid to one side, then flutter to the floor as the plane tilted into a perilously steep bank. Moments like this reminded him of exactly why he disliked flying, even as he enjoyed the convenience of it. The sense of helplessness extended beyond his inability to attend to the papers. It had to do with his complete and utter dependence upon machines and their operators to keep him alive, sometimes in apparent defiance of natural laws.

He was on his way to the Saint-Exupéry airport in Lyon. In all his global travels, he’d never been through there, so when he was told where they would be landing, the name had brought an unexpected memory to the surface, followed by a deep sense of loss. So strong was the feeling, in fact, that on the way to Newark Liberty from Manhattan, he asked his driver to pull into a small rundown plaza with a used bookshop called THE READING EDGE. It was there, in the donation bin, that he found the book he was looking for, a dog-eared copy of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, its pages yellowed with age and the back cover affixed with old tape from which the adhesive had long since dried out. He had his driver pay the owner a dollar for it, and slipped it into a plastic bag for the journey.

But now that bag, with the book still inside, was as much out of his reach as was the avalanche of papers he’d been sorting through when the turbulence hit, copies of documents and photographs gleaned from the Manhattan apartments of both David Eitan and Angelique de l’Enfantine. As for Washington, DC, Cheong was still waiting to hear from his man there.

On his lap was the copy of the Eitan-de l’Enfantine divorce filing dated eighteen months earlier. He’d snatched it from the pile to read while the plane rode out the rough weather, and now he flipped distractedly through it hoping to keep his mind off the fact that so many things could go wrong at any moment, while so many things had to go right — and keep on going right — for the plane to stay suspended in the air.

He came to the claims of irreconcilable differences and tried to focus on what that meant. The two had been separated for some eighteen months by then. Any judge would have been convinced by the passage of that amount of time to accept that their differences must have been, as asserted, irreconcilable.

He was having trouble buying it.

He had no concrete evidence to the contrary, nothing more than a vague feeling, a suspicion. Perhaps it was in the wording, the hesitant way that the attorney depicted the relationship between the couple. There were no descriptions of acrimony. And in reading the scant post-separation correspondence his crew had found between the two, there was no sense of any bitterness. Instead, the notes were filled more with regret and loneliness.

His eyes strayed again to the plastic bag on the seat opposite him. He considered risking unbuckling himself and fetching it. How long had it been since he’d first read the story of the lonely little prince? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Not since he’d been brought to the United States as a teenager. It seemed to him that Angelique de l’Enfantine was like that lost little boy, searching the cosmos for a friend.

Hadn’t he crashed his airplane?

He placed his fingers on the buckle, determined to assert his will, but the plane shook again, violently enough this time to make the plastic molding in the cabin creak and the tables rattle. He heard the stifled exclamations of a couple team members outside his private cabin. And in his personal bar, the liquor bottles clinked together. He decided to stay put.

He turned to the last page of the court filing. Neither party had signed it. Rather, in the right-hand margin, someone had scribbled:

hold until can confirm david’s ip exposure as regards license agrmt

~s.a.

He frowned. Somewhere in the stack of papers he had come across a one-year option to license Eitan’s invention of a synthetic gene reprogramming technology. He hadn’t read it, had instead been prompted to search for the patent application which Eitan had filed when his first company, MECH INVIVO, was established over six years ago. Reading that document, Cheong quickly realized that the technology was one of those pie-in-the-sky type things, a discovery that Eitan had made early on in his graduate work. The idea he proposed seemed utterly impractical. There were already tools available that could accomplish much of what he suggested, though admittedly on a much more limited scale. Modified viruses, for example, had become commonplace in genetic engineering. Eitan’s proposal had depended upon synthetic technologies rather than biochemical or organic ones, and most of them didn’t exist and likely would not exist for decades: computer processors at a molecular scale; streamlined algorithms one trillion times as robust yet one trillion times as compact as those currently in use; on-the-fly reprogramming of networked processors remotely based on unicellular genetic codes. The man’s vision was so ahead of its time that it was unfeasible.

And yet it had piqued someone’s interest. Why?

And whose?

The timing of that option, along with the scribbled notation coinciding with Eitan’s and de l’Enfantine’s separation, were other peculiarities. It almost seemed as if someone was worried about her interference. He had no doubt that Angelique would have known about any interest in her husband’s inventions at the time. But if they had gone through with the divorce, then she’d almost certainly have been left out of the loop. Was someone trying to cut her out of the discussion? The profits?

The latter didn’t really make that much sense. After all, she was far richer than he, and it was to his financial benefit to remain married to her. She’d opened up her checkbook to him, had funded his second startup company, had continued to pay his expenses, even after their separation. Even after the divorce papers had been drafted (but never officially filed). The second apartment in Manhattan, for example, the one with Eitan’s name on the lease, was still being paid for out of her family accounts in France.

He became aware of the pilot’s voice over the intercom, informing him that the rough patch of air was now behind them, and that everyone was welcome to remove their seatbelts and walk about for the remaining minutes they had before landing.

Alvin Cheong released his restraint and stood. He stared balefully at the avalanche of papers for a moment, then he strode over to the bar and poured a couple fingers of fifty-year-old Macallan scotch whiskey into a glass that had been sterilized and sealed inside plastic. It was a treat he reserved for rare occasions, since at twelve grand for a bottle the price tag was a bit steep, even for him. He also regretted that whatever remained once he debarked the plane would need to be poured down the drain. But the malt was one of few good ones he knew to be safe, as it had been bottled in the mid-eighties, before the world began its descent into the mess it was in now.

Taking the glass, he returned to the table, and began to resort the papers.

Chapter Forty One

”No,” Jamie protested, her voice little more than a whisper. “I’m not going.”

Angel kneeled over the girl and rested her hand tentatively on one of the bulges in her abdomen. “You’re very sick. Does that hurt when I push here?”

She shook her head.

“Then what hurts?”

“Everything . . . . Nothing. I don’t know.” Jamie tried to swallow, winced. “My stomach hurts. And my back, when I move. And . . . down there.”

Angel slid her hand from one side of the girl’s belly to the other while applying slight pressure on the protuberances. Jamie didn’t flinch. She didn’t even seem to notice. Angel pressed harder, but there was still no reaction.

It was terribly frustrating, trying to understand what was happening to the girl without the basic tools she had had when she was doing her medical studies. Completing her examination simply by touch and sight, Angel felt confident enough only to consider her earlier diagnosis of internal bleeding as a less probable cause of the abdominal distension, though she still couldn’t rule it out entirely, at least as a secondary diagnosis. The paleness of the girl’s skin, her rapid heartbeat and shallow respirations, the sunken eyes and chapped lips, all suggested she might be suffering from hypovolemia as a result of internal bleeding. But those symptoms could also be a result of the pain she was experiencing. Determining the source of that pain was what really mattered.

Palpitating those odd, hard deformations had revived the old bag-of-bones memory. But, in the end, she decided that the girl had to be suffering from intestinal hernias, several of them at once. It seemed a reasonable diagnosis, since the trauma she’d suffered from the crash a week earlier could have easily torn several small perforations in her abdominal wall. The strain of pushing the laundry cart at the hospital must have widened the tears, allowing her intestines to bulge through.

It was still just a guess, she knew. In her years of medical school and as a resident at Stanford, she couldn’t recall ever having witnessed such an extreme case as this, but the hardness and irregularity of the protrusions, as well as the fact that they could be pushed in slightly — reduced was the medical term — and the intermittent pain she suffered while moving, all seemed consistent with that conclusion.

The good news was, if that diagnosis were correct, then the girl was in somewhat less danger than Angel had first imagined. The bad news was, without corrective surgery, the herniated intestines could strangulate, atrophy, and turn gangrenous, requiring immediate emergency surgery. As it was, the girl was likely to lose at least a portion of her small intestine. And if she were really unlucky, the herniated organ would rupture, spilling bacteria into her abdominal cavity and leading to septic shock. If that were to happen, she would die a very quick, very painful death.

Which is why she needed to get to a hospital. And why she needed to remain as immobile as possible to prevent the hernias from getting any worse.

“I need you to lie still,” Angel told her. “I mean it this time. Don’t move.” The girl was exhausted after the last episode of screaming, so getting her to comply didn’t seem like it would be a problem. But if the pain returned . . . .

“The nurse’s . . . office,” Jamie answered, moaning. “Check there.”

“I know. I’m going to see if I can find a — some way to carry you, a civière — I don’t know how to say it in English. Litter? I don’t want you to walk to the car. We’ll find a hospital and—“

“No,” Jamie told her, trying to sit up. Angel placed a hand on her shoulder and urged her to remain lying on the floor. But the girl reached over and grasped Angel’s arm with a weak grip. “No hospital. Won’t help. Only . . . . Must be a cure.”

“You need surgery!”

“Surgery won’t help! There has to be a cure!”

Angel tried to pull away, but Jamie’s fingers hardened into a claw. She tried to pry them off and couldn’t. “Jamie, please, we have to—“

“I SAID CHECK IN THE OFFICE! IT’S IN THERE!”

She jerked away at the force of Jamie’s shout and fell onto her back, relieved that the girl had released her to clutch at her stomach again. She scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding. For a moment, she thought about submitting to her instinct to turn around and run. If she had known a week ago how much her world would turn upside down, she would never have come to China in the first place. Especially after all the hard work she had done to keep herself under control these past few stressful years.

Nevertheless, she felt her mind threatening to slip away. The buzz of chaos inside her head grew loud, thrumming like vibrating wires stretched to their limit. Her brain strained, wanting to relinquish control of her body. But she couldn’t let that happen. Not again.

She wrestled herself back, took in a deep breath and held it, and waited for the beating in her temples to subside.

“Okay,” she said at last. “Okay, I’ll take a quick look.”

The man on the floor had stopped struggling and was now just watching them. She didn’t trust him, of course. But if she were going to leave Jamie here in the hallway, she couldn’t leave him alone with her, not even for a moment. Not even tied up. The shoelaces were barely adequate, no guarantee that he wouldn’t escape. And she didn’t like the murderous look in his eyes. He’d allowed them to escape from him twice. There wouldn’t be a third time.

She checked through his clothes, ignoring his defiant grunts, avoiding his angry glare. She’d already taken away his knife. This time, she emptied his pockets, removing his car keys and placing them into her own pocket. She also found a single loose round for his gun. “So much for wishing I had that bullet back,” she told him, holding it in front of his eyes so he could see it.

That was all she found on him. He had no other weapon and no identification, which surprised her. She figured it could be in his car. She also considered the possibility that he might not be carrying any on purpose.

Grabbing him by the back of his shirt, she dragged him down the hallway to the nurse’s office. She was halfway there when she heard a moan behind her and noticed Jamie trying to follow. “I told you to stay there!” she shouted, and wiped sweat from her eyes. “Don’t move. You’re making yourself worse.”

She left the man in a corner of the office out of her way and turned around. It was her first real opportunity to look at the room, and it struck her that it wasn’t equipped in the manner of a typical nurse’s station. Nor, for that matter, was it like any other type of medical treatment facility she was familiar with. There was a patient table along the left-hand wall and the standard blood pressure cuff and ophthalmoscope mounted above it. Syringes and cotton swabs sat in glass jars nearby. There was a stainless steel sink and hand soap. But the resemblance ended there.

The bench in the middle of the room made the place look more like a laboratory. Indeed, the equipment on it was more typical of a research setting than a medical one. There was the microscope, where the man had been sitting when she’d accidentally surprised him. A Petri dish sat beside it, holding the small shard of bone he’d brought from the hospital. An edge had been shaved away exposing the whiteness beneath a coating of dark, clotted blood. A glass slide had been placed on the stage of the scope, presumably with the shavings on it. Based on what she’d heard, she was tempted to look, but resisted. There was no time for such nonsense.

Her eyes swept the room, but there was no litter to be seen, and nothing which she could use in its stead. The examination table was a simple stainless steel platform and pad, but it was bolted to the floor and couldn’t be moved.

Besides the microscope, the bench held a tabletop microtube centrifuge, a small research water bath, and a row of liquid handling micropipettes. These were common laboratory items like the ones she had used during her first-year research studies at the Sorbonne.

But on a narrower bench, along the back wall behind the microscope, were additional pieces of equipment that she didn’t recognize. One looked like a miniature computer server. Another resembled a wireless transmitter. Everything was plugged into a power strip that snaked up the wall and was clamped to the edge of the benchtop.

Out in the hallway, Jamie howled again, reminding Angel of the urgency of their situation. The sound made her flesh crawl.

To the right of the main door, in the corner of the wall behind the table, was a panel. She hadn’t noticed it earlier as it had a poster taped over it with a cartoon depicting the inside of a human body. The skin was peeled back, revealing the various muscle groups, blood vessels, and internal organs. She went over and saw that the panel was a pocket door, and she slid it into its slot, only to find a second door behind it. This one was made of glass. The room beyond was unlit.

The glass door resisted her push, but then popped open with a hiss. Cool air rushed out and caressed her cheek. It smelled slightly of rubbing alcohol.

She stood there for a moment, then stepped through the doorway. The walls were lined with glass cabinets, and inside each was a cart with a half dozen shelves. A light had come on, casting a dull red glow over everything.

The glass door whispered shut behind her, the magnetized rubber seal cutting off Jamie’s moans of pain in the hallway. Angel turned back to the cabinets, both fascinated and disturbed. On each shelf of each rack were six plastic boxes, and inside each box were rows upon rows of glass vials.

This was no nurse’s office.

But what it was, exactly, she had no idea.

Chapter Forty Two

There were eight refrigerated cabinets in all: three each in the opposite and right-hand walls, two more in the wall behind her. The wall to her left, the one shared with the hallway, was blank.

“What the hell are all these bottles?”

She pulled open the glass door of the closest cabinet and lifted the lid from one of the plastic boxes so she could remove a vial. The top was sealed with a rubber stopper, the kind used for sterile access with a needle, suggesting that the dark liquid within was intended for injection.

Affixed to the bottle was a simple machine-printed label with a barcode and some text:

She puzzled over the word undifferentiated, wondering what it might mean. She replaced the vial into the box and checked the next one:

Hepatic? she thought. As in liver?

The next several vials seemed to confirm her suspicion that these might be cell types, possibly derived from undifferentiated stem cells, perhaps even from a single person, whomever this Subject 145 might be. It would explain the contents of the first bottle, but not why they were here.

On the other hand, the solution looked nothing like a suspension of cells. Furthermore, cells would not remain viable under mild refrigeration, and certainly not sealed inside an airtight bottle. They would be dead within hours.

It was possible that they had been fixed in formalin, perhaps for genetic analysis. But then again, the black slurry did not look like any type of histological fixative solution she knew about. Perhaps they’re checking for—

Stop it! What are you thinking? This is a computer factory, not a molecular biology lab!

Except, of course, it wasn’t a computer factory, was it? Just like that room out there wasn’t a nurse’s office. Those were lies, just like everything else had been.

Quickly checking the next several bottles in the front row of the same rack, she found more tissue types, ranging from muscle and bone to cardiac and neural, as well as adrenal, corneal, and epidermal. Bottles occupied every slot in the seven rows behind the first, bringing the total to sixty-four in each box.

There had to be close to twenty thousand bottles stored in the cabinets.

The adjacent box contained an identical layout as the first, with the only differences being the subject (147) and the lot numbers.

She ignored the voice in the back of her head telling her she was wasting too much time, and instead lifted the entire box out of the fridge and carried it out to the other room and set it onto the benchtop.

The man on the floor squirmed and tried to speak. He was red in the face from struggling. The look in his eyes was filled with hatred. Angel went over to check that he wasn’t getting loose, ignoring his grunts.

Satisfied that he wasn’t going to work himself free, she went to check on Jamie. The girl had made it to the middle of the hallway and had collapsed in a heap. “How are you feeling?” Angel asked.

Jamie turned her bloodshot eyes up at her. “Did you . . . find anything?”

Angel hesitated, then nodded. “Maybe. Give me a few minutes. I want to check something real quick.” She stood up. “Did you happen to have an employee number?”

Jamie didn’t answer right away.

“Jamie?”

“Two-two-four.”

Angel hurried back and checked the lid of the plastic box. Like the vials, the box was marked in the corner with a white label, except this one included a black and white head shot of a Chinese man and his name underneath. It read: SHEXIN, YING - 147.

Subject 147.

She returned the box to the shelf where it belonged, then searched until she found the box labeled 224. Despite knowing what she was going to see, an icy shudder of recognition spread through her when both Jamie’s face and her name were there. Unlike the other boxes, however, this one contained only a single bottle. Puzzled, she retrieved one of the full boxes and brought them both out to the laboratory.

You need to leave, Angel. Jamie needs surgery.

“In a minute,” she muttered to herself. “Just want to check something.”

She quickly assembled a needle and syringe, then extracted about a dozen milliliters of the black liquid from the UNDIFFERENTIATED vial from Jamie’s box. The solution appeared viscous in the bottle, but it passed surprisingly easily through the small bore needle. Without bothering to locate a clean microscope slide, she added a drop of the colloidal solution to the slide that was already on the stage. It looked like glittery black paint.

Plucking the stool from where it had earlier fallen onto the floor, she set herself down in front of the microscope and squinted through the eyepiece. Under magnification, the solution appeared mostly clear. The black coloration was due to the high density of tiny black pellets floating around in it like bits of metal filings.

“Not cells,” she muttered to herself. They were definitely not cells.

So, what were they?

As she moved the slide across her view, the leading edge of the liquid encountered a tiny splinter of bone and engulfed it. Curiously, the black pellets seemed to be drawn to it, as if the shard were magnetized. They amassed on the surface of the splinter in growing numbers, moving through the liquid in a clearly non-Brownian, non-random fashion.

Out in the hallway, Jamie’s cries rose and fell. Then came the sound of her body sliding against the wall. But Angel didn’t heed it. She was completely absorbed by what she saw. A moment later, her fascination turned to horror.

The pellets were beginning to change shape.

With a choked gasp, she pushed herself away from the bench, knocking the stool over once more and stumbling against the back counter. Her hands scrambled over the equipment as she fought to stay on her feet. Something came on with a soft whir.

“Mon dieu!” she cried out. “They’re . . . alive!”

Chapter Forty Three

What the hell are they?

And directly on the heels of that thought: What are they doing?

Donning a pair of disposable latex gloves, Angel removed the slide from the stage and wiped it clean with a tissue, then added a drop of the solution from the vial labeled HEPATIC and slid it back beneath the lens. Once more, she saw a clear solution in which thousands of tiny black—

viruses

—pellets swirled around.

Curious, she increased the magnification and readjusted the focus. One of the pellets edged into view, an opaque, roughly disc-shaped object with a stippled surface. If there had been any doubt before that it was a cell, it was completely dismissed now. It was unlike any cell that she had ever seen before. They were too small to be human, and too large to be bacterial. If anything, their symmetry and uniformity resembled that of viruses. But she’d never known any virus to be so big.

The record, as far as she could remember, was a mimivirus discovered in a French water tower a decade or so earlier. At three-quarters of a micron in diameter, it was considered a veritable giant, yet still puny compared with the smallest human cells, spermatozoa, which were ten times as large. She guessed these objects to be almost the size of a human sperm cell.

But what if it is a virus? What if they created it?

She shuddered at the thought.

After several seconds of watching, she pushed away from the scope in confusion. Unlike the objects on the previous slide, these had remained completely inert. On a whim, she tapped some of the bone dust from the Petri dish beside her onto the glass. Once more, the objects migrated toward the splinters, but when they contacted them, they simply stopped. She scanned several fields to make sure she wasn’t missing anything, but it became clear that nothing was going to hap—

“Don’t. Move.”

Angel froze as a hand dropped heavily onto her left shoulder — not hard, but firmly enough that she knew it meant business — and a small button of cold steel pressed against the base of her skull.

“Keep your hands up on top where I can see them.”

Once more, she obeyed, not moving her hands away from the scope. Shifting only her eyes up and to the side, she saw that the man on the floor was still there. This was someone else, someone who had managed to enter the room without her knowing it, who’d moved around the bench and edged up behind her with the stealth of a ghost.

“I got the text you sent,” he quietly said. The hand dropped from her shoulder, moved down along her side, then swept front to back. It located the pistol and removed it from her waistband. “You shouldn’t have tried to get cute. That’s how people screw up.”

Angel’s head spun. The stranger had appeared so suddenly that she hadn’t had time to panic, but now the terror was starting to rise up inside her, pushing away the shock and sending her toward that edge. “I-I didn’t hurt your man,” she said. “I mean, I could have killed him, but I didn’t.”

“Quiet,” the man warned, his voice low and ominous. “I hate groveling.”

“Please. I don’t want to die.”

“Give me one good reason why I should let you live.”

The gun jiggled against her head, then the frisking resumed on the other side. Angel found it nearly impossible to breathe, much less speak.

“Who are you?” he demanded, sliding the gun to her middle back as he checked her calves. “Why are you here?”

“I-I . . . ,” she stammered, but her mind couldn’t seem to form any words.

“You had a chance to leave. Why didn’t you? You could have taken the girl and disappeared.”

Anger flushed through her. That’s exactly what she had wanted to do, what she had planned to do, until Jamie convinced her to come back. She shouldn’t have listened to her!

But then a vision of the girl lying in the hallway came to Angel. There were no more cries, not a single sound, and the vision changed: Jamie’s throat had been slit, and her lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling. “What did you do to her?” she demanded. “Did you kill her?”

The hand was back on her left shoulder, gripping firmly. “Stand all the way up. Slowly. Keep your eyes forward.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“That depends on you. My orders were to kill you, make it look like an accident. As far as the girl . . . . I didn’t do anything but tie her up. Someone I know has a burning desire to talk to her.”

Burning? He’s taunting me.

“Listen,” Angel said. “She needs surgery. She won’t live long enough to be questioned if—“

“She doesn’t seem to be in any distress. Catatonic, yes, but otherwise fine.” He turned her to her left. “Now, walk. Slowly.”

Catatonic?

“Turn right. Stop. Kneel.”

Angel lowered her eyes to the man on the floor. “I could have shot him,” she said again. “He tied me up. But after I got his gun, I could have shot him. I’m not a killer.”

“I know. Now kneel down and untie him. Slowly!”

The hand remained on her as she knelt. The button of pressure against her skull went away for a moment, then she felt it again, shifted to the top of her head, pressing down with deadly potential. Slowly, she reached forward and, with trembling fingers, tried to work the knots loose.

“I-I can’t. They’re too tight.”

“Keep working on it.”

She didn’t know if she could. Her vision was blurring, and her head was pounding. She realized she was hyperventilating and tried to make herself breathe deeper and slower, but it seemed to only make matters worse.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. She hoped that talking would help slow her racing thoughts. And her breathing. “You killed those people in the village.”

His silence only focused her anger even more.

“Yeah, I bet it was. I can smell it on your skin, the death. I hope you burn in hell for what you’ve done, murdering hundreds of innocent people.”

She heard him suck in a sharp breath, though it might’ve been her imagination. She was surprised that he didn’t strike her.

At last the knot began to give and a few seconds later she had it undone.

“Now stand up. Back away.” He pulled her up, then angled her to the side and pushed her face down against the bench. The gun shifted back to the notch at the base of her skull. “You okay?” he asked, speaking to the other man.

Angel watched him stand up. He pulled the gag from his mouth and gave Angel a deadly look. “Sorry, boss. The other bitch cold-cocked me when I was—“

“Go check on her. She’s in the hallway. And I think I saw your shoes out there.” He handed the man his pistol back and told him not to harm the girl.

After they were alone, the man pulled Angel up again and guided her back to the stool. “Pick it up, then sit down on it.”

Up until now, she hadn’t been able to see his face. She didn’t know what she expected to find when she did. A man with scars, perhaps. A face of stone, cold and heartless. Dead eyes. Bald head.

A tattoo of flames running up his neck.

She stepped slowly forward, relieved to be away from his hand and the gun. Then she turned to face her captor.

He’d backed away as well, putting distance between them so he could react if she tried something. He still had the gun trained on her, both hands steadying it. It was now aimed at her chest. Center of mass, she thought, as she slowly picked up the stool. No chance of missing. Her knees were shaking so badly that she almost fell sitting on it.

She raised her eyes and was surprised to see that his face had no scars or tattoos. His hair was cut short, sprinkled with gray, and thinning. He looked surprisingly normal. And his eyes . . . .

His eyes showed nothing at all. No anger. No pleasure or sadness. They were flat, toneless, though anything but lifeless.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Why are you here?” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and quickly glanced at the screen. “And you better talk fast.”

“And if I don’t?”

He tilted his head at her, as if to say, “Do I need to explain the seriousness of your situation?”

“I saw what you did at the crash site,” she said. “I saw it, and I made a video recording. I had it posted online, so now the world knows what you did— what you’re doing! They know I’m here and—“ After a stuttering start, her words came out in a mad rush, but he stopped her with a simple shake of his head.

“You’re lying. Start over.”

“I’m not lying!”

“There’s no video.” He stated this with such conviction that she had no choice but to believe him.

“I recorded one,” she stammered half-heartedly. “I sent it to—“

“Enough.” He held up a hand to silence her, then stepped quickly over to the door and glanced out into the hallway. “You okay out here?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Sit tight for a few minutes while I question this one.”

“Will do. But what the hell is wrong with her? It’s like she’s, I don’t know, totally out of it.”

“Just stay alert,” the man replied. He kept his eyes on Angel the whole time, studying her like she was a puzzle he needed to figure out.

He shut the door and leaned against it. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Angel hadn’t taken the opportunity to grab something to attack him while he was distracted. To be honest, she didn’t think she’d have the strength to make a successful go of it. Her body was a quivering mass, and whatever grip her mind had on sanity felt tenuous.

He stood there for a moment without speaking, without moving, still without showing anything on his stony face. Just studying her.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he finally said.

Chapter Forty Four

Angel gripped the edge of the bench, trying to keep herself from falling. “Is that what you told the others before you burned them to death? The villagers? Did you tell them they weren’t going to die, either?”

“They’re not dead,” he said, keeping his voice low. A muscle in his cheek twitched once, then went still. He lowered the pistol and stepped closer.

Angel shook her head, confused as much by the statement as by his conciliatory tone. “But— No! You’re lying. I saw it all! The mountain and village, the people, everything burned. I saw the plane—“

“Yes, my orders were to burn it all, including any villagers. No witnesses.” He put the pistol back into his shoulder holster and held up his hands, as if to make her believe his sincerity. “What you saw didn’t really happen.”

It took a moment for Angel to parse this. “But . . . I was there.”

“I moved them all out. I presume it was probably around the same time you were at the Buddhist hospital rescuing the young lady out in the hallway. I’m curious, though, how did you even know she was there?”

“We went into town to— Wait, you moved them? What about my interpreter, Jian? He went up to the burial site last night. He didn’t come back.”

Something flashed across the man’s eyes. “When?”

“After we returned from the hospital. We were running late. It was around dusk. He went up while I stayed in the village. That’s why I saw the plane. I heard it fly over and barely escaped with my own life.”

The muscle twitched in his cheek again. He blinked slowly, then shook his head. “The village and hill were cleared an hour — hour-and-a-half — before sundown. If your man went up there afterward then he . . . . Look, I’m truly sorry. I didn’t know.”

“But—“

“Listen to me,” he told her, his voice gaining some urgency. “We do not have much time. You need to tell me your name and who sent you here.” He nodded at the microscope, and his eye caught on the bone shard. “You brought that girl back here for a reason. Why? Tell me what you know. What do you think’s going on here?”

“Why should I tell you?” Angel snapped. “Why should I believe a word you’re saying? I don’t even know who you are! And I still don’t believe you didn’t kill those people. I saw it with my own eyes! You’re just saying that to trick me into trusting you.”

“You do need to trust me.” He inhaled deeply and frowned. “I don’t work for the people who run this factory, the ones who killed their employees and ordered the others dead. I did what I could to save the villagers. Now, you can either choose to believe me or not, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other because you will tell me what you know.” He gestured at the door behind him. “If you wish to save your life and hers, if you want to save a lot more lives than just your own, then, please, tell me who sent you here and why.”

Angel blinked numbly at him for a moment before it sunk in. He was asking for her help, begging for it.

Or, maybe, another voice inside her head warned, that’s just what he wants you to believe.

Chapter Forty Five

”What I’m about to tell you,” he said, sweeping around the corner of the bench, “is off the record.”

“Off the record?” She stared warily at his hands as he approached, afraid that he was going to strike her. She didn’t like how unreadable his face was.

“You’re a reporter, right? Then you know what that means.” He waited until she nodded before continuing. “So you also know that means you agree you can’t publish any part of this conversation or any of the details. Not . . . yet, anyway. I need your word on this.”

“And I need your word you’ll let us go.”

“I already gave it to you.”

“Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

He sighed. “You can at least tell me your name, right? What news organization do you work for, and how did you know about this place?”

She stared at him for a moment, hoping for a sign that might dispel her doubts. How could she trust him? Why should she?

“Look, lady, I can’t tell you anything until I know who I’m talking to.”

“That goes both ways.”

He continued to stare at her without saying anything, and Angel knew that he had her backed into a corner. He would extract the information from her sooner or later, by force or finesse, whether he was being honest about his intentions or not. Her only hope of learning anything — even if she had no way of verifying any of it herself — would be to do as he said.

“It’s Angel.” She shook her head and turned back to the microscope so he wouldn’t see the turmoil on her face. And because she needed time to think. “Angelique de l’Enfantine. I’m a medical investigative reporter.”

“Yes, I guess you are,” he said after a moment.

She pulled away from the instrument and saw that he was on his phone. He held it up next to her and nodded. “This picture they have of you on the Newsweek site doesn’t do you justice.”

She turned back to the instrument, blushing despite herself. He was obviously trying to keep her off balance by stroking her sense of self-image. Such attempts usually had the opposite effect on her, making her question the speaker’s motives. And yet, she found herself desperately wanting to believe what he’d told her. She wanted to believe that the villagers were still alive.

All but Jian, she reminded herself. And his death is your fault, because you made him go to Bairin Zouqi so he wasn’t in Baoyang for the evacuation.

“You’re from France originally, Miss de l’Enfantine?”

Missus, she silently corrected. “I-I moved to the United States after my second year at Sorbonne, transferred to Stanford. The French medical training program is much more de rigueur than America’s, but I needed to get away from—“ She stopped herself from finishing.

“Away from what?”

“Rien. Nothing.”

“So, you’re a medical doctor?”

“My parents died during the third year of my residency, and I just . . . . I couldn’t finish.” Why are you telling him all this? “I moved back to France with my husband and became a reporter instead. Freelance. I like to pick my assignments, sell my stories to whomever I choose.”

“Husband?”

She didn’t answer the implied question.

“I see.”

The vials clinked together as he picked up the plastic rack box from the benchtop. “And what is this?”

“I don’t know. I found it in that room over there.” She pointed. “Some kind of stem cell . . . stuff. Cells maybe, or not. I don’t know exactly. Each bottle is labeled with a different tissue type: liver, heart, bone, skin—“

She stopped herself with a gasp as she realized something. “Bone! Oh, mon dieu! I should have seen it before.”

Fumbling for the glass slide on the microscope, she asked him if he could find some saline solution. “Look in the cabinet behind me. Quickly!”

He did as she asked, surprising her with his willingness. “How did you know about this place?” he asked.

She extracted an unused slide from the box and scraped some of the bone shavings onto it. “I’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn to talk. You still haven’t told me your name. Who do you work for?”

“Not until you tell me how you knew about this operation. You were supposed to meet with the accident investigator, but the crash was never publicized. Nobody knew about it. How did you?”

“Rumors,” she lied. “I was on another story on Huangxia Island when I heard about the train crash. I was told there might be a survivor.”

She could hear him rummaging about behind her and wondered if he bought her deception.

“Will this do?” he asked. He dropped a liter bag of Ringer-Locke’s solution onto the table. “There’s a whole case of it down there.”

“Yes. Thanks. One’ll do.” The solution was meant for intravenous rehydration, but all she needed was a couple milliliters of an isotonic liquid to resuspend the dry bone shavings. She inserted a new syringe into one of the injection ports on the bag and withdrew a fresh syringeful, then added a drop to the new slide with the bone shavings and slipped it onto the microscope.

“So, rumors, eh? Curious.” The doubt was thick in his voice. “And a train crash isn’t exactly a medical story, is it? What made you decide to investigate it?”

“One might characterize surviving a crash as a medical miracle, no?” She tapped the microscope stage to encourage mixing.

“Even we didn’t know about the girl. We assumed everyone had died.”

The anger returned at the callousness in his voice. Whether or not he had actually saved the villagers, he seemed to show no remorse for what had happened to the train passengers.

“Who are you working for?” he asked.

“I told you,” she said. “I’m freelance.”

“And I don’t believe you. Stories don’t just spontaneously pop into your head out of the ether. Someone had to have given you a heads up. I need to know who.”

The Huangxia story did, she thought idly. Then drew back as she realized that someone must have sent that tweet across her Twitter feed. She’d never really wondered who it might be or why, but now it seemed glaringly obvious that she had been meant to bite on it. Had it been Cheong?

She moved the slide around until she found a sliver, then concentrated on adjusting the focus. “Why were you sterilizing the crash site? What evidence were you removing?”

When he didn’t answer right away, she looked up at him. “Who do you work for?” she demanded. “If not for this company, then who?”

“I can’t tell you everything, okay? I can say, confidentially, that I work for an American government agency investigating groups who have been linked to potential terrorist organizations and activities around the world.”

“Terrorist?” She thought about what Cheong had said in Shanghai about groups wanting to bring about the end of the world. Was the man talking about 6X or the groups they claimed to be trying to thwart?

What if they’re the same?

But then again, when Angel had mentioned the Americans at the site, Cheong had seemed genuinely surprised. Did that mean he hadn’t known about them? Or had his surprise been because she had? And even if he hadn’t known, it didn’t mean 6X wasn’t part of the cover up. It was possible the group was involved in terrorist activities — perhaps even with this particular company — without Cheong’s knowledge.

That might also explain why the video she’d sent to him hadn’t been aired. Maybe he had tried to clear it with his superiors and they had said no.

“An American group investigating terrorism. Sounds like the CIA,” she said. It certainly seemed like that’s where he was leading her without actually stating it. “Is that who you work for, the CIA? NSA?”

“I didn’t say that. And, no, I’m not a spy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I can say that with all honesty.”

Angel sniffed. The man’s word still meant very little to her. And yet, she needed to give him something if she hoped to get anything in return.

“If you’re investigating terrorism, then maybe you’re familiar with an apocalyptic group called 6X? It stands for the Sixth Extinction. They believe the world is experiencing another mass extinction event and that this one will include our own.”

“Not familiar with them. Are they the ones who hired you?”

The drop on the slide had turned pink from the reconstituted blood on the bone. There was a lot of debris in the field— platelets, the remnants of dead blood cells. But there were also a couple of those small dark—

viruses, they look like giant viruses

—objects floating around after being released from the redissolved clotted blood. They, too, were moving, though only very listlessly at first. Their presence confirmed that that the bone sample had contained them, too.

“What’s your name?” she asked again.

“It’s better that you don’t know it.”

She’d half expected such an answer, but it still irritated her. She’d told him hers. Nevertheless, the detail was practically irrelevant.

The tiny objects from the bone were beginning to awaken. She pushed the stool back and gestured for him to look.

He hesitated, studying her face carefully before acquiescing, and once more his willingness to make himself vulnerable to her, to give her a chance to attack him or escape, struck her as odd. Maybe he’d seen something in her that convinced him she wasn’t going to do anything rash. The thought to do something had certainly crossed her mind. She could run, but then there was the man out in the hallway, and as angry as he was at her, he’d probably shoot first, then ask questions.

“What am I looking at?” he asked. “What are those things? Are they . . . ? Wait, are they moving?”

“Keep watching. There’s more.”

She told him what she was doing as she placed a drop of the black solution from one of the differentiated vials to the drop on the slide. The two liquids merged. She wasn’t absolutely certain what might happen, but she had an idea, and her prediction turned out to be correct when he jerked upright a moment later.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed. “Those things are alive!” It was the first emotion she had seen him express since his sudden arrival. “What are they? Bacteria? Holy hell! Are they infectious?”

He wiped his hands on his pants.

She pushed her way back in and looked for herself. The new objects had swarmed over the debris, just as she’d seen before, but now they were vibrating with such frenzy that she couldn’t even focus the objective. The difference between these and the inert ones labeled HEPATOCYTES, the ones she had looked at earlier, was that these had come from the bottle labeled OSTEOCYTES. In other words, bone instead of liver. Whatever they were doing, it had no doubt been triggered by the presence of the bone fragment.

“Those black things I added from the bottle? I don’t know if they’re viruses or what, but I do know that some of them were already in the bone and dried blood. That means they were inside the person this bone came from before the crash.”

“You think they were extracted out of the crash victims?”

She held up the bottle. “I think they were being injected with them. They’re not natural, or at least not like anything natural I’ve ever seen before.”

“That’s why they had us burn everything,” the man whispered. “Evidence of what they had done. That explains the . . . experiment.”

“What experiment?”

“What? Nothing.”

Angel held up the full syringe. “This came out of the undifferentiated bottle from Jamie’s box. Plus, there were no other bottles in her box, so I don’t think she’d been injected with them yet. If this was all some kind of experiment, then she might have been some kind of negative control.”

The man stared at her in unmasked disbelief. “I didn’t understand most of that. What do you mean she hadn’t been injected yet?”

“When we were at the hospital, she kept saying that something got inside of her, through the wound from the bone. I didn’t . . . believe her. I thought she was a little crazy, or maybe in shock. But now I think she was right. Whatever these things are,” she said, gesturing at the box. “They got inside of her from this piece of bone. They’ve been doing something to her body.”

“Making her sick? Is that why she’s—“

Angel shook her head. “No. She has other problems. She needs surgery for her injuries. It’s something else, I think, something she showed me earlier today. These things are—“ She paused and shook her head. “They’re doing something to her, changing her body somehow, altering its ability to heal.”

“Healing! That’s what Aston was talking about.”

“Who’s Aston?”

“Someone I’m hoping you never meet. Are they contagious?”

“Infectious? No, I don’t think so. Maybe.” Angel abruptly stood up. She’d wasted too much time. Out in the hallway was a girl who needed medical care, and here she was chasing theories down rabbit holes. “I need to check on Jamie.”

The man grabbed her arm to stop her, and in that moment all of the doubt flooded back in again. He had duped her into revealing everything she knew. He really was a bad man, and she’d been a fool to believe him.

“Nobody else knows who I really am,” he told her, keeping his voice low. “That man out there is just a hired hand, meant to follow orders without asking questions. He knows I’ve been trying to get answers behind the company’s back, but that’s as far as his involvement goes. And as far as my trust in him extends, as well.”

Angel blinked stupidly. She was relieved to hear him tell her this, but also confused that he would entrust her with this secret. And yet she still knew nothing about him or whether anything he said was true. It could all be an elaborate charade.

She started to gather some syringes and needles. “I-I need to draw some of her blood. I want to see if they’re in there.”

He pulled out his pistol and gestured toward the door with it. “Okay, but remember, you need to act like you’re my prisoner. It’s very important that you look plenty scared.”

She nodded. As far as appearing frightened, looking down the barrel of his pistol, she didn’t have to act at all to make it convincing.

Chapter Forty Six

”Twenty minutes, sir,” the pilot announced.

Alvin Cheong sucked in a deep breath and stretched. His brain felt too big for his skull, and his stomach was more-than-slightly upset. He’d drunk more of the whiskey than he had a right to. One of the curses of being Asian was a genetic predisposition to intoxication caused by a polymorphism of the ALDH gene involved in alcohol metabolism. It also made his skin flush, sometimes uncomfortably. Though he had an affinity for the taste, he abhorred the physical results, which was probably how he’d managed to avoid becoming a full-fledged alcoholic over the years.

Nevertheless, at the moment, he was grateful for the whiskey’s inebriating effect, as it had lessened the tedium of sorting through the papers and helped shorten the duration of the flight. And as he gazed upon the neatly arranged stacks with a level of muted satisfaction, it also helped dull the disappointment he felt at gaining so little additional insight into the relationship between the woman he’d entrusted to verify his team’s suspicions and the two men to which she’d been most close as an adult. What’s more, Cheong had been unable to dig up any more information about David Eitan’s invention or the person or persons who had expressed interest in it once upon a time.

To another man, these details might have seemed insignificant, but Alvin Cheong’s mind kept returning to them time and again.

He knew he had only just begun to scratch the surface in his quest to understand the woman better. His team still had thousands of photographs and the encrypted files on her laptop to sift through. And his assistant in DC still hadn’t gotten back to him, which itself was a bit troubling. But then again, he tended to immerse himself so deeply into his roles that he sometimes forgot to surface as regularly as Cheong would have liked.

The photographer persona had been one such example. Cheong had balked at the cost of the cameras DeBryan had purchased for the charade, but he’d insisted that anything cheaper and Missus de l’Enfantine would have seen right through the guise. And the boys he’d hired to rough him up on the island had been unnecessarily careless with the expensive equipment. One of the camera bodies and a lens had been damaged beyond repair. They were fifteen grand worth of junk now.

Worthless, just like this bottle, Cheong thought, tipping the neck of the Macallan over his glass. He reconsidered, then angled the bottle away and decanted the remaining eight thousand dollars of rare amber liquid down the drain of the bar. It’s just money, after all. It’ll all be useless soon enough.

He started transferring the sorted piles into the box they’d come in, alternating orientations by ninety degrees so that they could be easily separated out again later.

And that murder in Shanghai. It had been DeBryan’s idea, a bit of excitement to throw the woman off balance, render her emotionally vulnerable. Cheong had been opposed to the elaborate plan, thinking it needlessly complicated and too unpredictable. He also felt bad for manipulating her in such an underhanded way, especially given the traumatic circumstances of her parents’ death a few years back.

“She’s seen worse since then,” DeBryan had assured him. “My murder will give her a reason to feel like she has a stake in this.”

Cheong had acceded, but his concerns were very nearly realized when she almost caught the fake murderer in the garage. That had been unexpected and too damn close for his comfort. He told DeBryan that it had been careless of him hiring a drug-addicted homeless man to play the part, especially one who would turn out to have advanced lung cancer. But then again, no one noticed or cared when he ended up disappearing.

Cheong wondered idly what DeBryan had done with the body. He knew it was better not to ask such questions.

DeBryan. DeBryan. That wasn’t even the man’s real name. The thing was, Cheong wasn’t sure what the man’s real name was. Since 6X had paired them up nine months before, he’d known him only by the characters he played as he weaseled his way into peoples’ lives — Shawn Chesser, Armand Rosamilia, Mark Tufo, and a slew of equally improbable names — only to discover later that they were actual people, authors, in fact. The man had a penchant for horror novels, especially post-apocalyptic, which seemed apropos but also somewhat disconcerting. Cheong occasionally wondered if the man actually looked forward to the end of the world.

“What’s next,” he muttered to himself, as he shut the flaps on the box. “Stephen King?”

Too obvious.

There was a knock at the door to his private cabin. He quickly donned his gloves, then unlocked it and invited Emily in.

“We’re starting our descent, sir,” she quietly told him.

She was a meek little thing, and despite his constant assurances to her that he appreciated her attention, she still couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye. It saddened him that she had been so abused as a child, that her psyche had been so badly damaged. He had hoped to bring her out of her shell.

If ever he’d possessed parental feelings for anyone, it was for her.

“There’s tape there,” he told her. “Please seal that box up and make sure to hand deliver it to my hotel room. No one else is to touch it,” he added, though he knew it was an unnecessary stipulation. She knew his quirks and always followed his instructions to the letter. She was deathly afraid that he’d fire her, send her back out into a world to once more fend for herself. He would never do that, though. “Thank you, Emily.”

A chime sounded and the pilot came over the intercom to tell them to prepare for landing. Cheong returned to his seat and belted himself in. Emily finished sealing the box, lifted it into her arms, and left him alone, shutting the door quietly behind her. It locked automatically.

He sighed and closed his eyes. In an hour, he’d be in the de l’Enfantine estate on the outskirts of Lyon. He hoped that effort would prove more fruitful than his searches so far had been.

As the jet descended to ten thousand feet, the pressure in Alvin Cheong’s head turned to a dull throb. In another half hour or so, the migraine would force the contents of his stomach, including approximately a thousand dollars’ worth of partially digested expensive scotch whiskey, back up his throat, soiling the floor of the car that was currently sitting in the plane’s hold beneath his feet.

Chapter Forty Seven

”Slowly.”

Once more with his hand on her shoulder and the pistol pointed at her head, the man led Angel across the room.

“Open the door. Good. Coming out!” he shouted into the hallway, startling her. “ Now step out. Slowly!”

She did as he said and, despite his assurances to her that it was all for show, she didn’t have to pretend at looking fearful. She entered the hallway, again feeling the weakness in her knees which threatened to drag her to the ground, and she immediately turned left beneath the firm guidance of his hand. The grip on her shoulder tightened slightly, slowing her, holding her back. She winced, but kept going.

“One step at a time. No sudden movements. Do as I say if you know what’s good for you.”

Jamie was sitting on the floor leaning against the door to her office, her wrists and ankles bound in front of her but not tied together. She stared slack jawed at an invisible spot on the opposite wall, breathing slowly and steadily. To Angel’s surprise, she didn’t appear to be in any distress at all. She wanted to ask what they did to her.

“Everything okay?” the man guarding her asked. “You were in there a long time.”

Angel was surprised to see that his anger was gone. Instead, he looked nearly as apprehensive as she felt. Was it because of those strange shapes beneath Jamie’s shirt? A quick glance confirmed that they had grown larger, and Angel realized with a start that her diagnosis was wrong yet again.

But if not hernias, then what?

She was at a loss to explain the girl’s condition.

“Boss? Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” the man behind her replied. “We’re just going to draw a little blood from the girl.”

“Blood?”

Angel frowned at the man, but he wasn’t looking at her. He seemed to be staring instead over her right shoulder toward the other end of the hall.

Something’s wrong. What is he looking at?

The other man must have sensed it, too, because he shoved her down just as the gunshot rang out. Angel tumbled to her knees, landing close to Jamie. There was a second blast and the head of the man guarding her suddenly hinged backward, spraying blood and brains and bone from a gaping exit hole in the back of his skull. He stepped back, throwing his arms forward. Then his knees buckled beneath him. He toppled like a tree, spattering more blood and tissue onto the walls and carpet when he hit.

Angel screamed. She panicked and scurried over to Jamie. She was aware that she was spouting gibberish — a mixture of French and English words — yet she seemed unable to stop herself. She pressed against the girl, who hadn’t flinched at the gunshots, hadn’t even blinked, and tried to make herself into a tiny ball.

“Shut up!” screamed a high-pitched voice behind her. “I said shut the hell up, you stupid bitch!”

She clamped a hand over her mouth and buried her face into Jamie’s shoulder, but she couldn’t stop the whimpering sounds from escaping. She expected to feel the pain of a slug slam into her at any moment, but it didn’t come.

“Goddamn it, Norstrom! You were supposed to kill the bitch reporter. Instead, I find you sticking your nose into nobody’s business! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Angel turned her head around. The man—

norstrom his name is norstrom he called him norstrom!

—was sprawled out on the floor clutching his side and grunting in pain.

Standing over him was an extremely obese man in an oversized tan business suit, one side of which was covered in blood droplets. He aimed his gun down and sneered.

“I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

“Aston,” Norstrom panted. “You . . . bastard. You lied about everything!”

“Lied? Oh, that’s rich. Seems you lied to me about the women escaping and heading to Chifeng. You think I didn’t know you were up to something? You think I can’t read that stupid little poker face of yours? Huh? You’re not as smart as you think you are. You’re just some dumb, stupid grunt. You clean up other people’s shit!” He gave Norstrom a vicious kick, eliciting another groan from him and a scream from Angel.

Norstrom pushed himself onto an elbow. The carpet beneath him was wet with his blood. “You said there would be no risk to my men. You infected those people with those things—“

“Infected? No no no! You’ve got it all wrong, my friend.”

“The . . . things you told me about,” he panted. “In the car. What you couldn’t tell me before.”

“For your own good. But now you know, because you couldn’t keep your goddamned nose out of it. You’ve been trying to get unfettered access to this place since the day you arrived. Didn’t you think I’d get suspicious? And the way you ran off, saying you were going to Chifeng. I knew you were lying. I’d hoped I was wrong, but I guess I wasn’t.”

“You . . . lied . . . to me.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I wanted to tell you the truth, believe me. I wanted to tell you everything, because then you’d understand, you’d see all the good we’re doing here, why we have to test and refine and test again. But I couldn’t. I was bound by my oath of secrecy. Besides, you wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”

He leaned against his cane and laughed. The sound of it chilled Angel’s blood.

Norstrom had worked his way over to the other side of the hall and was trying to prop himself up against the wall, but he kept sliding to the side. He was growing weaker by the moment. Blood leaked out through his fingers. His breathing had become alarmingly labored.

“Should I put you out of your misery?” Aston asked. “A wound like that.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t look good.”

Norstrom didn’t answer.

Without warning, Aston fired the gun again, and a spurt of blood arced from Norstrom’s shoulder, splattering the wall behind him and sending droplets to the opposite wall. The dying man folded forward, slipping to the floor once more. His face went suddenly gray.

Angel screamed, this time drawing Aston’s attention to her. He stepped over Norstrom’s legs, jabbing the tip of his walking stick into the injured man’s shoulder until he hissed in pain. As he lurched over to the two women, he picked up the dropped pistol. It had been sitting at Angel’s feet the whole time, just waiting for her to pick it up.

“Don’t, please,” she pled, raising her hands. “I don’t know anything. Please.”

Aston shook his head. “Why don’t I believe that? Isn’t it the job of a reporter to know things? To tell the world?”

“She’s not . . . ,” Norstrom said. His voice was fading, but it was enough to make Aston stop. “She’s a doctor. Leave her alone.”

Surprised flickered over Aston’s face. Then he smiled. “A doctor? How fortunate. Now move away from the girl,” he told her, jerking the gun to the side.

“Why? She’s—“

The gun exploded again, a blinding flash and an explosion. Angel screamed and pulled herself into a ball.

“Shut the hell up with that goddamn screaming!” Aston shouted. He pulled her hair, dragging her away from Jamie.

The pain was terrible, but it was nothing compared to the horror of seeing the gaping hole in Jamie’s lower leg. The flesh had been shredded by the force of the slug entering it. Angel moaned, unable to help herself, and it brought Aston’s fist crashing into her face, sending her reeling against the wall.

“I told you to shut the goddamn hell up! See? It didn’t even hurt her! Look at her! She didn’t even feel it.” He aimed the gun at Jamie’s other leg.

“No! Stop!”

Incredibly, Jamie was still just sitting there, no expression on her face. No pain. No fear. Her leg had been blown half off at mid-calf and she just sat there like she was watching a movie.

She’s in shock. The pain finally got to her. She’s not conscious. She can’t be!

“I need you to do some surgery,” Aston said.

“What?” Angel stared at the madman, trying to understand what he was saying.

“I need you to do a job for me.”

“W-what job?” She glanced over at Norstrom in fear. “I can’t stop the bleed—“

“Get away from him!”

Angel pulled back.

“She’s not a part of this,” Norstrom said through gritted teeth. “Just leave her out of it.”

“Are you still with us?” Aston said, whirling around. He raised the gun.

“No!” Angel cried. “Enough shooting. I’ll do what you want.”

Aston chuckled. “See? She’s smarter than you, Norstrom. She wants to be a part of this. Of course, she already was. She made herself a part simply by coming here in the first place.”

He hobbled over to her and leaned down as much as his ample frame and cane allowed. “Here’s what I need you to do. That girl there, the American? See, she stole some intellectual property from my company. Oh, maybe steal is a bit disingenuous, since she came into possession of said property unknowingly and rather quite against her will. You might say it was an accident.”

He snorted and turned around. “Quite the happy coincidence, that turn of phrase, don’t you think, Norstrom?” The smile slipped away, leaving the pale, waxy face of a ghoul.

“Unfortunately, the company doesn’t care about semantics,” he growled at Angel. “It simply cannot tolerate anyone retaining unauthorized possession of its property, no matter how they came to have it.”

“What property?” Angel asked, though she suspected she knew.

“Our technology, of course. It’s very expensive to produce.”

“What are they?” she asked. “What did you put inside those people? Viruses?”

“No, not viruses. I’m not a scientist, so my understanding of the technology is rudimentary at best. They’re more like . . . cells. Well, they assume some of the functions of cells, anyway.” He gestured the gun at Jamie. “The ones inside of Miss Peters there, the ones that got inside of her from that piece of bone, they don’t belong to her. They’re not hers. So I will be needing them back.”

“But how? They’re microscopic. They’re in her blood. I can’t just—“

Aston shook his head. “The ones in her blood?” He shrugged. “No no. Not going to bother with them. I’m talking about the ones that made those . . . those—“ He pointed at Jamie’s abdomen, at the protrusions, and shivered in mock disgust.

“What are they?” Angel whispered fearfully.

“Why, they’re bones, of course,” Aston replied. “What else would they be?”

Chapter Forty Eight

He told Angel to remove the bindings then lift Jamie up and carry her into the lab and place her onto the examination table. It was a struggle for her, as she had no strength, but she somehow managed.

Norstrom didn’t move as she stumbled passed him. She could see that he was still alive, though only barely by the looks of it. He lay on the floor against the wall with his eyes closed, one hand still clutching his side, the other against the wound on his upper chest. His face had gone from gray to an alarming white from the blood loss. And his breathing was fast and shallow.

“What a mess this is,” Aston muttered, throwing her a box of latex gloves and ordering her to put them on. As to whether he was referring to the lab or the entire situation in general, she couldn’t tell. He pulled drawers open, searching for something, which he eventually found in one of the overhead cabinets along the back wall. He set the aluminum case onto the bench and opened it up, revealing a set of surgical instruments. “Start harvesting. You’ve got a half hour.”

“But they’re not sterile,” Angel said. “None of this is sterile, not the gloves, the scalpel—“

“Sterile?” Aston laughed. “That’s what you’re worried about? The poor girl won’t live long enough for that to be a problem.”

“Then anesthesia. Please,” Angel begged. “Even if she’s going to die, give her something so she won’t suffer. Even you can’t be that cruel.”

Aston limped over and stuck his cane into Angel’s belly, driving her backward into the wall. She nearly tripped and fell, and only the sudden certainty that he’d simply shoot her if she did fall and then expect her to continue with the surgery kept her on her feet. She fought the pull of gravity and the weakness in her legs and somehow managed to remain upright,

“Cruelty would be letting her live,” he growled. “Besides, she doesn’t feel a thing right now. None of them did.”

Them?

Angel’s eyes flicked over to the aluminum case, took in the gleaming instruments. Besides the scissors and scalpels, the hemostats and retractors, she noticed bone saws, several large-bore aspirating needles, scrapers. There were instruments that looked like metal nutcrackers. Instruments of torture, she thought. “What the hell did you do to these people?”

He followed her gaze and nodded, seeing that she had guessed correctly. The kit was indeed part of their experimentation. “Well, it’s not like we just took their bones and tissues without making sure they’d grow back.”

“What?” Angel gasped.

He hobbled over to the bench and plucked the UNDIFFERENTIATED vial from the full box. “Pluripotent nanites,” he said, holding up the bottle. “Not cells, but like cells. Stem cells, to be more precise. That’s what the science boys tell me. The tech guys say they’re more like tiny little computers just waiting to be programmed.”

He gave it a little shake and smiled at the black swirls. “Whatever they are, they’re beautiful, don’t you think?”

Angel didn’t reply.

“Aren’t you curious what they do? Not even a little?”

He set the bottle back down and picked up the syringe she had filled earlier. “Inject them into the bloodstream and they spread out into the body, finding every single nook and cranny occupied by living cells. Yes, even the brain. Of course, getting them to cross the blood-brain barrier had been a technical challenge, but the scientists eventually figured it out. That was in Florida. You might recall the so-called bath salt incidents there a while back?” He chuckled. “Bath salts. The media will believe anything you tell them. More like faulty programming. Anyway, there were a few hitches in the early runs, but we got it all sorted out in the end.”

“You’re insane, you and whoever else is involved.”

“That’s what they always call visionaries.” He set the syringe back onto the benchtop and patted it. “Once distributed throughout the body, these little technological marvels settle in. Then the magic begins. They read and record the specific gene expression profile of the cells around them. They become those cells. Sort of.”

He plucked the next bottle out of the box. “In the parlance of cell biologists, they differentiate, although that’s not technically correct. As I said earlier, they aren’t cells. They don’t replicate, for example. Which is too bad, as it would make manufacturing them so much easier. And cheaper.”

“Is that what you make here?”

“Make? No, they don’t make a damn thing here, actually. No, we mass produce these in West Af—“

He stopped himself and smiled wickedly at her. “I see what you’re doing. Not that it matters if you know or not.”

“Because you’re going to kill me.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he continued with his lecture: “It takes millions of these little guys to make a real difference in a person. If you put just a single one inside a body, it’s pretty useless by itself. Even a few thousand, if they’re spread out instead of concentrated, won’t do much.”

He gestured at Jamie. “But concentrated, well, you can see what a few thousand can do. It’s wonderful.”

“It’s horrible,” Angel whispered. He ignored her.

“This bottle holds ten billion nanites per cubic milliliter. Inject one hundred milliliters into a person’s bloodstream and you’re talking about populating every single part of the body.”

“To do what?” Angel demanded. “What exactly do they do?”

“They heal, of course. Rebuild. The little buggers remain quiescent, doing nothing at all, just sitting quietly. But then, boom! Trauma happens, and your cells send out a localized stress signal. Wakes these things right up, makes them go to work. They’re like microscopic trauma centers. They start repairing the damage, fixing cells and tissues, rebuilding what would otherwise be destroyed. They fix you right up good as new!”

Angel didn’t know what to say. She’d never heard of such a thing before, never even knew it was possible. How could it be?

“The bone,” she whispered, her eyes widening with sudden understanding. She pressed a hand gently again Jamie’s abdomen, then pulled it away again. “Those things got inside of her from the bone. They spread and started making bone where it didn’t belong.”

Aston nodded. “Alas, that’s yet another technical issue that needs to be resolved before we can start general distribution. It seems that once they’ve differentiated, these little pretties have trouble reverting when they’re not needed. We’ve been testing a few ways to deprogram them.”

“Technical issue?” Angel cried, incredulously. “These are people we’re talking about! Human beings, not computers or machines!”

“Of course! Why do you think we’re doing all this testing? South America, Kansas, Wales . . . a whole host of other places. I already told you about Florida. We are literally this close to having a final product! The purpose of the China study was to establish exactly how much damage whole individuals can receive before it’s too much to be reversed. We know that isolated damage can be completely repaired within a few days time. We’re working on shortening that. The engineers tell me it’s all in the programming. They say it’ll one day be possible to repair lethal injuries within minutes.”

He placed the second bottle back in the box and picked up the bone saw. “There was one old woman here,” he said, running the serrated edge over the barrel of the pistol, setting Angel’s teeth on edge. “She must’ve been eighty years old when we cut off her hand.” He chuckled. “Do you think there’s something in yak milk that makes these people live so long? Never mind. Anyway, we amputated three times, all at the very same place, and each time the damn hand grew right back. The first time took a month, the second two weeks. The last time, she had a functioning hand again in four days. Simply amazing. Microscopic cellular repair resulting in macroscopic tissue regeneration, just like lizards. Think of it! With these things inside of every human being, trauma and disease and radiation will become things of the past.”

“It’s not natural.”

“Mortality is what’s not natural, my dear. Soon, we’ll be able to defeat that disease, too.”

“You are completely insane.”

“Don’t dismiss it so out of hand. You might think it’s a fantasy, but it’s not. It’s inevitable!”

Angel shook her head. “How is any of this even possible? How could you keep it secret? The villagers— The woman whose hand . . . . She would have told somebody. Someone had to notice!”

“The subjects have no memory of any of it. We keep them here during their recuperation, in special recovery rooms.”

He snapped the bone saw back into the case and went over to the device on the back counter, the one that looked like a small computer server. The machine was still emitting a slight hum from earlier. He reached for it, but then pulled his hand back at the last moment, as if he were afraid it might shock him. “Um, you may want to hold onto her,” he advised, turning and gesturing at Jamie. “I wouldn’t want her to fall off the table. That leg might snap clean off.”

“Why? What—“

He pressed the button and the lights and humming immediately faded away. At the same time, a scream rose from Jamie’s throat and she lurched upright on the table. Angel spun around in time to see the look of agony on her face before she suddenly went limp and fell back again. The scream died, becoming nothing more than a ringing echo in the room.

“What did you do?” Angel yelled.

“It’s this thing,” Aston admitted, patting the machine beside him. He had turned it back on again and was looking at it like he wanted to toggle it off one more time, just to prove to her that it was responsible for the changes in Jamie’s condition. “They call it a resonance uncoupler, but to be honest, I don’t understand how it works. The hardware guys explained it to me once. I just couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around it. It interacts somehow with the nanites in the brain is all I know, and it somehow turns off certain neural functions. Not essential ones, just those involved in consciousness, I think.”

“You think?”

He shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t understand it. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is what happens to people with them inside when this thing on— they mentally uncouple. Very limited range, of course, this device. Maybe fifty feet or so. Makes it work great as anesthesia while not interfering with the nanites’ functions. Our girl is lucky that enough of them got through to her brain to render her uncoupled, otherwise I can’t imagine how painful the surgery would be for her.”

He pushed the aluminum case toward her end of the bench. “The lab guys will want to study the nanites in those bones to figure out how we can avoid—“ He waved his hand in the air, looking for the right word. “What is it called when something grows where it’s not supposed to?”

Angel shook her head in disbelief. How could he possibly just stand there and act like this was normal? How could someone who claimed to be working to benefit mankind be so cruel and heartless, so utterly unrepentant of the inhuman things they were doing?

“You should know the term,” he said, oblivious to her thoughts, “being a doctor and all.”

“T-tumor?”

“No no. The investors don’t like to hear those kinds of words— tumors and metastases and such. We try and avoid those kinds of negative connotations. No, I mean like a fetus, you know, developing in the body but outside the womb. There’s a term they use . . . .”

“Ectopic,” she whispered.

“Yes! You got it! That’s what the research guys called it. They’re still trying to figure out how to prevent ectopic tissue formation when the differentiated nanites end up going somewhere they’re not supposed to be.”

“I won’t. I won’t do it. I won’t be a party to—“

He sighed and his face went slack. He raised the gun. “I don’t want to have to harvest those bones myself. I will if I have to, but I’d prefer not to.”

“But—“

“Enough!” he roared. “Get on with it!”

With shaking hands, Angel pulled on a pair of gloves, then reached for the scalpel. She thought about telling him that she hadn’t done any surgery in over four years — longer when it came to anything abdominal — but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference to him. She held the blade up to the light to check for defects. It appeared to be new, though it was hard to tell by eye if it had been used before. There was no trace of blood on it.

Past it, she could see Aston standing with the pistol raised. He had purposefully placed the bench between them, out of her reach should she choose to swing the blade at him. He was sweating profusely, plastering his greasy hair even tighter against his scalp.

He’s a disgusting man, Angel thought. Then she turned and faced Jamie and, without hesitating, inserted the tip of the blade into the girl’s left flank, halfway between the iliac crest and her bottom rib. With firm pressure, she drew it straight across to the near side, the whole time expecting the girl to cry out. She didn’t. Blood leaked out of the wound and pooled in the hollow of her umbilicus. It ran down her side.

There wasn’t as much bleeding as Angel expected, and she guessed that it was because the girl was so dehydrated. But another terrifying possibility came to mind. The molecular building blocks for those bones had to have come from somewhere. Those things inside her body were cannibalizing her to make them, breaking down tissues to drive their production. It explained her paleness, the hollows of her eyes and cheeks.

And in that thought Angel realized that they were exactly like tumor cells: they were eating her alive to carry out the function they were programmed to do.

And just like tumor cells, they wouldn’t stop until they or the patient died.

The blood formed a shallow puddle, and the puddle widened and became a swamp. The swamp breached its levees and poured down onto the pad. Angel realized that the table had been modified to collect such fluids, draining them somewhere unseen below. She could hear the muted tock tock tock of it dripping into a container.

Not once did Jamie flinch. She continued to stare up at the ceiling without emotion. Her breathing remained steady.

Digging her fingers into the incision, Angel carefully pierced the underlying tissue, the thin, almost nonexistent layer of subcutaneous fat, through the tougher connective tissue of the rectus fascia. Then the abdominus muscle, which she was surprised to see was intact, not torn as would have been the case if there truly had been a hernia. She recited to herself the proper names of the layers, surprised that they would come back to her so easily and under such duress. The blade felt almost natural in her fingers. She’d forgotten how much she missed it.

Focus, Angel!

The tissue separated easily against the strain placed upon it by the bones pushing up underneath, practically tore itself in front of her blade. She went as rapidly as she dared, hoping to stay ahead of it to avoid further damage. A thin spray of blood jetted into the air, hit the ceiling and wall, before abruptly stopping. Some of it sprayed onto her face, and she backed away, coughing to try and keep from vomiting.

Don’t stop. Just do it.

Her mind spun. She needed to figure out a way to save them both, to disable Aston. But he had moved over to the door to check on Norstrom, giving her nowhere to go.

Step back to the table, Angel. Keep going.

Down the blade plunged, through another tough, glistening layer of connective tissue — posterior rectus fascia, her mind numbly informed her — through the peritoneum and the omentum, slicing shallowly, carefully.

And then she was into the abdominal cavity. She pulled the last layer aside, exposing a dense, hard tangle of tissue— not intestines, as her mind kept trying to convince itself was there, but bones.

Dozens upon dozens of bones.

Chapter Forty Nine

Her stomach was rebelling. She gagged, wanting to cry out in disbelief. In horror. She wanted to make it all go away.

“What the hell are you waiting for? Take them out, goddamn it!”

She turned to him. “Wh-what do you want me to put them in?”

He stared back at her for a moment, as if it were the stupidest question he’d ever heard. Then he rolled his eyes and went over and yanked out a shallow drawer, dumped the contents onto the floor, and slammed it down onto Jamie’s chest. “Need anything else?”

Angel glared at him as he returned to his post in the doorway, backing slowly away while keeping the gun pointed at her. “Just the tissue retractors,” she muttered, gesturing at the surgical kit. “I need them to hold the incision open.”

“Well, get them your goddamn self!”

She placed the scalpel down on the bench, where it left a bloody smear, then walked slowly over to the case.

“Don’t try anything,” he warned. He eyed the scalpel nervously, as if he expected it to leap at him of its own free will.

The retractors were snapped into notches in the lid, and she had to hold the case with one hand while prying it out with the other. He kept his eye on her, but as she struggled with it, she noticed his gaze drifting impatiently to the woman on the table.

Incredibly, Jamie was still breathing at the same slow, steady rate as before, still staring up at the ceiling. Now, however, a tear slipped out and ran across her cheek, cutting a pink line through the blood splatter.

She feels it. There aren’t enough of the nanites in her brain. She hurts, but she can’t respond.

“Hurry the hell up!”

Angel jumped at the sound of his voice and returned her attention to the kit. With her right hand prying the retractor from its holding spot, she slipped her left hand behind the lid of the case to where he’d left the syringe filled with the undifferentiated nanites from Jamie’s bottle. At last, the retractor popped free.

She turned her body away from the door and returned to Jamie’s side, hiding the syringe in her hand. She didn’t know how much of the nanites would be needed to save her, or how quickly they’d spread and differentiate in her body. Aston had said days for an amputation. The surgical damage Angel was inflicting should be considerably easier to fix than that. The girl mostly needed blood. Would the nanites make it?

You’ve no idea what you’re doing. You could just end up killing her quicker.

The girl was going to die if she did nothing. She needed to at least try something to save her life. If the nanites did as he said—

Don’t do it!

She set the syringe on the table in the space between Jamie’s hip and her thigh and began to prepare the retractor to hold the abdominal muscles open. The tool wasn’t critical for finishing the job, as the bones had already forced themselves up through the incision, widening it and keeping it open.

She wiggled one of the growths experimentally. It didn’t appear to be anchored to anything; rather, it seemed to be free-floating, as if a cluster of nanites had migrated into her belly from her leg and begun to generate the tissue they had been pre-programmed to make. She would need to cut away the blood vessels feeding it, but otherwise it should come out easily. If only she had a cauterizing scalpel.

“What’s taking so long!” Aston snapped, jabbing her in the back with his cane.

Angel slapped it away with an angry shout, spraying blood onto the floor and the hem of the madman’s pants from her glove. But he was already covered in Norstrom’s blood and didn’t seem to care. He tapped his watch with the gun and reminded her that time was wasting.

She reached around behind her to retrieve the scalpel. As his eyes tracked it, she slipped the syringe into a small space in Jamie’s abdominal cavity with her other hand. “They’re attached by blood vessels,” she explained. “I need to cut—“

“Spare me the damn details. And hurry it up! You’ve been at it a half hour already!”

She turned back and wrapped her fingers around the first bone. It was thin and curved, and as she pried it free, slicing through the blood vessels holding it in, she thought that it resembled a rib. In fact, they were all shaped the same way, and she realized with a jolt of recognition that the shard of bone the doctors had removed from her thigh in Bairin Zouqi had the same characteristic curve to it.

It knows what kind of bone it is!

The rib came free. She held it up, then dropped it into the drawer with a wet clatter. How many nanites had it taken to build it? How many had infected Jamie? How had they known to travel up her leg and come to rest here?

But Angel realized then that it hadn’t just been the bone in her thigh. Jamie’s body was covered in lacerations. She’d been infected multiple times, all over by the smaller shrapnel of the bodies torn apart by the force of the crash. Blood and teeth and who knows what else. The bone was the biggest, but it hadn’t been the only thing.

Angel swooned and nearly fell imagining what it meant for the girl. It all seemed too incredible. It was so utterly, unthinkably horrible.

She pushed it out of her mind so she could continue.

She released a second. And then a third. There had to be at least two dozen bones inside of her, all oriented without reason, a mesh of ribs of various sizes, unmuscled, lacking attachment tendons. Just ribs growing where they weren’t supposed to be, like terrible, monstrous cancers.

Whoever these people were, they weren’t helping anyone but themselves. They were creating terrifying new ways to make artificial tumors.

She worked her way down through the ossified nest. In their place, the cavity filled with dark, sticky blood, masking her work, blinding her. Beneath and between the rope of the intestines, she felt the strong pulse of the descending aorta, and she knew that it was time. She placed her fingers beneath it and gently pried the vessel up, giving her a target for the injection.

What the hell am I doing? This is crazy! These things aren’t natural! Don’t do it!

But before she could second guess herself, she emptied the contents into the blood vessel, maybe twelve or fourteen milliliters’ worth of undifferentiated nanites. Then she resumed removing the rib bones.

The work took on a sort of peculiar monotony: find, lift, cut, remove; find, lift, cut, remove. The further down she went, the smaller the bones became, as if they were newer, pushing the older ones out as they grew. Would she find the source? What would she do when they became too small?

Aston had pulled the stool over to the door and was sitting in it now. It squeaked as he shifted. Angel hoped it would collapse beneath him, but it held.

“The thing I don’t understand,” she said, dropping another bone into the drawer. It was about a quarter of the size of the first, and she sensed that she would soon be unable to continue as they’d be too small. “Why did you have to kill all those people on the train?”

“I told you already,” he snapped, and when he didn’t go on right away, she thought that would be the end of it. But he couldn’t seem to help himself. “We needed to test the full range of trauma that could be inflicted on a person and yet still be reversed.”

“But a train crash?” She had to suppress the urge to spin around and stab him with the scalpel. She wanted to slice his face off, slit his throat. But she knew she wouldn’t reach him before he pulled the trigger. She wanted revenge, but she also needed to live, and the only way to do that was to keep her wits about her. If she were to die here, no one would remain to tell the world what these people were doing. “Why not just continue . . . amputating.”

“Real life scenarios, my dear. That’s the real proof. And doing the tests one by one just takes too damn long, requiring more resources than we had. And, I’ll be honest, our nurse was having a little, what you might call, a crisis of faith. She refused to do any more surgeries and had to be . . . terminated. The company was pushing me to speed things along. They wanted to move onto the next stage, so I had to improvise.”

Improvise? And then, with dawning horror: Next stage? What next stage?

“You’re a monster.”

“No, the monster is whoever sabotaged that train so it would crash at full speed!” Aston snapped.

Angel turned. “You just can’t see it, can you? You blame other people for your failures—“

He jumped to his feet and slammed the cane down onto the benchtop. “Enough! Finish what you’re doing and shut the hell up!”

She dropped another bone onto the pile, this one about half the length of her pinky, and felt around inside, gently pulling away Jamie’s viscera. She was pretty sure she’d managed not to perforate any of the intestine, but there was too much blood pooled in the cavity to be sure.

She finally found what she was searching for, but as her fingers curled around the descending branch of the aorta, she realized that there was no longer any pulse. The tough vessel was limp and still.

Stepping back in alarm, she looked over to check Jamie’s face. The skin was pasty white, and her eyes were closed.

“She’s dead!” she cried.

“Just as well,” Aston replied, sounding relieved. “Your time’s up, too.”

Chapter Fifty

”Our scientists will be most appreciative,” Aston told her, as he dumped the bloody contents of the drawer into a large plastic bag and gathered the opening to seal it shut. “So much easier than transporting a whole body, especially through Customs.”

Angel collapsed to the floor in the corner of the room. She didn’t think she could stand any longer. She hadn’t eaten much of anything since her meal in the yurt the night before, and her mind was numb from shock and exhaustion. “I don’t think I got them all,” she whispered. “I’m sure there are more.”

“Oh, you’re probably right about that, but I can’t afford to waste any more time here. Now, get up!”

He checked his watch again, then dug into his pocket. With his eyes still on her, he jerked the pistol up. “Johns,” he said into his phone, “just finishing up in here. Any word from the crash site? They are? Good. That’s exactly what we had hoped. Go ahead and set the charges. I want them timed for ninety minutes from now. Then prep the chopper.”

He scowled at her still sitting on the floor. “I told you to get up! We’re not done here.”

Angel cried out when he yanked her to her feet by the arm. He was a lot stronger than she expected, certainly more than he appeared, though she realized that buried beneath all that mass there had to be enough muscle to move it.

He twisted her around and shoved her toward the hallway. But when she stumbled toward the door, he barked at her to turn around. “In there,” he said, pointing toward the room with the refrigerated vials. “Start pulling out those racks.”

“Do it yourself,” she snapped back at him. “I’m finished—“

The round didn’t come any closer than a decimeter of her head, but the shot was close enough that she felt the hot air of it exploding out of the pistol. She dropped to her knees and covered herself with her arms.

“I can either shoot you where you lay,” he calmly told her, “or you can do as I say and I’ll consider not shooting you at all. It’s up to you. Now get up and start pulling out those carts.”

Somehow, she managed to get to her feet. She didn’t believe him for a second that he would let her live. She had always assumed that he’d kill her the moment she finished doing his bidding, which is why she’d been wracking her brain trying to figure out a way to escape. But she’d come up with nothing. He had been too wary of her and too reckless with that gun to make running a viable option.

He watched her as she pushed through the glass door and went over to the first refrigerated unit. When she pulled out the cart, the bottles clinked inside their boxes. “All of them?”

The room was too small to accommodate all eight carts at once.

“One at a time. Roll it outside,” he instructed, as he tried to jam the plastic handle of a broom into the hinge of the door to hold it open. It was too fat, so he used the broken vortex mixer as a doorstop instead. “I’m taking them all with me.”

Angel stole another glance at Norstrom as she passed him, pulling the cart after her. She could feel Aston’s eyes on her back, leading the way, the sight of the pistol a red hot dot on her skull. Both of the gunshot wounds in Norstrom’s body appeared to have stopped bleeding, but she couldn’t see any sign that he was still alive. His face was slack and his chest motionless. He’s dead, Angel. If he were alive, he’d have done something by now, moved or tried to escape, maybe tried to take Aston out.

And it was then that she realized she was completely on her own now. Jamie was dead, as was Norstrom, and no one else knew she was here.

She remembered that Cheong had said he’d send someone else out. But a voice inside of her told her not to count on it. Nobody knows you’re here at the factory.

“Everyone dies the same,” Aston told her, startling her with his laughter. “Even the tough ones. We’re all made of the same vulnerable flesh and blood. Of course, that’s soon to change. Soon, this gun and its bullets will become practically harmless. A couple wounds like those and the new-and-improved Norstrom wouldn’t have died so easily. Too bad he didn’t live to see the day.”

Angel continued backing up without replying. When her foot came down wrong on something behind her on the floor, twisting her ankle, she began to fall. The cart tipped, and several of the boxes started to slide out.

“Watch it!” Aston screamed.

She let go and fell onto the dead man. The cart righted itself with a loud rattle.

“Goddamn it, bitch! Watch where you’re going!”

“You could have warned me,” Angel shouted back. She jumped to her feet and happened to look up just in time to see Aston swing his cane down at her. She ducked, but it caught her on the arm and sent a flare of pain rippling down to her hand.

“Move him out of the way!” he screamed at her. The missed hit had caused him to stumble into the wall, which only made him angrier. He pushed himself away and threatened to hit her again. “Hurry up!”

Angel pulled the dead man over to the side. His blood had already begun to dry, and his hair had stuck to the thin carpet. It made a sickening sound when it tore away.

The remainder of the trip went without incident. Angel had been expecting a car, and indeed there was one parked behind Jian’s just outside the door, but when Aston put a bullet into each of the front tires, she realized that it must have been Norstrom’s.

“Around the corner,” he instructed.

The cart rolled unsteadily over the gravel surface, threatening to upend several times. She expended more energy than she could spare just wrestling with it. And yet she managed to keep going.

When she reached the corner, a helicopter came into view, parked on the flat. Its engines were silent. Several light blue metal boxes, just like the ones she’d seen inside the supply truck at the crash site, were piled up beside the chopper. Two were open and empty; two remained sealed shut.

The pilot was nowhere to be seen.

“Hurry up!” Aston pulled the door open. “Load them up inside.”

She finished transferring the boxes and began to drag the cart back to the building, but he told her to push it out of the way. “And, Christ, can you move any faster? You’re taking too long!”

The next three trips passed in a blur of fatigue and barely restrained terror. Bringing out the fifth cart, she noticed that all of the metal cases by the chopper were now empty. That’s when she realized where the pilot had gone and what he was doing.

“You’re going to blow it up!”

Aston didn’t reply.

“I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s all you people seem capable of doing, destroying things.”

He jabbed her hard between the shoulder blades with the cane. “Shut up.”

“You won’t be able to get away with this. Someone will find out. Somehow the word will get out. You can’t keep something like this a secret.”

She finished unloading the cart and wheeled it away, pushing it into a shallow ditch to join the others.

“Do you really think I care about that?” Aston asked her. “Finish up. You’ve got eight minutes to get the last few loaded up.”

She saw the explosives going back inside this time, set along the base of the wall in the hallway. They’d been spaced roughly five meters apart. One was situated right by the dead man’s head, another opposite Norstrom’s body. The timers read sixty minutes, and they were counting down.

By the time she’d wrestled the sixth cart out to the helicopter, the pilot was back in his seat, his helmet on. He looked over at Aston and tapped his wrist, then spread out the fingers of one hand.

“Leave it here,” Aston told her. “Johns’ll load it up. One more. Quick!”

She heard the chopper’s rotors begin to turn as he herded her back inside.

The last two carts were mostly empty. He told her to carry the four remaining full plastic boxes out to the lab and set them on the bench. He then ordered her back into the inner room.

This is it, she thought. He’s going to shoot me now.

“Those are incendiary devices out there,” he informed her, “not explosive. They’re intended to burn this place down, leaving nothing but an empty shell, if that. Looks better to snoopy officials than an explosion, which would raise more questions and suspicion right now, especially after the recent spate of warehouse fires. They’ll be igniting in less than an hour.”

He pointed to one of the refrigeration cabinets and told her to open it up. When she did, he tossed a couple objects inside onto the floor and told her to get in. After she entered, he shut the door, then thrust the broomstick through the handles. “You won’t be able to break through the glass, so save your energy. If you’re lucky, the fire won’t come inside this room for another fifteen minutes after the place starts to burn. The broom handle will melt soon after, releasing you.”

“Why don’t you just shoot me?” she shouted at him through the glass.

“I told you I wouldn’t if you did as I said, and you did, so I intend to keep my end of the bargain.”

He pointed to the floor beside her feet, where she saw one of the nanite bottles and a syringe. “Differentiated epidermal,” he said. “Skin. If you’re quick enough with the injection, and if they’re quick enough getting to where they need to be in your body, you may just survive the fire. Of course, there will also be the long term side effects for the ones that go to the wrong place. After today, I’m sure you’ll be able to imagine what those might be.”

He turned to go, but paused when he reached the door.

“And in case you’re wondering, yes, we’ve done burn tests. You’d be impressed at how well our little marvels work to repair flesh. Unfortunately, we still haven’t figured out how to program them to grow hair again. Shame, though, as there’s billions to be made just in that one segment of the market.” He shrugged. “People can be so vain about their looks.”

Chapter Fifty One

A heavy mist had begun to fall by the time Alvin Cheong’s personal car pulled up to the front gate of the de l’Enfantine estate on the outskirts of Lyon. A wooden sign had been attached to the stone wall reading CHÈVREFEUILLE, but the paint was faded and beginning to chip away.

It was already midmorning by the time they’d left the airport, and behind the tinted glass of the car the world had turned into a blur of gray and swirled pastels. Between intermittent wipes, the windshield looked as if it were cratered by a million tiny missiles.

Once they had gotten outside of the city and were away from the morning commute traffic and the stench of diesel fumes, Cheong opened his window several inches and breathed in the wet smell of the countryside. The rich organic pong, rife with life and rot, smelled natural to him. Wet sheep and grass and dirt. Trees and pollen. How long before the entire world smelled like this again after man and his machines were gone?

But the rain was growing heavier, so he rolled his window up again, leaving it open barely an inch to keep the stink of his own vomit from completely filling the car again. Now he stared up the drive to the silent house behind the iron gate, a faint ghostly form in the drizzle . No lights were on inside, though the lamps along the path were still lit. All except one, whose bulb appeared to have blown out. For some reason, his eye kept returning to it.

He waited with his driver, the car’s engine idling quietly, and they didn’t speak.

It wasn’t a huge house. Certainly not ostentatious. Gray stone and ivy, a Mediterranean roof. If he didn’t know otherwise, he would have guessed the structure claimed somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty rooms, perhaps eight bedrooms and nearly as many baths. In actuality, it was closer to thirty, though many of those rooms he hoped were empty, or at least unused. In any case, the search was going to take quite a bit longer than the Manhattan apartment had. And that was assuming there weren’t any outbuildings. The plans hadn’t shown any on the grounds, but he asked his driver, Nate, to double check while he was inside making his own rounds.

The gate suddenly began to swing open, the motor rumbling and the chain rattling. It sounded in need of some maintenance.

“They’re in,” Nate announced, and he guided the car through the stone walls and between the untidy hedges.

The whole place is in need of maintenance, Alvin thought, glancing at the long grass on the lawn and the fallen leaves. A feeling of gloom settled over him.

They approached the front door and slowed to a stop beside a man he didn’t recognize. The search team consisted of the same members he’d used in Manhattan, but he’d also arranged to be met by someone with familiarity with the place.

Nate rolled his window down. “You the local guy?”

The man leaned over and offered his hand. “Alain Champlain. Plaisir.”

“This is Mister Cheong.”

“Bonjour. Bienvenue chez les Chèvrefeuille. You can pull around the side. Zere is a covered arbor out of sight from all ze roads. If we need to leave in a hurry, zere is a separate staff gate. I have a man to keep watch out front; another in back. Anyone comes, zey will override ze gates until we’re clear. But I don’t think we need to worry. I have been watching ze place since two days and have seen no one coming or going.”

Cheong stepped out of the car, then mounted the stairs to the porch. After shaking off the mist from his overcoat, he entered the house. He stopped in the middle of the foyer to look around, wondering whether to remove his gloves or not. He decided to keep them on.

Like the apartment in Manhattan, the house was sparsely furnished and minimally decorated. A large tapestry, old by the looks of it, covered the wall beside the stairs. A piano sat beneath the overhanging balcony landing. A pair of ground floor hallways, one to either side, led toward the back of the house. A kitchen was off the left hall, as well as the pantry, bathrooms, and servants’ quarters. To the right were a large dining hall, parlor, offices, and storage rooms.

Other than a few small runners, there was no carpeting that he could see. And besides the hanging tapestry, the only other wall hanging was a single large mirror mounted on the back wall of the foyer. It was encased within a wide, gold frame with a gaudy floral design. No portraits or photographs anywhere. No artwork. No plants, whether real or otherwise.

His eyes were drawn naturally up the stairs to the second story, to the double doors set into the middle of the landing and the master bedroom, which he presumed belonged to Missus de l’Enfantine. The doors were both open, and he could hear someone already rummaging around inside, opening cabinets and drawers, shifting boxes, checking behind doors.

He wandered down the hallway that ran along the left front of the house to what he knew from the plans was the library. Two men were inside the large room, one working on the computer, the other sifting through papers and books. He watched them for a while, taking in the tall shelves and the tomes, many of which were behind glass. The room included items of a personal nature here, decorations and trinkets, though he couldn’t dispel the feeling that they had lost whatever significance they once might have held. There was no obvious sign of neglect, and yet the room had the distinct air of neglect to it.

He shook his head at himself, then left the men to their jobs and headed back toward the middle of the house again.

On the opposite side of the foyer was a similar hallway. At its end was, according to his notes, the butler’s study.

“Mister Cheong?”

He looked up at the man standing at the top of the landing, his latex gloved hands resting lightly on the balustrade. Jaffe was his name. He looked perplexed.

“Can you take a look at something up here?”

Cheong took in a deep breath and bit back his irritation. The men knew he had a routine for such things and didn’t appreciate having his concentration broken for trivial matters. He turned and headed for the stairs.

“What is it?”

Jaffe gestured toward the master bedroom, and they entered.

The bed was unmade, and several items of clothing littered the floor between it and the closet.

Cheong’s attention was drawn to the computer workstation. It was clearly a homemade setup, a Rube Goldbergian monstrosity of unmatched parts brought together and connected by cables of all different colors. A man was sitting at one of three keyboards in front of the left hand-most monitor and shaking his head in frustration. He was clearly having a difficult time figuring out how to log in. Two of the screens were filled with the same solid, unvarying sea of blue. The last was black but for a blinking cursor.

This is where she writes? Cheong wondered. It seemed excessive for a reporter.

“The closet, sir,” Jaffe said.

“Excuse me?”

“The closet. It’s all men’s clothing. She doesn’t appear to use this room. Or if she does, not as her bedroom.”

Cheong frowned. “David Eitan’s then? From before the separation?” Or after?

Jaffe shrugged. “There are some carry-out food containers lying around — there on the dresser, for example — some no older than a few days. Nothing more recent, though. Has the other team located him yet, the ex?”

“Not ex,” Cheong muttered. “They’re just separated. Apparently. And no, they’re still looking for him in DC.” He glanced at the clothes on the floor, overcome by a passing sense of déjà vu. Then at the bed, which was queen-sized. Both pillows appeared to have been used, and the sheets on both sides were rumpled. “No women’s clothes?”

“No, sir.”

“Maybe they’re not as estranged as we think.”

“That would explain why they haven’t been able to locate him— if he’s here in France, that is.”

Cheong nodded. Separated, but together; together, but not together? Something didn’t seem right, but what it was, he didn’t know. “Okay,” he said, exhaling in frustration. “Keep looking.”

He stepped from the room and paused at the top of the landing. Damn whiskey, he thought, looking dizzily down at the first floor landing. He stepped quickly away from the railing, even though it reached up to his chest and there was no way he could fall. But he was a short man. A taller person might topple over it if they weren’t careful.

Feeling sick to his stomach, he descended the stairs and wandered out to the front porch until one of the men told him to come back inside before he was seen.

Sixty-two minutes after arriving, his team gathered in the foyer for the debriefing. As with the earlier search, additional medication bottles had been found confirming the idea that Angelique de l’Enfantine was being treated for a chemical imbalance affecting her mind. The proof only troubled Cheong all the more, as he could find no record of what exactly that condition might be.

“I was finally able to access the upstairs computer and cloned it,” the technician reported. He had been new to the team in New York, and Cheong couldn’t for the life of him remember the man’s name— Edwards or Edmund or something. “All the files are deeply encrypted, so it’ll take us a while to crack them open and see what’s in them.”

“Doesn’t that seem a bit strange?” Cheong asked.

“Edleman, sir,” the man replied, sensing his boss’s hesitation. “We know her father was a security expert. The systems he created were designed to prevent hacking. It might be—“

“Gaétan de l’Enfantine died almost six years ago. I may be wrong, but the setup upstairs didn’t look that old. And the laptop in the library wasn’t secure.”

“No, sir.”

“Why encrypt one but not the other?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Cheong nodded. “Notify me the very moment you’re able to crack open those files.”

There were no further surprises.

Alvin Cheong returned to the car and belted himself in. It would take his people several more days to carefully review the thousands of additional documents they had photographed, probably longer to crack open and sift through the computer files.

“Did you find anything?” he asked Nate as they exited the property and headed back to the airport.

“There’s a guesthouse, but it looks like the roof caved in a while ago. Years, maybe. It’s overgrown with ivy. Nothing retrievable. Found a small shed with some gardening tools and a cardboard box with some old medical textbooks in them. There’s a garage with a bunch of old machinery.” He shrugged.

Alvin Cheong turned his face toward the window. He felt like he was chasing ghosts. Or, worse yet, phantoms. Why had 6X picked her of all people to dig into the events his team considered high risk? What was so special about the woman?

And was he right in worrying about her mental condition, whatever it might be?

“One last thing, sir,” Nate went on. “You’ll be happy to hear that I located the younger brother.”

Cheong looked up, startled. “Really? Where?”

“In the back corner of the property, there’s a thick copse of willow trees. Found four plots and three tombstones. His name was on one.”

Chapter Fifty Two

”Let me out!”

Angel pounded on the tempered glass with her fists, but they simply bounced off without breaking it. The door rattled against the broom handle, snapping it against the cabinet’s aluminum frame. It, too, wasn’t going to break, and she couldn’t get the door open enough to slip her hand through to slide it out of the handles.

The cabinet was just tall enough to allow her to stand slightly hunched over, but it wasn’t sufficiently deep to give her any leverage to push on the door with her feet or ram it with her shoulder. She tried anyway, wedging her body into the corner and pushing with all her fading strength. But it was no use. The glass was too tough, the cabinet too well built, and the broom handle too unyielding.

She had no idea how much time had passed since Aston left. It might have been five minutes or twenty-five. And she was getting a cramp in her back from not being able to sit or completely straighten herself up.

“Let me out!” she screamed, and pounded on the glass again. “Anybody?”

Her eyes strayed to the syringe on the floor at her feet, a small pale tube in the red glow, and for a moment she wondered what would happen if—

No! her mind screamed at her. What Aston had proposed was impossible. He was taunting her, nothing more. The man was cold, heartless. Sick. She had angered him with her defiance, and he was getting his revenge on her by offering false hope. But there was no way it would work. How could it in so little time? How could it even if she had all the time in the world? No one could possibly survive being burned to death.

And yet . . . . What if—

Focus, Angel! There is no surviving an inferno, so you have to get out before those devices go off!

She pushed feebly at the door, then sent a flurry of ineffectual kicks and punches at it. How could anyone be so cruel that they would do this to anyone? How could anyone think any of this was okay? She just couldn’t understand it.

“Help me,” she begged. She lowered her head, crumpled against the confines of the cabinet, and began to weep into her hands. “Help me.”

* * *

It was the sound of a siren which pulled her out of the pits of her despair. A siren which rose and fell, then faded away into nothingness.

Angel lifted her head away from the wetness in her hands and opened her eyes.

Nothing but complete darkness greeted her.

Confusion gripped her mind. She was dead. But how could she be? She hadn’t remembered burning to death. Had she used the nanites? Had she injected herself?

You’re not dead.

Then why couldn’t she see?

Open your eyes.

“They are open,” she mumbled, and the sound of her voice was strange, closed, and she realized she was still inside the glass cabinet. She waved her hand in front of her face, saw nothing. She felt the air moving on her cheek.

“The power’s out.”

No lights. The fan of the refrigeration unit had gone silent. Nothing but darkness and quiet.

So the fire had started. It had reached the electrical box and blown the breaker, cutting off the power. That explained why she couldn’t hear the siren anymore. Without power, it had died.

She leaned halfheartedly against the glass door and yelped in surprise when it opened, tumbling her to the floor of the inner room. “Who’s there?” she cried, throwing her arms blindly over her head to protect them.

Cool, fresh air brushed her cheek, carrying on it the faint coppery smell of blood. No hint of smoke, which confused her. She felt around the floor and recoiled when her fingers encountered a puddle of something thick and sticky. She eventually made it to one corner of the room. Her hands climbed the glass, squeaking in the silence. Her ears filled with the throb of her heart beating and the harsh whisper of her blood rushing through her head. How could it be so dark?

And who let you out?

“Norstrom? Are you there?”

She got to her feet and turned right, though she wasn’t sure which way the door was. The fall had turned her all around. She slid her foot to the side and walked her hands over the cabinets. One door, two.

Three.

And there was another corner. She kept going.

Stopped when she heard something.

What had it been? The sound of a breath perhaps? A footstep? Her lungs cried out for air as she held the back of her hand over her mouth to stifle her sobs. Who’s there? Who’s there? She didn’t dare make a sound.

But all was quiet again. No noise reached her ears. She was as deaf as she was blind.

Moving again, not dragging her feet but lifting them now so she didn’t—

Something touched her hand, brushed over her arm. She drew back, stumbling over her own feet and losing her balance. The broom crashed to the floor with a clatter that sounded like an explosion in her ears. Her breath was a gravel avalanche.

And then she heard a sigh underneath it.

Someone is here!

“Oh god,” she whispered, scrambling again to her right, not caring if she was being quiet or not. She crashed into a wall. “Oh god! Please.”

And suddenly there was nothing. She fell into the opening, caught herself, then slammed into the bench in the nurse’s office. Her arms sprawled over the surface, knocking into the plastic boxes Aston had placed there. Bottles tumbled out, spilling and rolling across the bench. One exploded as it hit the floor on the other side. Another dropped without breaking.

Why didn’t he take them with him?

She lurched to her right, in the direction of the hallway, her mind only vaguely aware of the danger of fire outside.

Don’t open the door! she screamed silently at herself. But she couldn’t help herself. She reached for where she thought the handle was and again fell into the emptiness of the hallway.

She landed on something hard and soft and—

A body!

Her knuckles burned against the thin carpet. She spun around, saying Norstrom’s name. But then her fingers closed over the rigid surface of Aston’s cane, and she knew that it was him, and she couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t stop them from finding the face of that grotesque man, confirming that, yes, it was him it’s him IT’S HIM OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Something was sticking out of his throat, just beneath his chin. Stickiness. Blood. He was bleeding. He was—

Dead! He’s dead. Keep going. Get out!

On hands and knees now, feeling, crossing the hallway. No body where Norstrom had died, just a sticky wetness, the fibers in the carpet stiffening. Where was he? Had he somehow survived? Had he been the one to let her out?

“Norstrom!” she screamed. “Norstrom!”

Why would he have just removed the broom? Why would he leave her inside?

Oh, god! Had that been him inside the room with her? He was hurt!

Turning around, she found the glow of the timer on the incendiary device, too dim to illuminate anything but itself: 3:12 . . . .

3:11

3:10

Three minutes before the bombs went off!

A sound down the hallway spun her around again. The brush of skin against fabric, a foot dragging along the carpet. “Who’s there?”

3:04

3:03

A choking gurgle. A shuffle.

“Norstrom?”

A wet breath. The fetid stench of rot.

“We need to get out of here. Norstrom?”

What if it’s not him?

She spun back toward Aston’s corpse and ran her hands over that misshapen bulk, over the mounds of cooling fat on his cheeks, his open eyes, mouth, the greasy hair. His flabby neck. Cooling skin. Sticky blood. Or vomit. Something thick and viscous. Over the barrel chest. Patting, patting.

A gasp behind her made her duck instinctively, pressing her face against the lifeless chest, forcing the stale air from his collapsed lungs. A moan burped through the dead man’s lips. Blood gurgled from the wound in his neck and dripped thickly onto the floor.

Something was there in the hallway with her.

The dark man it’s the dark man it’s—

“Where is it?” she whimpered.

Hands sunk into the mounds of cooling flesh, swept across, down his legs, checking pockets. Frisking. She could feel the presence in the hallway getting closer, could hear its strangled breath. It was—

Jamie!

—the dark man. It was the dark man!

She slid her hand beneath Aston’s lower back until her fingers hit the metal of the pistol. She tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t come.

The thing behind her lurched against the wall, startling a yelp from Angel’s throat. She pushed against the corpse, trying to move it off the gun, but he was too large, too heavy, too dead. She could feel the thing getting closer, could feel its breath on her neck. Who are you? she wanted to yell. What do you want?

She knew it wasn’t the dark man. She knew it couldn’t be. Not Norstrom, either. She knew what it was, who it was, and yet she refused to accept it. No. No no no!

And then she felt it rest its dead hand on her shoulder and she nearly fainted. She cried out, pulling one last time, wrenching the pistol free from beneath the corpse. She turned and fired, and in the lightning flash of the gunshot she saw the sum of her fears, saw what she had done, saw the entrails of the walking corpse like bloody ropes, and the gleam of the tissue retractor still in place, holding open that gaping black hole which she had carved.

How could she be alive? How could she be walking on that destroyed leg?

Angel fired again. She kept firing, cringing at the horror that seared itself into her mind with each flash — Jamie’s deathly pale face, her mouth contorted in a mask of agony — until all she was doing was pulling the trigger and nothing was happening, nothing was showing in the stifling darkness.

She threw the pistol away from her. It hit nothing until it landed on the floor at the other end of the hall. Then Angel got up and ran.

Chapter Fifty Three

She was standing knee deep in water, leaning against the stiff sedge that grew beside the stream along the bottom of the valley. Her feet and legs had grown numb from the cold, but now they were beginning to hurt, so she pulled herself out, collapsing on an exposed face of a flat boulder.

How long had she been walking?

Where was she?

She couldn’t even remember why she was in the stream, except maybe to wash away the blood.

She remembered seeing smoke, a thick line of it receding into the sky over a hill, flattening out, passing like the contrail of a jet. The factory had gone out of sight by then, so she realized she’d been wandering for a while and had gone quite some distance.

Now the sky was clear. Nothing but blue above and the sun beginning to touch the tips of the hills to her right. The wind was picking up. Night would soon fall.

She shut her eyes, and the images rushed back at her, as if they’d been waiting for just the right moment. Jamie’s gawping mouth, her unseeing black eyes. The paleness of her skin.

One end of her trailing intestines had caught on the handle of the door, holding her back. Keeping her from—

“Oh god!” Angel wailed at the sky. “What did I do?”

The poor girl had been alive, breathing. She’d been aware when Angel shot the gun, three, four times. She’d lost count, didn’t know how many had found their mark. She knew some had. She’d seen the holes made by the slugs puncturing the poor girl’s flesh, the exploding tissue splattering the wall behind, the jagged edges of the bones exposed within the scorched and cratered flesh. Jamie had cried out in pain, her voice rising in that fire alarm siren sound, rising until another slug exploded through her neck, leaving little to hold up her head. She’d fallen then, Angel was sure. Almost sure. No one could have survived that.

No one could have survived that surgery, either.

Except Jamie had, hadn’t she? She’d died. Her heart had ceased. She’d stopped breathing. She had died.

And yet she’d come back.

How?

She’d woken up, that’s all. Not dead but only very nearly so. After the machine had gone off, when the power went out, that’s what had brought her out of it. The power had gone and shut off that machine in the lab, allowing her to—

But who shut the power off?

Jamie must have been the one to pull the broom out of the door. It was her in the room with Angel.

She had attacked and killed Aston and come to let her out.

When did the power go out? Who shut it off?

Norstrom?

And who had killed the helicopter pilot? It couldn’t have been either of them.

Could it have?

Angel wanted to open her eyes to erase the image, but she found that they were already open, open and staring into the endless blue. And she was alarmed by how much darker the sky had become all of a sudden. The sun was nearly gone, just a golden white fringe burning against the ridgeline, a shrinking crown of brilliant light.

She stumbled once more to her feet and tried to walk. But her legs were numb, and she fell to her knees.

Who killed the pilot?

The man had been hanging from his harness, half out of his seat, the door of the chopper swinging in the breeze, banging against his head and dangling arms. Banging. His eyes had been gouged out. Who could have surprised him like that?

Surely not Jamie. Surely not Norstrom.

Who turned off the power?

She fell, skinning her elbows and palms, and was surprised to find that she’d gotten up and was walking again. Behind her, the valley was in shadow. No factory. No smoke. No sun. The day was gone. Everything was gone.

She kept walking.

She fell.

She got back up.

And she kept walking.

* * *

”Three days,” Alvin Cheong said. He shook his head, giving her a worried look. “That’s how long you were out there on the steppe before you were found . . . .” He shrugged. “I’m very sorry about everything.”

He stood up from the chair and began to pace by the side of the bed. “You sure you don’t remember anything?”

Angel watched him for a moment. Her whole body ached terribly. She tried to flex her fingers, but even that sent a river of nausea through her.

He was clearly frustrated that she couldn’t tell him anything. Or maybe frustrated believing that she wouldn’t. He seemed to doubt her claims that the past several days were all a blank. The last thing she remembered was chasing a man to the garage of a hotel in Shanghai after he’d run out of DeBryan’s hotel room. She’d acted shocked when Cheong told her she was in a hospital in Beijing and had protested when he told her she’d been found by a Mongolian family tens of kilometers from any road.

“When can I go home?” she asked. Her throat was terribly sore and dry. Her voice came out as a whisper.

“I’m working with the consulate to get you a replacement passport,” he said, sighing. “But you’re still too weak to travel. Dehydration, malnutrition, hypothermia.” He ticked off the conditions on his fingers. “And traumatic amnesia.”

He sat down again for the fifth or sixth time. “PTSD,” he said. “That’s what the American doctor on staff here is saying. Judging by the injuries you sustained, he believes you were kidnapped, and that’s what we’re letting him believe. It happens sometimes. No, no. No sign of any . . . of sexual assault. It’s a convenient cover story. Keeps the police from asking any more questions about why you’re really here.”

“Why am I here?”

He had no answer for her. Instead, he buried his face in his gloved hands and held it there for several seconds. “I’m so sorry,” he kept saying. “For whatever happened. I shouldn’t have assumed you would— I should have known better. No, I think I did know, just not how bad it would be.”

“And DeBryan? Where is he?”

He gave her a queer look, then abruptly rose once more from the chair. “I should let you rest. You need your rest. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He stared at the IV bag on the stand at the head of her bed and refused to look at her. “Get some sleep. Maybe I’ll have the nurse sneak in an extra special treat for your dinner.” He smiled awkwardly. “I hope you’ll be able to eat.”

He turned and stepped quickly toward the door of her private room.

“Cheong.”

He stopped, but didn’t turn. “Get some rest, Missus de l’Enfantine. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

“How’s DeBryan really?”

Finally, he turned. “He’s . . . fine. Don’t worry about him.” He gave her an awkward smile. “He’s off doing whatever. You know, his photography stuff.”

“Tell him I said hello.”

“Sure.”

“Tell him it sounds like he missed all the fun.”

Cheong’s half-smile faltered. He nodded once, then left.

Angel rolled over onto her side, wincing from the pain. She extended a hand from beneath the blanket and found the plastic bag with her clothes in it in the space beneath the bedside table. And from deep within the bundle, she found what she was looking for.

She shut her eyes. Cheong was lying, about everything. She was sure of it, and she intended to figure out why. She would not rest until she knew the truth about the factory and the experiments they had done there. She would expose them all, even if it meant putting her life in danger again.

And with that, she fell asleep holding the three worn stones the old man — the same old man who’d guided her to the crash site — had given her when he found her half frozen on the steppe.

Chapter Fifty Four

. . . represent a great moral and practical threat to humanity. Their callous disregard for the sanctity of life and natural biological processes, as well as their complete contempt for both local and international laws, possibly even with the full blessing of regional powerbrokers, strongly argues that these people will continue to operate with impunity in whatever dark corner of the globe they are welcomed.

And they will be welcomed, for there will always be people willing to provide them succor, often for a price, but sometimes for little more than a promise. And sometimes for nothing at all but the terror they know will follow in their path.

They must all be stopped.

As to proof of these claims, I have none that I can offer, other than my own eyewitness testimony. There is, of course, the hazmat suit which remains where I buried it, though I now realize it is proof of absolutely nothing. My video and photographs are gone; they were destroyed when my phone burnt in the factory. And anyone visiting the crash site now will see nothing more than a scorched place in the earth where a wildfire might have raged.

The rubble of the lost village, as well, will provide no affidavit of its inhabitants, other than to simply state that a settlement had once existed there. Where they went remains a mystery, and yet they did go somewhere. I have to believe that. But these are nomadic people, and even if birth records existed for them, the Chinese government would likely deny their existence as well.

As for the factory, well, I am told it was never such a thing. The building had been used for storage for the army in the last century. Wenbai Munitions. No company by the name of Goh Li Xhia ever existed. And the place was gutted by fire years before.

So what does that leave me? Three small stones which I could have picked up anywhere and a memory of an old man who may have been nothing but a ghost or the product of my own imagination.

Someday, when this is all done, when I am able to safely say it is ended, then I will return to that place and honor the dead. For the two hundred souls whose lives were worth nothing to these criminals, nothing but a series of numbers in a spreadsheet with dollar signs pasted next to each one of them. For Jian, whose sacrifice I hope someday to repay. And for the four hundred more, whose stories will finally be told— not by me, nor even in my words, but by their own voices. I will cast my stones upon a thousand ovoos and pray that all their souls may at last be at rest, beginning with Jamie Peters’.

But for now, I will find the people who did this to her. To them all. I will find them and I will stop them.

The future of the world depends upon it.

Angel clicked SAVE, then the SEND button without bothering to review her writing. Finally, she closed the lid on her laptop. She was glad to have finished the article, though she knew it really wasn’t as complete as it could be. She hadn’t mentioned Jamie’s dark man. She wasn’t even sure she believed it herself. It was one of those larger inconsistencies that felt like a part of a completely different story, a distraction. She figured whatever the truth about him was, it had died with the girl in the inferno.

Him, as well as all the terrible, inexplicable things Angel had seen and done in the darkness of that building as she made her escape. She could not include those nightmares, and not simply because no one would believe her. What had happened, she’d been partially responsible for it. She’d let her curiosity, her desperation, get the better of her. She’d fallen prey to the very same blasphemy she’d accused her captors of engaging in. She had dabbled in something she had no right to. She had allowed herself to wonder if maybe it might be possible to supplant the body’s natural healing mechanisms with something wholly artificial.

And it had been possible. It had.

That’s what scared her most of all.

With Aston’s horrible vision of immortality whispering at her, she slipped the laptop into her bag and stood up off the park bench. The Corniche passed before her, the Old Port at one end and the Bay of Marseilles at the other.

She had come here looking for the chateau and beach where her family had stayed all those years ago, but her memory had proven faulty, and in the end she’d been unable to decide which of the half dozen homes had been the one they’d rented. Now, as one of the many ferries passed across the clear blue water to the islands of the Frioul archipelago, taking its tourists to Château d’If, she realized that it was the same fortress that she had dreamed about that night in the yurt. The sand castle her brother Jacques had built around himself had taken its form.

She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and began the long walk back to her hotel. Bicyclists and skaters zipped past her. She watched them with a sense of disquiet and urgency. They were so oblivious. Not one of them knew a thing.

Her phone rang as she skipped across the path during a break in the traffic. She drew it out of her pocket to check the number. It was unlisted.

“Allô?”

You know you can never publish it.

The ground suddenly came loose beneath her feet. The bag fell from her shoulder to catch in the bend of her wrist. It knocked against her knee. “Quoi?”

They’ll come after you if they know you got away.

“Norstrom?”

The line was silent.

“It is you. But . . . how?”

I need you to do me a favor. Delete the article from your computer.

“But I already sent it to the New York Times.”

They didn’t get it. I intercepted it.

“You’re monitoring me, my computer?” She felt her scalp prickle. “You know I can’t hide this. It’s too big.”

You remember you promised that it was all off the record, at least for now. We’re too close to breaking this open, and your going public with it would only drive them underground again.

“Who’s we? The CIA?”

I already told you I’m not a spy. Now, listen, you asked about a group called 6X. I’ve been checking up on them. They’re the group that hired you, aren’t they?

She hesitated, then said yes.

Have they made contact with you since you returned?

Angel shook her head. “No. I told them I can’t remember anything. I said I was done with them.”

Do you have a way to contact them?

“Yes.”

Good. Do so. Tell them you want back in. Say you think it’ll help you remember, but don’t tell them anything. That should get them to bite.

She turned slowly around, suddenly positive that he was somewhere nearby, watching her.

“And if I don’t delete the article?”

She heard him sigh. I can do it right now.

“No! Wait. I— I will. Okay.”

I have a feeling they’re waiting for you to call. Whatever they ask you to do, say yes.

Angel shut her eyes. “I’m not— I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

It’s been almost two months. I just read what you wrote. You are ready. And I’ll be here, keeping an eye on you.

“I don’t even know who you are.”

It’s best that way.

Angel stopped and leaned against the railing. The bay waters were achingly blue, even more so than the sky, a stark, deep blue against the blazing white of the chateaus and the yellow of the sand. “Did you kill Aston? The pilot? Did you help me get out?”

No.

“How did you get out?”

He didn’t reply.

“Norstrom?”

Yes, I’m here.

“How did you get out?”

I . . . . To be honest, I don’t remember.

“You don’t remember, or won’t?”

He didn’t answer.

“Norstrom?”

But he had already disconnected.

END OF BOOK ONE: CHINA

BOOK 2: ICELAND AVAILABLE 2016

Subscribe for advance notice

Book 1: China 10/2015

Book 2: Iceland 04/2016

Book 3: Africa 10/2016

Book 4: TBA 04/2017

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Tanpepper is a writer of speculative fiction for teens and adults. A former molecular geneticist originally from Upstate New York, he now calls Northern California home.

If you enjoyed the first book of THE FLENSE serial, then you’ll want to check out the companion series, BUNKER 12, which follows the apocalyptic events detailed in THE FLENSE. You may also enjoy his popular thriller sries, GAMELAND, an epic cyberpunk adventure through a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies are used as avatars in a twisted live action game for the amusement of the rich and privileged. You can find out more about all of Saul’s titles at his:

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ZOMBIE MANEUVERS

By

Griffin Carmichael

Chapter One

The morning the world came to a stumbling, moaning end, Janet Corwin called in sick to work. Her excuse this time was a suspected bladder infection. The truth was, she was pissing blood, and had been all night. She could barely stand up straight, her wrist was bruised and swollen, and her head felt like a Mack truck had driven through it. Twice.

In other words, a typical Monday.

Janet zoned out before the small kitchen window, sipping slowly at a cup of very hot coffee, letting the warmth seep through her body. The sun peeking over the city made her wince, and the sound of the television was pounding in her aching head.

She was about to turn the blasted thing off—she could barely stand to have it on, but Connor couldn’t get through the day without the background noise. But he was gone, at work an hour already, and while he was gone she could shut off the idiot box. It wouldn’t be in her best interest if she forgot to turn it back on, but that was a risk she was willing to take for a little peace and quiet.

The late-breaking news icon that popped up over the local morning news anchor’s face made her pause. At the bottom of the screen, text began scrolling slowly from right to left. Janet slowly lowered the remote and read the breaking news text.

Her mind didn’t want to process what her eyes were seeing. The scrolling bar was saying something that absolutely could not be real. And it wasn’t the first day of April, which ruled out Janet’s first thought, that it was some elaborate hoax.

Janet stood numb for a minute while the meaning of the headline began to sink in.

Reports of violent attacks stun officials.

It wasn’t the words (flesh-eating mobs) so much as the images that began flashing across the screen that made her finally realize this wasn’t a joke. Video from cell phones and news cameras, police dashboard cams and traffic cameras that showed the same things: ordinary people pouncing on other ordinary people, chasing other people. And ripping them to shreds.

When the footage began to replay and the talking heads began to mouth their usual useless commentary, Janet began to move. She went to the small second bedroom—once a dreamed-about future nursery and now a cluttered storeroom—and began to haul out large Rubbermaid containers. She pulled them one-by-one into the living room, roughly sorting them into categories: food, camping equipment, ammo.

The room began to fill as Janet brought in more bins, leaving very little room to walk in. She was surprised at the number of containers, actually. Connor must have added a few when she wasn’t around. Especially the ones with the weapons. There had only been four of those, and now there were ten. A small army could have been supplied from those green plastic boxes.

If what Janet suspected about the day’s events were true, an army might very well be just what they ended up needing.

* * *

Janet was halfway through checking the inventory list for the various crates when there was a loud squeal of brakes outside. She stepped gingerly around some bins to look out the side window, where she could see not only their narrow driveway, but most of the street leading into their cul-de-sac.

Connor jumped out of his truck and stalked to the tiny garage attached to the side of the Craftsman-style bungalow they rented. He yanked up the wooden door, and she could hear him cursing the fact the thing wasn’t electric. She sniffed and turned away. He was the one who had told the landlord he had no use for the garage, and didn’t want the door changed and modernized.

Of course, that was because of the illegal pot farm he had inside, completely outfitted with grow lights and hydroponic tanks. Like most things Conner got interested in, the illegal grow patch had failed, and the garage was now empty except for an old mower and some yard tools.

Janet went back to the list, waiting while Conner parked the truck inside the garage and burst through the kitchen door. She’d finished going through most of the items in the spiral inventory notebook by the time he began yelling for her.

Setting the notebook down on top of a bin marked “MRE”, Janet went into the kitchen. She stood just inside the door, left arm pressed across her stomach, listing towards the side with the bruised kidney.

“There you are. What were you doing, something I ain’t supposed to see?” Connor sneered at her, his usual expression. It was better than the furious one, but not by much.

“I was checking the supplies,” Janet said, keeping her voice low.

Connor snorted. “Making yourself useful, for a change. Color me shock-and-awed.”

Janet ignored the jibe. He’d said worse. “You saw the news reports, if you’re home this early. Do you think it’s for real?”

“Hell, yeah. I told ya the zombie apocalypse was coming. You thought you knew better, but as usual, you ain’t all that smart as you think.”

Janet just stood there. She kept her expression neutral, fearful of setting Connor off into one of his cruel phases.

Connor fidgeted for a moment, staring at the reports still scrolling across the television screen before he opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. He busied himself with looking for a bottle opener in the drawer next to the sink, making a big show of popping the top into the stained porcelain basin. Finally, he turned to her and leaned back onto the counter.

“Yeah. I do think it’s real. I think we’re in the shitter for sure, so I told the boss where to shove it and hit the door running. I grabbed a few things on the way out, so if this turns out to be nothing, I’ll be looking for a job.”

Janet didn’t dare show how upsetting this was. If Connor thought for a minute she thought he’d fucked up, bloody piss was going to be only a tiny part of her hurt.

“Like, what things?” Maybe if she kept him occupied with the story, he’d ignore her for a while longer. Long enough to get through the night, at least.

“The keys to the warehouse, and to a couple of the trucks.”

Oh, god. He’d likely end up in prison, rather than unemployed. Those keys were zealously guarded; every employee with a set had to sign them in and out daily. The owner of the food distribution center where Connor worked was insanely suspicious of workers stealing food and other items from the warehouse.

“What do you think we should do now?” Janet finally asked. “The news people said FEMA is already setting up safe zones in most cities, trying to get ahead of this—whatever it is.”

Connor snorted. “Ain’t going to no camp. I figure we should hole up here, wait for a few days to see how it all goes down. Then, if it works out like I think it will, we’ll head out of town, hit the hunting shacks up in the mountains.

“We can swing by the warehouse, pick out a truck loaded up with all the stuff we’ll need for a while. I’ll drive it, and you take my truck. Between what that will carry and a full tractor-trailer, we won’t be hurting for anything for a long while. Maybe long enough for the stupid government to get its head out its ass and fix things.”

Connor finished up the beer and set the bottle behind him on the counter. He didn’t bother righting it when it fell over with a harsh tinkle. He never did. That was her job, and he wasn’t about to do anything he considered “women’s work”. Janet was used to it, and the action didn’t even make a blip in her head as she worked through this latest bump in her very rough life.

The last thing she needed was to be caught up in a medical situation the government couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around. There had been chatter about bird flu, radiation from that place in Japan, and the latest fall out from some wonder drug all the Hollywood people were getting high on for the past few weeks, but the last thing she’d expected was for anything to come of it.

To be honest, she hadn’t really paid that much attention to any of the news, or the gossip her coworkers filled their time with. Her problems were entirely domestic, and all her energy went to work, home and plans to finally leave Connor behind for good.

Now, with whatever it was that was causing all the terror filling the airwaves, Janet realized that all her planning had been for nothing. The secret stash of money, the furtive explorations into traveling anywhere Connor wouldn’t find her. All of it had been washed away by the certainty that her best bet to survive this was with Connor.

Connor of the guns and ammo—which until today she’d firmly believed would be used on her. Connor with his food and other supplies, the extensive camping gear, and the map to an abandoned hunting camp firmly in his head, and nowhere else.

She’d snooped around, looking at property maps and old surveys, and never found any indication of where that precious camp might be. Sometimes she even doubted it existed at all, that it was just something Conner talked about to sound like a smart prepper.

Probably the smartest thing he could have done was keep the location to the camp from her, because if she had more than the vaguest idea where it was, she would use one of his guns and put one of those precious bullets between his eyes.

If she were perfectly honest with herself, Janet knew she should shoot him anyway, and take her chances with the zombies. It was the only sure way to get away from him, as she knew from bitter experience.

The last time she’d tried to run for it, he’d hunted her down within a week. She’d spent the next month in the hospital, recovering from an “accident”. Connor’s story, which she’d overheard the nurses whispering about shortly after she woke from three days in a coma, was that she’d been standing in front of his truck when the brakes failed.

Janet hadn’t bothered telling anyone the truth after that, because she could see how the nurses flirted with Connor. He was a handsome man, and perfectly charming when it suited him. It was how he’d caught her, much to her regret. Turning on that aw-shucks-ma’am, I’m just a good ol’ country boy act. It worked on women, and on most men.

“I hope you don’t think that playacting is going to get you out of cooking dinner, or anything else. I’m hungry and I’ve got a lot of work to do before the night’s done.”

Conner’s abrupt comment as he wandered past her on the way to the living room shook her out of her thoughts with a shudder. She just shook her head and moved towards the stove.

“Of course not. It’s not that bad, anyway.”

“Damn straight. Learn to behave right, and you wouldn’t have to get showed how so often,” Connor muttered.

Janet didn’t say a word, just took some hamburger out of the fridge. Hamburger steaks with some grilled onions, gravy and mashed potatoes would settle him down. Served with lots of creamed corn, it was his favorite meal and certain to settle him down for a few hours, at least.

* * *

By the time she was ready to call Connor in for dinner, her headache had returned with a vengeance, her back even sorer from all the lifting and carrying she’d done, and not helped at all by the constant volume of noise from the television. Between that and Connor’s muttering, cursing and grunting as he moved the storage bins around, Janet was ready to fall into bed and sleep for a couple of days.

She wasn’t going to get to do it, though, because Connor was worked up over the events of the day, and the lingering anger from the night before. Janet knew he was going to make her repeat their less-than-satisfying sex act, since she hadn’t pleased him well enough the night before.

With a sigh, she took a pill from the dwindling stash she had from her last “learning” session, which had left her with a cracked jaw she explained away as coming from tripping over the cat. Since Connor hated cats, and they’d never had one, it was a total lie, and Janet knew the doctor hadn’t believed her. Only her pleading eyes and a soft hand on his had made him agree to not report the incident.

The last thing Janet needed was to have the police involved any more than they already had been. One beating had led to him being jailed for six months, and what followed that brief reprieve still gave her nightmares.

Janet caught a short cell phone video on the news before Connor turned the television off. The scroll bar said it had been taken as the phone’s owner was attacked and killed.

Her mind was still reeling from the stuff she’d been hearing about all evening, but flesh-eating undead zombies didn’t worry her nearly as much as her living man.

Chapter Two

“Son of a fucking bitch!”

The shout and subsequent crash as Ted rushed to tell Dara the latest news echoed through the small house. Down in the basement, Dara cursed as she dropped an entire box of 38 ammunition rounds. Now she’d have to get down on hands and knees and collect them all. With the current situation across the country, they couldn’t afford to miss a single one of the brass and lead cylinders, but it took more time than she wanted to spare.

“Dara!” Ted’s voice was rising to a screech as he came to a stop at the basement entrance. “Those fuckers just nuked New York! They bombed the whole fucking city. All of it.”

Dara closed her eyes. Typical of Ted to forget that Dara’s brother and sister-in-law lived in Queens, along with their two children. If what her husband had said was true—and it wasn’t unusual for him to totally misread things he heard or saw since the accident—then all hope of her remaining family getting out and joining them was gone.

Tears seeped between her lids. Dara let them fall while she stood shaking, surrounded by the dropped ammo. She couldn’t help the moan that escaped despite her best efforts to contain it.

“Dara?”

God damn it. Poor Ted. He couldn’t help it; nobody chooses to get hit head-on by a drunk driver going eighty miles and hour. She knew his problems weren’t his fault, but it put the burden of getting the two of them out of this shit hole of a town before the residents began eating each other squarely on her. She didn’t even have the hope now of having Jayvon for backup, nor of Emily’s nursing help, once they’d gotten back home.

“Yeah, Ted,” she called towards the stairs. “I heard you.”

She wondered if she should remind him about Jayvon and his family being nothing more now than irradiated dust blowing across the Northeast, but knew it would only upset him because he’d forgotten they lived in New York. Had lived there, despite knowing that it was going to be a pain to get out if things went bad.

Dara looked around at the scattered shells, and thought, fuck it. They could stay there another hour or so, while she got Ted calmed down and fed him some lunch. She needed to check the Internet, see for herself that Ted hadn’t screwed up such horrifying news, and New York was still there.

She wiped her cheeks, taking a tissue to blow her nose while she put on a calm face. She didn’t want to frighten Ted, because he would refuse to eat or take any of the meds that kept him on the slow path of improving health. Dara had to keep that steady train moving, until he was once again the man he used to be.

She had a feeling she was going to need him, the old, strong Ted, if things were really as bad as she feared.

* * *

It took two hours to finally get Ted situated in front of the television again. She had put on one of his favorite movies, a light comedy that he didn’t have to strain his brain to understand and enjoy. He’d eaten well, because by the time she’d gotten upstairs, composed and falsely chirpy, he had totally forgotten what he’d seen on the news.

It was a blessing, of sorts, since it allowed Ted to stay pretty calm and accepting of his limitations. Of course, Dara was exhausted from having to be on call twenty four hours a day for whatever he needed, with only short breaks, and then the zombie apocalypse happened.

The goal of their years together—working so hard and spending nothing they absolutely didn’t have to on the house, the cars or themselves—was to have enough money to set themselves up someplace out of the city, away from the crazies, the drug lords and the cops who seemed to have forgotten they were supposed to protect the citizens, not kill them for no reason other than being black.

Two years earlier, they’d managed to scrape together enough money to buy a property high up in the surrounding mountains, an old hunting camp that had been abandoned for decades. Weekends and every other spare moment were spent getting the area set up for their eventual move.

And then the drunken high school kids had plowed into Ted’s old, rusty Escort, crushing it like a tin can in a giant’s fist. The first miracle came when Ted survived, with injuries the doctors said would heal, and the second came when the driver’s father, a prominent local attorney running for the state senate, had paid handsomely to avoid dragging his dead only son’s name through the courts.

With the money that didn’t need to be spent on Ted, Dara doubled down on fixing up their new homestead, adding to their food, water and other supplies. Once Ted’s rehabilitation was complete, they were going to sell their little house on the edge of town and move up into the hills.

It was just bad luck, Dara guessed, that something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in the world, and something very like a zombie plague had hit.

She shook her head as she gave a last pat on Ted’s shoulder and headed for the basement. She still had quite a bit of work left to get the last of the things they wanted to take with them sorted and brought upstairs before the end of the day. It was mostly stuff like old family pictures, the last of the ammo they kept in the house, and some odd and end knickknacks she’d been wanting to bring up to the camp. Stupid stuff, for the most part, but it was hers, and she wanted to take it with her.

Surprisingly, she was humming as she set to the tasks ahead of her. Crawling around on the dusty basement floor wasn’t what could be called the highlight of another busy day, but all in all, things could have been worse. Ted could be dead, or a vegetable in a home, after all. What she would have done in that case, she wasn’t sure. Could she have left him to the unmerciful world that was forming?

Probably not.

“I’d be right there, beside him like always,” she said, voice strong and confident of her choice. “Yep. I’d be there, right through this damned apocalypse, come what may.”

Dara shook her head at that thought, an image of her brandishing a walker at some animated corpse that threatened her man flashing behind her eyes. She could see how that ended, with the two of them bloody corpses, or worse, joining the other dead and setting out to infect their next victim.

It was like one of those TV shows they liked to watch, sitting snuggled up on the sagging old couch, feet up on the coffee table. They’d have popcorn and sodas at the ready while their eyes were fastened on the gruesome action on the big flat screen in the den.

It was funny, in a way, how they’d talked so much about how to defend themselves in such a situation, how they’d need a plan and a place to go. And now the time was upon them, and it wasn’t anything like they’d supposed. Ted wasn’t the strong, resilient man he had been six months before, and Dara wasn’t the meek little bank teller she’d been. Planning for disaster had strengthened her for when the bad times came; though for a long time she’d thought what happened to her husband had been the worse thing that could ever happen.

Except, it hadn’t been nearly the worse. If what she’d been watching on television, and reading far too much speculation about on the computer were true, things were going to really get bad. And it might never get any better.

Dara felt like the two of them had been playing at preparing for things. Even her brother, who was more serious about staying on top of things, had kidded her about the food, silver coins and weapons. His theory was that it was all for nothing, and one day they’d be sitting around a holiday table, with their kids and grandkids, and joke about how much money they’d all spent for a day that never came.

“Well, the day is here, Brother,” Dara whispered, looking at an old photo of the two of them, when they were children and life had seemed like it would last forever. “It’s here, and you’re not. Even Ted isn’t really here, and maybe won’t be for a long time.”

Her chin rested on her chest as Dara cried for her lost family, especially for the two little ones who would never get the chance to grow up now. She let the tears flow freely, getting the pain out in the only place she had where Ted couldn’t roll up silently behind her and wonder why she was so upset, and ask her in that scared, little-boy voice if he’d been bad.

Ted retreated into a child-like state when he sensed the people around him were upset or sad. It was a lingering effect of the brain injury he’d suffered. He was getting better, but the last couple of days had been hard on both of them. He could sense that Dara was upset over something, though she’d hidden it well enough so far that he easily went along as she distracted him.

Finally, Dara got control of herself, dashing the tears away and sniffling. She’d forgotten to replace the tissue from earlier in the day, so she did something she’d never have allowed herself at any other time and swiped the sleeve of her blouse across her nose.

“And that’s the last time I am going to do that,” she said, looking down at the photograph. “I’m sorry you and Emily and the kids won’t be joining us, Jayvon. I’ll miss you always, and I hope you know that. But Ted needs me. He can’t take care of himself, and I can’t do it if I’m always crying.”

Dara put the picture gently into the last box she had to fill, closing the flaps. She pressed a hand on the box in a final goodbye, and turned to climb the narrow basement stairs. Her work down here was done, and in the morning she’d carry up the last few boxes, load them into the old moving company trailer, bought for a bargain price at auction, and it would be time to leave this part of their life behind.

* * *

When morning came, it was all Dara could do to get up and get moving. Now that the time had arrived, she was reluctant to go, knowing in her heart she’d never seen the house, or even the city, again. Her gut said this was it, that humanity had finally reached its extinction level event.

The stuff she was seeing on the morning television shows only reinforced her instincts. Now it was all that you could see, more and more reports of rioting as people protested the government’s lack of action. More and more videos and first-hand accounts of people dying and rising again.

It was insane, and Dara finally had to switch the TV off and send Ted into the den to watch an old movie while she finished up.

Dara went around the house, dusting and doing the breakfast dishes. They were leaving a lot of stuff behind, big pieces of furniture and the appliances. There was just no way to transport them by herself, and they wouldn’t be of any use at the hunting camp anyway.

When she’d finished her chores, she brought up the final few boxes and tucked them into the back of the moving truck. Very little empty space was left, not more than enough to put Ted’s wheelchair and other equipment in the very back.

Once that was in place, after getting Ted to climb up in the passenger seat of the truck, Dara pulled down the door and latched it. She’d bought a large padlock to secure the door, and that took her a minute to get in place and locked. It was probably too big of a lock, but she’d grabbed it during one of her stocking up runs without thinking about how hard it was going to be to use.

Dara turned and took a last look around their old neighborhood. There were mostly older couples, with a few immigrant families moving in over the last few years, bringing the noise and boisterous activity of children back to the area.

She only realized she had an audience after she’d finished with the truck. Several people were standing on their small porches, or out by the sidewalks, watching her preparing to leave. It bothered her for a minute, now that they were almost gone, because she’d never thought to go around and warn anyone about getting some supplies in, and getting their houses secured, just in case.

Well, it was too late now. Dara lifted a hand and waved at the watchers before turning towards the front of the truck. She pulled herself up into the driver’s seat with a groan, already tired and not looking forward to the long drive ahead of them.

Dara backed out of the driveway, trying not to look at the house. She didn’t want to think about that old life any more. Today was the start of a new adventure for her and Ted and she pushed her thoughts away from anything else.

Ted was more than happy to grin and wave at everybody who was still watching as they drove slowly down the short street, heading for the road to the mountains.

Chapter Three

The clubhouse was a mass of moving, talking and drinking members. The noise level was stunningly loud, even for a typical Friday night. It was only added to by the topic of conversation: the impending zombie apocalypse and the gang’s response to it.

If George “Big Bear” Andropolous had told himself a week before he’d even think something like a zombie apocalypse could be an actual thing, he’d have laughed like a mad man. He’d say anybody that believed in that shit needed to be locked up, or weaned off whatever drug they were using.

It was insane.

Except, now it was all over the television, nothing but special reports all day long, the radio talked about nothing else, and the Internet was chock full of people claiming to have been eyewitnesses to actual zombie attacks. They even had video to prove it.

But Big Bear was nothing if not accepting of the shit life seemed to throw at him. He’d brought his old lady with him tonight to hear the gang’s leader, Joey Waldron, discuss what was going on and what the club members needed to do about it.

He wasn’t the only one who had shown up with their entire families. It was like they expected to roll out tonight, and from the looks in some faces, George thought some of them might do just that, no matter what Joey said.

George was thinking it actually might not be a bad idea.

Half the kids in their neighborhood were sick, and a lot of the parents, too. Everywhere he’d gone during the week, while running his route for the mail-order company he worked for, there’d been sick people. He couldn’t even make some deliveries because no one would come to the door to sign for them.

He owed it to Joey, though. Joey needed his co-leaders to back up whatever plan they came up with at the meeting tonight. George wasn’t about to let Joey down, not after all the man had done for him since they’d met so many years before.

No, Joey had hauled his ass out of trouble back then, and he wasn’t going to bail on him now. The club needed to stay together. That’s what kept them all out of trouble and on the straight and narrow.

Or, at least as straight and narrow as they could be. Some of the members were, to put it nicely, a bit light on the adherence to local laws thing. Mostly it was flouting the stupid drug laws that would get you locked up for just thinking about smoking some weed.

There weren’t any really bad apples in this group. Joey had put his foot down on that score when he’d started the club, which was more a social group than an actual motorcycle gang. A real MC club would probably laugh them out of town, but Joey and his compatriots loved their bikes, and some of the usual stereotypes about motorcycle gangs, at least.

George was shaken from his inner thoughts as the noise welled up even more. He looked around and saw everyone turning towards the raised platform at the back of the room. Usually some local musicians would be occupying the space, making a little green playing for the Friday night club meetings.

Now, though, the stage was being taken by the gang’s leader, Joey “Dead Eye Joe” Waldron. He got the nickname after winning a turkey shoot when he was just twelve years old. Joey was a natural-born shooter, being able to hit any target with any gun you handed to him. He didn’t even need to have shot with a particular weapon before, just sighting and pulling the trigger like it was the most normal thing in the world.

“Hey, hey, boys and girls. Listen up,” Joey started, raising his hands. The hush spread backwards through the crowd, until there was total silence in the room. Even the smallest baby seemed to wait on Joey’s next words.

When there wasn’t the merest whisper to disturb him, Joey grinned and started the meeting.

“Okay, so I can reckon you all can guess why we’re here without a band or any food tonight. It’s all about what’s been on the news the last few days.”

There was a rumble of agreement and lots of nodding heads at that.

“Yeah, it’s been getting kind of scary as the week went on,” Joey said. He looked around the room, meeting eyes. “I don’t know any more than the rest of you, no idea how any of this happened. All I know is, it’s time to make a plan to get the hell out of town. We need to find a safe place we can hole up with our families, somewhere we can ride this nightmare out.”

The muttering was getting louder, and Joey held up his hands again until things settled down.

“I’ve been talking to some of you during the week, feeling out what you think we need to do, and see if you had any ideas about where to go. It seems one member has a very good idea, and I want him to come up and tell you all about it, see what you all think.

“Big Bear, the floor’s all yours, man.”

With that, Joey stepped back. He waved at George, urging him to come forward. Speaking in public wasn’t George’s favorite thing to do—that would be humping his old lady every chance he got—but when the boss man spoke, he would obey.

George clumped up the short set of stairs, rocking the wood and making the stage shimmy. He wasn’t called Big Bear because he was a little cuddly teddy bear. George topped out at six feet, four inches and three hundred pounds. It was all muscle, not an ounce of fat softened his rock hard body.

George gave Joey and nod and turned to speak to the gathered members of the Road Kill Motorcycle Club.

A sea of anxious faces met his gaze as he stared out at them. He swallowed and cleared his throat before he could speak.

“When Joey came to me, asking what I thought about this whole zombie apocalypse thing, I knew right away where we should head for. It’s a place up in the mountains that my grandpa used to tell me about, a hunting camp his daddy stayed at.”

There was a good amount of muttered interest at that. It was news to most residents of the area, as the place had been closed since long before most of them were born.

“Anyway,” George went on. “Grandpa took me there once, when I was about fifteen. We hunted for deer, and camped out around the old cabins. Some of them were in pretty good shape, though most had just about fallen down.

“I think we can fix up a few cabins, the ones in the best shape, and use campers and tents until we can get something better going. There’s good clean water and plenty of game, since it’s been part of a Federal preserve for most of the past fifty years.”

Most of the men were nodding, though George thought they’d be having some serious conversations later as they tried to convince the women and children that leaving their homes and camping out indefinitely was a good idea.

George had a feeling that being without the modern conveniences people had grown used to would be hard for most of them, especially the kids who were connected to their smart phones like they were vital organs.

But, far better to do that than fall to the sickness going around, or even worse, to the aftermath. The zombies.

No matter how many times he thought about it, no matter how many times the word punched him in the brain, he still could hardly wrap his mind around undead creatures eating their family, friends and neighbors.

Joey had come up and clapped George on the back. He stepped forward and called for quiet again.

“Okay. Now, I think George’s idea is the best I’ve heard. I don’t think it’s going to be safe to hang around the city for much longer. We don’t have a large enough place to settle every body in, and no way to really fortify it if we found one. This place would be a death trap.

“So, I’m calling for a vote. All in favor of George’s idea raise your hands.”

Every hand in the room went up, even the women and kids agreed, if somewhat reluctantly. Fear was a great motivator, it seemed.

“Right. With all in agreement, I want to get some groups formed and put them in charge of the different things we need to find, and also to make plans about how we’re going to do this, and when we’ll be leaving.

“Anybody with access to RVs, campers, trailers of any kind, tents and so on, get up with George. He’s going to be in charge of the hauling and housing.”

Joey began pointing at various members of the club, and indicating different parts of the room where they should join up and start their planning. Before long, there were small clusters of people all talking and taking notes.

* * *

George had his hands full getting a list of everything the members were volunteering in the way of useful equipment for both the move and living conditions afterward. It was going to be a huge list, considering how many people they were talking about.

One thing he asked for that Joey hadn’t mentioned was generators. They wouldn’t last for long, but would be a huge help in running power tools for the rebuilding the camp was going to need.

Then there was the need for space heaters, lanterns and some sort of cooking system. RVs and some campers would have propane stoves, but that meant the need for extra tanks. Then he thought about grills. Some used charcoal, but many were run from propane as well.

And coolers, George realized. They’d need something to keep food in, and without a source of easy refrigeration, stuff would go bad quickly. So they needed to think about food that wouldn’t spoil so easily.

He went to remind the group in charge of food and water about that, but they already had it covered. Turned out, some folks had small solar power systems, and they’d volunteered to take them down and set them up at the camp.

So, one problem solved, George sighed with relief. Now he wouldn’t have to worry about storing the insulin for Clarice, his old lady. She worried so about keeping her medicine cold and protected, and he knew she would have been making herself sick over it. Now he could tell her to relax, because he’d arranged for space to store all she could get from her doctor.

By the time the little meetings broke up, everyone was exhausted, hungry and worked up by all the things they had to get done in the next few days.

George gathered up his wife and headed out to their truck, determined to say to hell with his diet and stop for the biggest burger and fries he could get.

* * *

The ride back into town was quiet, and George knew why. Clarice was still worrying about having enough insulin. Her doctor had agreed to write several scripts, which she could turn in at several different drug stores. But even that likely wouldn’t be enough, if things didn’t go back to normal very soon.

“Babe, I don’t want you to worry about your medicine. You’ll just make yourself sick, and then things will be even worse.”

“I know,” Clarice whispered. “I just can’t help thinking about what will happen when I run out. Like in that book, remember?”

George remembered. It was about what happened after an EMP—electro-magnetic pulse—weapon was set off over America. He wished she’d never read that book, because the main character’s daughter had been diabetic, and she’d died when there was no more insulin for her.

“I didn’t want to say anything earlier, because I know how you feel about stuff like this, but I’ve been talking to some folks, and they have a way to get all the insulin you’ll need for a few years.”

Clarice turned to her husband, frowning. “Bear, I don’t want you doing anything stupid.”

Ah, the woman knew him all too well. It was something similar, a small heist gone wrong, that had led to him being jailed for two years. It was how he’d met Joey, the only good thing to come out of the whole experience.

“I know how you feel, Clarice, but with the world going to hell without the hand basket, we might have to make our own rules. I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but I don’t see we have much choice.”

When Clarice made to question him about the plans, he put a finger gently on her lips. She sat sideways on the truck’s bench seat, her eyes wide with fear.

“I’m not going to discuss it further. I didn’t want to say anything at all, because if it goes wrong, I don’t want you involved in any way. So forget the whole idea, and let’s get you a big salad for dinner. I’m starved.”

Clarice didn’t want to let it go, but after a huge sigh and a moment of pursed lips, she nodded.

“I’ll have the grilled chicken with ranch dressing. The big one. Who knows when we’ll have premade salads again.”

“Not only that, but burgers and fries we don’t have to cook ourselves, Babe,” George said with a laugh.

They rode home with the bags between them, pushing thoughts of what was coming in the future as deep in the backs of their minds as they could.

There was plenty of time to think about the horror and the hardships they were facing. For the rest of this night they just wanted to be normal.

Chapter Four

After three days of waiting and watching the news stations reporting on the sickness and what was happening all over the world, Connor decided it was time to get moving. He’d been sitting in front of the big screen in the living room, cleaning one of his many guns, when the situation suddenly became intolerable.

“Janet, get your sorry ass in here!” He didn’t bother turning from the latest video horror showing on the spotty local channel.

When Janet came into the room, wiping her hands on a dish towel, Conner glanced at her and grunted. She was moving faster today, must be feeling better. He knew he’d hit her harder than he’d meant to the other night, but he wasn’t the sort of man who apologized.

No, Connor was more likely to punch the other kidney, so his target could hurt all around their torso. A band of pain to remember him by. Any of the many people who’d gotten on his wrong side would verify that outcome, if they dared.

“What do you want, Connor? Another beer?” Janet kept her voice mellow, giving it a little June Cleaver lilt. It was the voice she used when she knew better than to piss him off again.

“Of course I want another beer? What else are you good for, you scrawny slut? It sure ain’t screwin’.”

Conner set the cleaned and oiled pistol on the coffee table in front of him and selected the next in line.

“I think it’s time we started heading out,” he said, not looking up. “We’ll load the pickup after lunch, and when it’s dark we can drive over to the warehouse. I’d bet there’s nobody guarding the place by now, what with all this shit going on.”

When he gestured at the television, Janet looked despite herself. They were showing some more video from someone’s phone. The caption said it was Paris, and she could see the Eiffel Tower far away in the distance.

The scene was one of such madness it was hard to believe it could be real. But as they’d seen, the events happening all over the world were the unvarnished truth. The government had given up trying to excuse what the public was seeing, and had mostly gone silent.

Conner glanced up at the television, eyes glazed over at the blood, ears deaf to the screams and cries of those enduring the attacks. When the video went blank and the newscasters began their stuttering attempt to explain it all way, he looked back at Janet.

She was still standing in the archway between the living room and the kitchen. Silent tears were slipping down her cheeks, smearing her mascara and leaving trails in her blush.

“What we got left in the fridge?” He ignored her distress, and the disturbance of her makeup. She’d fix that soon enough, or else.

“Bacon, eggs, some ham from the roast on Sunday. That’s about it. The milk is gone, and almost all the butter.”

“Breakfast for lunch sounds good. Best to use up all the fresh stuff, and pack the other stuff so we can take it with us. Never know what we might need.”

With a satisfied grunt, he turned back to cleaning the next gun lined up on the coffee table. He’d be finished with these, and ready to eat by the time his lazy-ass woman got his lunch cooked.

“Perfect timing,” he muttered with a grin.

* * *

Janet grimaced once she was safely back in the kitchen. It was a good thing Conner was distracted by his preparations, or he would probably have punched her for not having any bread to make toast with.

It wasn’t her fault there wasn’t any left in the store when she’d gone out two days before. People had already started panicking, after watching a day’s worth of increasingly bad news about the flu and the reports of the dead rising to attack their families before getting out into the streets.

So she’d pushed a cart around, picking up whatever canned goods she found, along with some powdered milk and three bags of sugar. Connor had said those would be good to have.

The spice aisle was still stocked, so she’d gotten salt, pepper and the other things Connor let her season his food with. Chili powder and Cajun mix, mostly. Some ketchup and mustard, and jar after jar of dill pickles in all the different cuts the store stocked had finished out her spree.

Connor had said to max out his only credit card, so she’d gotten as much as she could, and when she was done the card balance was beyond his small limit and into overdraft status, with the high interest rate to go with it.

Not that it mattered, really. Even if this—whatever it was—ended and things got back to normal, Conner didn’t have a job anymore, so she’d be the one to pay off the card.

Janet fried up bacon in one pan while she got two eggs to cook perfectly over easy for Connor. He hated badly cooked eggs, and over the years she’d gotten good at making them just right. Anything less than perfect went on her plate. She didn’t mind. It all tasted the same anyway, especially with the lingering taste of blood from a bruised mouth.

While the pans were sizzling, Janet couldn’t keep her mind from straying back to what she’d seen on the television. The beautiful city of Paris was a smoking ruin, with crowds of people running around in a panic, being attacked by other people.

Dead people.

Janet didn’t want to admit it, but that’s what they were. They had been alive, but then they got sick and died. They didn’t stay dead, but reanimated with an unending craving for the flesh of the living. She’d seen enough speculation on the Internet to know that this was a very bad situation, and that it wasn’t going to get better any time soon.

And it probably never would get better. It looked like every government in the world had gone silent. She wondered if any of them were still alive. If the president and his wife, their sweet daughters, had managed to get to safety.

Since there’d been no news from Washington DC lately, other than some oddly worded requests for citizens to remain calm and to protect themselves, she doubted it. If the president were alive, he’d be talking to the people. He wouldn’t run out on the country when it needed his leadership the most.

People on the web were saying that all the military had pulled out and just left the citizens on their own. The police in most cities had been overrun by the dead, or people looking for safety. Many of them now joined the ranks of the dead roaming the streets. She’d seen it on the footage uploaded since the first days of the “situation”, as the reporters were calling it.

Situation. Janet would laugh at that at any other time. It wasn’t a situation; it was the downfall of humanity, for god’s sake. Man’s last go at destroying the civilization it had taken centuries to build.

Well, there was nothing she could do about it but try to survive. Janet was determined to get through this, one way or another. If it meant sticking with Conner, then that was what she’d do. At least until she got the opportunity to put a bullet between his soulless eyes.

Why she was so set on living, she didn’t know. There’d been many days she didn’t care one way or another. All Janet knew was her mind was set on it, and she’d do whatever it took to come out a survivor.

With a sniff, she plated up the meal before going into the bathroom to fix her face. Connor liked her makeup to be flawless. It was too hard to look at her otherwise, he always said.

* * *

Night fell with an eerie silence. The few people left in the neighborhood were either too sick to be out and about, or were smart enough to stay indoors. There had been some looting, and some gangs going around doing their part to mess the world up even more than it already was.

Connor had been true to his word, and they’d spent the rest of the afternoon packing up his pickup, settling things into the bed and putting tarps over it all. Then he’d tied it down with ratcheting straps, checking each one several times to make sure nothing would shift, or become uncovered.

Janet had helped, holding back any sign she was still sore or in pain. Connor hated for her to look hurt, as if it had been her fault he couldn’t keep his hands, fists or feet off her.

With their clothes and personal items stowed in the back seat, Janet stopped and looked around the house. She wasn’t exactly sad to be leaving it. There hadn’t been any good memories to associate with the building, only the ghosts of Connor’s anger, and her muffled cries.

Connor leaned out the window, and watched her for a minute.

“Get a good look. I don’t think we’ll be coming back here. Not any time soon, anyway.”

Janet nodded and closed the door into the kitchen. She didn’t bother to lock it. There wasn’t anything of value left inside, other than the flat screen TV that had stopped working when the power failed an hour before.

If anybody wanted it, they were welcome to it. She’d seen enough gore on the HD screen to fill a lifetime’s worth of nightmares. Somehow, she didn’t think she’d get away from the true horror that was going on. Soon she’d have real-life experience to make those dreams even worse.

Janet went around the truck and began to pull up the garage door. Conner started the truck, and the rumble filled her ears, drowning out the rattle as the segments rolled up overhead.

As soon as she’d joined Conner in the truck, he eased out of the garage and rolled out to the street, lights off. There was enough moonlight to see their way to the intersection, and within minutes they’d gotten blocks away from home and headed towards the distribution center warehouse.

Connor’s plan was still to take a loaded truck, even if he had to fill it himself. Janet hadn’t bothered to try to talk him out of it. His mind was made up, and she knew it was partly to get something over on his boss that was behind it.

The fact that they would actually need the food and supplies didn’t make her feel better about what Connor was going to do. She just accepted it with some part of her brain, the part that was looking out for her survival.

Janet rolled the window down a little, listening to the silent city. She thought she could hear faint screams and gunfire, but told herself she was imagining things. Letting her fears make up things that weren’t really there.

The city smelled of burning. No matter what she told herself, that was real. The people might be hiding, but the city was burning. Whether the reports were true or not, the reaction had been the same, as it always was when people were afraid. They panicked, they rioted, and they burned.

With little traffic on the road, Connor was making good time towards the warehouse. The lights weren’t working at any of the intersections they came up on, so Connor only slowed down, looked in all directions, and went on through.

There wasn’t a cop car to be seen, though Janet was sure some of the burned wrecks they passed had been black and whites. Other than some dogs roaming between the alleys, they could be the only living things in the city.

The thought made Janet shudder. Maybe the city was so quiet was because it had already fallen. Maybe she and Connor were the only people alive in the area. But no, if that were true, she would have seen it on the news. Something like that would have to have been a big enough story still to have at least made a local report.

Connor’s grunt as he turned off the road broke Janet’s train of thought. The truck was idling next to a guardhouse, and Connor was getting out. He pulled a bunch of keys out of the back pocket of his jeans, and took the short steps to the guardhouse door. It was dark, and no one seemed to be inside.

He fumbled a minute until he found the key for the door, which he unlocked and pushed open. Connor took a step back, waiting to see if anyone—any thing—came out. When nothing happened, he leaned inside and fumbled around.

Janet knew he was getting the right key into the machine that would unlock the huge gate in front of them. They would get inside, choose a truck, hopefully one loaded already, and be on their way.

It was going to be a long night, and she had to drive Connor’s truck, following him to this mystical hunting camp he was so hung up on.

The thought made her yawn, and she could only stare blankly as the gate began to slide open.

Chapter Five

Dara had spent a lot of time going over the route she and Ted would take to their new home. Google Maps had helped her find potential trouble spots and mark what she hoped was the fastest way to the mountains on the printed maps she’d bought.

She’d ruled out going through any major cities, and looked for ways around even minor towns. Most of the time, she’d been lucky, and there had been back roads she could take around most places that were more than wide spots in the road.

Unfortunately, the only good route around one small city was taking the business bypass. It still took her far too close to the outskirts of the city, but it was the best way she could figure out that wouldn’t add extra hours to the drive.

While Ted didn’t mind riding as much as he had just after the accident, he still tired of long trips and could be come anxious and angry. The last thing she wanted was to have to deal with Ted in one of his moody spells. It was hard enough to handle at home, where he felt safe.

Dara sighed and watched the endless countryside glide by the old moving van’s windows. They’d last been close to a town several hours back, when they’d took a side trip and stopped for lunch. Their meal was now only a fading memory, and she knew she’d have to turn off this road and head towards the area where she’d planned to stop for the night.

It was getting dark. The cool air that swept into the truck through her open window was only partly successful in keeping her awake.

“I’m hungry, Dara,” Ted said with a heartbreaking childishness in his voice.

“I know, Sweetie. We’ll be stopping soon.” Dara tried to keep the tiredness from her voice. Anything less than an upbeat tone could send her husband from his sunny good self into the whiny, mean bully she dreaded.

Nothing she did would bring back the good Ted until he’d worked through it himself. As he recovered, these moods had become lest frequent, and hadn’t lasted as long, but she worried about Ted freaking out on the road.

Well, there was nothing to do but get off this road and find the small hotel she’d chosen for the night. It had a small restaurant attached, and that would be good enough for her. Dara wasn’t used to driving for hours on end, and she could use a good night’s sleep.

The sign for the exit she needed came up, and Dara slowed, ready to take the off ramp. As she turned the van carefully onto the small, two-lane road, she could see movement in the near-darkness that had fallen. Large shadows were converging on the road, and she slowed even more.

The van was barely moving now, and Dara still couldn’t see much. The night was getting darker, and the headlights didn’t show much.

Dara jumped when something ran out onto the road in front of her, barely showing as a streak before it was gone. She hit the brakes by instinct, afraid to hit something that would damage the van and leave the two of them out in the middle of nowhere.

That might be the dumbest thing you’ve ever done, girl.

“Damn it,” Dara muttered. She stared out all the windows, but all she could see were moving shadows. Through the open window on her side, odd moaning sounds got louder as the shadows neared.

“Dara, did you see the man?”

Dara jumped. For a minute, she’d forgotten Ted was there, and his question jolted her. Man? Was that what had run in front of her? God, she could have killed him!

“Was it a man, Ted, or a deer?”

“It was a man. A white man. He had pajamas on. Isn’t that silly?”

“Yes, it is.” Dara sat for a moment, lost in thought. If a man was running around out in the country in his night clothes, then the sickness must be here already.

Her stomach churned. Part of her plan had been to escape the spread of the disease by leaving early, to get up into the sparsely populated mountains before things got bad.

Now, with Ted’s sighting and the growing sounds assaulting her ears through the window, she realized she might have made a horrible mistake.

Without thinking, she began to roll up her window. The van was still sitting in the middle of the road, idling. She was about to let off the brake and drive forward, as fast as she could, when there was a loud thump on the side of the van.

Dara screamed a little, more of a soft screech, really, but it was enough to get Ted upset. He began crying as more and more thumps hit the van, coming in from all directions.

* * *

Janet had fallen into a restless doze, slumped against the driver’s side door of Connor’s pickup truck. She was dreaming about sunny beaches and fruity drinks, something she’d never experienced in her real life. It was nice, and she was pissed when she was jostled out of the dream.

At first she couldn’t tell what had woken her, and she had settled back against the door when movement across the lot caught her eye. It was hard to tell in the dwindling light, but it looked like someone heading for the warehouse.

Probably someone with the same idea as us, she thought, squinting into the shadows. Figured they’d raid the place while there was still something to get.

She hated to disturb Connor in the middle of the job, but she was afraid to be out here by herself as it was. Janet picked up the small radio and keyed the transmit button.

“Connor, I think we have company.”

“How many?”

Connor sounded pissed, even over the static from the radio, but she knew he’d have been more upset if she hadn’t called and he’d been taken unaware.

“Only one, I think,” she answered. Try as she might, Janet couldn’t see more than the single, slow-moving figure emerging from the shadows.

“You think. Can you count, you stupid bitch?” Connor was definitely pissed now, and Janet cringed as if he could reach through the device and hit her.

“I can only see one person, Connor. They’re moving slowly, headed towards the warehouse. It’s getting dark out here, and the sun’s in my eyes.”

Let him do to her what he would, she decided. She was doing the best she could.

Janet could hear the heavy sigh even through the static. “Okay, I’m coming out. Try not to panic and do something stupid.”

More stupid than staying with an abusive asshole? Janet didn’t think it was possible. If she had any sense, she’d take off right now, and leave Connor to whatever confrontation was coming. She had enough stuff loaded into the bed of the pickup to last her for a while, and Connor could take care of himself.

Janet had gotten lost in that fantasy and nearly screeched when movement in the side mirror caught her eye. She realized it was Connor, crouched and moving up beside the truck in time to avoid that mistake. Janet stayed still and watched as he moved up to kneel beside the front bumper, staring towards the figure coming towards them.

She didn’t dare move. It would call attention to the fact that the truck wasn’t empty, and piss Connor off in one easy step. Janet could barely breathe as the person sneaking up on them moved out of the shadowy fringe of the parking lot, which was surrounded by tall pines, and stepped into the moonlight.

Despite her best intentions, Janet gasped. It was enough sound to attract the person’s attention, and he—she could see it was a man now—changed directions and headed toward the truck.

“Damn it,” Connor grunted. He stood up and began walking towards the other man. “Hey, dude. There’s plenty here for the both of us. You let me get finished loading the big truck here, and you can take whatever you want.

There was no response, and Janet began to sweat. Why wasn’t he saying something? Connor was being nice, in his own way, walking with his hands held out, not threatening at all.

The man began growling, a weird moaning sound that carried all too well through the cool night air. One of the infected. Dear god, Connor was going to die. She was going to be left alone with one of the shambling, hungry dead.

Janet fumbled with the ignition, not sure if she would simply drive away, or if she would try to hit the man before he could get to Connor. That’s when she realized Connor had taken the truck’s keys when he went into the warehouse.

The bastard. Janet nearly threw up. Wouldn’t that serve him right, to have to sit in her vomit? But she knew he wouldn’t care. He’d make her lick it up, if that’s what it took.

Janet could only sit and watch, unarmed and trapped inside the truck, as Connor got close enough to the man to see him clearly.

“Son of a bitch!” Connor yelled and reached to his hip, grabbing the pistol holstered there. He had the gun out and pointed at the man.

“Dude, stop right there. I ain’t telling you twice.”

But the man kept coming, shambling a little faster now. Janet could hear the click as Connor jacked the slide back. The shot was anticlimactic; a rolling echo in the large parking lot that went on long after the infected man had dropped like a lead weight.

Connor stood looking down at him for a while before he shoved the pistol back into the holster. He turned with a shrug and headed back to the truck, only pausing beside the window for a brief moment.

“You might have warned me the dude was sick. I’d have shot him from the dock and been done with it.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t see that,” Janet whispered.

Connor gave her a hard stare, and then muttered something she couldn’t catch. “I’ve only got a couple of pallets left, and we can go. Try to do a better job out here, or I might just leave you to keep company with our friend there.”

Janet nodded without saying anything. She’d have to wait, or risk walking out on her own, and she wasn’t willing to do that just yet. Connor walked off without another word, and she leaned forward so she could see more of the area around the warehouse.

* * *

Now that the shadows had reached the van, Dara could see that they were people. All shapes, sizes, ages and colors of people, dressed in vastly different styles from work clothes to sleepwear. Dara could see the ones in the glare of the headlights, and the look on their faces made her even more frightened.

She knew they couldn’t stay there, or the van would be surrounded. Dara stared at the faces she could see, looking for any sign of humanity. She couldn’t see anything that said these were people any more. She knew she had to push forward, get past this blockage and make it to the hunting camp.

Ted was depending on her getting them there, getting them both to safety. But the thought of running down these—people, for she couldn’t make herself think of them as anything else—made her sick to her stomach.

“Dara, why are the people hitting the truck?”

Ted’s plaintive voice broke the spell, and Dara slammed her foot on the gas pedal. The van was slow to get moving, but it was going forward, pushing the people in front of the hood backwards. A couple dropped down out of sight, and Dara was pushing harder on the pedal when a glare blanked out everything in front of her.

Her foot eased up and the van stopped moving. Dara couldn’t see past the bright headlights, only able to tell it was a larger vehicle than her own. The truck stopped a short distance in front of her, taking up the center of the road.

Some of the people who had been pushing up against the moving van turned to stare towards the brighter lights, and a couple even began a slow stumble in that direction. Dara though she might could get through the people now, but she wouldn’t be able to get around the other truck.

“Damned fool,” Dara said, forgetting Ted was beside her.

“What fool, Dara? Like on a deck of cards? Those are fun. Can I see it?”

“I’m sorry, Sweetie, I meant the person driving the other truck. The road is blocked and we can’t get moving until whoever it is moves out of the way.”

“Oh,” Ted muttered. He turned his head away, staring out the window.

Dara sighed. Things still upset Ted, things that shouldn’t even matter. Like thinking she was keeping a deck of cards from him. At any other time, she’d try to jolly him out of his pout, but right now she had bigger things to worry about.

Like getting the hell off this road and getting some sleep.

Dara was squinting along the side of the road, trying to see if she could maneuver the van along the edge and get by the big truck. She didn’t want to get into any kind of confrontation, but she reached down beside the door and pulled out the small automatic pistol she’d tucked down there.

If she had to, she’d use it. She wouldn’t like it, but she’d do whatever she had to do to get Ted out of this mess.

Dara watched the driver climb down out of the truck and head towards her. He was carrying a gun himself, she realized just before he began shooting the people between his vehicle and hers.

She clicked the safety off and waited to see what he’d do next.

Chapter Six

“Janet, there’s something blocking the road up ahead. I’m going to stop and check it out. Stay far enough behind me to get around on the shoulder, in case you have to go.”

Conner’s voice on the radio crackled and sputtered, but she could hear him clearly enough.

“Okay, Connor. Keep me advised.”

Janet was kind of proud of that response. It sounded so official. Like she knew what she was doing with the radios and keeping safe as they traveled towards the mountains.

Connor had given her some quick directions before they’d left the warehouse, mainly about not following too close behind him and watching the side roads and other areas where an ambush could come at them.

She didn’t think she’d needed the lecture, but she’d sat in silence and nodded at the right times, repeating everything he’d told her when ordered to. Other than the one man at the warehouse, they hadn’t seen any sign of others being out and about, so she thought it was a waste of time and effort. They’d be better off just driving and making better time towards the mountains, in her opinion.

Not that Connor cared about what she thought. He’d made that clear enough over the years they’d been together. She had only one purpose, so far as Connor was concerned: to take care of his needs. Cook, clean and screw on command. That was her job.

Janet sat and fidgeted while she waited in the pickup, watching as the door on the delivery truck opened. She could see Connor only as a dark shape as he climbed down. She lost sight of him as he went to the front of the truck, towards whatever he’d seen blocking the road.

She could hear more moaning like the man at the warehouse had done. The sound of Connor’s gun, a quiet pop-pop-pop, came through her partially open window. Whatever the road block was, infected people were part of it.

The next time she saw him, he was walking along the right hand side of the road, going towards another set of lights she could faintly see past his truck’s brighter lights. There must be another vehicle out there, maybe broken down.

Connor disappeared into the glare, and Janet got a little worried. If the people in the other truck were also armed, there could be trouble. Though if they were armed, she wondered why they hadn’t already shot the infected people and moved on.

When there was nothing more than the vaguest hint of conversation, Janet got restless and opened the truck door. Since Connor couldn’t be bothered to let her know what was going on, she’d see for herself. Besides, she reasoned, he might need backup.

Janet giggled a little at the thought. Imagine her backing Connor up. He was an excellent shot, and she could hit big targets if they weren’t moving. He’d probably end up saving her ass, and he’d never let her forget it.

She stepped quietly around several bodies lying between the warehouse delivery truck and what she could make out through the lights as something like one of those big moving vans. Janet could hear someone talking that wasn’t Connor, but she wasn’t close enough to make out what they were saying.

When she finally got near Connor, she could see he was standing with his gun aimed at a dark figure behind the van’s open driver’s door. Even in the glare, she could tell the person was holding a gun pointed at Connor, leaving them both in a stand off.

That could only end badly, Janet knew. Both of them would probably be dead, leaving her alone and facing who knew how many others in the van. She didn’t like the odds.

So, Janet did the only thing she could think of, and stepped around until she was in front of the van. She put both hands up, leaving her own small gun in the holster behind her left hip.

“Hey there. What’s going on?”

Not the sort of greeting she was used to giving when coming upon strangers, but under the circumstances it would have to do.

“Go back to the truck, Janet. Let me handle this.”

“Handle what? I think we can both get going, now that the infected have been taken care of.”

“It seems the lady isn’t too happy with me taking care of her problem. She got a little upset about me shooting them all.”

“That’s right. You didn’t need to do that. I was going to push through them. They were falling back.”

The voice was a light one, educated from the tone, Janet thought. Maybe she could be reasoned with, if Connor would keep out of it.

“Connor, let’s just go. Ma’am,” Janet pitched her voice to carry to the van. “We’ll be leaving now, if you’ll kindly make room for us. I’m sorry you’re upset, but we’ve had to deal with one of these infected already tonight, and I think Connor was still dealing with that.”

“I’m not dealing with anything, except this crazy woman who won’t get the hell out of my way,” Connor snarled.

Did the man have a death wish? He was itching to cause some kind of trouble, and Janet had no idea why. There was enough facing them as it was, with a long trip to the mountains and then setting up decent living arrangements with whatever they found at the camp.

She’d have to diffuse this situation herself somehow, and soon, before they attracted more infected from the surrounding area.

Janet began walking slowly towards the van, keeping her hands up and in plain sight as she went.

“Ma’am? Can we talk about this? We don’t want any trouble, no matter what it seems like. We’re just trying to get out of town, make it up to the mountains. We think it will be safer there.”

There were no threatening sounds or movements, so Janet kept walking. She ignored Connor as she went around him, and for once he stayed silent.

When Janet was at the side of the van, she could see the driver was a woman a little older than herself, maybe late thirties, with dark skin and hair in a tight cut close to a well-shaped head. It explained a lot about Connor’s attitude. He didn’t care for black people, or anyone who was not white. One of his many issues that Janet hadn’t known about until it was too late.

“Ma’am, my name is Janet, and this is Connor. Like I said, we’re trying to get out of town, and we need to get moving. Things are getting worse, and it’s dangerous to be sitting around, as you’ve probably guessed.”

The woman stared down at Janet for a long time, keeping her gun aimed firmly at Connor. She seemed to be taking stock of the other woman, thin, blond and pale.

Finally, she came to a decision and lowered the gun, though it was still pointed in Connor’s direction.

“I’m Dara. My husband, Ted, and I are trying to get to the mountains ourselves. We have a place up there we’ve been working on for a while, and we want to get there as soon as we can.

“We’d just turned on to this road, looking for a hotel to stop for the night, when these—people—came out of the woods and got in front of the truck.”

Janet nodded. The warehouse was just down the road, and she knew from going there with Connor a couple of times that there were some housing developments all around. It made sense there would be infected people roaming around the area.

“We had one guy come up on us,” Janet said. She didn’t want to say it was while they were ripping off Connor’s former employer. “Connor had to, um, take care of him.”

Dara nodded, looking towards Connor and the delivery truck.

“Well, thank you for the help. I guess I can get around the, what you called infected, so you two can get going. Ted and I need to get settled for the night, so we can get a fresh start in the morning.”

“It’s not a problem. I should tell you that if you were planning to stay at the hotel that’s just a mile or so up the road, it’s closed. It went out of business a couple of months ago.”

Dara’s heart dropped. Now what would they do?

“That was the place. Guess my guidebook was out of date. You wouldn’t happen to know of any place else we can stay?”

Janet cast a glance at Connor. He was still standing just past the edge of the van’s headlights, his gun gripped in both hands. He had it aimed more at the ground now, and Janet heaved a sigh of relief. She turned back to Dara, sure now that Connor had himself under control.

“Nothing on this road. The only thing is in town, and I wouldn’t recommend staying anywhere near that many people.”

She could see the other woman’s face droop, tired and discouraged.

“I now a place back on the highway, about five miles. It’s a good hotel, clean and a good price. You could follow us until we get there, or I can point it out to you on a map.”

“That would be great,” Dara said. “Let me get the map. I think the sooner we’re all on our way, the better. We’ve still got a ways to go before we reach the camp.”

Janet’s heart jumped.

“The camp? You mean the old hunting camp?”

Dara nodded. “That’s right. My husband and I bought it a few months ago. Do you know about it?”

“Well, not me, but Connor does. His family used to go up there, he’s been there a few times since he was a kid. That’s where we were going to hold up until this mess got sorted out.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. The place had been abandoned for so long, we just assumed no one remembered it.”

Janet heard someone in the van’s cab saying something, and Dara ducked down to listen. There were a few moments of conversation that Janet couldn’t make out before Dara straightened up.

“Ted says you two should come with us, and stay at the camp anyway. I admit, having a couple of extra hands to help out would be nice.”

Janet hesitated. “I don’t know how Connor would take that. He was pretty sure we’d be alone up there. He might not like the idea of there being other people.”

“Well, talk to him, tell him about us owning the land and everything, and that he’s welcome.”

Janet looked up at the other woman, searching her face. She seemed like a nice, friendly person, but she was black, and Connor might balk at the invitation. Still, she had to make him agree, or they had nowhere to go.

“I’ll talk to him,” she finally said, giving Dara a smile. “Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Sure. But let’s not take too long. I want to get out of here.” Dara gestured at the dead bodies on the road, and shuddered.

* * *

“I ain’t going nowhere with no niggers,” Connor muttered after hearing Janet out. “I say we shoot them now and just go.”

“Connor, you know we can’t do that. It’s bad enough you’ve killed all these people. They were sick and I can understand that. But you can’t just shoot anybody who gets in the way. That’s not going to work.”

Connor spit back towards the moving van. “They got no right, buying up that property. It was for white folks, a place to get away from the darkies.”

Janet had to fight to keep from smacking him down. It was self-preservation, because he’d probably beat her unconscious if she did, or kill her and then Dara and Ted. That wasn’t any sort of solution for their problem.\

“That might have been true back then, Connor, but Dara says they bought it, so they decide who gets to stay there. You think we’ll be safe at the camp, so we’re going to have to accept their offer and deal with it.”

It took a few minutes of quiet persuasion, laying out the hard facts without getting him totally pissed at her, but finally Connor agreed to the proposal.

He didn’t like it at all, she could tell, but what other choice did they have? She wasn’t going to sit back and watch him murder the couple, even if it meant she’d have to confront him and take the consequences.

“I’ll go talk to Dara, then. She wants to get a hotel for the night. Seems her husband isn’t well, and they’ve been on the road for hours. They need to sleep and get some good food in them.”

“Fine,” Connor grumbled. “You deal with them. I don’t want anything to do with either one of them. We’ll stay wherever they end up, but I’m not eating with them, and we better get rooms far away from theirs.”

Janet could only shake her head as she left him fuming beside the truck. Maybe he’d settle down after they got to the camp. She doubted it, but she didn’t see any other way to deal with the situation. They needed a safe place, and Dara and Ted owned the only one they knew of. It was too late to go back home and look for something else, even if Connor would agree to that.

When she told Dara they would come along and help the couple out at the camp, she could see Dara knew something about what had happened between her and Connor. Janet figured she was used to that reaction when dealing with some white people.

After some turning and backing, with Janet spotting her, Dara got her van turned around, leaving room for Connor and Janet to get by. She followed the other couple out onto the highway once again, heading to the hotel and what she hoped would be a decent night’s rest for them both.

Chapter Seven

The roar of a dozen motorcycles was a familiar sound to George “Big Bear” Andropolous and the rest of the club as they sped down the road out of town. The smell of exhaust and the vibration of the big Harley between his legs were as natural as salt air and the motion of a ship at sea was to a sailor.

If he tried hard enough, he could almost forget that they weren’t on a normal club ride. Almost. But every time he looked into the bike’s side mirrors, he saw the train of truck campers, old RVs and pickups loaded to the gills following along behind.

After packing up two days before, the group had set out for the mountains. It had been a long ride for everyone, with people packed into vehicles already loaded up with everything they could bring with them.

The first night, the exhausted travelers had barely been able to make camp and get a hot meal inside them before they fell out, only to be wakened to stand watch after too short a time.

By the end of the second day, exhaustion had led to short tempers and questioning the decision to make the trip. After all, some argued, their neighborhoods were still safe. They could have stayed in their own homes, fortified themselves behind locked doors. Used duct tape and rolls of plastic to keep out the infection.

After all, Joey Waldron had done exactly that.

Joey’s decision was understandable, though. He had two kids away at college, and they were supposed to be heading home. Joey and his wife, Tammy, hadn’t wanted to leave before their whole family was together. The Waldrons would come along as soon as the kids arrived, and George had stood behind their decision.

George had talked far too long the previous night, trying to calm people down, staying up into the wee hours of the morning to have quiet moments with each of the group. Now he was nearly done. He wasn’t sure if he would make it another night, much less the remaining day after that before they reached the hunting camp.

Now he drifted along, letting his mind go blank as he watched the road ahead of them. His eyes spanned side to side, not really making a conscious note of the scenery. The group was coming up on a small, decrepit motel, and he idly watched as some people clustered at one end.

There were four people pressed up against the side of the motel, facing about a half-dozen others. More were coming around the end of the building.

At first it didn’t sink in, but when he was almost past the entrance the Bear realized the people facing the four were sick—zombies.

Without thinking, he swung his Hog over onto the road and gunned it down towards the motel. He could hear the other bikers following, and knew those in the trucks and RVs would be right behind.

He was being stupid, he realized. The one thing they’d agreed on before the gang had left town was that whatever happened on the road wasn’t their fight. His job was to get them all safely to the camp, and he was about to throw that idea out like moldy bread.

“Damn it,” George muttered. He was going to catch hell for it, but one of those people was in a wheelchair, and two of them were women. One of them sported a handgun on her hip, but still.

George pulled his bike to a halt a couple of yards from the moaning, reaching zombies and drew a shotgun from behind his shoulder. He took aim and watched the blood and brains of the infected person closest to the four live people.

He could hardly hear himself give a rebel yell as the zombie went down with a sudden slump. While some of the others began slowly turning towards the sound of the shot, he ratcheted another shell into the chamber and took down a second zombie.

George was taking aim at a third zombie when another gang member pulled to a sliding stop beside him. He barely spared a glance to see who it was before he ejected the spent shell and downed another of the ravening infected.

* * *

It was hopeless, Dara knew. She’d made a mistake early in the morning and didn’t do a sweep of the area before opening the door and ushering Ted out. It hadn’t been a restful night, what with Ted staying up until the early morning hours, constantly chattering about what had happened the night before, and asking her endless questions about his “new friends”, as he liked to call Janet and Connor. She was tired and not thinking straight.

Dara wasn’t entirely sure Connor would be much of a friend. She figured the scruffy, rough-looking white boy would probably shoot them both in the back, if it suited him.

Somehow, she knew it would, at some point. He was the kind of man she’d met and dealt with all her life, though most of them had kept their racism hidden behind a smile. Connor didn’t bother, though so far he’d restrained from calling them niggers to their faces. It was just a matter of time before he lost that thin veneer, she knew.

He treated Janet like a concubine, one with the spirit beaten nearly out of her. But Dara knew it had been Janet that got him to help when the infected people had swarmed towards the van. It was surprising that the other woman had enough gumption to stand up to him, and it had probably cost her a few bruises and sore spots.

Still, the couple had helped them, and if it came down to it, Dara would just put a bullet in Connor’s head while he slept one night. The thought turned her stomach, but with things the way they were she had resigned herself to being as tough as she had to be to protect Ted. She’d nearly lost him once, and she didn’t intend to risk it again.

At first things had been fine as she’d gotten Ted ready to take his place in the van. The motel lot was empty, and quiet. The few other rooms that had vehicles parked in front were dark, with no signs of movement. Dara had heard a few people pulling in throughout the night, so they’d probably sleep for a while yet.

Her group had to get on the road, though. There were still a lot of miles to cover, and a couple of decent-sized towns to get through or around. The longer they lingered here, the more miles they’d have to cover after dark, before they could stop to rest. Then there was the remaining day of travel, which would see them navigating the mountain road in the dark as it was.

From their last trip up the mountain, Dara had made a note of how overgrown and deteriorated the roads had become, due to heavy snowfalls over the previous months. No one had done any repairs on the road for decades, and it had nearly returned to nature.

It was all on her mind as she’d loaded their few things they’d used overnight into the truck, settled Ted in his chair with a bottle of juice and a donut, and wheeled him out the door. That was when Janet and Conner had brought their own gear out, packed it back into the bed of their old pickup truck, and turned towards their new companions as the first groans drifted over the still morning air.

Dara’s stomach clenched from fright, and she was sure she peed herself a little. She looked around to see where the infected were coming from. At first there was just the sound, and she almost convinced herself it had just been the wind. She moved towards the van, pushing Ted’s wheelchair, stopping with a jerk when a movement from the end of the motel caught her eye.

“There!” Janet called softly at the same time. She pointed towards the lone person who was shambling towards them, dull eyes locked on the living souls beside the building. In seconds, another followed, and then a clump of infected rounded the edge of the building and made their awkward way towards Dara and the others.

Dara fumbled with the key to their motel room, intending to get the door open and shove Ted back inside. She would feel better if he was safe behind a locked door while she, Janet and Connor dealt with the infected.

“Shit,” Connor grunted, grabbing his holster from where it was resting on top of the tarp covering the truck’s bed. He thumbed off the strap holding the gun in place as a roar like rolling thunder broke the near-silence.

Dara looked up to see about a dozen large motorcycles barreling down the access road towards them. A long line of pickups, some pulling campers, and beat up RVs followed more slowly. It must be a group like theirs, she thought. People banding together for survival.

She wasn’t sure if they were going to help, or wait out the infected and scavenge like vultures afterward. She had a sudden burst of hope that they might just get through this nightmare, if these people were on the side of righteousness.

Ted had seen the mass of bikers coming towards them and clapped his hands with delight. “Look, Dara! Motorcycles! I just love motorcycles.”

“I know you do, honey. Let’s not make too much noise and scare them off, okay? Maybe they’ll let you touch one, if you’re very quiet.”

Ted made a zipping motion across his lips, grinning like a kid, and dropped his hands in his lap. With one eye on the incoming infected, and another worrying over the bikers, Dara was clumsily trying to fit the key into the motel room’s peeling door. She dropped it, and bent over with a curse to pick it up.

“Dara, bad words for the jar,” Ted chided, watching as the bikers got closer.

“Sorry, Ted. I’ll put a dollar in the jar when we get to the camp.”

She finally got a good grip on the motel key and stood up in time to watch as the lead bike slid to a stop in the loose gravel parking lot. The bike slewed sideways before coming to a standstill. The biker reached backward and pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a case fastened to the bike’s saddlebags.

Before Dara could turn and unlock the door, the biker had taken his first shot, dropping one of the infected in a spray of brain and blood.

* * *

She didn’t know how long the gunfire lasted, but by the end Janet had a massive headache and her ears were ringing from the noise. Connor had shoved her roughly against the motel’s cinder block wall, stepping in front of her while he fired his pistol. Being so close meant she felt every vibration as he pulled the trigger, and the sound was deafening at that distance.

Janet only knew it was over when people started to move again. She eased out from behind Connor, rubbing at a skinned elbow that had caught the brunt of her contact with the wall.

The smell of hot motorcycles and gunpowder was overwhelming. The infected lying broken and bloody on the ground around them didn’t help any. There was a stench about them that wasn’t normal for people who could have only been dead a couple of days. The bodies reeked of spoiled meat and had an odd chemical tang that make her want to vomit.

But, she had to control herself. Connor wouldn’t like it if she made a mess in front of all these people, especially a gang of bikers. He’d never been in a club, but had great respect for the mystique.

Janet eased around one body that had been beheaded by a shotgun blast, trying not to step in any of the gore. When she was past it, she went to help Dara with Ted, who was making a fuss now that all the drama was over.

“Should we take him back inside?”

Dara shook her head. “He won’t calm down if he knows there’s something going on out here. Things like this upset him, and he regresses a lot, gets more child-like.”

Janet nodded. Ted did look sort of like a petulant toddler, with his lower lip stuck out. His skin was ashen, except for a high flush that showed on his cheeks. He was trembling as he stared around at the bodies.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when a soft voice spoke from behind her. Janet whirled around to see one of the bikers standing a short distance away, helmet off and tucked under his arm. He’d unzipped his jean jacket, revealing a plain blue tee that clung to his muscled body.

His dark blond hair was short enough to have been pulled into a spiky, sweaty mass from being under the helmet. Janet thought it gave him a younger, punk look, though his expression was kind.

What the hell was she doing, looking at another man with Conner only a few feet behind her? She must be insane.

Janet pulled her gaze from the biker’s green eyes and tried to keep the blush she felt burning her cheeks from getting any worse. She knew it wasn’t working by the way the biker’s eyes were searching her face. Janet ducked her head, turning back towards Dara and Ted.

“I think we’ve got it under control. Ted’s just a little overwhelmed by all of this,” she said, gesturing around them.

“I can see that,” the biker replied. “If you need anything, though, just ask.”

Janet nodded. If Connor had heard their exchange, she’d pay for it later, she knew. Even though the guy had just been trying to be nice, it wouldn’t matter. The jealous streak that ran deep through her boyfriend made him suspicious and mean.

Dara was watching her as Janet reached out to pat Ted on the shoulder. The look in the other woman’s eye said she’d had some experience with a man like Connor, and the understanding and sympathy Janet could read on Dara’s face nearly undid her.

Janet gave Dara a bright smile she didn’t feel, and moved to help her calm the injured man so they could finish loading up and get back on the road.

She’d have to deal with whatever Conner dished out later, once they’d reached the camp. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be private.

Chapter Eight

When the smoke cleared, the two groups were left staring at each other and the carnage they’d produced. The smell of gunpowder overlay the usual late summer odors of nature, but a freshening wind was sweeping it away. It couldn’t do much about the smell of the corpses—or were they doubly dead now?

Big Bear rose from the low-slung seat of his Harley and stretched. As much as the scene facing these strangers had stressed him out, somehow he felt relaxed and energized. He barely spared a glance for the cooling bodies of what had once been people—somebody’s mother, or son, or boss—as he went to talk to the people his group had just saved.

George walked up to the women standing beside the man in the wheelchair. One woman and the man in the wheelchair were black, the other two were white. All of them looked to be in their mid-to-late thirties. The woman closet to the man in the wheelchair stared at him as he approached, looking deep into his eyes. George smiled his best, most friendly smile.

“Hey, there, folks. Looked like you needed some help,” he offered when he was just a few feet away, within reasonable talking distance. An added advantage was it didn’t put him too close to the corpses. They had a stink on them that defied belief.

The woman nodded. “Appreciate it.”

The white guy standing near a rusty pickup truck snorted. “Could have handled it ourselves, dude.”

George spared him a glance. “I guess you could have, at that. Three of you against twenty or more. Pretty good odds, right?”

The white guy frowned at George. That one is trouble, something in the back of George’s mind flashed. Yes, he could be. If he got behind you, jumped you from out of the dark, when you weren’t looking.

“I’m George,” he said to the woman. “This is my club. We’re headed west, keeping away from towns. We have a place that we think would be safe, been on the road a couple of days. How about you folks? All traveling together?”

He was just trying to be friendly, but when the black woman’s face closed down he knew he made a mistake. He was about to wave a good bye and get the club back on the road when the thin blond white woman standing beside her spoke up.

“Yes, we’re together. I’m Janet, and this is Ted and Dara. That’s Connor,” she said, pointing a thumb behind her.

“Nice to meet you, Janet, Dara. Hey Ted,” George gave his hand to Ted, who shook it with a grin. He just nodded to Connor, who leaned against the truck and frowned even harder.

“The reason I mentioned where we were headed was I think you guys might want to join up with us, at least to you get nearer to wherever you’re going. It’s getting pretty dangerous out there. Safety in numbers, as they say.”

Janet and Dara looked at each other. Something passed between the two women, but George couldn’t tell what it was. Still, he tried again.

“The club is headed up into the mountains, know of a place up there that can be fortified, defended if need be.”

Something sparked in Dara’s eyes at that, and George stopped suddenly. He’d said something wrong.

“If you mean the old hunting camp, it’s spoken for,” Dara said, her voice firm. “Ted and I bought it months ago.”

George felt like it had been knifed. Nothing he’d found in his searches had shown the camp to be anything other than a forgotten resort place; it didn’t even show up on the county or state’s list of properties.

“Are you sure? I looked into it a while back, and I didn’t see anything about that. Maybe you’re thinking of some hunter’s old cabin?”

Dara shook her head. “Nope. The old camp, that backs up onto a national forest. Most of the property documents show it as being part of the forest, but it’s not. Never was. Some clerk misfiled the deed, and it dropped out of sight and memory long ago.”

Damn it! How was he going to explain to the others that he’d just lost them their refuge? That knife in his gut twisted.

Something of the anguish he felt must have showed on his face, because he could almost feel the woman softening.

“I’m sorry,” she said, softly.

“Dara,” Ted turned his head to look up at his wife. “Our new friends can come with us. It will be fun! Maybe I can take a ride on the big guy’s bike!”

“Honey, I don’t think that’s a good idea—”

“But I want them to come! I want my new friends!”

Ted’s voice had risen, and he was petulantly pounding on the arms of his wheelchair. George could only stare at the scene before him.

Dara sighed. “Okay, Ted. Calm down and I’ll talk to George about it. Remember, we need to be on quiet time until we get to the camp.”

Ted pouted, but nodded and was silent.

Dara gave George a defeated look and tipped her head towards the front of the van.

“Why don’t we go talk about the situation, George?”

* * *

Dara could hear the huge biker clomping along behind her, his boots crunching on the lot’s loose gravel. She almost felt like she was fleeing from a giant in a fairytale, rather than just getting some privacy to discuss the future in this insane new world.

If it weren’t for Ted, she would have told the man flat-out there was no way his gang was going to join them at the hunting camp. But in reality, what could she have done to prevent it? Even joining up with Connor and Janet hadn’t exactly equipped her with an army, while biker dude had at least fifty people—all armed and ready to shoot—to force his way in.

So, she’d do what she’d always done, and negotiate. The few members she’d seen hadn’t seemed like the usual rough criminal element portrayed in the media.

When Dara reached the front of the old moving van, she stopped and turned to face George. She stared up into his face, searching for any sign that she was about to make a big mistake.

She only saw an open, kind expression, with a bit of worry behind it.

“So, George. It seems we have a problem. I feel like I should be worried about your group taking over the hunting camp. You have a lot more people than I do—and I’m not all that sure that Connor wouldn’t be more than glad to help, if that’s what you decided to do.”

She stopped when George put up a huge hand.

“I know we look kind of rough, Dara. I can understand where you’re coming from, but I need to say something here.” He paused for a deep breath.

“I’ll be the first to admit that not all our members would qualify for a heavenly choir. Some of them don’t have the cleanest records, having served time in places from the local jail to a federal maximum security prison. But, it was never for anything violent. Drug smuggling, a couple of dealing charges, one for embezzling from his grandmother’s estate.”

“No murders? Rapes? Stuff like that?” She should have been more skeptical, but something about the big man said he was being truthful.

“No, ma’am. Nothing like that at all. They wouldn’t be members if there was anything in their past that was violent. Most of these guys have regular jobs. They just like to ride bikes and have some fun, play around the edges of the criminal element.”

Dara pursed her lips and looked down at the ground. She studied the toes of her sneakers. There was something that looked a lot like brain matter on one, and she scraped it off in the gravel. Nothing would take care of the red smears and splatters, though.

A small frown tugged at her eyebrows as she thought about the situation. It was too late to hide their destination, not that they could have anyway. Showing up at the camp after the motorcycle club got there wouldn’t have done any good, even with a legal deed to show.

They couldn’t turn the club away, either, because they knew where the camp was, and they had more people and more weapons.

It felt the same as when she’d decided to bring Janet and Connor in, like there wasn’t any good answer, she’d just have to choose the less-bad option and hope for the best.

Dara looked past the biker and took in the sight of all the pickups, campers and RVs that now waited silently a distance away from the motel. Some people had gotten out of the vehicles and stood in small clumps, talking and watching her. A few kids leaned out windows, wondering what was going on.

After thinking about it some more, her mind just going around in circles and worrying over things like a hungry mouse, Dara made up her mind.

“Okay. I guess there really isn’t much choice here. You all know about the camp, and there’s a heck of a lot more of you than us.”

George nodded, but stayed silent.

“I think we should all join up and live at the camp. But there will be some rules. First one, Ted and I own the place, so we’re the ultimate judge of what happens.”

She put up a hand to stall any comments.

“Secondly, we’ll need some form of leadership, something that gives everyone a voice in what goes on. None of us know what’s going to happen, whether this thing blows over or if we’re all in a big pot of shit. I don’t want to end up spending my last days fighting other human beings, while this—” Dara motioned to the dead bodies behind George. “This tries to take us down.”

“I agree. We can sort that out after we get there. There’s still a lot of road between here and there, and I don’t think we should be wasting any more time getting going.”

George nodded back towards the motel, where a couple of people had started poking their heads out of the rooms, staring at everyone gathered in front of the building. They mostly couldn’t take their eyes off the dead infected people, whose blood was still seeping into the sparsely graveled parking lot.

Dara turned and looked, watching to see if there would be any trouble from the other motel guests. The last thing they needed was a confrontation with the living.

“Okay. What say you and I be co-leaders for now, until we can get settled in at the camp? Will your people agree to that?”

“I’ll see to it,” George said. He didn’t think there would be any arguments about the agreement he’d struck. They still had a place to go, after all. Four more people, who were armed and supplied, wouldn’t make a difference, and it might help.

Dara reached out and George took her hand, shaking it before they turned away and headed to their own people, to spread the news.

* * *

As George made his way towards the area where all the vehicles had parked, he stopped only long enough to set a few guys to watch for more infected. He didn’t want to get ambushed while he was laying out the facts to all the members and their families.

Most of the people were out of their trucks and campers by now, standing clustered by the largest RV, where his wife Clarice was handing out bottles of water. George decided that was a good a place as any, so he gathered people as he went.

“Listen up, everybody,” he said, waiting until the noise had settled down and his people were focused on him. “I know we’d said we wouldn’t be helping people on the road, that we’d take care of our own, first.

“I couldn’t go by and ignore what was going on here, though. Good people needed our help, and I’m not sorry about that at all.”

There was some muttering around the edges, and George could guess who it was coming from. But those members didn’t have many backers, so he let it go. Most of the group was nodding, smiling.

“So, I was talking to those nice folks back there, and it turns out that one of the couples actually own the hunting camp we were heading for.”

George put up his hands to quell the upset club members, and after a moment they quieted down.

“I explained what we’d planned, and how we needed a safe place, and they’ve agreed to let us join them. They feel—and I’m with them on this—that there’s more safety in numbers in their situation, there only being four of them. So we’ve agreed to some basic rules, and I know you all will think I’ve done the right thing.”

“What rules?” someone shouted out.

George looked for the speaker, but he couldn’t put a name to the voice. “First of all, Dara and Ted—they’re the property owners—have final say over any decisions about the property, and any rules that are made.”

There was some chatter at that, but it soon faded as the club waited for him to go on.

“Secondly, we’ll be setting up a form of representative government, where everyone will have their say in whatever rules we come up with.

“Thirdly, while we’re on the road, Dara and I will be in charge. We’ll decide on what’s best for all of us, until we reach the camp and get everyone settled. After that is when we’ll work on whatever leadership and rules we end up with.”

George gave the group the floor, and listened as they knocked the ideas around. Finally, all eyes turned to him, and he knew the decision had been made. He dusted his hands together, and smiled.

“Okay, then. How about we get this train moving again before we end up with more infected, or too many curious eyes following us?”

Chapter Nine

When Dara got back to where Ted, Janet and Connor were waiting, she filled them in on the details of her agreement with George.

“I know it might be a bad idea,” she explained. “But they know all about the hunting camp anyway. They’d been planning to go there for days, and they have their club members and families packed up. They’ve left their homes, families, jobs. There’s nowhere else for them to go.”

Connor was frowning like his brows were trying to meet up with his chin, but he didn’t say anything. It was a miracle, Dara felt, that he could hold his tongue so well. Someone must have taught him to hold things in unless he was in the best position. Probably with a belt.

With the motorcycle club so close, and her with a gun in her hand, she knew he realized he wasn’t top dog here. Yet. She still didn’t trust the man as far as she could spit.

“I understand,” Janet said. She gave Dara a small smile that darted across her lips and disappeared almost as quickly as it came.

“I’m glad. I had a good talk with the group’s leader, George. He seems like a good man, and frankly, I think we need more people. If we had to defend ourselves, four of us won’t be enough, and Ted isn’t at his best right now.”

Connor snorted at that, but didn’t say anything. Dara let it go. Ted was going through a phase right now, what with all the stress and excitement, but once she got him settled in at the camp and resumed his therapy, people were going to be surprised. The old Ted was still there, and he would come back.

Then Connor would have someone just as tough as he thought he was to go up against. Dara was betting on Ted to come out on top of that fight.

Well, that was a battle for another day. It was going to be soon, but there were enough things to deal with right now, so Dara moved on.

“George and I both agree we need to get going as soon as possible, before more infected come. And, we’ve got an audience now. I don’t want to have to answer two many questions about where we’re going, or what our other plans are. I think it’s best to keep that to ourselves.”

Janet nodded, and even Connor gave grudging grunt of agreement.

“I’m going to get Ted settled in the van, and then I think we should move out. If one of you will return the room keys, we can be on the road in a few minutes, if our friends up there are ready.”

Connor surprised her by taking her room key and turning away towards the motel office. He gave Janet a little shove as he went by.

“Get the tarp tied down tight, and be ready. I ain’t waiting on you, even if the others will.”

Janet just put her head down and began pulling the tarp tight before threading the strap through a slot on the truck’s side.

Dara watched for a minute before turning away to see to Ted. She didn’t know much about Janet, or why she was in the relationship with Connor, but if she was any judge, things were shifting around in the brain under that pale blond hair, and Connor wasn’t going to like how it all worked out.

She just hoped they could all live through it when the eruption came.

* * *

“Aw, hell no!” Connor said, slamming his hand against the truck’s tailgate after he’d returned from the motel office. “No way am I going to go along with this. Those bikers will just shoot us in our sleep, and take our stuff. They’ll probably keep you and Dara alive, for a while, though.”

Janet dropped her head and bit back a sigh. Why did he have to be so hard-headed?

“I know, Connor. But it wasn’t my decision to make. Besides, they already know about the camp. They were heading there when they saw we were in trouble.”

“Bullshit. We could have handled it. Wasn’t that many zombies.” Connor spit against the peeling paint on the motel’s wall. “Now I have to deal with a bunch of motor head crooks and the niggers.”

Janet couldn’t hide the wince when Connor said the word. She’d never gotten used to how freely the man used all sorts of insults and hateful words when talking about other people.

Connor stared at her, his eyes narrowed as he studied her face. “Just like I thought. You’re just a damned nigger-lover. Probably can’t control yourself, you slut. Do you want to put your face in Ted’s crotch? I don’t think he’d have much for you, the shape he’s in, but you’d suck it anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“Jesus, Connor! Why do you have to talk like that? Ted’s like a child. Just because I want to help him and Dara doesn’t mean anything. Or have you forgotten that they own the place we’re running to?”

Connor raised a hand to slap her, before he remembered they had a growing audience as more guests woke and came to check out all the commotion.

“I ain’t forgot anything, you bitch. I had some plans about all that, until that black bitch went and invited that group of assholes. Now that’s all gone to shit, and to top it off my bitch of a girlfriend has forgotten how to behave.”

Janet thought her heart was going to pound right out of her chest. She was surprised at how scared she was at this moment, with Connor’s hand raised. The look on his face told her there would be payback for her later, and it was going to be bad.

After all these years, she’d gotten accustomed to her boyfriend’s behavior, his casual racism and disdain for women. It didn’t really register any more, but something had changed, she realized. What it might be, she couldn’t be sure; maybe the threat of death at the hand of some pandemic scared her far more than Connor ever had.

He was just a man. She could deal with him, could understand him, on a basic instinct level. But whatever this thing was, this disease that was turning ordinary people into walking, ravening beasts, that she didn’t understand.

An image of the biker who’d offered to help with Ted flashed in her mind. She could clearly see the compassion in his eyes when he looked at Ted. A look that didn’t change when he saw her.

Janet felt a flush of shame, because it seemed the biker had seen all the sordid history of her life in that one look. She bit her lip and pushed that memory away.

She couldn’t let herself think about another man. It was too dangerous. If Connor guessed she had even spent one second thinking about that biker, the man was as good as dead. And he wouldn’t be the first man who’d looked at her in a way Connor didn’t like, and paid for it.

None of that mattered now. She needed to get Connor to agree to stay with the newly expanded group. She didn’t want to end up alone with him, looking for another place to go, to be safe.

“I thought you liked bikers?” The words were out of her mouth before she thought about how he would react. God, she needed to focus, or she was going to get herself killed before the day was out.

“I like real bikers, the kind who would have put a bullet in that black bitch’s head before letting her tell them what they were going to do. Bikers like that would have killed ol’ Ted where he sat, shitting himself in that damned chair.”

Connor chuckled at that imagery. His eyes glazed over, and his hand began tapping his gun holster where he’d strapped it on his hip. It wouldn’t surprise her if he was getting a hard-on, just thinking about it. Janet shuddered.

“Well, it wasn’t our place to decide what to do. Dara and Ted were nice enough to let us come along, so we can either stay with them, or go out on our own.”

Connor slammed the side of the truck again, and growled with frustration. He knew she was right, but he didn’t want to admit it. Janet waited him out, watching as he worked through the problem, searching for another way. When he couldn’t find one, he gave a huge sigh.

“Well, fine, then. But as soon as there’s one problem, I’m out. Nigger tells me to do some dirty job she thinks she’s too good for, and I might put one between her monkey eyes before I go.”

Without a glance at her, Conner strode over to the delivery truck, unlocking the door and pulling himself up into the cab. The engine started with a deep rumble, echoed by the motorcycles just up the access road as they roared to life.

Janet finally released the pent up breath she’d been holding and loosened her grip on the truck’s key ring. For a minute, she was afraid Connor might snap, and pull out his gun. If he had, she knew he would save her for last, make her watch as he shot Dara and Ted.

She glanced over the truck’s cab at the bikers as they began moving slowly towards them, waiting to follow Dara’s small group back up onto the highway.

Maybe George and his friends would take Connor out before he did any damage, though. She had the strangest feeling that this was one biker club that wouldn’t take kindly to watching innocent people get gunned down.

She couldn’t help the happy feeling that thought gave her, or the little smile that lit up her face.

* * *

Micah Cavanaugh slicked back his hair before putting his helmet back on. While they’d waited for George and the woman—Dara—to come to an agreement, the light breeze had mostly dried the sweat. It had felt good to sit for a while without the constant vibration of his bike between his thighs.

After settling the helmet, he happened to glance over to the old pickup truck where the blond was about to get into the cab. His fingers stopped trying to fasten the chin strap when she looked over the cab top and smiled.

The brief stretch of lips turned her from a drab, meek woman into a beautiful goddess. Micah could only sit, stunned, as something flared in his heart. He couldn’t explain it, but if someone were to ask him, he would have only been able to say one thing: there was the woman for him.

He felt like he was under a spell as he watched the woman turn away and get into the truck. He could faintly hear the engine start, and watch as she pulled out behind Dara’s old moving van. He knew the food warehouse truck was driven by the other man in the group, who was probably her husband.

And that was the thing that finally got him moving, before the club left him behind. She was spoken for. It didn’t look like a happy relationship, but that wasn’t his business. He was going to stay far away from her, and mind his own business.

It didn’t matter how much the thought hurt his heart. He couldn’t have her, so that was that. With a sigh, he turned the key and gunned the engine before turning out into his place among the other bikers. There was a long road ahead of them, and he needed to focus.

Within minutes, the motel was behind them, and the club was rolling towards their new home. They’d be sharing it with Dara, Ted and the two others, but that was okay. Micah didn’t mind having new people join up, though some of the club members had expressed rather different opinions.

All he wanted was a safe place where they could ride out whatever this disease was. Most of the others felt the same way. They had their families to think of, children to protect. Micah was alone, having lost his close family years before, but he understood how they felt.

You took care of your own, you watched your brothers’ backs, and you did what it took to survive. That was what his older brother had always said, right up to the day an IED took out his convoy in Iraq. Nine soldiers survived because Roy had their backs. They came home to their families, messed up, but alive. It didn’t matter that Roy came home in a body bag. He’d lived his code, and Micah was proud of him.

Now Micah did his best to follow in his brother’s footsteps. He’d joined the motorcycle club to find the same kind of fellowship Roy had found in the Army. He wanted a gang of brothers to watch his back, friends to joke with and in some small way, a replacement family for the one he’d lost.

And he’d gotten that. It was probably the best decision he’d ever made, joining the club. All he’d needed but hadn’t gotten was someone to share a more personal relationship with. He knew the right woman was out there, he just hadn’t found her yet.

Micah’s mind kept straying to the blond in the pickup, somewhere up the road ahead of him. He didn’t even know her name, didn’t know anything about her at all. What kind of work she did, where she’d gone to school.

Why she was with an asshole like that guy.

He shook his head and laughed, the rushing wind throwing it back in his face. He could find out all of that soon enough, if he wanted. It wouldn’t be hard, with everybody living so closely together at the camp.

The thing he had to convince himself of was would getting the answers be worth coming up against the asshole?

Chapter Ten

The newly expanded group of travelers stopped at noon for a much-needed rest and a meal. An old rest area served them well enough, though the bathrooms had been boarded over and there was little else to show the place had once welcomed the weary occupants of countless vehicles.

Though they had made good time, considering the late start the newest members had gotten, George was reluctant to stop. Something in the air was making him antsy, urged him to keep riding. Just keep riding.

But, many of the families of his club had children and elderly people who needed to stop and walk around. They all needed bathroom breaks, with most going off behind the old restroom building to find some privacy for their needs since there weren’t any working facilities.

While everyone got a turn to relieve themselves, several of the women and men got out small grills and coolers of food, and soon the smell of burgers began to drift around. Stomachs began to grumble, and before long a line had already formed so hungry men, women and children could take care of their other urgent need.

George got Clarice settled with some food on a folding chair he’d brought out of their RV. He laid out her insulin so she could take her dose of the drug that kept her alive. He sat and watched until she’d dialed up the amount needed, after testing her blood with a small meter.

It worried him that they didn’t have nearly enough medicine for her, even after using every source he could come up with. It was just a matter of time until she ran out, or the insulin went bad. The guy he’d bought a year’s supply from assured him it was stable, and would last far beyond the printed expiration date, especially if it was kept cold and stable.

But that was only a year’s worth. They’d gotten a six month supply from her doctor, and another from a pharmacist who was on the shady side and sold drugs from his store for extra cash. So, two years. Clarice probably had only two years.

He didn’t know what he’d do if things hadn’t been fixed before then. He couldn’t face living without the love of his life.

“Don’t think about it, Bear.”

George snapped back to the present and looked at Clarice. She was tucking the injector away in the case where she kept her daily diabetic needs, but she was watching him from behind a fringe of hair.

“I can’t help it, baby girl. We both know what will happen if you don’t have the insulin, and we don’t have anything like enough.”

Clarice bit her lip. Her husband was right. It wasn’t enough. She knew that better than anyone. But it was more than a lot of people probably had right now, if the last news reports they’d seen had any truth behind them.

“I’m just not going to think about that, George. If I do, I’ll fall apart and you don’t need to be dealing with that right now, will everything that’s going on.”

She put her hand on her husband’s and gave it a squeeze. “So, tell me about the people you saved this morning. Do you think they’ll fit in with our people, or that ours will fit in with them, since they own the land?”

George looked out over the picnic area where most of the group had set up chairs and were talking and eating. From here, he would say things looked great, but he knew looks could be deceiving.

“I think things will work out. Dara seems like a reasonable woman, and so does Janet. Ted’s a little out of it, because of the accident—.”

“Poor man,” Clarice inserted softly.

“Yeah, he got a bum deal there. But he’ll come out of it, or so Dara says. The only one I’m worried about is that Connor dude. He’s trouble on two legs, that one.”

Clarice nodded in agreement. “I overheard Micah muttering something about an asshole. I guess he was talking about Connor.”

George looked surprised. “He was? Did Micah have a run-in with him?”

“No, I think it was more like just the attitude,” Clarice said, thoughtful. “I think he beats on Janet. He’s sure hard on her, at any rate. Maybe Micah saw something like that, and it rubbed him the wrong way.”

People were starting to get up and move around, cleaning up and repacking after the much-needed rest and food. George sat for a while longer, holding Clarice’s hand and thinking. Finally he got up and pulled his wife to her feet.

“After we get cleared here, I’m going to have a word with Micah. I don’t want there to be any trouble, which means he’s going to have to leave those two alone and let them do whatever it is they do.”

“Good luck with that. You know Micah doesn’t take kindly to men who abuse women. He saw enough of that in his life.”

Her husband just shrugged, and Clarice knew George was afraid his friend was going to get in the middle of something he shouldn’t. Nothing but bad news was going to come from it, he was sure.

* * *

She could feel his eyes on her, watching every move she made, adding up every bite of food she put in her mouth. And she knew what he was thinking: she keeps that up, and she won’t just be a slut, she’ll be a fat slut.

One thing Connor had made clear, back in those golden days when he was still wearing his human face and she still thought she’d found herself a good man, was that he didn’t like fat women. His definition of fat pretty much excluded everyone with more meat on their bones than a survivor from a concentration camp.

Janet had spent the last five years whittling down her frame until she couldn’t go any lower without falling over dead. There had been one period, early in the relationship, when she had actually passed out at work.

Despite her protests, her boss had called 911, and she’d ended up in the hospital, spending hours talking to doctors and psychiatrists until she convinced them it was just an overly enthusiastic attempt to diet before her high school reunion.

She was thin enough now to be acceptable to Connor’s tastes, for the most part. He still reveled in calling her a sloppy pig, a heifer, and the like. It amused him to pinch her ass during sex, and comment about pulling out his knife and trimming the fat.

Like many of the things she’d endured since she met Connor, Janet had learned to let the remarks and physical punishments slide over her like an arctic wind. It hurt, but it did her no favors to let him see it. Adaptation was survival.

That Janet was even thinking about the issue at all said something about the weird feelings she’d been having ever since she watched that first news report and learned that the world was taking an express train to crazy town. She’d stood in the kitchen, sipping hot coffee and saw madness taking over the rest of the world, and for once she didn’t feel guilty.

Something else that had been messing with her hard-won stability was that biker guy. Micah Cavanaugh. Ever since she’d looked into his mossy green eyes, she couldn’t get him out of her thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. She’d had to fall back on all of her old coping mechanisms so she could seem like her old self around Connor.

It was a wonder to her why she even thought about him at all. Living with Connor had killed any interest in other men years before. She never paid any of them the slightest bit of attention, if when he wasn’t around, out of fear he would somehow know that she’d let even the tiniest spark out.

“Aren’t you done, yet? Do you want to get fat, you stupid bitch?”

Conner’s mocking voice jerked Janet from her thoughts, and for a moment she could only stare up at him, towering above her. She shut her mouth with a snap and glanced down at the plate in her lap. A half-eaten hamburger and the handful of chips didn’t take up half the space.

Her stomach rumbled.

“No, I’m done. I was just waiting for everyone to be ready to leave.”

“What, so you can help clean up? Like it matters with this place. Just toss that shit and get your ass in the truck. I’m ready to go as soon as they lazy ass slackers get their shit together.”

Janet didn’t question him, just got up to toss her plate into a rusted can the others were using to gather up their trash. Connor snorted and slapped it from her, sending the paper circle and food flying.

“I told you, just drop it. You never learn. When I say something, you do it.”

Janet winced and cringed away, her hand stinging from his blow.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” She hated the way her voice came out more like a whimper than that of a grown woman. Out of the corner of her eye she could see some of the biker club members staring at them. She didn’t want anything to get started, so she straightened up and lifted her chin.

“See, that’s your problem. You don’t think. Why I put up with you, I’ll never know. Even the sex isn’t worth it.”

Janet just nodded. Connor stared at her for a minute, as if debating whether to escalate things further, but it seemed as if he didn’t want to start anything in front of the others.

He began walking away, tossing his next words back over his shoulder. “Get your ass in the truck. If these yahoos don’t get moving, we’ll go without them. I’m tired of waiting.”

* * *

George had to put a hand on Micah’s shoulder and clamp down hard when Connor slapped the food out of Janet’s hand. The boy had been one second away from jumping that asshole, which would not have been a good thing. Connor was armed, and with his temper, George didn’t think it would take much for him to pull it and use it.

“Steady, son,” he whispered. “Hold off for a minute. She’s not hurt.”

“Not yet,” Micah muttered back. “It’s just a matter of time before he loses it completely. I don’t know what she’s put up with before, but I’m not going to let him beat her and do nothing. He treats her like a dog.”

“Worse than a dog,” George agreed.

Micah turned towards the club leader. “Why do women put up with shit like that?” His voice was pleading, and George knew he was looking for answers that nobody but Janet could give him.

“I don’t know. Lots of reasons, some of which the woman doesn’t usually understand herself. Maybe one day, you can ask her. But not today.”

Micah sighed and watched as Janet followed behind Connor, heading to where they’d parked their trucks. She kept her head down, eyes focused on the ground, and he knew it was because she was ashamed. But it should be Connor who was ashamed, and one day, Micah vowed, that bastard was going to get what was coming to him.

When the couple had disappeared beyond of the club’s RVs, Micah heaved a deep, sad sigh and turned towards George. The older man had a look of sympathy that he quickly masked under a neutral expression.

“We good?” he asked Micah.

It took a minute, but finally the other man nodded. “Yeah. We’re good. But don’t think I’m going to forget about this guy, or not keep track of what he does. I intend for him to be gone, as soon as possible.”

“The thing about that is, most times the woman isn’t going to appreciate you interfering. She’s as likely to blame you for breaking them up as to thank you for saving her.”

“Hell, I know that,” Micah said, eyes blazing. “I’m not planning on being some Prince Charming, riding in the rescue the fair maiden on my trusty Harley. That dude is bad news, not just for her, but for all of us.

“You know damn well, if he gets the chance he’ll put a bullet in all of us, but especially Dara and Ted. He’s made no secret about how he feels about them, or our own members that don’t meet his lily-white standards.”

George had seen how Connor had watched as the black and Latino members had worked around the area, setting up chairs and getting the food out for everybody. The narrow-eyed, thoughtful look had told George all he needed to know about the man. This was somebody you watched your back when you were around him, and took extra care when you weren’t.

George had once worked with a woman who was partially deaf. She’d taught him some sign language, and how to read lips. He wasn’t that good at either, but he could do the latter well enough to watch Connor mouthing the “n” word, and other derogatory terms.

And not just against the minority members of the club, but also as he looked at the women in the group. Like he was grading livestock at an auction, deciding which he would bid on.

The club members could take care of themselves, especially after he gave them a heads up. Heck, most of the women were as capable, if not more so, of taking care of themselves. But some were more vulnerable, and George decided he’d have a word with everyone, make sure they were looking out for any trouble.

With a final clap on Micah’s shoulder, George led the younger man towards the rest of the group.

“I’ll have a few words with the others, and you watch your step. That’s all we can do, until he shows his ass.

“Right now, I think it’s about time we got this show back on the road.”

Chapter Eleven

All Connor could think about as he got himself settled behind the wheel of the delivery truck was that something was going on in Janet’s head. She’d been absent half the time he tried to talk to her, mooning about like a stupid kid.

He didn’t know what was going on, but she’d been acting weird ever since the news started talking about the sickness going around the world. It was probably her dim brain trying to figure it out, he reasoned, but it was getting on his nerves. He was tired of having to remind her of stuff she should be doing, like watching what she ate and concentrating on keeping up with their stuff.

He didn’t like how she spent so much time with that black bitch, either. Like she was trying to suck up to her, get in good with her. With a nigger.

It chapped his hid. He had to put up with them at work, because half the place was niggers and wetbacks, and the other half was simpering fags, but he didn’t have to be friends with them.

Of course, when he thought about it, Janet getting in good with the black bitch might not be a bad thing. They needed to watch out for that dammed gang Dara had joined up with, make sure they didn’t get too cozy with the people who claimed to own the hunting camp. He had his doubts about that, but it didn’t do any good to think about it. Not now. Once they got there, and had things running pretty good, he had some ideas about how the leadership of their little group was going to change.

And then there was that biker dude. Connor had got his number when the guy went over to Janet and Dara at the motel and started smiling and being all helpful. He was too damned good-looking, for one thing. He was tall, with wide shoulders and slim hips, just the kind of thing dumb ass women drooled over. Add a pretty-boy face and a smarmy attitude, and watch the bitches drop their panties.

As far as he could tell, Janet had taken no notice of the dude, which was good for her. It saved him having to reinforce the lesson about having a lying, cheating mind. Not that it would have bothered him, but he would have had to rough her up too much, and he didn’t want any shit from that holier-than-thou crowd.

Connor had already decided he was going to spend some time getting the fat sow’s mind focused on her job, which was to do what he said, when he said it, if not sooner. He’d make sure they set up alone at the camp, and then he could concentrate on making sure Janet remembered her place. After he was done with her, she wouldn’t soon forget who was boss.

He shifted a bit, pulling at his jeans to ease the tightness in his groin. Damn, but he was going to have a good time setting his bitch in her place.

Connor started the truck and let it warm up while waiting for the rest of their happy little group to finish up being good citizens and cleaning up the mess they’d made getting lunch. From where he sat, he could see the plate he’d dropped, and the one he’d knocked from Janet’s hand.

He snickered as one of the cows from the motorcycle club gathered up his trash and put it in the old trash can that had been left when the state cleared out of the rest stop. Fucking damn sheep. Must have seen too many of those commercials with the old red skin crying over pollution.

When the line of vehicles finally started to move, Connor laughed.

Damn, but life was good.

* * *

Janet pulled into line in front of Connor, being careful not to get too close to any of the other vehicles, nor to scrape the sides of the old pickup on the overgrown bushes that lined the access road. The truck might be a rusted, faded junk heap, but Connor would have her head if there was the slighted scratch on it while she was driving.

This was another thing that irked her about the man. He could drive like a maniac, backing into cars in parking lots, driving the truck down the worse roads he could find while looking for places to illegally hunt or fish. He could bring it home covered in mud and bird poop, and let it sit for days.

But let a leaf fall on it while she was around, and there was hell to pay. It was like everything that happened to that damned truck was her fault.

And now that she was thinking clearly for the first time in years—was actually thinking at all, much to her surprise—Janet realized that something deep within her had indeed changed.

For the first time, she was thinking about life after Connor. Since his little show of authority back at the rest area, the fear that she’d felt had begun to drift away. It was like a fog had lifted from her eyes, and she knew that what Connor wanted didn’t matter to her any more.

For all she cared, he could take a flying leap off a tall building. He could do a Wile-E Coyote and drop an Acme anvil on his head. He could blow himself up with an atomic bomb, and she’d be standing on the sidelines, sticking her tongue out.

Bleep-bleep!

Janet laughed. The sound shocked her, like something alien blasting her ears. She drove for a little while, watching the RV in front of her as the road spooled away like a worn ribbon.

Suddenly, she was giggling, snorting and grinning. She looked up at the rear view mirror, seeing the almost mad happiness that lit up her eyes. Then she had a full-blown laughing attack. It lasted a long time, slowly withering away, leaving behind a small contented smile.

Janet knew then that Connor’s hold over her was broken. All those years under his thumb, in front of his fists, being the target of his wrath, had flipped into the past. Like wrapping up the pain and humiliation and tossing into a deep well. He might still control her outwardly, but inside she was free.

She was free in spirit, and at the first opportunity, she would be free of the physical shackles that were her life with Connor.

And all it had taken was for the world to end.

* * *

Dara was going over some vocabulary exercises with Ted, playing a game to help him recover more of his verbal skills when she saw the motorcycles coming towards her. They were going fast, and without thinking she put her foot on the brake and began to slow.

Something must be up, if the bikers were speeding back the way they’d just come. Looking in her side view mirrors, she could see that the others were slowing as well, and by the time the bikers had reached Dara, she had the window down. Her stomach was trying to tie itself into a knot, wondering what trials lay ahead. Things had been going well, despite their run-in with the infected at the motel that morning.

They were so close to the turn off that led up into the foothills, where they’d planned to stop for their last night on the road. Now she worried that something was going to keep them from making that turnoff.

The big biker leader—Big Bear, Dara recalled with a smile—parked just beyond the moving van and came up to her window. His face was drawn in tight, eyes squinting and lips turned down.

Definitely bad news, then. Dara resigned herself to having yet another decision to be made before the day was done.

George walked up, grabbed the frame for the side mirror and leaned in. He gave Ted a quick look, but then focused on Dara.

“Things aren’t looking too good up ahead,” he began. “There’s a really small town, hardly more than a wide spot in the road. Looks like something nasty went down there. Half of it’s burned out, and the other half is filling up with the infected.”

Dara’s eyes widened. When she had first planned the trip to the hunting camp, she’d seen that going through the town was the shortest way to get up into the foothills. She’d thought that the small size and relatively remote location on the old highway would mean less possibility of running into trouble.

Judging by the look on George’s face, trouble was exactly what they would have.

“We should look for a way around it, then,” Dara said. She couldn’t remember there being another route that wouldn’t take them miles out of their way.

George nodded. “We should stop here look at a map. I’ve got one in the RV, if you don’t.”

“I’ve got one here. Let me park, and we can see if there’s some way, something I might have missed.”

“I’ll get everyone else to pull up and get off the road as well, in case anyone comes up behind us in a hurry. No need to have a wreck on top of everything else.”

Dara gave him a curt dip of the head and put the van in gear. She eased up onto the wide dirt verge that was all that ran alongside this old road. There was a shallow ditch, but it was far enough from the pavement that she had plenty of room to park the van and still not block the two lane highway.

George made his way down the line of vehicles, directing them to do the same as she’d done, and soon the rag-tag collection of trucks, campers and RVs were safely off the road. Those on bikes filled in empty spots, or grouped themselves in a knot behind all the vehicles.

When he got back to Dara at the van, he pulled out a bandanna and swiped at the sweat and dust that coated his face and beard.

“Damned if it ain’t hot for this time of year,” he commented when he saw Dara watching him.

“Yes, unseasonably hot. I’ve got some water bottles in the van. Why don’t you grab a couple before we get started?”

“Thanks, that would be great. You know, we could go back to my RV, sit inside with the AC on. I know I’d sure feel a lot better, and I’d bet Ted would, too.”

Dara smiled. “I’m sure he would. I wouldn’t mind a little cool air myself. The van didn’t have air conditioning, and I didn’t think it was worth the money to get it installed, since I hadn’t planned to be on the road during a heat wave.”

George chuckled at that. “I guess we can blame El Nino for that. The news was full of how it was going to affect the winter.” He turned serious. “At least, that’s what the news was, before the infection.”

“That and the election,” Dara agreed as they started walking towards George’s RV. “Wonder what’s happened to all the politicians?”

“Knowing them, they’ve either run off and hid, or they’re in the same shape we are.”

“Now wouldn’t that be a kicker? The one percent fighting zombies, just like the rest of us.”

The two were still laughing at that thought when they arrived at the RV. Clarice gave them both a strange look, as if she was trying to figure out what could be the least bit funny about their current situation. George gave her a hug and explained why he and Dara needed to cool off.

“Why don’t I sit with Ted for a while, so you too can concentrate? I used to work with special needs children, so I know how to talk with people with all sorts of brain injuries.”

Dara looked at the other woman gratefully. “That would be wonderful. Ted likes to talk about all sorts of things. Ask him to show you his card collection. That will keep you busy for a while.”

“That sounds wonderful. What do you say, Ted? Want to come sit with me and show me your cards?” When Ted nodded happily, Clarice led him into the RV and settled him into the seating area beside the small dining table. Soon they were involved with talk about the cards Ted had been collecting. They weren’t anything special, just odd and end cards of various sorts he picked up wherever he found them. Playing cards, tarot cards, cards from old children’s games.

Once she saw that Ted would be distracted while she and George got to work, Dara spread her map out on the tiny table. “This is the latest map I could find. I checked it against Google Maps, and I couldn’t find anything that was different. When Ted and I were planning our trips up here, I looked for any way that took us around towns and cities. All I could find were old county roads, most of them gravel, or even dirt.”

George stared down at the map. His finger wandered over the surface until he found their location, just outside a tiny spot marked with a name in tiny print.

“Well, this is where we are now. The town we rode up on is about five miles west, so here,” he tapped it. “There’s nothing between here and there, no side roads at all. Only one or two driveways. If there’s another way, we’ll have to backtrack. That means going back to the motel, or further.”

Dara was shaking her head. “I’d rather not do that. Who knows how bad things have gotten since we left this morning?”

“I agree with you. It feels like a bad idea. Our best bet is to look for something we missed, some small country road we didn’t pay any attention to during the drive today.”

The two bent their heads over the map, each of them finding and tracing any possible route they could find. After several minutes of this, they both sat back and sighed.

“There just isn’t a way. If we go back to this place,” Dara poked her finger down. “That means hours lost, and then maybe fifty miles added onto that. We don’t even know if the road is passable.”

George was thinking as she spoke, lips pursed. He finally looked up and caught Dara’s gaze.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to go through.”

Chapter Twelve

Dara was near tears. This was exactly what she had feared running up against from the first day she’d seen the news reports. Being forced to make her way through a mass of infected people, without Ted’s strong will to help her.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, now that she had more people with her. She thought that meeting up first with Janet and Connor, and then with George and his group, might have been the luckiest thing that had happened to her since she’d learned Ted would eventually recover.

“It’s not going to be so bad,” George said, leaning forward to place a hand on hers. “We have weapons, and some experience dealing with these—people. We know what to expect. If we’re careful, everyone should come out of it just fine.”

Clarice had begun showing Ted around the RV, and Dara focused on his happy enthusiasm for a few moments. She was trying to get herself to the point she could possibly send these bikers into such danger. They did know how to handle themselves, but the thought of them being surrounded by infected people was enough to make her sick.

“We can put it up for a vote,” George said softly. “I don’t think we should, but that’s an option. If the majority votes to backtrack and take the other road, then that’s what we’ll do. Even if it takes us days longer to get to the camp, we’ll get there.”

Dara was shaking her head before the biker finished. She had a sinking feeling about the plan, but going backwards, losing time and risking someone else knowing about the camp and getting there first wasn’t an option.

“No, George. We have to push through. It’s the only way. I have a feeling we don’t have days to waste, with the speed this disease is spreading. If we wait much longer, we might find ourselves in worse trouble than we face now.”

Clarice had left Ted at the back of the RV, in the small bathroom. She’d come up to stand next to her husband without Dara realizing it.

“I think Dara’s right, dear. If it goes to a vote, that will take at least a couple of hours. Then we’d have to drive all that way back, until we got to that other road.”

Clarice put a hand on George’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze when he would have protested.

“I know you like to be a more democratic leader, and that’s great. But in this case, being a dictator is what’s best for everyone. You two need to go tell everyone now, and get the guys armed and psyched up.”

A deep rumble worked its way through George’s chest before bursting out into a hearty laugh. “Woman, what would I do without you around to talk sense to me?”

“Probably be in the arms of some floozy with illicit designs on your well-toned ass.”

Soon Dara had joined in the laughter, which caused Ted to come running from his explorations.

“What’s so funny, Dara? Did you tell a joke?”

“No, sweetie, we were just laughing about how funny life is sometimes.”

Ted eased around Clarice and came around to slip in beside Dara in the short bench. She put her arm around him and held him close for a minute. He’d already seen people shot dead in front of him once today. So far, he hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but she knew at some point there would have to be an explanation given.

It was what he might have to see as they pushed through the town that worried her now.

* * *

Dara and George had cooled off a bit more before they got up to gather together their combined group. Neither one of them wanted to have to spread the bad news, but it wasn’t something they could brush away like a pesky telemarketer. The people had to know what they were up against.

George went down the line, getting people out of their vehicles and directing them to the other side of the road, where they gathered in small groups and gossiped about what could be happening. Dara went up to get Janet and Connor, and the three of them joined the others and waited for George to tell all.

Dara and Ted had decided before they left the RV that he would do the talking, since he had the most people, and they were used to doing what he said. Dara thought the news about the destroyed town would be better coming from him, because he’d seen it.

“Okay, listen up, people,” George began. “You’ve probably heard most of what I’m going to tell you already, from your men who were with me. But I’m going to lay it out anyway, so nobody gets confused or doesn’t understand something.”

The big man looked around, making sure everyone was paying attention. He didn’t need to worry, because every eye was watching, even the kids had settled down and were waiting for him to continue.

“While we were scouting the road ahead, we came up on a really small town, hardly more than a main street that doubled as this highway right here.” George thrust a thumb behind him. “Nobody thought there’d be much going on, but it looks like something pretty bad happened there. A big fire, and maybe some gun fire, judging by the damage we saw before we hightailed it out of there.

“What’s the problem, Big Bear? Seems like it would be easy enough to get through, right?”

The voice had come from one of a newer club member’s family. George didn’t know them well, but he knew enough to know this wasn’t a trouble maker. And it was a fair question.

“I was getting to that, just not sure how to say it without panicking people. The problem is that whatever hit the town was really bad. There are infected people all over the place, wandering on the road and blocking the way.

“Dara and I have discussed the problem, and looked for another route around the town. But there isn’t one. Nothing that wouldn’t take days more travel, if the road is even passable.”

There was a lot of grumbling about that, with some voices raised to say it didn’t matter, they should go back, until they found another way. Dara kept shaking her head, listening to the rising tenor of the conversations, until she decided she’d had enough.

She stepped forward, in front of George. When people saw her standing there, there were calls for quiet. She waited until everyone had stopped talking.

“You all agreed that George and I would make the decisions while we’re on the road. We talked about this, went over every option we could see, and some that we couldn’t. There just isn’t any other way. We have to go through, and that’s all there is to say. Now, I think George wants to get with everyone on motorcycles and discuss his plan to clear the road. I’ll turn things over to him.”

When Dara stepped back, George cleared his throat. He was sore tired of all this talking. It would be better to face the horde of undead infected in the town than to have to keep talking to the angry, restless people that faced him.

“Okay, then. What I want to do is make sure every vehicle has at least one armed person besides the driver when we go through the town. Everybody needs to be inside, with windows up—” there was a moan at that. “I know it’s hot. But it shouldn’t be for long. Anybody with health issues, or little kids, we can make room in the RVs, which have better AC. It would probably be safer to have the children out of the way, any how.”

George paused for breath. “I want everyone on bikes to get their full leathers on. Gloves, chaps, whatever you have. I want you to make sure you have enough ammo, and that you can get to it.

“The bikes are going through first, just ahead of the trucks and stuff. We’ll split into two groups, and try to draw the infected away from the road itself. It doesn’t have to be far, just enough so that there’s a clear path for everybody to get through.”

There were heads nodding as the group listened closely. George was encouraged, and proud of his people. He ignored Connor’s sour face standing at the rear of the crowd. All that asshole had to do was drive his truck and keep from screwing things up.

“When we split up, we want to attract the infected people’s attention to us, to make them ignore anything else. Be careful, shoot if you have to, but get the road clear so the other vehicles to get through. Any questions?”

There mercifully weren’t any, and George clapped his huge hands together.

“Then let’s get on with it. Daylight’s wasting.”

And with that, the crowd dispersed. Within minutes, everyone was ready to go, and soon George was signaling the others on bikes to line up behind him, and then they were roaring up the road.

* * *

While he waited for his chance to pull back out onto the old highway, Connor’s brain was churning. News about the dead town had given him some ideas about what to do with Janet. Nothing concrete, nothing he would describe as a solid plan, just a little niggling thought that kept wiggling like a worm on a line.

He’d been biding his time, watching that pretty boy biker dude whenever he could. It hadn’t gotten past him that the dude couldn’t keep his eyes off Janet, even as she stood right beside Connor while that mountain of a man gave orders.

That was another one to keep an eye on, Connor mused as he pulled in behind his pickup truck and followed Janet down the road. The leader of that club was going to be trouble. He had a way of looking at Connor like he was dog shit on the bottom of those giant biker boots.

Nobody looked at Connor like that. Not anybody still alive, anyway. He’d put up with assholes like that when he was a kid, people like his own father, but as soon as he got big enough and mean enough, he’d learned how to fight. He got good at it, too, using his size, grievances and general bad attitude to his advantage.

The last guy who’d looked at Janet like a lovesick rabbit had ended up dumped into the river, and as far as Connor knew the bastard was floating in the Gulf of Mexico to this day. And it served him right, Connor muttered. Janet might not be much, but she was his, and she was going to stay that way.

At least until he was ready to get rid of her.

And that led his thoughts back to that little whisper of a plan he’d gotten while the biker giant had been talking about the town. That would be a good place to ambush somebody. Get them in the right situation, and the zombies would take care of the evidence for him. It would be the easiest thing he’d ever done.

Still, he was going to have to bide his time. He couldn’t get Janet out of the truck and into a deserted alley. There were too many people around, and he’d have no excuse to take her away. That damn black bitch wouldn’t allow it.

Well, she couldn’t read minds, so she had no way of knowing what Connor was thinking about. Once they got to the camp, and everybody got busy getting the place livable, he’d find a way to get Janet alone. Something that wouldn’t make anybody suspicious.

Up ahead, he could see the bikers split up into two groups, one going on either side of the road. He knew they were getting close to town, so he followed the lead of Dara and Ted in their old moving van and slowed down. They needed to give the bikers time to distract the infected, and then the convoy would move through, if the road cleared.

Connor had to admit, the big guy had a pretty good plan. The bikes were noisy, which should work to attract the infected people’s attention. They were fast and maneuverable in the close spaces of a town. If things went right, they would draw enough of the zombies away to let the convoy through. It was a small town, only a few blocks long.

Once they were through, and the bikers had met back up with them, then the group would push to get up the mountain and to the camp. They wouldn’t arrive until late, but it wouldn’t matter. Connor figured people would crash wherever they could.

He’d have to round up Janet, to keep her where she belonged, but that wouldn’t be a problem. She knew better than to defy him over anything.

Thoughts of having a night alone with Janet without the busybodies from the motorcycle club up his ass make Connor squirm on the seat. He’d been careful to not attract attention, but he needed to get laid, and tonight was going to be it. Janet could bite that pretty lip of hers all she wanted—an action he should probably start beating out of her, he thought idly. She was going to spread her legs tonight, or she’d live to regret it.

Or maybe not, he debated.

No, the part of his brain that kept him alive and out of jail, for the most part, warned him about doing anything around the club, and especially Dara. He had to play it smart, and not do anything that could land him in trouble with the likes of George. Connor knew that biker that had his eye on Janet would like nothing more than to administer a little Wild West justice on Conner.

His mind drifted back to that germ of an idea that kept growing inside his brain. Soon enough it would turn into a complete plan, and then he’d get rid of all his problems.

Just see if he didn’t.

Chapter Thirteen

The bikers gunned their engines and entered the smoking ruins of the town with a roar that reverberated like the inside of a jet engine. The effect on the wandering infected was instantly noticeable, as they started to turn and search blindly for the source of the sound.

Micah had a moment of panic when he saw how many of the undead had gathered in the area. It was a small town, and he wouldn’t have thought there could be that many people living there. It could have been that news of the spreading sickness had brought people from outlying farms and villages into town, in hopes of finding help.

He shrugged to loosen up his shoulders. The reason didn’t matter now. The town was halfway destroyed; there were what looked like thousands of infected people congregating along the main thoroughfare. Those people were a danger to his friends. His job was to get them moving, to clear the road for those following behind.

That’s what he had to focus on. He had to have his mind in the game, or he was going to be a danger to himself.

Micah shifted his bike towards the right side of the road, slowing down slightly and revving up the engine a little. He could see heads turning towards him, the mindless eyes of the undead somehow latching on to the sight of living flesh. Like sports fans doing a wave motion, the horde began to shift and follow the bikers.

As George had ordered, the bikers were leaving large gaps between themselves, trying to extend the effect of the noise and draw as many of the undead as possible. George called them zombies, in reference to popular culture, but to Micah they were still people. They might be dead, even if they could still move and think on some primitive level, but they were still people.

He didn’t like to think about what had happened to them, about the disease that had run rampant throughout the world. It had struck without a care for class, education, race or religion. The last reports he’d heard revealed that entire smaller countries had fallen, France and England were lost, and the rest of the world’s great nations were close behind.

Micah considered himself lucky, in that he seemed to have immunity from whatever this scourge was. He hadn’t had so much as a sniffle in years. He’d worked closely with people who showed symptoms and later died, and yet he went on.

The vagaries of fate? Or was there some larger plan in play, some stage upon which he would walk and complete the role he was assigned?

Micah didn’t know. Maybe he had survived to be there when Janet came into the picture. She needed someone to help her, to save her. He didn’t know if he was the one to do it, but he hoped it was the reason he was there when George made the decision to race to the rescue at the motel.

At any rate, Micah knew he had to put his mind on the current task. He wouldn’t do anyone any good if he ended up dead in this no-name blip on the road. With another rev of the engine, he swerved and wove back and forth to attract as many of the infected as he could, and began to pull them away from the highway, working them towards one of the side streets.

George had given them an idea of the layout, warning the bikers to avoid several areas that lead to dead alleys and streets blocked with debris from the burnt buildings. Micah had fixed as much detail as he could in his mind, and settled on one street that would lead out of the downtown district into a small neighborhood.

If he kept his head about him, he could get the infected moving in the right direction, and then double back through the residential streets and meet up with the back of the group’s convoy. With any luck, the infected wouldn’t have time to reach them before the last of the vehicles had cleared the town.

* * *

From her place in the caravan of mis-matched vehicles, Janet couldn’t see what the bikers were doing, but she could hear them. The motorcycle engines were revving and growling, echoing down what remained of the town. If the plan worked, the road would soon be cleared of at least the majority of the zombies that George had told them filled their path.

She eased up on the brakes as the old moving van Dara was driving began to move. That must mean that the road was clearing. Janet glanced at the side view mirror to see if Connor had noticed. She knew he was watching her, even closer than he usually did. It was hard to ignore, since he was always by her side, or had angry eyes focused on her if he couldn’t be there.

It was maddening, really. Before this plague had struck, she hadn’t even thought about it anymore. Had let Connor’s control run her life, and his anger slide over her like oil on water. She’d long stopped caring that her every movement, every thought was guided by what Connor said. What Connor wanted.

Never what she’d wanted. Never what she’d needed.

Now that she’d been freed from the cocoon she’d lived in for years, she couldn’t imagine letting herself live like that any longer.

As Dara began picking up speed while the sound of motorcycle engines faded, and Janet followed, her thoughts turned to Micah. He was among those trying to save the group, up there with the undead. What was happening to him? Was he safe? She had no way of knowing. Janet could only hope he was being careful.

Why, she really couldn’t say. It wasn’t that she felt anything romantic for him. She wasn’t interested in starting a relationship so soon after her awakening, but she had to admit she was intrigued by the quiet biker. He had a story to tell, and someday she wanted to hear it.

She had a feeling that day would come soon. Even tucked up close to Connor earlier, while George laid out the plan for getting through the town, she’d felt the man’s eyes on her. She had stolen looks at him as well, when she thought Connor wasn’t paying attention. It was a risk, but her curiosity about Micah was too strong to overlook the danger she was courting.

Micah didn’t seem to fit her idea of a motorcycle gang member, but then, neither did any of the others. Even “Big Bear”, George Andropolous, was more like a football coach than a biker leader. The whole group—even those George had admitted had criminal pasts of one kind or another—struck her as far less dangerous than the man she’d spent the last five years with.

Which was funny, but somehow reassuring. It said that her fears about other men were largely unfounded. Janet had let herself accept a lot of what Connor did as just the way men treated women. Deep in her mind, she knew that wasn’t so, but time and enough blows tended to override reason. Thinking that another man would be different had come close to breaking her, once before.

Much safer to accept that this was how things were.

Janet’s dark thoughts were broken by the realization that Dara had begun to pull too far ahead of her. The plan had been to not let great distances break up the group, in case more infected strayed into the area and surrounded someone.

Connor’s angry blast on his horn made her jump, and she goosed the pickup until she had closed most of the distance. A glance in the side view mirror showed that Connor had kept up with her, and just past him she could see the rest of the vehicles matching speed and separation.

Janet couldn’t help the lurch her stomach took. Connor would be pissed when they stopped again, and he’d make sure she paid for her inattention. It made her angry. It wasn’t like it had been much of a gap, after all, and they hadn’t even made it inside the town yet. She hadn’t done anything that would hurt anybody. It was just a few extra feet of empty space, for goodness sake.

Her lips pressed into a thin line, Janet turned her focus to watching the moving van ahead of her more closely. The lapse wouldn’t happen again.

* * *

Connor fumed as he watched Janet drift further behind the vehicle in front of her.

Couldn’t that bitch do anything right?

As much as he hated not being included in the planning of this little maneuver, he was determined to do what it took to make it through the dead town. How could he follow through on his own plans, if he let that stupid cow screw everything up?

He sighed and thought about cold beer. He could use a couple right now, to get him through this rough spot. A beer, or maybe a fat joint rolled just right. He could feel how great that would taste, burning his nostrils as he held the smoke in as long as possible. Let these young punks vape their shit. He liked going old school.

The memory of the last weed he’d smoked was strong, almost strong enough to mellow him out just by thinking about it. He cracked the window of the truck just enough to let a little fresh air in, just as he would have if he were actually partaking. To hell with orders. He needed a breeze.

While he chilled and thought about better times, which he hoped to be recreating very soon, Connor zoned out and turned to the thing uppermost in his mind: what to do about Janet and her pretty boy admirer. He refined his plan as they finally made it into the destroyed downtown area and he could finally get some actual details to work with.

Connor kept one eye on Janet, and took in the burned buildings on either side. There were places where parts or all of a building had fallen, creating interesting dead ends and places where it was conceivable to stage a zombie attack. It was a perfect battlefield for a paint ball battle. His mind was already planning where he would advance, or where he’d hold position. Where there was cover, and where he’d be a sitting duck.

Instead of paint ball, with guns that shot pellets filled with colored liquid that marked your targets as dead, he’d be playing with real bullets, and his opponents would be the swarms of walking, breathing undead people.

It excited him in a way few things had, and he couldn’t recall feeling this much anticipation in years. He hadn’t been in the military, having no need to serve nor pretend a patriotic fervor he could never feel.

But he’d been in his share of wars on the paint ball field, which to his mind was much more fun, and certainly more indicative of any expertise in military strategy. After all, he’d been in charge, he’d made the decisions about strategy and tactics. In the military, he would have been just another grunt following orders.

Planning out what was to come was certainly fun, but the best part was figuring out how to get Janet in the right position without her suspecting what was in store for her. The look on her face when she realized what was going to happen, that she was going to die and he was going to watch, would be priceless.

It was a memory that would sustain him for a long while, as he put the second part of his plan into place. He was going to get rid of Dara and Ted next, he decided. Or maybe he’d kill that Micah. The pretty boy. Connor would make it clear that messing with Janet, even just to look at her or say hi, in the most innocent way, had signed his death warrant.

Then he’d take out as many of the other bikers as he could, and offer the others a choice: join him, or get out. And if they wouldn’t leave, then he’d just kill them, too. What were a few more bloody corpses, after all.

The world was filled with them now.

Connor could tell the bikers had gotten further away, which meant they were far down the side streets now. They should have most of the infected people in the town out of the way, so the group should begin moving faster.

Almost as soon as the thought formed, the two vehicles ahead of him began to pull away, and he pushed harder on the gas pedal. He didn’t really care if anyone behind him made it through. The fewer that got to the hunting camp, the better. If he was lucky, some of the bikers would fall to the undead, which would make his job that much easier.

Connor watched the stores and offices sliding by as he followed Dara and Janet through the last of the little town. It didn’t take long, as they were ironically going the speed limit posted on the signs that lined the road. He had to laugh at that. Even with the world dying, they were still obeying laws that meant diddly squat in the new world order.

The rules that had governed civilized society before the infection had begun to spread were just words on paper, locked away forever. When he was done, Connor was going to be the new lawmaker. He would decide who lived and who died, and anybody who didn’t like it…

Well, the punishment for open discontent would be death.

Chapter Fourteen

The town was behind them, the danger forgotten as the group looked forward to getting to the camp and settling in for the night. It would be late by the time they arrived, and dark. Dara knew it was going to be another tiring job getting everyone parked and tents set up. They needed to eat, and they needed to rest.

It had been a tiring day, considering all she’d really done was drive. The stress of being responsible for so many others had stretched her nerves to the breaking point. She knew she couldn’t have done it without the help of the biker club’s leader. People seemed to follow him as a matter of course, which helped keep the dissent down, and made dealing with an already horrifying situation easier.

Dara was so glad to finally see the turn off to the mountains she nearly cried. They were almost there, so close now that she began to believe they would actually make it, despite the problems they’d had that day. She knew that people who hadn’t been able to get out of the cities and towns were either dead, or suffering terribly. Pity made her heart sore, but knowing she had gotten Ted out, had saved him, gave her the strength to push on.

The sun was setting as the group drove up the winding mountain road, and nearly behind the shortened horizon by the time she was the old, nearly invisible turnoff to the hunting camp. The last time she’d been up here, on one of their many trips to fix things up, she’d taken an old sign, the printing faded and unreadable but bright enough to see in low light, and nailed it to a tree just before the turnoff.

She’d had enough trouble finding the exit every time she and Ted had driven up here, that she felt there needed to be some kind of indicator, but she didn’t want to put something up that would scream “here we are” to anyone who might be passing by. Best to let people think there was nothing there, she decided.

George had nodded his approval when Dara had explained what she’d done, the sign he should be looking for. He’d been even more excited that she’d kept the turnoff as unkempt and unused as possible, even going so far as to throw dirt and pine needles over the area whenever they’d left to go back to the city.

It was George and Micah leading them up the road now, and they slowed enough to show the rest of the convoy where to make the turn. Dara eased the moving van into the small, dirt road and began the slow trek to the camp. The road was in such disrepair that it would be foolish to pick up speed now, when they were so close.

A breakdown, or a vehicle that got stuck, would keep the rest from making it all the way to the camp, and leave valuable material sitting around like a beacon. So she went as slow as she could and watched for pot holes in the glare of her headlights.

Ted was dozing, leaning against the window, when the van bounced and threw him away, only to land back in place and bump his head. He woke with a gasp, and looked around sleepily.

“Dara, are we home yet?”

“No, sweetie. We’re almost at the camp. Remember what I said about staying there for a while?”

Ted looked confused in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, but Dara didn’t have time to comfort and reassure him. He’d had to wait like everybody else, though it wouldn’t be long now. George and Micah had gone up ahead, to check things out and report back if there were any problems. She’d given him the key to the gate that still barred the entrance into the old camp so he could take a look around.

When she was the single headlamp heading back down the road towards her, Dara eased to a stop and rolled down her window. The bike pulled up close, and she could see it was Micah.

“Any problems?”

He shook his head. “Everything looks fine. George has the gate open, and he’s taking another look around. As far as we can tell, no one’s been up here since the last time you and Ted came up, so I guess we’re good to go.

“I’ve dropped some glow sticks on each side of the road, so there shouldn’t be any problems seeing where the edge is.”

Dara grinned at the young man, who in truth was just not much younger than she was. “Good idea. It gets awfully dark when there aren’t a ton of streetlights and buildings lit up.”

Micah gave her a grin and a nod, and headed back down the line of vehicles to pass on his tip about the glow sticks. Dara put the van back in gear, and began moving upwards, to the camp.

She was tired and weary, longing for a bed to collapse on. But for the night, she’d have to settle for a cot and whatever she could scrounge up for herself and Ted.

Tomorrow was plenty of time to begin the huge task of building a community.

* * *

George was waiting by the gate, having pulled it completely open now that the others were coming. He’d built a couple of fires so people could see where to park, so that everyone would be behind the gate and the small extra margin of safety it offered. Determined invaders wouldn’t be slowed down much by the gate, but he hoped it would be enough to warn them something was coming.

When Dara and Ted’s old moving van appeared, George grinned and waved it on. He knew the couple was near exhaustion, as were nearly everyone who’d begun this journey. His own people had been traveling for a couple of days longer than the four they’d met up with, and they were nearly as worn out. But they’d had the benefit of having relief drivers so they could make more miles every day.

But all that was behind them, the big biker reminded himself. They’d arrived safely at the camp, and there hadn’t been any need to remove squatters. No one had been lost on the journey, despite having run-ins with masses of the infected.

All in all, he felt pretty damn good about how things had turned out. He was sad about leaving his old life behind, and deeply missed the biker club’s real leader. He hoped that Joey and his family showed up within the next few days, and that they were all safe. His main worry now was getting Clarice settled in, and maybe finding a way to get more insulin for her.

George pulled the gate back across the road and made sure it was locked up tight. Then he made his way up to the hunting camp proper, picking up dying glow sticks as he went. If everything had gone right, the various trucks, campers and RVs would be sorted out, and there might even be a bite to eat before he crashed for what he hoped was a long, restful sleep.

* * *

When the new day dawned, a bright late-summer sun began to warm the cool night air. People began to rise and move about, getting their things unpacked so they could do a proper breakfast to celebrate reaching their new home.

Janet stood by the tailgate of Connor’s pickup, eyes closed and head tipped back as she let the sunlight warm her cheeks. Sleeping in the tent hadn’t been very restful, with the night being so much colder than when they’d been at a lower elevation.

She had gone without the stingy comfort of Connor’s warmth, because he’d curled up in his sleeping bag and turned his back on her with a grunt. It surprised her, because she’d been expecting to endure a few punches and a furious sexual encounter which would leave her aching and unsatisfied, as was their usual routine.

Instead, she’d gotten the cold shoulder, and had spent the night wrapped in a thin blanket, pressed up against the wall of their cheap tent. Despite the chill, she’d had the most restful sleep she could remember.

Janet’s stomach began to rumble, and the thought of a big, hot breakfast spurred her to finally undo the last of the straps holding the tarp down. There was a cooler at the back that was full of everything she would need for the first true meal of their new life.

When she pulled it out and set it on the ground, Janet turned to get the other bin she would need. A noise behind her made Janet whip around. Her heart started pounding, and her stomach lurched.

Micah was just a couple of feet away, hair still tousled from sleep, smiling. “Need any help?”

Janet didn’t know what to say. A helping hand would be appreciated, but she knew what the consequences would be for a momentary ease in her workload. It wouldn’t be worth it, for her or for Micah.

So she shook her head and gave him a quick smile. “Thanks, but I’ve got it. Connor will be up soon, and he’ll want something to eat. So I need to get on that,” she finished awkwardly.

It was hard to pull her eyes from his, to ignore the interest and concern he showed every time he looked at her, but she had to do it. Things had to keep going the way they’d done for years, until she could find a solution, a way to get out from under Connor’s thumb for good.

She could see Micah nod, the smile fading as he turned away. Janet was sorry if he was hurt, but crossing Connor would get him a lot more hurt, or more likely, dead. She suspected there were a couple of bodies that Connor had left behind him in one of his jealous rages, but there was no way to prove it. And even if she had evidence, the day for running to the law was long past now.

No, whatever happened, she would have to deal with it on her own. She would have to have a plan, something that wouldn’t let Connor come back at her. Just how she’d manage that, Janet didn’t know. All she really knew, deep in her gut, was that it had to happen. The sooner the better, too.

While Janet pulled out a camp stove and settled it onto the truck’s tailgate, she thought about possible plans. It kept her occupied and thinking of something other than handsome, kind Micah. She primed the propane bottle and lit the flame, setting a frying pan on one of the double burners. While it heated up, she turned to the cooler, which contained a supple of food packed in ice.

She pulled out butter, eggs and bacon, a jug of milk and a smaller one of orange juice. There was a loaf of the gooey white bread that Connor preferred, and seeing that reminded her that one of her greatest joys in getting rid of her abusive boyfriend would be dumping every bit of that nasty stuff. She didn’t care if she starved without it.

Somewhere in the collection of bins were a few bags of freeze-dried coffee. Janet had no idea where, though, and she didn’t have time to look. The frying pan was heated now, so she cut some butter and put it in to melt. Hopefully, Connor wouldn’t want coffee this morning.

Janet used the other stove burner to toast some of the bread, which she spread with butter and grape jelly. She laid that out on a plate, and began to fry up some bacon. When that was done, she turned to the eggs, which she carefully cracked over the bacon drippings and left to fry up.

By the time the food was ready, Connor ducked out of the tent. He gave the breakfast Janet had placed on a plate and set beside the camp stove, grunting before going off towards the woods for his ritual morning piss.

He returned in time to take the second plate from her, freshly cooked and still hot. He sat in a camp chair they’d set up the night before, and looked around.

“What, no coffee?” He frowned as she shook her head.

“Sorry, it’s packed up somewhere, and I can’t remember which bin it’s in.”

Connor snorted. “Too lazy to look for it? Jesus, why ain’t I surprised?”

Janet bit her lip and waited for him to throw a tantrum over the lack of coffee to go with his breakfast, but he just settled back and began to wolf it down, shoving eggs, bacon and toast in his mouth as fast as he could chew.

Janet placed a glass of juice and one of milk in the cup holders on either arm of his chair, and turned away to get her own meal. She settled into another chair, and ate, her mind wandering.

Her thoughts centered on what it would be like to cook what she liked to eat, when she wanted it. What it would be like to eat in peace, and not wonder what she would do wrong that would get her a beating.

There had been a time when she did that, she remembered. When she was happy and in charge of her own life. The memories fled back, warming her heart and making her sad at the same time. She’d never thought she could feel that way again, had never thought she’d find a way out of this life with Connor.

But as she chewed on the last piece of bacon, it was all she could do not to smile.

Soon, her heart sang. Soon.

Chapter Fifteen

In the weeks that followed their arrival at the hunting camp, Dara and George had done a remarkable job of getting people enthused about the new living conditions. Plans were made to repair as many of the old cabins as possible, and to re-purpose what materials they could from those too far gone to fix.

As it turned out, two of George’s group had done construction, and they busied themselves inspecting things and making lists, drawing their ideas on paper that Clarice had brought with her.

After the best of the cabins were repaired to a point people could live comfortably in them, those who had been living in tents were assigned one of their own. Janet and Connor got the one next to the main administration building, which Dara had refurbished for herself and Ted. Connor had grumbled about living next to his most hated minority, but the comfort and warmth of the cabin had won him over.

The campers and RVs had been slotted in between the cabins and in other open areas, with everyone having enough space for a minimal amount of privacy. It wasn’t ideal, but considering how things could have been, nobody complained, or at least not where George and Dara could hear it.

The biggest project that needed to be taken on was the old picnic pavilion that stood, somewhat shakily, across from Dara and Ted’s place. John and Emilio, the group’s carpenters, wanted to turn it into an enclosed space where people could gather. It would be a communal cooking and dining hall for the most part, but there were unlimited uses, as the two argued when they proposed the plan.

The project was the subject of a long meeting, with everyone talking about how much work it would be, but also about how great it would be to have a kitchen area so the women would have an easier time getting meals together. A couple of the men chimed in agreeing with this, because they loved to cook and a small fire or camp stove just didn’t work for them.

Another suggestion was to use the area as a school, and also to hold church services for those who desired the fellowship. One of the biker club’s members had become a minister online, and studied Scripture as a hobby. He was unanimously chosen to lead the potential church.

George ended all the discussion after nearly an hour.

“It seems like this new project has met with the approval of everyone here, so let’s agree to see it built. I think it will be a great addition to our little community.

“John and Emilio have already given me a list of things we’ll need to finish the project, which means we’re going to have to go out on a supply run.”

Hands began to up, but George waved them down.

“I’ll take names at the end of the meeting. I know it might be dangerous, since we don’t know what we’ll face down the mountain, but I think it will also be a good idea to look for other things. Dara and I have been discussing that, and talking with all of you over the past week. We’ve got a pretty long list of stuff we’ll try to get over the next days and weeks, until we get snowed in for the winter.

The big man paused to take a long drink of water, collected from a spring just beyond the ring of campers. It was sweet and cold, as pure as water could get. George appreciated every drop of water from that spring, because it saved him and the others from having to haul it from the next closest source, a stream nearly a mile away.

“The only other thing I wanted to say was how much Dara and I appreciate having you all trust us to get this community set up. Our next step is to start thinking about forming a communal governing body. I think we can hold off on that until we’ve made all the supply runs we can, though. If the group agrees.”

Heads nodded and voices rose to approve the suggestion, and Dara let out a sigh of relief from where she stood beside him. Like him, Dara didn’t relish being in charge, but she knew the process of getting a representative government was going to take a while, and they both knew other concerns had to come first.

Having the community agree with them made things easier. He just hoped people would be reluctant to take positions in that government when the time came.

George looked out over the assemblage. They were a good group, with a notable exception or two, so he didn’t really think it was going to be a problem. And if it was, they’d deal with it when the time came.

“Okay, that’s all we have. Those interested in going on the supply run, stop by and talk with me after the others have gotten back to whatever it is that needs doing around here.”

The sound of laughter and happy chatter filled the air as almost everyone left to do as George suggested.

* * *

When Connor had volunteered them for the supply run, Janet’s stomach had felt like it was sinking and trying to hide behind her bowels. It was the strangest feeling, and it left her weak and afraid. Somehow, she knew he was going to try something. What, she couldn’t imagine. All she knew was it wouldn’t be good for her.

Now as they stood listening to George explain how the run was going to go, and splitting the volunteers into teams, Janet could only stand mutely while the big biker’s voice drifted away on the breeze.

They were just outside the town that the group had only recently traveled through. The smoke from the burning buildings had disappeared, thought the air still held an odor of burnt wood and plastic. Only a couple of other women had come along, mostly to support their man with loaded weapons, in case the infected became a problem.

George had set everybody else into teams of three or four, each with a list of food, medicine, building supplies or other necessary items they hoped to find in what remained of the town. As he’d explained it, they would get what they could on this trip, and in a few days they would go further out, in hopes of finding a larger town or small city that would be safe to scavenge through.

She, George, Connor and Micah were the only ones left, and they had yet to learn what their tasks were. When Connor saw that he’d be in the same group as Micah, he had started muttering. Finally George had had enough, and he interrupted the background noise.

“Connor, is there a problem?” His voice was level, without any anger or aggression. It made no difference. Connor jumped at the older man.

“Yeah. I’m not hanging around with this guy,” he said, thrusting a thumb at Micah. “I don’t like the way he’s been looking at my woman, and I’m not letting him be anywhere nearer to her than where we’re standing right here.”

Connor pushed his face forward, frowning, shoulders hunched. Janet knew he was testing George’s authority, and she feared the biker would snap. Instead, George just leaned back, and smiled.

“I see. Well, in that case, why don’t you and your—woman— take that corner drugstore? There doesn’t seem to be many, if any, infected inside, so the two of you should be able to handle it. If you run into any trouble, just call out on the walkie, and someone will come running.”

Connor took the offered little radio and thrust it in his back pocket. He looked sullen, and Janet knew he’d wanted a fight. It was a good thing George was so easy going, or there might have been a shoot out right on the street. Not only would that tear the fragile peace between the three men, but it would alert the zombies to their presence.

So far, their arrival in town hadn’t caught the interest of more than three or four undead, who had been taken out quietly by some of the other men before they left on their own errands.

Janet didn’t dare look at Micah or even George for more than a minute, but she hoped they understood her silence. It wouldn’t be a good idea to say anything to Connor, especially since he’d worked himself up into an ill mood ever since breakfast.

It had started with the bitter taste of his coffee and escalated into how bad the orange juice was, the lack of fresh milk and the toast being a little burnt. Every chance he got, he would pinch or slap her, usually on the ass, and she jumped whenever he was near her. That just made him laugh, and the next time he would do it harder.

By the time George had called the meeting, just before lunch, Janet was exhausted and stressed out from trying to find any excuse she could to be away from Connor.

She hadn’t been happy at all to hear him walk up to the biker leader and put their name on the list for the supply run. The last thing she wanted to do was be out there with Connor, exposed to who knew what sort of dangers on top of the fear about what he was cooking up in his devious mind.

Janet tried to get out of it, pleading tiredness, work, even going so far as to use her monthly flow. She told him it could be dangerous for them, if the infected could smell it.

“So use a damned tampon and plug the leak. God, woman, do I have to tell you how to do every damn thing? Can’t you think for yourself at all?”

Janet wanted to scream at him, to tell him that of course she couldn’t think for herself. He’d seen to it that her thinking skills were beaten out of her early on in their relationship. Now he wanted her to think?

But she just bit her tongue and went to get her rifle. There wasn’t any point in starting something right there in the middle of the camp. Even with witnesses, she knew Connor would beat her if she got him mad enough. She might end up dead before anyone could stop him.

No, best to stick to her plan and go along with him. She’d keep her eyes open, try not to give him a chance to turn the situation against her. The very real possibility that he had plans to make sure she didn’t make it back to camp make her feel like throwing up. She was frightened, and for the first time in a long time she actually cared what happened to her.

It occurred to Janet, as she and Connor walked away, that she could have refused to go. There was a good chance either George or Micah would shoot Connor like a dog if he tried to hurt her in front of them. As she watched the drug store get closer, her steps slowed. She could do it, she reasoned. Turn around and go back. Catch up to the other two men and beg them to take her with them.

For a moment, it was all she could do not to turn and run back the way they’d come. Her legs twitched with the effort to keep walking ahead, and she stumbled a little.

Connor glanced back at her, a sneer turning his lip up. “Got your panties in a wad over leaving your pretty boy? Well, get over it. He won’t be touching you, ever. You might as well stop mooning over him.”

Janet shook her head. “I wasn’t. I just stubbed my toe a little.” She looked around, wide-eyed. “Let’s get inside and get the stuff on our list, okay? I don’t like being out here in the open like this.”

Connor snorted, but increased his pace. Janet followed along in his footsteps, making sure her expression looked like a frightened doe. If he didn’t think she had anything on her mind but the infected, he might stop worrying about her and Micah for a while.

And it wasn’t like there was anything between her and the biker. She’d made that clear the first day in the camp, when she’d cut him off when he offered to help her with unloading the truck at breakfast. Since then, the man hadn’t done more than nod at her when they chanced to meet. She knew he watched her sometimes, but it wouldn’t go any further than that.

She would make sure of that. At least until she’d worked out a way to get Connor out of her life.

When they reached the door of the drug store, Connor looked through the dusty glass for a long time, watching for infected. After he was satisfied the store was empty, he pulled the door open and sauntered in like it was a normal day to be out shopping.

Connor thrust the list at her, and pushed her towards a line of small shopping carts. He was looking towards the back of the cramped space.

“Here. You take care of getting all this shit, if you can manage to not screw it up. I’m going to look for some cigarettes.”

With that he walked off, soon disappearing into the dimness of the store’s interior. She knew he would probably raid the pharmacy section for stuff to get high on before he looked for any cigarettes, which were behind the counter to her left anyway.

It didn’t matter. Most times Connor high was much easier to deal with than an angry Connor. With a sigh, she began searching for the stuff on the list.

Chapter Sixteen

Janet had gotten most of the items on the list when she heard a commotion coming from the back of the store. She stood gripping the handle of the shopping cart, turning her knuckles bone white while she listened.

Whatever it was, it was quick, and soon the eerie silence fell over the empty store again.

“Connor?” She called out to him as quietly as she could. They hadn’t thought any of the undead were inside, but what if he’d come upon someone while he was rummaging through the drugs in the back?

There was no answer, so she called out again. Still, nothing. Maybe something had happened to Connor, or he was unable to answer her for some reason. Janet peeled her fingers away from the plastic around the cart’s handle. They were cramping from the force with which she’d gripped the narrow cylinder.

Janet stood stock still, shaking the tension from her hands and shoulders. She listened, hoping for any sound that would clue her in to what was going on. Other than her own breathing, which sounded so loud against the general silence of the world these days, there was nothing.

She had a decision to make. She could go looking for George or Micah to come check it out for her, or she could go look herself. Going for the other men meant she’d have to leave the relative safety of the drug store, and face the empty parking lot of the small strip mall they’d stopped at.

She could have called them on the walkie talkie, but Connor had kept that shoved firmly down in his back pocket. But he might have used it himself, if he’d run into any problem on his own.

Going to look herself wasn’t a good idea. If there were infected in the store, she might be facing them alone. She didn’t know if she could handle it by herself.

Janet shifted from one foot to the other, trying to make a decision. She knew what Connor would say, if he could see her struggling to pick something, anything, to do rather than just standing there like a deer facing a hunter’s flashlight.

The scorn would be front and center as he sneered at her. Just like a woman, a fat, stupid cow like herself. Couldn’t chew cud if he didn’t tell her to. Couldn’t decide to stand or run, even if her life depended on it.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Janet’s breath was coming in short, soft snorts, and she’d taken to wringing her hands. The shopping cart was bumping her hip unnoticed as the fidgeted from side to side. She could almost hear the minutes ticking away while she dithered away.

Maybe Connor was right. Maybe she was too stupid to live on her own. She’d believed it for years, went along with everything he told her to do or not do in all aspects of her life.

To hell with it, she finally decided. She’d go look, see if there was trouble. If she was careful, she could turn and run out, find help.

Slowly she stepped away from the shopping cart, dropping the paper with her list on top of the items already inside the small wire form. Janet eased her way down the closest aisle, nearly overwhelmed by the smell of stale candy.

As she neared the end of the aisle, which was bisected by another, broader aisle that ran crosswise to the main aisles, she slowed even more. Without thinking, Janet went down into a crouch, wincing as her knees cracked.

She knew the sound would barely be heard by anyone standing more than a foot or two away, but it might as well been a gunshot. Her heart started pounding, and she had to take a couple of slow, deep breaths to calm down.

The store was still strangely quiet. If Connor had run into something, he’d handled it in record time, and with almost no sound. Something in the back of her mind urged her to turn around and run before it was too late. Janet almost jumped up and did just that, but she realized she had to know what had happened.

She had to know if Connor was still alive, somewhere in the back of the store. If he was, then her problem would have been solved without her doing anything at all.

If he wasn’t, he would come after her with a vengeance for leaving him behind.

Janet took a final deep breath and ducked her head out into the large center aisle long enough to take quick look both ways. When she was nothing, she scooted across into the darker area towards the back of the store.

If this drug store was set up like most others she’d seen then the pharmacy would take up the entire rear section, only feet away from her now. Janet duck-walked the last inches, and once again took a quick look left and right.

Still no sign of Connor, or any other living thing—or un-living thing—anywhere. The quiet was beginning to grate on her nerves. She almost wished she could hear something, anything that would clue her in to what she might expect.

Finally, a light scraping sound came from behind the pharmacy counter.

Janet swallowed hard and called out. “Connor? Is that you? Quit messing around and come out here.”

A shadow moved near one of the shelves that held the pharmacy’s drug supply, making Janet jump. It moved towards the place where people would drop off prescriptions to be filled, and part of it leaned towards her.

Slowly, the light revealed Connor’s face. Her heart started thumping at a slightly slower rate.

“What the hell have you been doing back here?” she whispered. “I heard something, and called out, but you never answered me.”

“I heard something in the back, and went to check. The back door was loose, so I was going to close it when I heard something whimpering. You should come look. It’s a little dog, out back behind the mall. If you can get it to come out, you can have it.”

Janet stared at Connor where he leaned against the counter, arms crossed like a bartender talking to a customer. He’d promised to get her a dog before, but never came through. It was a cruel joke he played on her.

She thought about it for a while, until the impatient look came over his face. Maybe he was telling the truth. If a dog really was lost out there, hiding from the infected, she had to try to save it. As far as she knew, animals hadn’t gotten sick, so she didn’t have to worry about that, at least.

Finally, she stood up and started towards Connor, who directed her to the pass-through a few feet from where he now stood upright and stretched.

“Better hurry up, before we get a tardy on our report card. I’ve got all I want from here, so if you’re finished, we can get the dog and get the hell out of this dump.”

Janet followed as he turned to go. “I have all I could find. It’s in a cart up front, ready to load up.”

Connor just nodded and swung open the back door.

“This way to doggie heaven.”

* * *

Janet could hear the whimper as soon as she got outside, stepping carefully into the narrow alley. She also heard the weird moaning and crowing sounds the infected made through their ravaged throats. She stopped dead in her tracks, a few feet from the door, which Connor had propped open with a brick.

“Well, come on. That dog’s not going to wait forever.”

Reluctantly, Janet moved forward, Conner a step behind. She went to where the cries of the dog were coming from, a dumpster pushed out into the alley. Squatting down, she looked into the darkness beneath the stinking trash container. A pair of frightened eyes looked back at her, and her heart melted. It was just a little thing, a mess of tangled fur so dirty she couldn’t tell what color it was.

Connor leaned against the dumpster, shifting it a foot or so. The little dog scampered back, and Connor cursed. “Damn dog. Hold still. We’re just trying to help.”

Something in the way Connor said it made Janet’s hackles rise. A chill swept over her, and she scuttled around on her heels so she could look up into his face. For a brief instant, his expression was so evil she thought her heart would stop. It gave a hard beat against her ribs, and she feared she would choke on the sudden pressure.

“If you want that dog, you better get it now. I think there’s some company about to arrive, and we need to get going.”

It would have sounded entirely reasonable, if it had been someone else saying it, and if he hadn’t grinned at her. His face looked like a cartoon image of a mad man and Janet realized she was finally seeing his true face.

All these years, and she’d thought she had seen all the badness inside of him. She hadn’t had a clue.

Janet jumped to her feet, the dog forgotten. She took a step, trying to start running from a dead stop, but Connor was quicker. He grabbed her arm and jerked her back, trying to shove the dumpster a little further from the wall. Her rifle, forgotten until it fell from her shoulder, nearly tripped her up as she struggled to get free.

She pulled her arm from his grasp just as he got a foot or so of open space along the back wall of the drug store. She could hear the infected louder now. They were coming closer, their empty faces turned towards them, seeking out a living victim to ravage. At her feet, the dog growled.

Janet began to move away from the dumpster, her eyes focused on the half-open pharmacy door. If she could get inside, she might be safe. Connor was on her heels, though, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it. It was too far.

As he reached for her arm again, Janet threw her shoulder, and he missed. The next time he reached for her, he got hold of her ear, and yanked it cruelly, making her cry out.

“Don’t fight it, bitch. If you’ll just hold still, I might give you a mercy shot before I go crying to good old George.”

Janet moaned as her head was pulled back painfully. She tried to turn around, take the pressure off her abused ear, but something was tripping her up, nearly bringing her down. She knew if she fell, all was lost.

She had reached the door, but their struggles had knocked the brick away. Janet nearly screamed out her frustration as the door closed before she could grab it. All that was left was to somehow get free of Connor and make a run for it to the end of the mall. Out in the open there, she might have a chance.

The infected were getting louder, and had gotten far too close. Janet kept pulling away from Connor, forcing him to move with her. She ignored the pain in her ear, and the tug of hair he was pulling out by the roots. It didn’t hurt nearly as bad as what she imagined the infected would do to her.

With a great shrug, Janet nearly broke Connor’s hold. She ducked her head, trying to get into a position he couldn’t maintain a grip, and finally realized her rifle was hanging by its strap around her elbow. She couldn’t get it up so she could shoot the sorry bastard that was determined to kill her, so she did the only thing she could do.

Janet dropped her arm and let the rifle’s sling slip further down her arm. She grabbed the stock and flipped it back towards Connor. By some miracle, the barrel hit him just as he made a huge stride, trying to make up the small distance she’d gotten ahead.

The rifle barrel went between Connor’s legs, and he tripped. He jerked so hard on her ear that Janet was sure he’d ripped it off. Then the painful grip was gone, Connor was down, and Janet turned and began to run towards the distant open space.

She looked back once when she heard an eerie screech of pure fear and pain. The infected had caught up to Connor, and were falling to their knees beside him, reaching for him with eager hands. Strips of flesh had already been torn from his cheeks, which only made the grin as he held up the truck’s keys that much more hateful.

Janet just shook her head and turned away. The last image of him she had was of him going down in a mass of heaving bodies. A spray of blood shot out of his throat, and finally the screaming stopped.

She’d never run so fast in her life. Janet’s feet hit the rough pavement of the alley with loud steady slaps as she focused on getting to the edge of the mall before the infected decided there wasn’t enough of Connor left, and came after her.

There was safety on the other side of the building, if she could just get to it. She took a deep breath and ran faster.

It wasn’t until she’d gotten back to the truck, with Micah and George rushing up to meet her, that she looked down and realized the little dog had been running by her side all along.

THE END

About the Author:

Griffin Carmichael writes speculative fiction from an undisclosed location somewhere in the South Eastern United States. Various children animals and varieties of plant life run rampant everywhere.

Previously published work includes two short story collections, Zombie Town and Daily Life. Griffin has had stories published in two charity anthologies, as well as in Stories on the Go I and II. More short stories and longer tales are in the works.

More information can be found at Griffin’s Amazon Author Page, as well as the author page on The Guthrie Press website. Griffin also has a no-spam New Releases email list.

THE MOON DWELLERS

Book One

of

The Dwellers Saga

by

David Estes

For Adele. Just for being you.

Prologue

Adele

7 months ago

Hands grope, men shout, boots slap the rock floor.

Clay dishes and pots are smashed to bits as the Enforcers sweep recklessly through our house. There are more bodies in the tiny stone box that I call home than ever before. The walls seem to be closing in.

My mother’s face is stricken with anger, her lips twisted, her eyebrows dark. I’ve never seen her fight like this. I’ve never seen her fight at all.

It takes three bulging Enforcers to subdue her kicking legs, her thrashing arms. For just a moment I am scared of her and not the men. I hate myself for it.

I realize my sister is by my side, watching, like me. I can’t let her see this—can’t let this be her last memory of the ones who raised us. I usher her back into the small room that we share with my parents, and close the door, shutting her inside alone.

When I turn back to the room, my mother is already gone, taken. Undigested beans from our measly supper rise in my throat.

My father is next.

The Enforcers jeer at him, taunt him, spit on him. As he backs his shoulders against the cold, stark, stone wall, five men corner him. Smart. They don’t underestimate him.

He makes eye contact with me; his emerald-green eyes are hard with concentration. Despite the inherent tension in the room, his face is relaxed, calm, the exact opposite of his eyes. Run, he mouths.

My feet are frozen to the floor. My knees lock, stiffen, disobey me and my father. I am ashamed. After all that my father has done for me, when it counts the most, I fail him.

One of the men lifts an arm and a gun. I hold my breath when I hear the shot, a dull thwap! that doesn’t sound like a normal gun. The man moves backwards slightly from the force, but his legs are planted firmly and he maintains his balance.

Father slumps to the floor. I feel my lips trembling, and my hand moves unbidden to my mouth. My frozen feet melt and I try to run to him, but a big body bars my way. I kick him hard, like my father taught me. My heel catches the Enforcer under his chin and his head snaps back. Like most people, he underestimates me.

The next Enforcer doesn’t.

The Taser rips into my neck and tentacles of electricity slam my jaw shut. My teeth nearly snap off my tongue, which is flailing around in my mouth. They don’t take it easy on me just because I’m a kid, or a girl—not after what I did to the first guy. Still stunned by the Taser, I barely feel the thump of their hard boots as they kick me repeatedly in the ribs. My eyes are wet, and through my blurred vision I see the arcing nightstick.

Strangely, it feels like destiny, like it was always going to happen.

I hear my sister’s screams just before I black out.

Tristan

A brief history of the Tri-Realms

They say the meteor was enormous. Any life left on the surface of the earth when it hit was wiped out by either the shockwave caused by the collision, or the resulting tsunamis unleashed across the world’s oceans. Humans were forced to move underground. Or so the story goes.

Secretly, government scientists expected it for years, using covert teams of miners to dig the world’s largest caverns in preparation for the inevitable. But still: There wasn’t room for everyone. It would’ve been terrible: the Lottery. Families ripped apart; friends lost; blossoming relationships cut off at the knees. Of course, key individuals, like politicians, doctors, scientists, and farmers received a free pass, but all others just got a number. The number gave them a one in a hundred chance of getting selected to move into the underground facilities.

All the rest were destroyed.

And that was just the United States. No one knows for sure what happened to the rest of the world. Perhaps they weren’t so prepared. Perhaps they were all dead.

Year Zero would have been difficult for everyone. Losing relatives who didn’t make the cut; eating from the rations of rice and beans and hoping it wouldn’t run out before the leaders and their teams of advisors could come up with a way to grow food underground; most people becoming miners; living in darkness.

Now all of that is just a part of everyday life.

These days, time is measured from the day the meteor hit. It’s 499 PM (Post-Meteor). Time before Armageddon is referred to as Before-Meteor, or BM. The funny thing about Armageddon: we survived. Well, some of us anyway.

Year Zero’s first president was Stafford Hughes. Things were run much like before Armageddon, albeit in a slightly more haphazard manner. The U.S. Constitution was upheld, laws were revised as required for our new living situation, new laws were created.

But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last.

Things were too different. People were too scared. There was too much chaos.

More structure was required.

The first Nailin was elected president in 126 PM. His name was Wilfred Nailin. He was my great-great (and a lot more greats) grandfather. At that point elections were still held regularly. Congress decided that given the state of America, elections should be held every five years instead of four, with the opportunity for reelection after the first term. But Wilfred wasn’t satisfied with ten years in power, so after his first reelection he pushed a new law through Congress that allowed for a third presidential term, but only if supported by the people, of course.

There were rumors of ballot-rigging.

After his second reelection, he passed a law that allowed him to remain in power indefinitely, assuming he obtained approval from Congress every five years. At the same time he passed a law that also permitted Senators and Representatives to maintain their elected positions indefinitely, unless the president released them from service. It was a circular system, one where bribery and deep pockets ruled. Who you knew meant much more than what you knew.

The people had lost their voice.

That wasn’t the end of it.

Wilfred’s next move was to secure his family’s future. He had one son, Edward Nailin. With the full support of Congress, Wilfred managed to pass a law that allowed positions to be handed down from generation to generation within each family, so long as Congress and the president unanimously approved it. Public elections continued to be held, but they were fixed so that no new contenders could infiltrate the inner circle of the government, which was holding all the cards.

It worked for a while. In fact, people seemed to like the more rigid and consistent structure. Soon, however, the gap started to widen between the classes. The wealthy began to take more and more liberties, much to the middle and lower classes’ frustration. The complaints started pouring in from those who were being disadvantaged, but they were largely ignored. It got to the point where fights were breaking out in the streets. “Elected” officials couldn’t walk down the street without being accosted by the poor and depressed. Something had to be done!

The Tri-Realms were created from 215 PM to 255 PM. First the Moon Realm was excavated, using the advancements in mining technology to create massive caverns deep beneath the original caverns, to build more cities in. Natural caves were used as a starting point, widened and heightened to the extensive size required to house thousands of people. Heavy beams of rock were used to support the caverns’ roofs, which were prone to cave-ins. Middle and lower class citizens were used to do the work, having been convinced by large salaries and the opportunity to “advance our civilization for the good of humankind.”

Once the caverns were complete, the workers were forced to take their families to live in them. Then the work on the Star Realm began, digging even deeper below the earth’s surface. Fewer resources were allocated to excavating the Star Realm, and therefore, the caverns were smaller, more confined, more densely populated. The poorest citizens were sent to live in the deepest caverns.

The top level was given the name of the Sun Realm.

Each of the Tri-Realms was split up into eight chapters, and each chapter into between two and six subchapters depending on its size, each of which was populated by between ten and a hundred thousand people.

Over time, taxes were increased annually for the Moon and Star Dwellers, as those living in the Moon and Star Realms were called, until the Sun Realm was receiving significant resources to improve their own caverns. Life was good for the Sun Dwellers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for anyone else.

The U.S. Constitution was legally abolished in 302 PM.

A Nailin has been in power for more than 350 years.

My father told my brother and me the whole story when we turned twelve. I still remember the smug smile on his face when he finished. He’s proud of what Wilfred accomplished.

I’m disgusted by it. Sometimes I think about it, and it makes me sick. Like now, lying in bed and wishing my mother was still around. I don’t know why I’m thinking about history right now, but I am.

Chapter One

Adele

Present day

Something’s happening to my body. There’s a dull ache in my skull and ripples of energy coursing down my spine. It all started when I saw him. I know I should hate him—everyone else around me does.

“Filthy mutt,” I hear one guy growl. “He should’ve stayed above.”

“Yeah,” another guy says. “I’m surprised he’s gettin’ his shoes dirty down ’ere with the rats.”

I’m sitting in the Yard. The Yard is what we call the expansive area outside the Pen’s main building, although I don’t know who came up with the name, because it makes no sense. There’s no yard, just barren rock. Real yards—with grass, bushes, and trees—are magical places that don’t exist in our world.

The high fence surrounding the prison buzzes with electricity and threatens us with barbed wire. Through the fence we can see our town, subchapter 14 of the Moon Realm. And the non-prisoners can also see us, the convicted.

Even as I stare at freedom through the fence, the feeling gets stronger, like a tingling in the back of my scalp; but it really hurts, too—achy and throbbing. I feel…I feel drawn to him, in the most painful of ways. Now wait just a minute before you judge me, it’s not love at first sight if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s something else entirely, but I don’t have a name for it. I’d like to think it’s magic, like in the illegal fantasy books my grandmother used to read me, but there’s no magic in the dark, underground world we live in. Nothing but rocks and electrified fences and pain.

The parade passes the Pen, just outside the fence, so close, making all kinds of noise: people cheering, drums thumping, dogs barking.

And Tristan, smiling and waving.

All the girls in my old school are in love with Tristan. Obviously, none of them know him, but like any male celebrity, he captures the attention of young, naïve females. But I’ve always hated him, because of what he represents.

Now, stuck in the Pen, it seems like an awfully big waste of energy—to hate the son of the president, who I don’t even know. Perhaps if I hadn’t hated him in the past, none of this would’ve happened. Perhaps my family would still be together. Maybe it was bad karma. But no matter how much I try to wish it all away, my past is the zit that you pop, watch bleed, watch heal, only to see poking from your skin again a week later.

Tristan is the polar opposite of a recurring blemish. Blond, curly hair. Seventeen but already over six feet tall. Strong, solid frame. A princely face. Big, navy blue eyes. An addictive smile, with right-sized lips and ivory teeth. My brain is telling me to stop staring at him, but for some reason I can’t, like the pain coursing down my spine is only tolerable if I continue facing him. He flashes a smile.

The throbbing grows duller in my head, the buzzing down my spine sharper. My body is telling me something. The pull toward Tristan is getting stronger and more painful. But why?

There are about a thousand of his adoring fans outside the Pen, lining the streets, screaming his name and throwing flowers at his car. I even see one of them chuck her undergarments at him.

“You like him, don’t you?” a voice says from behind.

I turn, unable to stop the look of surprise that blankets my face. A tall, thin girl stands before me. Her strangely white hair is long and straight, reaching all the way to the small of her back. She has porcelain features, as if her face was drawn on by an artist. I can’t help wondering what a beautiful girl like her is doing in a place like this.

“Can I help you?” I say, somewhat rudely.

“I’m Tawni,” the girl says, sticking out her hand.

I stare at her slender fingers like they’re a nest of snakes, hesitate, and then eventually take them. I shiver at her icy touch, but her handshake feels surprisingly firm for how thin she is.

“Sorry. Poor circulation,” she says.

I chew my lip, considering her. “Have a seat,” I finally say with a slight wave of my arm.

Flashing a grin, she takes a seat next to me on the rock bench. “Thanks,” she says.

I grin back. I can’t believe it. I’m actually smiling. Well, sort of. I think it’s a pathetic attempt, but at least my lips are curled up in a crooked, awkward, I-don’t-know-how-to-smile-for-pictures kind of way. You know, like those kids in Year Three who always end up with the worst yearbook photos? The ones with the crazy eyes and fake smiles. That’s me trying to smile at my new friend, Tawni.

“Are you going to answer my question or what?” she says.

I go back to chewing on my lip. “What question?” I say, feigning ignorance.

“C’mon,” she says. “Do you like Tristan or not?”

“I don’t know him,” I say neutrally, internally considering whether she’s one of his crazed fans, obsessive to the point of throwing underwear.

The parade passes slowly—Tristan will be out of sight in a few minutes, moving down another street, probably heading toward Moon Hall, where the local politicians gather to do whatever it is that they do. Mostly screw us over. I crane my neck, trying to get a final glimpse of his smile.

“I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” Tawni says.

“Mmm, really?” I say, only half listening.

“No. I mean his dad’s a jerk, but I don’t think kids should be judged by what their stupid parents do.”

My ears perk up. I glance at Tawni. Her slight grin has melted. Her lips are pursed and thin. If nothing else, her statement has piqued my interest in her. Where she comes from, who she is, what she’s done to land herself in this hellhole. And why she cares about what Tristan and his father do.

Tawni ignores my look and continues watching the parade, so I turn back, too. The lead car, in which Tristan is standing, is about to turn the corner. He’s waving to his fans, smiling his mesmerizing smile, and then…

…he looks at me.

Right at me, like his eyes are gun sights and I’m their target. Despite the distance, it’s like they pierce my soul, sending waves of energy up my back and through my neck, slamming into my brain like a freaking sledge hammer.

“Arrr!” I cry out, flinching. I tear my eyes away from him and settle my head in my hands, massaging my pounding temples.

“What is it?” Tawni asks, putting an arm on my back.

Ignoring her, I glance up at Tristan, who’s still looking my way. The pounding in my skull comes back in droves, but not quite as strong this time.

As I stare at him, his face changes. Gone is the smile. Gone are his piercing eyes. All swallowed up in a frown. At first I think I was rude, that I’ve stared too long, or too crazy, because of my weird spasm, but then I feel a presence approaching from the side—a dark shadow.

Not good.

Chapter Two

Tristan

It feels like something’s gnawing on my spine.

Then I see her and an agonizing pang rips through me, but I manage to keep the fake smile plastered on my face. She’s just a prisoner—nothing to me. A random, dark-haired prisoner. And yet I can’t pull my eyes away from her. She’s pretty hot, but not train-stopping hot. So why am I staring at her?

And is she staring back at me? No. Not really. Not just her. Everyone’s staring at me.

An ache in my bones, a knife in my back.

The sensation is growing stronger by the second. My jaw clenches as I try to stifle the scream rising from the back of my throat.

She’s still staring.

Something’s different about the way she looks at me. The only way to describe it is intensity. I’m used to people watching me, but they usually only do so in one of three ways. First are the obsessive girls, the stalker types, who want to marry me and have my babies and wait on me hand and foot for the rest of my life. I think I saw one of their undergarments fly past my head during the parade—that would’ve been from one of the obsessives. I tolerate them, but unlike my brother, do not enjoy their affections. Next are the admirers. They think I can do no wrong, and are generally old, gray men who look at me with a respect usually reserved for the dead. Not that I’ve earned it. I haven’t done anything; except be born. Last are the haters. Simply put: they hate me. Want me dead. Stare at me with steely eyes, like they think if they stare at me long enough I’ll spontaneously combust. They’re the ones who sit at home with voodoo dolls of me and my dad and my brother, poking and prodding and twisting with needles. Hoping we can feel what the dolls are feeling.

Is that what this pain is? Is this girl using a voodoo doll on me? I wouldn’t normally believe in that sort of thing, but…

My fists clench at my sides.

Her jet-black hair cascades around her face like a funeral shroud, and I find myself mesmerized. Her skin is a natural pale, the result of living underground her entire life, not like the fake-tanned bodies that parade around the Sun Realm. What the hell? Why do I care? She’s nobody to me!

And yet…yet I have this crazy urge to leap from the parade car and charge the electrified fence to get to her. It’s not love, it’s not lust—it’s something else.

There’s a flash of heat in my head, as my headache intensifies. I raise a startled hand to my scalp at the same time that she does. She’s not looking anymore, her head in her hands.

The parade car starts its slow arc around a bend; soon the Pen, and the girl, will be out of sight.

A big guy approaches the girl. His footsteps are malicious. His demeanor screams violence. Her hands are still covering her face. I have to warn her!

Look up, look up, LOOK UP!

She does, her eyes returning to mine.

Although I know I should make a warning motion of some sort, I don’t. Only my facial expression—a deep frown—alerts her to the impending danger.

Her eyes pull away and she sees the guy. My view is partially blocked by the edge of a building as the float turns the corner. Craning my neck, I see her twist away from the guy, say something to her friend. The guy says something to her. My view is nearly blocked. The headache rages in my skull.

She stands up and pushes him.

No! I scream in my head as subchapter 14 surrounds me. Then she’s gone. Although there’s nothing I can do now, my muscles are twitching, almost urging me to run to her, to save her, to do something crazy. It’s like I’ve lost control of my own body.

I fear for her, a girl I don’t even know.

Chapter Three

Adele

I turn my head and see a guy.

I’ve seen him around the Yard before. A teenager in a man’s body. Six-five, about two hundred and fifty pounds, covered in tats: he’s one of the local gang leaders. Not a good guy.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says.

I ignore him and look at Tawni, hoping he’ll pass straight by me. He doesn’t. Tawni’s wide eyes give away her fear.

“Hey,” he says.

I keep ignoring him.

“I said ‘Hey,’” he repeats.

“I heard you the first time.” I still don’t look at him, not wanting to inadvertently extend an invitation with eye contact. My head’s killing me. I’m really not in the mood.

“You should watch your mouth,” he says.

“And you should keep on walking,” I say.

He doesn’t. “I haven’t seen you around before,” he says.

“You must be blind. I’m here every day.”

“Nah, I would’ve noticed you for sure,” the gang leader says.

Tawni stares at me like I’m crazy. I’m looking at her, but talking to the guy. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Leave me alone.”

I finally swivel my head and make eye contact with him, giving him my iciest stare. I know he’s not scared of me, but I want him to decide I’m not worth the effort.

“Not gonna happen,” he says, moving in close to me.

Something inside me snaps. It probably doesn’t help that I’m in a fair amount of pain, lingering in my head, neck and back. I’m sick of people ruining my life, acting like they own me. He reminds me of the Enforcers who barged into our house and abducted my parents. Arrogant. Selfish.

I stand up, gritting my teeth, my eyes on fire. My fire-eyes barely reach his chest. His gray sweat-stained tunic is right in my face and makes me nauseous. I push him as hard as I can, which doesn’t do much, but moves him back a couple of steps. My hands are knotted into fists. I hold them out in front of me, ready for the guy’s response.

“You’re a real bitch,” he says. “And you smell like filth. See you around.” He slowly turns and saunters off, chuckling to himself.

I take a deep breath, trying to get control of my rage.

“That was amazing,” Tawni whispers from behind me.

I sit back down and try to relax my face as I look at her. Her eyes are still wide and white. “He’s a jerk,” I say through clenched teeth.

“A scary jerk,” she says. “That was awesome how you stood up for yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Tawny shrugs. “Honestly, I probably would’ve tried to run away, or yell for help or something. Not fight—that’s for sure.”

Tawni’s eyes flick back to the fence and I follow her gaze. The parade. Tristan. I forgot all about him when the gang guy approached me.

But now Tristan is gone, the front of the parade having moved out of sight while I was dealing with the thug. With each passing second the throbbing in my head and pulsing in my spine seems to lessen. Weird.

“That was pretty weird.” Tawni echoes my thoughts, still looking past the fence.

“What was?” I say, glancing at her furtively. Did she notice how it hurt me when Tristan looked at me? Did she sense what I had? Had I imagined the look of concern on his face just before the confrontation with the gang guy, or had she seen it, too?

“I didn’t see many photographs being taken of Tristan during the parade. I thought the face-stealers would be out in full force.”

I roll my eyes at myself. Of course Tawni didn’t notice Tristan looking at me, hurting me with his stare. Probably because he didn’t. He’d probably just looked in our general direction, past us. He was probably frowning at all of us—at the criminals. Disgusted by us. Clearly he wasn’t warning me about the approaching gangster. And the pain? More likely a result of lack of sleep. There was another suicide last night, and the awful keening of the death toll cried out for more than two hours, keeping everyone awake.

Yeah, in reality Tristan probably didn’t even look at me. I might have seen his head turn in my direction, perhaps a random glance at best; certainly not the laser-beamed, tethered gaze that I’d obviously imagined.

But still. My body reacted strangely when I saw him, when he was near. It didn’t feel natural though. It’s like my mind knew to stay as far away from him as possible—he’s a Sun Dweller after all, one of the bad guys—but my bones, my skin quivered in his presence.

Very weird.

“Helloooo? Earth to…What’s your name anyway?” Tawni waves her hand across my face—apparently I’ve spaced out, lost in my own random thoughts.

“Adele,” I find myself saying, to my surprise. Giving my name away so easily like that—what am I thinking? Tawni is penetrating my social defenses faster than a mine cave-in swallows a trapped traveler.

“Well, Adele, it’s been a true pleasure meeting you and watching you handle that guy. Truly impressive, really. Would you like to dine with me and my friend Cole tonight?”

Dine? This girl has a funny way of speaking. Like she has no clue that we’re locked up in a juvenile detention center. And that we live underground. And that most of us will never get our freedom back. Certainly not me. Maybe she’s just a few days from being released, which would certainly explain why she seems so cheery. I hope so. If I can’t get out, at least someone I know can.

“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” I say. “Thanks,” I add quickly, realizing how rude I sound.

“Great! Meet us in the northwest corner—we’ll reserve a table.”

There she goes again: speaking as if we’re going out to some fancy restaurant that accepts reservations. I shake my head and realize I’m smiling. Not my normal smile—no, I’m not ready for that yet—but slightly better than the crooked, awkward smile I attempted earlier. Maybe things are looking up for me. I’ve made a friend. At least, the closest thing to a friend I’ve had in a long time.

* * *

There are only two hours to kill before dinner, so I use the time to think. I start with the past—my happiest memories. My father coming home from a long day of work in the mines, filthy and dripping sweat, but bringing my sister and me a treat of some kind. Either a small gemstone that he’d smuggled out or a piece of candy he’d bought in town. He always seemed to have a twinkle in his eye and a bounce in his step, no matter how tired he was. Sometimes he even gave me a piggyback ride before he got cleaned up. My mother hated it when he did that, because then I’d have to take a bath before supper, too.

God, how I love my father.

I love my mother, too, but in a different way. She isn’t as playful as my father, is quicker to punish, and is less rebellious toward the Sun Dwellers. She says that it isn’t our place to tell the wise leaders—who’d gotten us through Year Zero, she likes to remind—how to run the government. I try to see her point, but it’s been nearly five hundred years since Year Zero, and all of the people from back then are long dead.

I shake my head and try to focus on the happy memories of my mom. When we’d cook radish stew together, play games of chess and checkers, watch the late-night news on our beat-up old telebox.

My mother is the most compassionate person I know. If someone in our neighborhood was sick, she was always the first to deliver a meal to them, using our already scant supplies to help out a friend. Sometimes I got mad at her, wished she wouldn’t do things like that, wished she wouldn’t give away our stuff. But I usually felt bad about my thoughts later on. In the deepest recesses of my soul I am always proud of her.

But as usual, my thoughts quickly do a one-eighty. Now I am thinking about all that has gone wrong, all that is bad. About the cruelty of life.

About how I’ve failed my parents. I don’t dare to hope that they’re still alive.

I think about all the waste in the world. Although we live underground now, we still require many of the same basic necessities humans have needed for decades. Toothpaste, for example, produced in a cave somewhere. The point is: we use up the toothpaste and then throw out the container. It is sent to the lava flow for destruction. Have human lives become like a tube of toothpaste? Something to be used up and thrown away? At first the tube seems so big, so full of life. But after just a few uses it becomes dented and lumpy—already life is ebbing away from it—and it’s only a matter of time before the final bit is squeezed out, rendering it an empty vessel, good for nothing.

I feel myself being squeezed out every day.

I try to distract my scattered thoughts, gazing up at the dimly lit cavern ceiling rising more than twenty stories above me. It’s weird being in the Pen, cut off from the town, and yet being able to see everything that the non-prisoners can see. From the Yard, I can see the same massive cavern that houses our town, the Pen, all of us. If I didn’t know it so well, the 14th subchapter might be a stunning sight, with an arcing roof coated by the glossy sheen of the panel lighting that controls our days and nights. The cavern was excavated more than two hundred years ago, and covers more than five square miles. Most of the rough and jagged rocks were smoothed over, huge stone support columns built, stone roads laid, and houses and buildings erected.

There’s a light commercial district, where goods can be bought, sold, and traded. Mostly they’re traded, because the wages are so low that money is short. I remember well the first money I ever had. My father saved for a month so he could give it to me on my tenth birthday. A single Nailin, bright and shiny and round. Printed with the face of the President. I stared at it for hours, trying to imprint its memory in my mind, for I knew it would soon be gone, wasted, on a silly dress I’d coveted for over a year. Every time I passed by the dress shop in town, I stopped to look at the dress. It was black and long, and would sweep the floor as I walked. The sleeves were sheer and translucent, elegant in their simplicity. Simple—that’s the way I like things. There were no frills, no laces, no bows—simple. I bought that dress with my first Nailin.

I outgrew it in three months. Funny the way the world works sometimes.

The pinnacle of the town, however, is the mine. All things considered, we are lucky. Many of the other subchapters in the Realm have mines, but none so valuable as ours. For ours is full of gemstones, raw and uncut—and worth a fortune to the Sun Dwellers. So you’d expect us to be a rich town. We should be, but once the taxes are taken out of the workers’ wages, it’s a pittance, barely enough to survive on.

When my father complained, they took him away. My mother, too, guilty by association. I was sent to the Pen and my sister to a crummy, broken-down orphanage. Yeah, life is good as a Moon Dweller.

Given my dark thoughts, I am glad when the two hours pass. I leave the Yard, weaving my way through the kids who are still lounging about. Some are clustered in groups, speaking in hushed whispers, trading pages of books for cigarettes, and cigarettes for socks, and socks for whatever else will help them forget they are prisoners, that their lives are forfeit. Others are sprawled out on the rock, sleeping their sentences away.

My headache is gone, I realize.

Inside the Pen it’s like a cattle call. Kids are pushing against each other in mob-like fashion, all trying to get to the cafeteria. Feeding time is about the only time any of the kids show any kind of energy. Also when they’re fighting. Interesting how both instances are a matter of survival.

I ease my way into the mash-up of bodies and manage to find a human flow that’s moving swiftly in the right direction, like a strong current in one of the many underground rivers of the Tri-Realms. Soon—after only a few minor collisions—I’m in the cafeteria.

Given the crowds, one might expect that the food is to die for. Perhaps it is a trendy new restaurant, one where you have to make a reservation, like Tawni suggested earlier. However, one bite of the lukewarm mashed potatoes or a spoon of the mystery stew is enough to clinch the notion that the executive chef would be much better suited to some other occupation—any other occupation. Seriously. It’s bad. Tasteless. Like eating a shoe. And not a new one. One that has been worn for years by someone who suffers from severe foot sweating.

But we have no choice. It’s the only show in town, a monopoly—on our stomachs. So we add lots of salt, which by some miracle they provide in plenty.

Once in the food line, I order—by pointing at things and grunting—a gob of something covered in brown gravy, a noodle dish that looks like dead worms, and a plastic cup of brownish water. Yum.

I find Tawni right where she said she’d be—at one of the corner tables. Most every table is already full, so I’m glad she arrived early enough to get it. Usually I just take my food outside, to eat alone in silence.

There’s a guy sitting across from her. He’s naturally dark-skinned, which is the only way to not have pale skin when you live underground; unless, of course, you reside in the Sun Realm, where tanning beds are a staple in every household.

He’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off, highlighting his muscular arms. He’s tall, but not as tall as Tristan. Funny how I’m already comparing other guys to Tristan, like I even know him.

Tawni spots me and motions for me to join them. I manage to squeeze through the throng of eaters and slide onto the bench next to her.

“Hi!” she says brightly, like we’re just a bunch of friends going out to eat at our favorite haunt.

“Uh, yeah, hi.” I still can’t seem to remember how to speak like a normal human being. I glance at the black guy. He smiles.

“I’m Cole,” he says, extending a hand.

When he grasps my hand it disappears, as if it’s been swallowed by his enormous paw. I shake his hand firmly, trying to act tough, but to my surprise he doesn’t return my iron grip. Nor does his hand crumple under the raw power of my squeeze. It’s just sort of there. It’s like his hand absorbs my strength, simply by the sheer solidity of his bones. His hand is also somewhat tender and gentle, smooth and well cared for. Somewhat feminine, if I’m being honest. It’s a contradiction, which I’m always intrigued by. Like bittersweet chocolate, which, by the way, I’ve only tried once in my life when my dad gave me a square for my eighth birthday.

By just shaking Cole’s hand I’ve started to like him. Can it be: another friend? Two in one day? It’s like a Christmas miracle.

“I’m Adele,” I say, feeling quite gabby all of a sudden.

“I know,” he says. “Tawni told me. She said you’re a real badass.”

I feel my face flush slightly. “Oh. Not really. It was just some punk who’s all talk.”

“She told me who it was. He’s not all talk. I’ve seen him bust some heads before. You were lucky; you don’t want to mess with that dude.”

“I can take care of myself,” I say. I hear coldness creep into my tone. I grit my teeth and try to relax.

Cole shrugs. “If you say so. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Whatcha in for anyway?” he asks.

Geez, this guy cuts right to the chase. But I tell him anyway. “Mass murder. Got burned by the shallow graves—I knew I should have dug deeper.”

Cole doesn’t flinch. “Oh yeah?” he says. “Me, too. Weird coincidence, huh?”

My jaw drops open.

Cole grins. “Gotcha!” he says proudly.

I realize that, like me, he’s joking. The way he delivers the line, combined with his soft handshake, combined with the fact that I’m actually speaking to real humans for the first time in a long time, makes me completely miss his sarcasm. Me, the queen of sarcastic comments—self-declared—has been outsarcastified.

I grin at Cole. That’s when I notice the strength of his eyes. When I say strength, I mean strength. Most people talk about eye color when they talk about people’s eyes—I certainly do. And yes, Cole’s eyes are a beautifully warm shade of milky chocolate brown. But what I notice is what’s behind his eyes. It’s like he’s wearing steel-plated contacts. There’s no trace of nervousness, or fear, or worry, or any of those other feelings I constantly have; the feelings that lead my eyes to look away, to flutter, to close. Right away I know Cole is someone you can count on in the most dangerous situations.

“Nah, I’m not sarcastic at all,” Cole says. Again, I can’t detect even the slightest trace of sarcasm in his voice. He’s good, that’s for sure. I’ll have to listen closely whenever he speaks.

Despite having only just met these two people, barely spoken three sentences to either of them, I find myself opening up.

“I’m the daughter of a traitor,” I blurt out. “What about you?”

Tawni looks at Cole. Cole looks at Tawni. A thousand words seem to be conveyed by their simple eye contact. Are they considering whether to trust me?

Finally, Tawni turns back to me. “Well, you’ve got us beat,” she says. “I got caught trying to travel interdistrict without a travel card, and Cole here stole a couple of loaves of bread to feed his starving family.” Something about the way she delivers the information, so matter-of-factly, almost makes it sound like a well-rehearsed line. But before I consider it further, Cole plows ahead.

“It was six loaves of bread,” he says, “which, let me tell ya, are hard to carry when you don’t have a bag and you’re in a hurry. When my family didn’t have anything to eat for three nights in a row, I came up with a plan. I was so stressed that sweat was dripping off my forehead and into my eyes. I could barely see when I smashed the bakery window. My hands were sweaty, but somehow I managed to grab the six loaves. Someone shouted at me—an Enforcer, I think—and I started running. Right away one of the loaves slipped out of my fingers. I grabbed for it, but that made another one slip, then another. Soon I was juggling the bread, batting it up in the air over my head. I did pretty well, too, keeping all six up in the air for like five seconds before one fell. My luck didn’t get much better at that point. I slipped on the loaf, which, for your information, was about as slippery as a banana peel, and went down hard. They brought me here.”

I almost want to laugh. Cole has a twinkle in his eyes, so I don’t think he’ll mind. But laughter is still coming hard for me, so I just smile lightly. “Truth,” I say, starting a game that has the potential to last for a long time.

Cole grins. “Correct,” he says. “As stupid a way as that was to end up in the Pen, it’s all true.” I’m starting to get a better read on him, noticing subtle things like the way his bottom lip pouts slightly when he’s being honest. His eyes are always the same, though, like metal, so I won’t be able to use them to read him, like you can with most people.

“How long you in for?” Tawni asks me.

I raise my eyebrows. “How long?” I parrot.

“Yeah, you know,” Tawni says, “a year, two years, what?”

“Try forever,” I say.

Cole stares at me. “Truth,” he says.

“No, that can’t be right,” Tawni says. “Lie. She’s messing with us.”

With tight lips I shake my head. “Not a lie. They told me rebelliousness is passed through blood, genetically, like eye color or being able to snap your fingers. They won’t ever let me out. I mean, when I turn eighteen I’ll move out of this place and into an adult facility—probably the Max, in the Star Realm—but I’ll never have my freedom again.”

Leave it to me to put a damper on my first meal with my two new friends. But they did ask, and I wasn’t about to lie. I expect them to shun me, to get up and leave, like just being in my presence will add years to their own sentences. They don’t.

Cole says, “That’s horse manure. I’ll never go for that.”

He says it in such a way that I know he’s dead serious, as if he’s already made up his mind to do something about it. Not that he can. If he tries anything he’ll just end up with his own life sentence.

“There’s nothing you can do,” I say.

“There has to be something,” Tawni says. The way she emphasizes the word something, I know she isn’t talking about legal methods.

“No, there’s not,” I say adamantly. “You guys barely know me and you’ll just screw up your own chances. When do you get out anyway?”

Cole looks at Tawni and motions with his head. She answers for them both. “I’m out in six months and Cole’s out in a year.”

I nod. Even their sentences seem exceptionally harsh considering their crimes, but they sound a whole lot better than mine. In a year they’ll both be out of the Pen, able to make their own decisions again, even if under the increasingly intolerant oppression of the government.

I’m glad when Tawni changes the subject. She says, “Wasn’t it weird today how Tristan looked at you?” My breath catches in my lungs. So she did notice.

I look at Cole. “Tawni told me about that, too,” he says, “but I want to hear it from you.”

“I thought it was all in my head,” I say, feeling my face go slightly warm again. One negative of having highly pale skin is that a blush stands out like a hairy wart on a nose.

“No—it wasn’t,” Tawni says. “It was like all the crowds and everything else just disappeared, and Adele and Tristan were the only people left. I could almost see his laser eyes touching you, caressing you…”

“Tawni!” I shout, ignoring a couple of strange glances from the other eaters. “It wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t feel any…touching.” I say the last word like it’s something disgusting, like moldy bread, crinkling my nose and curling my lip. “But I did notice him looking at me.”

“You see? I told you, Cole. But it hurt you, didn’t it?” she asks. When my eyes widen, she says, “You cried out. You were holding your head.”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I just had a headache.”

She shrugs, as if she’s satisfied, but I get the feeling that she and I both know it was much more than just a headache.

Chapter Four

Tristan

My meetings with the leaders of the Moon Realm pass torturously slowly. Although I’m barely listening, by the end of the day I’m so annoyed with the leaders kissing my hind parts that I want to scream.

As the rough gray cavern walls flash past on either side during the train ride back to the Sun Realm, I think about when my next scheduled visit to the Moon Realm is. Not for months, I realize. All the key contracts are signed. The Moon Dwellers will slave away for another year, providing sustenance to the lazy Sun Dwellers, for a measly wage of five Nailins a day; all because of the lopsided contract my father forced their leaders to sign. You’d think that as son of the President there’d be something I could do to help. There’s nothing. I’m merely a puppet, sent across the Tri-Realms to collect signatures and smile for the cameras. All the real negotiations are performed by my father, behind closed doors—and he always gets what he wants.

I have to find an excuse to go back to the Moon Realm. To find out what happened to the mysterious headache-inducing dark-haired girl. I have no choice in the matter; an unseen force drives me. I wonder if I would feel this strongly if she hadn’t been in danger when I saw her. If we’d only looked at each other, would I have simply shrugged her off as just another beautiful girl? I don’t know the answer to my own question, but my every instinct is urging me to find her.

But it’s more than that. It’s not only that she was in danger that interests me. It’s the way she handled herself. With confidence, with strength. Different from the girls in the Sun Realm, who can’t seem to do anything for themselves.

And I need to know why my body reacted the way it did when I saw her. Was it simply a strange seventeen-year-old hormonal response to a pretty face? Seems farfetched given how many pretty girls I see every day, each of whom try to throw themselves at me. But it’s even more farfetched to think of alternative reasons for the stabbing pain in my spine, for the thundering headache in my skull. Both of which, by the way, disappeared soon after she disappeared from sight.

Another question pops into my head: Does she hate me like so many other Moon Dwellers do? Just because I’m the son of the president?

She probably does. Not that I would blame her. We call ourselves a democracy, but rule like a dictatorship. The title of President for my father should’ve been replaced with something else long ago. King, Master, Czar…something. If I lived in the Moon or Star Realms, I would probably rebel against my father, against the Sun Dwellers. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a major rebellion, at least not in my lifetime. The last time it happened was the Uprising in 475 PM, but it was quashed by my father’s troops in less than a year. Another rebellion is my father’s greatest fear, and yet he takes liberties away from the Moon and Star Dwellers as easily as he shakes out stones from his shoes. I hate him for it.

“Sir?” I hear someone say. It’s my servant, Roc. He’s staring at me strangely.

I look around and realize the train has stopped. “Oh, we’re here,” I say, jumping up.

Roc escorts me out of the first-class car and onto the palace grounds. Everything’s brighter here, nothing like the gloominess of the Moon Realm. We’re still underground, yes, but the entire roof glows brightly, illuminating the massive cave network. It’s all part of the distinction between the Realms. Electricity is strictly rationed, such that the Sun Realm receives eighty percent of it, of course, with a paltry fifteen percent going to the Moon Realm, and a measly five percent to the Star Dwellers.

At least those are the published figures. In reality, I know that closer to ninety-five percent of all energy goes to the Sun Dwellers, allowing us to live like kings. Not that we are—there are no kings in a democracy.

“Your father requests your presence immediately,” Roc says as we walk.

“Of course he does,” I say. To any other servant, I’d probably sound smug, self-righteous, like I’m pleased my father has requested my audience. But not to Roc. He knows I’m being sarcastic. Roc’s more than just a servant. He’s my friend—maybe my only one. In public I’m forced to treat him as I would any servant, because to my father anything else would be a sign of weakness.

But in private we’re best friends. We’ve grown up together, after all. Before he reached the age of accountability—eight years old—we played every day together. He loved my mother, too. Sadly, Roc’s mother died giving birth to him. But my mom adopted him, treated him just as well as my brother and I. Kissing him goodnight, taking him on our adventures, giving him presents on the day of the Sun Festival: Roc was like a third son to my mom…and is like a second brother to me.

Roc grins. “We’ll try to get out of there fast, sir. If we have time afterwards, can I have another lesson?”

I grin back. A few months prior, Roc requested that I teach him to fight. Swords, guns, battleaxes, knives—that sort of thing. I gladly agreed. It was just another chance to disobey my father. He doesn’t want Roc and me to be friends. The servant/master code is far too important to him. Even Roc’s father, who is my father’s chief servant and has known my father for years, isn’t a friend to him.

“Absolutely,” I say. “We’ll keep focusing on swords—because they’re useful and awesome.”

We reach the palace garden. Creating and maintaining the underground garden costs more in a month than the entire population of Star Dwellers earns in a year. It isn’t possible without the sun-like technology that was invented decades earlier. Not that my father cares. Ignoring the insane cost, the garden is extraordinary. Pillars of perfectly pruned green hedges frame the entrance. Hundreds of varieties of flora and fauna are meticulously maintained by the garden staff, providing splashes of color throughout the garden’s boundaries. The garden looks weird inside the massive cavern.

I always loved the palace garden growing up. Running around in bare feet on the soft, lush lawns, playing hide-and-go-seek around the bushes and trees, Roc and I pretending we were palace guards as we charged through the garden, fighting off marauders with our invisible swords. Now, like most things in the Sun Realm, I hate the garden. For me the garden is just another reminder of how unfair the world that my father governs is. The world that I am meant to inherit, being the eldest son.

Perhaps it’s my mother’s influence, but I can never be the man my father wants me to be.

We walk quickly through the garden, like we always do.

Along the way we pass many people. Most of them are servants, who acknowledge me with a slight bow, which I ignore—another one of my father’s requirements. But some of them are palace guests—Sun Dwellers. Those are the ones I most like to look at. Because they look ridiculous. The current fashion is to wear bright colors, and the Sun Dwellers take it to the extreme, wearing gaudy red and pink tunics with blue and green polka dots. But compared to the hats, the tunics are tame. There are hats of all shapes and sizes, some glittering, some sparkling, some shimmering with diamonds and pearls, or stuck with feathers like a bird. All worth laughing at. Time and time again I’m forced to hide my amusement as I’m greeted by men, women, boys, and girls, all seeking “just a moment of your time.” It’s a wonder we ever make it to the palace.

By the time we do, the sun is waning in the west. Or at least that’s how some of the books my mom used to read to me described the sunset. In the Sun Realm, the artificial sun is just slowly dimmed, to simulate nightfall.

In reality, it’s always night in the caves.

My father is waiting, keeping court in his throne room—I mean meeting room. He’d have to be a king to get a throne.

“You’re late,” he says.

He’s wearing a spotless white tunic with shimmering gold embroidery along the seams. His gray goatee is groomed to perfection, no doubt trimmed twice already that day by a servant. Probably by one of the two pretty little things that stand by his side now, ready for his next command. They’re both blonde and deeply tanned, wearing tight, black tunics cut off well above the knees. The V-necks reveal just how mature they are. It’s all part of my father’s dress code for the female servants. Roc’s father excepted, all of my father’s personal servants are women—as beautiful as they are sleazy. I suspect they do a lot more for him than just iron his tunics and trim his beard.

“I was delayed by some journalists who wanted some quotes for tomorrow’s paper,” I say flatly.

“Sir,” my father says simply.

I sigh. “Sir,” I repeat. Another one of my father’s pet peeves.

“And everything else went according to schedule?” he says.

“Yes. Next year’s contracts with the Moon Realm have been finalized under the terms you stipulated…” I pause…one beat, two. My father drums his fingers on his wooden armrest impatiently. “Sir,” I say finally, enjoying my little game. I don’t dare to openly rebel against my father, but I can still have a bit of fun.

“Good,” my father says. “Is that everything?”

I nod.

Without waiting for his permission, I turn on my heel and march off, with Roc in tow. I hear my father say, “You may go,” as I walk away. It’s his lame attempt to show off his power in front of his Barbie Doll servants.

When we are out of eyesight and earshot, Roc says, “You really shouldn’t push him like that.”

I sigh. “I know, I know.” Roc is usually right. Flashing a grin, I say, “But it was fun, wasn’t it?”

“It’s the little things in life,” Roc says, smiling. His dark features look even darker as shadows fall upon the palace.

“Like swords?” I say.

“Yes!” Roc says, a bit too loudly. A passing servant woman glares at him. Mrs. Templeton—the palace housekeeper. She’s a nasty one.

We make our way through the business end of the palace and into the residential quarters. The change in décor is like night and day. The government side is stark and official-looking, everything clean-cut, free of clutter, and stamped with the symbol of the Sun Realm—a fiery red and orange sun with wavy heat lines wafting to the sides. The living quarters still feel a bit too posh and sterile, but at least there are a few personal touches, all of which my mother added before she disappeared.

There’s the family portrait on the entry room table. Normally, I wouldn’t have any interest in a family photo. But this one I love, because it presents our family in such an honest light. My brother and I look bored, restless, with tousled hair and cheeky grins. My mother has her arm around the both of us, pulling us into her side. About a foot away, on her other side, is my father, not looking happy at all. The cameraman snapped the photo a split-second before he was able to turn on his friendly-President face, as I like to call it. You know, the one that’s so obviously fake it’s painful to watch. The kind of face you just want to slap.

After that photo was taken, my father’s face went all red and he looked like he was ready to slug the photographer. But my mom managed to soothe him, rubbing her hand on his back and telling him how she liked the photo, how she wanted to keep it. That was back when she still had some power over him.

Somehow she convinced him to display the photo prominently in our home. After she disappeared, I expected him to take it down. But either he’d grown to like it (which I doubt) or he’d forgotten it was even there (more likely). And so it remains, making me smile every time I pass by.

A part of me clings to the hope that my father kept the photo there because he misses her, wants to remember her, but the more grownup part of me knows better. Before my mother vanished, there was no love between them. It was purely another of my father’s business relationships, using my mother for the sole purpose of demonstrating stability at the top of the government.

At some point in my parents’ relationship there must have been love—at least from my mom’s side—but I don’t think it lasted very long. As far back as I can remember he had the young, scantily clad servant girls. As a kid I thought they were just fun little helpers who giggled and helped my dad around the office. Almost like elves. That is one fantasy I wish I hadn’t outgrown. The truth is far too sickening.

Roc is saying something. “Huh?” I say.

He repeats himself. “You know it wasn’t your fault.”

Roc’s words sound cryptic, but I know exactly what he’s talking about. My mother’s disappearance. Two years ago, but still as fresh in my memory as if it was yesterday.

“I wasn’t thinking about that.” Well, not really. But it is on the fringe of my thoughts; it is always there, buzzing around the edge of my consciousness, suffocating my heart.

“It doesn’t matter what you were thinking,” Roc says. “I know you still blame yourself.”

I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to dredge up the memories again—they’re too painful. I’m fine to just let her memory cling to the edges of my mind where maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to face them. Sometimes talking to Roc is like talking to a shrink, only without the comfy couch to lie on.

“Not now, Roc,” I say.

“Then when?” he asks.

“Maybe never,” I say honestly.

Roc stops, grabs my shoulders with both hands, forces me to look at him. His dark eyes are serious. “Blaming yourself is like a curse eating you from within, a rogue virus, cancerous and poisonous. It will drive you mad if you let it. You’re my friend and I hate to see you like this. And your mother would hate to see her disappearance cause you to self-destruct.”

I expected Roc to say something cliché like Blaming yourself won’t bring her back, Tristan, but instead, his words are like darts embedding themselves in my chest. I don’t want to let him down. Nor my mother. But I can’t help it. The pain is more than I can bear. The what-ifs are a cancer, like Roc said. What if I was a better son? What if I’d stood up to my father? What if I’d been with her on the day she disappeared, refusing to let her out of my sight? Would everything be different then? Would we be a happy little family?

I want to believe the answer is yes, but in my heart I know it isn’t so. Accepting that fact will set me free. But I can’t…or won’t.

Not that it matters. I will hang on to the what-ifs and continue to blame myself regardless of whether I truly believe I had any influence on the events that transpired.

There isn’t much to believe in these days. I once believed in the love of a mother, but then she left me. I used to believe in honor, in chivalry, in the power that one person has to enact real, positive change in the world. My mother taught me all that. It vanished when she did.

Now all I believe in is pain.

Pain is the great equalizer, the cure to mental anguish, the antidote for a hopeful heart. It comes in all different forms—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Most days I like physical the best, choosing to throw myself into my training with unbridled aggression. I make my challenges impossible, sometimes facing twenty or more opponents simultaneously. And because I’m the President’s son, they have to obey me, have to attack. At first they’re timid, afraid to bruise me, but after taking a whack or two from the broadside of my steel blade they change, becoming more ferocious than attacking lions.

I still have scars from those training sessions.

The beauty of physical pain is that it wipes out the other forms of pain. Not necessarily completely or for an extended period of time, but long enough to grant a reprieve from my tortured mind and soul.

“On guard!” Roc yells, his teeth clenched together like a wild beast. He’s realized I’m not going to speak to him about my mother. I’m glad he’s given up for the time being. His new approach: beat it out of me.

I don’t even have my weapon yet, but it doesn’t matter. Roc’s clumsy swings feel like they’re in slow motion, coming in at awkward angles, without any attempt to hide his intentions: he’s going for my head. He’s probably trying to knock some sense into me.

He knows better than that—I’ve taught him better. Feinting is as important as the actual attack. Disguising one’s intent is the key to fighting. But he’s on a mission. I know it’s because he cares about me—wants better for me—that he’s trying to crack me across the skull.

Not today.

I spin to the left and drop to a roll, hearing Roc’s wooden blade crash thunderously into the wall behind me. When I fight my senses seem to magnify. I’m looking in the other direction, reaching for my own practice blade, grasping it, but I can picture Roc’s blade rebounding off the wall, him repositioning his feet like I’ve taught him, his next swing…

I whirl around just in time, catching the tip of his sword low on my own. Thud! The sound is dull and won’t carry past the walls. We fight with wooden practice swords in the privacy of my room because no one can ever know I’m training my servant to fight. It’s nearly as effective as using metal practice swords out in the yard—I can teach him the proper technique, the footwork, the positions—but I know at some point we’ll need to find a place to practice with real swords. If he’s to get any better, that is.

Instinct takes over. That and years of the highest quality training that money can buy. Without thinking, I bend my knees, straighten my back, keep my hips aligned with my shoulders. Roc attempts to do the same, but in the wall-length mirror I can see that next to me he looks amateurish, awkward.

I’m not being vain. Just realistic. Roc needs lots of work on his posture. I can help with that. But not today. Today is about passionate fighting. At least for Roc. Me, I’m calm, unemotional, businesslike. Just like I’ve been taught.

I easily parry Roc’s next three attempts at taking my head off, and then duck the fourth, moving in close to his body and elbowing him hard in the chest. One of the most important lessons in sword fighting—especially for real, life or death, fight-like-there’s-no-tomorrow sword fighting—is to use all parts of your body. Most people assume that because you have a pointy sword you should use it exclusively. Not so.

With a grunt, Roc goes down hard. Lucky for him he crashes onto my bed, ruffling the perfectly ironed red comforter. One thing Roc has going for him is his athleticism. While not trained in the art of fighting, or of swordplay, he has a natural speed and quickness that is particularly effective on the defensive side. His speed temporarily saves him from another defeat at my hands.

After crushing him with my elbow, I continue surging forward, following him onto the bed and attempting to get the point of my dull wooden blade under his chin and against his neck, which is the requisite for victory.

He recovers beautifully, executing a graceful backwards roll, and manages to maintain his grip on the sword. He lands on his feet on the other side of the bed, grinning slightly. His brown skin is shining with sweat under the soft lantern glow. Outstretching his off-sword hand, he flicks his fingers back toward himself, as if to say, “C’mon, bring it!”

I bring it. I launch myself over the bed, pointing my sword forward like a battering ram. Roc is forced to jump backwards, which allows me to land on my feet and go on the offensive. I feint hard to the left and Roc completely buys it. When I go right he’s left exposed. I connect sharply under his ribs and then whip a leg behind his knees, sweeping him off his feet. He smashes onto his back, losing his sword in the process. When he reaches for it, I step on the wooden blade.

He gives me a wry grin.

I give him my hand.

Big mistake.

He grabs my hand and pulls hard, throwing off my center of gravity and forcing me over the top of him. Although I’ve been trained to maintain a firm grip on my sword at all times, even to the detriment of the rest of my body, it’s difficult to do in real life when every instinct is telling you to release your sword and use your hand to break your fall.

I practically throw my sword across the room. By the time I stop my fall and start moving to recover my sword, Roc’s quickness gives him the advantage. He already has his own sword in one hand, and mine in the other.

“A little cheap, but a victory nonetheless,” I say.

“My first one, sir,” Roc says, laughing.

I hate losing, but I laugh, too. Roc knows I hate it when he calls me sir in private. It’s his way of getting even with me for my unwillingness to talk about my feelings.

“Thanks, Roc,” I say, feeling a stronger bond with him than I’ve felt for anyone in a long time. Without him I’m not sure where I would be. A wreck for sure. Well, at least more of a wreck than I already am.

For no reason at all, an image flashes through my mind: the black-haired girl sitting on the stone bench; her sad, sad eyes; the eternal gulf between us bridged when our eyes meet. Then her fists are out to fight the ogre. Bone-crushing pain surges in my head.

That’s when I pass out.

Chapter Five

Adele

A riot breaks out as I make my way back to my cell. That’s the way things work in the Pen. You’re minding your own business and then you’re in the middle of a brawl. Like the one I’m in now.

A fist the size of a miner’s hammer bashes the side of my skull, forcing my eyes shut and sending stars dancing across my field of vision. When my sight returns, I see what hit me. Wielded by a tattooed mountain, the clenched fingers are like a wrecking ball, colliding with anything and everything in their destructive path. And I’m in the way.

I can fight the guy, but he isn’t even fighting me. He’s just fighting in general, swinging at anything that moves.

Each time I try to push through the human net surrounding us, claw-like hands force me into the center. Ducking under another arc of human flesh and bone, I fire back, aiming my own punch at his ribs. When I connect, tendrils of pain rip through my hand and explode up my forearm. I know how to punch, but for a moment I think I’ve punched the stone wall by mistake. The steroidal teenage mountain looms over me, finally focusing his violence on a single target: me. I’m in way over my head.

His fist is the size of a basketball as it cuts toward my face. There’s no time to move. I close my eyes.

I hear a groan before I’m knocked to the floor by a big body, but my head doesn’t hurt. When I open my eyes I’m surprised to see darkness on top of me. And then I’m pulled to my feet by Cole, who charges through the impenetrable human blockade, tossing surprised bodies to either side as he pulls me to safety.

We race down a hall and pass by guards who are striding in the other direction, their eyes sparkling with excitement, their knuckles white and gripping clubs and Tasers. They like when there are riots. It means they get to satisfy their lust for blood.

We turn a corner and nearly run into Tawni, who’s galloping toward us. Her eyes start on me, but then flick to Cole and widen. “Are you okay?” she says, lifting a hand to his face.

I follow her gaze to Cole’s eye, which is already swollen. I realize that the reason my head isn’t hurting is because Cole’s is. He took the hit for me, and took it well. I’ve been protecting myself for so long it feels weird to have someone else do something for me.

“I’m fine,” Cole says, pulling Tawni’s hand away from his face.

“Thanks, but—” I start to say.

“No problem.”

“I wasn’t finished. Thanks, but I could’ve handled him on my own. I know how to look after myself.” I’m being a brat, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

Cole half-grins, half-grimaces. “Sure,” he says.

“No, really, I was fine,” I say. “I know how to fight.”

“If you say so,” Cole replies. “It just looked like that dude was gonna make mincemeat out of your face, but next time I guess I won’t bother…”

I take a deep breath, try to stop being the cold, isolated person I’ve become. “Sorry…I mean…thanks. Yes, thank you—that’s what I meant to say.”

“No problem,” Cole repeats. “Now we better get into our cells before that riot spills out this way.”

I know he’s right because I can hear the roar of chaos growing louder. I don’t know what else to say, so I leave them and head back to my lonely cell.

* * *

The sunlight retreats along the white windowsill. With each passing minute, the shadows lengthen, until the light gives way to a troubled darkness, gray and soggy. The dark clouds challenge the omniscient sun, and the clouds prevail, like a black-armored army descending upon a shining and pure city of light. Skeins of rain beat upon the panes of glass. Moisture splutters under the base of the barely opened window, leaving the painted sill slick and wet. A few drops gather and push forward to the edge, slipping off and onto the plush brown carpet.

If only.

I wish that’s what I am seeing. Only I’ve never seen sunlight. Or sunshine, or sunbeams, or even a ray of sun. Those are just words in books—not real. Nor have I seen rain—or clouds, for that matter. Like sunlight, those are things of myth and legend. As told by my grandmother, who was told by her mother—a story passed down for generations. Not even my father has seen the sun. Or my father’s father. Or my father’s father’s father. You get the picture.

But no, I’m not seeing rain, or clouds, or much of anything. Just the inside of my pitiful gray cell inside the Pen. The walls are made of stone. And the ceiling. And the floors. Even the bed. Shocking, I know. It seems that everything in my world is made of stone.

Weird that we’re called Moon Dwellers, when none of us have even seen the moon, much less dwelt on it. We’re still stuck on earth. Well, not on earth so much as in it, at least a mile below the deadly surface. I’m not sure who the idiot was who decided to call us Moon Dwellers, but I’d guess he or she was a Sun Dweller. It seems that most of the dumb ideas come from them. In school they told us that the logic behind the names is related to how bright each light source appears in the sky. For example, the sun appears the brightest—at least that’s what we’re told and how it looks in the pictures—and therefore, those nearest to the surface should be called Sun Dwellers. We’re next and are like the moon, second brightest. At the bottom, of course, are the Star Dwellers, miles from the earth’s surface. I also heard that there are some references to this kind of thing in the Bible, too, but I’ve never read it so I’m not sure if it is true. Bottom line: I think the names are stupid.

I’d prefer them to be called Deep, Deeper, and Deepest.

No matter how they spin things, it’s a class system, one predicated on those at the top being worth more than those at the bottom. My grandmother said the distinctions between the classes are more obvious in our world, but that it had been the same when people lived above the earth, only no one talked about it as much.

I’ve also heard stories about how the Sun Realm has buildings made of wood, a substance that comes from the trunks of trees. I’ve only seen pictures of trees. Old pictures saved from up above. Or pictures my grandmother drew for me based on what her mother told her. They have all kinds of plants up there, or so people say. It’s almost like they are living aboveground, with a synthetic sun, fake rain, and artificial stars that come out at night. Why they are so privileged, I may never know. I grit my teeth and try to think about something else.

My thoughts turn to my new friends, Cole and Tawni. With their sudden entrance into my life, I now have puzzles to solve. Clearly they haven’t told me everything. I mean, who would? They’ve just met me, barely know me. I certainly haven’t told them everything about my past, although I’ve told them a lot more than I planned to. Something about the way they looked at each other tells me there’s more to their story than they’ve let on.

An electronic voice blares through the speaker in my ceiling. “All guests are in their rooms. Lights out in exactly five minutes.”

I roll my eyes like I usually do when I hear the announcement. They’re always trying to make us feel better about our situation. It’s like just because we’re juveniles, the so-called adults can’t be honest with us. Guests? Really? We’re locked up, our freedoms restricted beyond recognition. Everyone knows we’re inmates, plain and simple.

And rooms? Come on. I look around my “room” as if I’m seeing it for the first time. No windows. A thin slat in the door is used to let air in and to speak through. It’s a cell. Sometimes I awake from a restless sleep and find the walls closing in on me, threatening to suffocate me, crush me. Sometimes I wish they would.

I’ve heard they named it the Pen after the word playpen, like a young child’s little safety enclosure, full of toys and bright-colored bobbles and trinkets. But it just makes me think of the longer version of the word it’s really short for: penitentiary.

I’m not sure whether they sugarcoat everything to help us sleep at night, or to help them sleep at night. Either way, it’s a waste of time.

The lights go out and I’m thrust into abject darkness.

I learned in school about the biological changes that humans have slowly undergone, generation after generation, since moving underground. We gained improved night vision due to long exposure to dim or no lighting. Our senses of hearing and smell have been heightened, making us less reliant on our slightly improved sight. Our skin has become paler and dustier. Human lungs are now more resistant to the constant intake of rock dust. Evidently, average life expectancies are about twenty years shorter than when humans lived aboveground, but no one really talks about it. Long story short: we’ve adapted, for better or worse.

Having a sudden urge, I manage to half-roll off the thin padding on my stone cot and stumble to the corner, where there’s a small hole in the floor. I squat and manage to relieve myself before collapsing back into bed.

In the dark, I bend my legs and flex them at the knees a few times, trying to get some feeling back. My eyes are quickly adjusting to the dark and I can just make out the faint outline of the slot in the door. I close my eyes but sleep continues to evade me.

Finally, I fall asleep.

* * *

My body’s convulsing, shaking uncontrollably, rattling my teeth as I make an unearthly, high-pitched noise. Tristan’s standing nearby, just watching.

I wake up, not shaking, not screaming. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Once more, I drift off to sleep.

* * *

The lights blink on and the computer voice screeches through the speaker. “Good morning. All guests may now exit their rooms for the day,”—I hear the click of the lock on my door—“breakfast will be served in the cafeteria.” As if it would be served anywhere else.

I lie in bed for a few minutes, blinking, trying to remember the strange dream that woke me in the middle of the night. I can’t. It’s like the dream has been permanently deleted from my memory. Logically, I know what the dream was about—me being in pain, Tristan watching—but I can’t seem to remember the feelings from it.

I sigh, not because I remember the dream, but because I forget it. Swinging my legs over the bed, I force myself up. Some days I feel like staying in bed all day, but that’s not permitted. One of the stewards—their name for prison guards—will eventually come and make me leave my cell, by force if necessary. It isn’t worth the hassle.

I go through my morning routine—use the “bathroom,” do a few stretches, feel sorry for myself—and then exit my “room.” First stop is the washroom. To my surprise, I find myself hoping—almost wishing—that Tawni will be in there. It feels weird looking forward to seeing someone again. Especially someone in the Pen. All the people I usually want to see are on the outside, or more likely, dead. Like my sister, who I hope is still alive.

The washroom has a few toilets, but I prefer the hole in my floor, because none of the stalls have doors. There are no mirrors—no one cares about their appearance in the Pen—and a simple trough-style basin covers one whole wall.

A bunch of girls are already using the trough: washing their faces, combing their hair with their fingers, brushing their teeth. The Pen management provides loads of crappy, gritty toothpaste, but no toothbrushes, so we’re forced to use our fingers. I scan the line of girls, looking for Tawni’s long, white hair.

She isn’t here.

I feel a bump from behind as another girl pushes past me and into the washroom. “Move it,” she says. Evidently I’m standing in the doorway. Even still, a simple “Excuse me” would’ve done the trick.

I go to work on my teeth, rubbing hard with my index finger to clean off the stale saliva still inhabiting my mouth. I rinse my mouth out with a swish of brown water from the rusty faucet. I can never understand why all the water in the Pen is brown. It’s like they purposely add dirt to it. Most of the water in the Moon Realm—or at least our subchapter—is clear, having been filtered naturally as it flows through the rocky tunnels around us. It’s just another way to punish us, I guess.

I skip a shower, because I’m really not in the mood to be naked in front of a bunch of other girls—there are no private showers in this hotel. Plus, we run out of hot water in about two minutes, so unless you’re the first one in, you have to shiver under the cold, drippy showerhead. Needless to say, I’ve reduced my standards on hygiene to about two showers a week, and quick ones at that. No one really notices the smell, though, because we all smell equally nasty. Freshly showered, smelling like soap, you’d actually stick out like a clown at a funeral.

I go to find Tawni, or Cole, or both.

I guess that they’ll be hungry, like me. I find them before I make it to the cafeteria. As I push through the crowds of kids, all zigzagging in different directions, I spot Tawni’s white hair next to Cole’s dark skin. The contrast is stark.

They’re slightly apart from the mob of bodies, against the wall, leaning in close to each other. Their heads are together and their lips are moving, like they’re whispering. It seems like such a funny place to have a secret conversation, but no one seems to notice. I remember something my dad used to say about how sometimes it’s best to hide in plain sight. It’s like that now. If they were further away from the crowds, crouching behind some rock in the Yard, or tucked away behind a door, they probably would’ve drawn everyone’s attention. Instead, they’re invisible.

I move closer, staying behind a really big guy who’s lumbering along in front of me. Next to Tawni is a janitor’s closet. The door is slightly ajar and I manage to slip from behind the big guy and into the closet. Out of the crowded hallway I can hear much better and, because they’re next to the wall, their voices are amplified and projected into my hiding place. I push my hair away from my ear and listen intently, trying to pick up every word.

Tawni says, “I know what I saw. He looked at her—no, it was more than that: he stared at her, right at her. You should’ve seen the way she screamed out in pain.”

Cole’s deep voice grumbles through the door. “What the hell does that even mean? That he’s got some sort of mental powers? Hurts people with his mind?”

“I don’t know,” Tawni says.

“What difference would it make? He’s a creep anyway. Just like his father. He comes down here and parades himself around, flaunts his power, allows his ugly mug to be put on every Sun Dweller magazine.” My nostrils flare suddenly and I feel my face go red, heating up. It’s anger. Directed at Cole for the things he’s saying about Tristan. They haven’t said any names but it’s obvious who they’re talking about. Me and Tristan. I take a deep breath, surprised at wanting to defend a random celebrity.

“He’s not a creep,” Tawni says. “I’ve heard things…”

“Yeah, right.”

“How long have we known each other?” Tawni asks.

There’s a pause, like Cole is trying to remember, or count the days or something. Then he says, “Five years.” Five years? I’m shocked. I expected him to say three months, or maybe six at the most. They’ve known each other since before the Pen. They must’ve met in school. That changes everything. The deepness of their relationship; what level of friendship I can have with them; what I can share with either of them.

“Yeah, five years, Cole. And how many times have I lied to you?”

“Never. At least not that I know of.” Cole sniggers to himself.

“Never—that’s right.”

“You might’ve just misheard, or misunderstood something.”

Tawni’s voice is rising. She’s getting emotional. “No. No, I didn’t. I heard both my mother and father say it before I ran away. I wouldn’t have left if I wasn’t certain. They’re spies for the freaking president. They know things. All I really needed to hear was that they were working for the Sun Dwellers, and then I was ready to leave, run away forever. But they kept talking. They said how Tristan’s different from his father. How they didn’t think he’d carry on the traditions if he became president. They were worried about that. I always wondered why we had so much more money than everyone else. I mean, I went to the same school as you. You couldn’t afford to eat, and I was eating with a silver spoon. Kickbacks for their dirty work. They were afraid the money would stop if Tristan took over. That’s how I know, Cole. That’s how I know!”

She almost shrieks the last bit and I hear Cole shush her, trying to get her to calm down. “Okay, okay,” he says. “I believe you. Maybe Tristan’s all right, but I still don’t get what that has to do with us, with Adele. Just because he looked at her funny…”

“Not funny. Intently, seriously, the way you look at someone you might try to track down at some point in the future. Particularly if you have the resources, which he obviously does.”

“What?” I hear myself say out loud. I mean for it to be a thought, confined to the safety of my own mind, but my wayward lips betray me.

Silence. I slap a hand over my mouth, hold my breath, listen to my heartbeat crunch in my chest like a miner’s axe on a slab of ore.

The door flies open and Cole’s face is silhouetted against the lights in the corridor. Some of the light sneaks past his large frame and spills across my face. One of his eyes is swollen shut, his cheek marbled with black, blue, and greenish yellow.

“Are you spying on us?” he says accusingly.

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I just saw you talking and wanted to hear what you were saying.” Insert foot in mouth. Translation: Yes, I am spying. Bye-bye, new friends. Hello, loneliness.

Cole looks like he wants to hit me.

“Why didn’t you just ask us?” The question comes from Tawni, who wedges her way between us.

“Ask you?” Again, the words pop from my mouth before I have a chance to stop them. They sound stupid. Like, Duh, asking would’ve been far easier than sneaking into a broom closet and listening through a door. I try to recover. “I, uh, I just thought you wouldn’t, uh, tell me these kinds of things,” I finish lamely.

“What kinds of things exactly?” Cole says.

Tawni pushes Cole back a bit with one arm. I’m surprised she can move him at all. Her arm looks like a toothpick compared to his armor-like chest. I guess she has hidden strength.

To my surprise, she says, “Cole, we need some girl time. We’ll catch up with you later.” Despite the evenness of her tone, her words sound like a command, and a powerful one at that.

Cole stares at me with one eye for a second, and then melts into the stream of bodies, disappearing in the mob.

When Tawni turns back to me, I say, “Thanks.”

Tawni offers me a hand and I take it. Unlike the previous day in the Yard, her hand is warm. Without another word, she pulls me out of the closet and leads me against the flow of human traffic. Where I’d normally bump and knock into a dozen kids if I tried such a maneuver, Tawni is graceful, able to find the path of least resistance. I stay in her wake, protected. I haven’t felt protected in a long time.

Soon the crowds thin and we are walking alone. I’m surprised to find myself still holding her hand. I feel like I should shake it free, but it feels so good—wonderful actually. I guess I need it. Human contact, that is. Having been deprived of human touch for so long, my body is craving it.

We reach a cell door. Not mine but the one next to it. Tawni’s. Funny that I never knew her and the whole time she was sleeping right next to me, just a rock wall between us. Not that it matters. I’ve lost Cole’s brief friendship and I’m about to lose Tawni’s slightly longer friendship. It’s time for my last-ditch effort to save it.

“Look, Tawni, I’m really sor—”

“It’s okay,” Tawni interrupts.

Huh? This time I manage to keep my stupid remark inside my head, but I’m sure my confusion is written all over my face. I can feel one cheek lifted weirdly, the opposite eyebrow raised, and my mouth contorted beneath my flaring nostrils. If Tawni and I are the lead characters in a magical fairy tale, it’s obvious who the ugly stepsister is. Not Tawni.

I realize Tawni’s back is to me; she’s facing the bed. Thank God, I think. Using my fingers, I manage to mold my face back into what I think is close to its normal shape. Just in time, too. She turns around.

Her eyes blaze with a sort of fire. Not real fire, but determination. It’s unexpected. She just looks so thin, so frail. Although she towers above me, I feel so much bigger than her. At least normally I do. But now she looks strong, like maybe her bones are made of a tougher material than I thought. I wait for her to speak.

“Your father is alive,” she says.

Chapter Six

Tristan

I like calling the Tri-Realms the underworld. For to me, that’s what it is. At times it feels more hellish than if I were at a barbecue with a bunch of demons and zombies, roasting the undead on a fiery spit.

I long to feel the wind tousle my hair, the sunlight on my face. Not the fake sun my father’s engineers have created, but the real thing. There’s nothing like it.

The underworld is so different. Dark, gloomy—it feels dead to me. Like it isn’t natural that any form of life other than the spiders and snakes and bats should occupy it. Certainly not humans.

And if we live in the underworld, then my father is the Devil himself, shrewd, evil, self-serving. They say that blood creates an unbreakable bond. If there’s a bond between my father and me—created by blood, DNA, or something else entirely—it’s as brittle as talc, cracking and crumbling while I was still in my mother’s womb.

I see her face again—the Moon Dweller with the shimmering black hair—so beautiful, so strong, so sad, like she’s crying invisible tears. Just seeing her, the pain is back. My brain feels like it’s expanding outward, pushing against my skull, trying to crack it, break it. But still, I want to help her. Reaching out, I try to touch her, to comfort her. But each time I try, she seems further away, as if some unseen force is keeping us apart. I run, pumping my arms and legs harder and harder, trying to keep up with her, but never able to close the gap. Finally, when I think my legs will collapse beneath me, she stops. I approach, my heart fluttering, my head pounding. I hear a slight whirr and feel a whoosh of air as something flies just past my ear. A flaming arrow. No! Already a spot of blood is seeping through her white tunic where the arrowhead has pierced her breast. The flames are licking at her clothes, charring them. I try to run to her, to douse the flames, to pluck the arrow from her skin and stop the bleeding, but my feet won’t move. At first I think I’m in shock, that I’m simply too weak-minded to gain control of my body, but when I look at my feet, they’re encased in stone. He moves past me. The archer. I can’t see his face, but I’d recognize his gait anywhere. My creator. I scream at him to Stop, please stop! but he ignores me, instead blowing softly on the flames, fueling them until they spread. I have to turn away—God, how desperately I want to turn away—but I can’t. Can’t. Can’t even close my eyes. I watch her burn. She’s brave—doesn’t even cry out, but I can hear her screams anyway. When she dies, my head stops hurting.

I wake up sweating and yelling, thrashing about in my bed. And thinking about the underworld.

Roc is by my side. As always. “Shhh,” he says. “Someone will hear.”

My legs stop thrashing, my arms stop flailing. I’m breathing heavily but not screaming anymore. It was just a dream. I’m on my bed; Roc must have carried me.

“What happened?” I say.

“You fainted,” Roc says, his lips curling slightly.

“Does that give you some kind of pleasure?” I snap.

Roc continues grinning. “Given it was brought on by your battle with a ferocious warrior, namely me, I’d say yes, it does bring me a level of pleasure. Especially because it was in the midst of my stunning and heroic victory,” he adds.

Normally I’d laugh. But I feel anything but normal. I feel like I’ve lost someone special to me, someone close. Like my mother—but a different kind of close, a different kind of special. I grunt.

Roc seems to recognize that something is wrong and his smile fades. “Tristan, are you okay?” he asks.

I honestly don’t know. So I swing my legs over the side of the bed and tell him everything. About the girl in the Pen, the pain in my back and head, the big guy who was about to assault her, how I saw her face just before I fainted, and about my dream—what my father did to her. When I finish I look for his reaction. I think he might make fun of me. If the roles were reversed it’s what I might do.

Instead, his lips are tight, his eyes narrow. He says, “I think it means something.”

“You do?” I say, genuinely surprised.

“Yes. A storm is coming. I’ve felt it for some time now. I think you have, too. Why we’ve never spoken of it before, I don’t know. Perhaps we were scared.”

My first instinct is to contradict him. Not the stuff about the storm—whatever that means—but about being scared. He might be, but not me. I’m not scared of anything. Not even my father—not anymore—although I probably should be. But I know I’ve been too reactionary lately—too quick to fire back at Roc if I don’t like something he says. Like a good friend, he’s put up with it, shaking his head and ignoring my outbursts. So, for once, I don’t say the first thing that pops into my head. I actually think about what he said.

A storm? I know he doesn’t mean a physical storm, like the ones that rage on the earth’s surface from time to time. Therefore, a metaphorical one. Like a conflict. A battle maybe. No, more specific than that: a rebellion. I have felt it, too. Have even commented on it. If not out loud, then in my head, to myself. How it’s a wonder that everyone puts up with my father’s tyrannical politics, his cruel and unfair treatment of the people that support his way of life. Not a wonder—a miracle. And miracles simply don’t happen these days. Not anymore. They’re a thing of the past, of legends, of stories. Which means it’s bound to happen eventually. From time to time we hear whisperings of secret groups of radicals, plotting and scheming in hidden caves, using secret handshakes and passwords. My father dismisses them as casually as he swats pesky flies from his shoulder.

I have felt it, too. So why haven’t we talked about it before? I try to open myself to the possibility that I’m scared, like Roc suggested. I know right away that isn’t it. It’s something else: I don’t believe my own feelings. And why would I? Things have been the same my whole life. Things will never change, can never change. Can they?

I feel Roc’s eyes on my face. I look at him. There’s a twinkle in his eye, like he knows I’ve worked it out.

I say, “I’m not scared.” You know, just to set the record straight.

“I know,” he says.

“You what?” I say. “Then why did you—”

“Because I am scared, and I wanted you to think about things seriously.”

I rise to my feet. “What? I do take things ser…What are you suggesting, that I’m not serious enough?” My face is starting to feel hot.

Roc puts his arms out, palms open. “No, I just think that ever since your mom…”—his eyes drift down—“…left, you’ve been in a funk, a haze, not really as engaged as you used to be. The only time I see light in your eyes is when we’re training.”

“What are you, my shrink or something?”

“There you go—not taking things seriously again.”

I grit my teeth. I’m determined not to make another light comment or joke for the rest of the conversation. I hope our talk won’t last too long.

“Fine,” I say. “Okay, so I’ve been in this haze, hating life, no light in my eyes except when I’m beating the snot out of you with a wooden sword…” Blast! A joke—I’ve failed already. Being serious is harder than I thought. Maybe Roc is right, but I’m certainly not going to say that out loud. Pausing, I try to gather my thoughts. Roc lets the joke pass without comment. “So I see this girl, this Moon Dweller. Roc, lemme tell ya, she was pretty hot. Beautiful. Even wearing her gray prisoner’s tunic she was stunning. Her hair fell like a black waterfall around her shoulders. Her eyes were intensely fascinating. And her curves, my God, Roc, were they ever—”

“Get to the point, Tristan,” Roc says.

Right. Serious. My point. What is my point anyway? Ahh, yes. “It’s like she was metal and I was a magnet, Roc. But at the same time it felt like someone had shoved an electric wire into my skin and was frying me from the inside. It hurt like hell. No, worse than hell, man. And yet, somehow across the distance, through the fence, over the mob of people, I felt a pull to her, even though I knew it would hurt me to be closer to her. I probably would’ve just let it go, chalked it up to male hormones, but then when she acted so strong, pushed that guy…I don’t know, since then I can’t get her out of my mind.”

“That’s called a crush, sir.”

Oh, damn you, Roc! He seems intent on making this more difficult than it has to be, even throwing a “sir” in there for good measure. I can feel the grit in my mouth as I shave the enamel off each tooth with my incessant grinding. Yeah, Roc’s like a brother to me, but also like a brother, I wish he’d just go away sometimes.

When I speak again, I’m proud of how even my voice is, pretending like I haven’t even heard Roc’s comment. “It’s weird. I know it’s not just a crush because of all the pain I felt. There’s something more to it. Like…like the pain was a sign. Yeah, maybe that’s what it was. A sign. Like our lives are tied together. Like our destinies are intertwined. I think I have to find her, Roc, if only to know that she survived, that her strength didn’t lead to her death.”

“Is this Moon Dweller girl the only reason you want to go?”

I raise my eyebrows. “I, uh, I think so…” I’m so unsure of my answer that I rub my head to try to think. Yes, I want to know what happened to the Moon Dweller. Yes, I want to meet her, if only to figure out why I feel so much pain when I’m near her, what it means. It hits me. “She’s only part of it,” I say.

“I know,” Roc says.

Of course he does. Roc always seems to be one mental step ahead of me. I sigh. “I want to get out of here, Roc. I’m tired of living like this. There’s no meaning in my life. I hate my father. I hate this place. Finding her is as good a reason as any to get out of here. I just have to get out of here. I can’t deal with my father anymore.”

“We can’t just leave.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you think they’ll notice?”

“Of course they’ll notice, Roc. But who cares?”

“I do. I don’t feel like being chased all over the Tri-Realms by a bunch of your dad’s goons.”

“My father’s goons,” I correct.

“Your dad, your father: What’s the difference?” Roc says through clenched teeth.

I frown. “It’s…different…to…me.” We’re on the verge of another brawl.

“Whatever. In any case, I’m not leaving with you on some half-baked journey all over the Moon Realm, just to chase the first pretty tunic you’ve seen in a while. She’s a prisoner, for God’s sake.”

“Then I’ll go alone. And for the record, I’m not chasing a tunic. Yeah, she was pretty, but who cares? There are lots of pretty girls. And yeah, I’ll try to find her, because I want to know why she makes my head feel like it’s about to explode. But this is not all about her, Roc. Like I told you, I need to do this for me. I thought you of all people would understand that.”

Roc’s hard stare continues for another moment and then his eyes soften. “Tristan, I…”

“What?”

“Never mind. You promise you’re not just doing this to find some silly girl?”

“Yes,” I say, my tone more confident than I feel.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I’ll come with you.”

I can’t hold back my smile. I’ll say it again: Roc is like a brother to me; I’m not sure what I would’ve done if he decided not to come. I’m glad we’ve made it through our serious talk without killing each other.

Roc says, “I’ll help you find your crush.” I spoke too soon. I leap off the bed, tackling him to the ground, pushing his face into the soft carpet. I’m laughing, he’s gasping, trying to take a breath. I release him and stand up, but I’m not done yet. As he turns over I place a foot atop his chest and raise my fists over my head, relishing my small victory.

* * *

We spend the rest of the day making plans. Now that the contract negotiations are finally over, I’ll request a holiday. My father will insist I go to one of the finest Sun Dweller resorts, one that has the brightest fake sunlight and truckloads of synthetic sand. But I’ll tell him I’m tired of those places, tired of the same old scene. It won’t surprise him—he already knows how I feel about the customs of the Sun Dwellers. If I request another trip to the Moon Realm—an unofficial, off-the-books trip—I think he’ll authorize it, as a sort of reward for all my work over the last few months. The first chance we have, Roc and I will ditch my security guards and go find the girl, and hopefully ourselves at the same time.

When we leave my apartment, I’m feeling good. I won’t go so far as to say I’m happy—I haven’t been happy in a long time—but I’m satisfied that I’m finally doing something real. Something I want to do. Cutting another one of my father’s ropes away, so to speak.

* * *

We’re at dinner, the three of us—me, my brother, Killen, and my father, his lordship. Dinner is funny in our palace. The table we sit at is about a mile long, with enough place settings to host the entire forty-third ghetto of the Star Realm (their population is only twenty-three). My father, his majesty (a president, not a king), sits at one end. My mother used to sit at the other head, but now her seat is vacant, like it has been for a long time. My brother and I sit across from each other, in the middle, so far from my father that we can barely see him.

When we were younger, my brother and I would get into all kinds of trouble at dinner, kicking under the table, slinging food across at each other, whispering nasty names so our parents couldn’t hear what we were saying. It was great fun, and we enjoyed the challenge of trying to get away with things while our parents shouted across the length of the table in a ridiculous attempt to have a conversation.

Now it isn’t worth the effort. Day by day, my brother is becoming more and more like a clone of my father. He even sits like him at the table, his back straight, his head held so high I don’t think he’ll be able to get his fork to his mouth without dropping his food. Killen is two years younger than me, but I know he thinks himself to be the older, wiser son. We haven’t had fun together in forever, since before my mother left.

“So I hear the contract negotiations were a success, brother,” Killen says. He’s trying to sound smart. In reality, he’s never so much as negotiated a turd from his butt.

I put on a fake voice and say, “Splendid, my dear brother. Simply splendid. We got an even better deal than last year and the people of the Tri-Realms seem to love us even more!” To my father it’ll sound like we’re having a mature, brotherly conversation. Killen knows better.

“That’s wonderful, Tristan,” he says. Under his breath, he mumbles, “Quit being a dumb arse.”

“I’d never take that title away from you, Brother,” I hiss. I feel his leg swing out as he tries to kick me. He misses, his toe thudding against the leg of my chair. His face turns red and he curses under his breath. It probably hurt, too, because he’s wearing these absurd shoes that look like white ballet slippers and provide zero protection for the foot. They’re just another Sun Dweller fashion trend that my brother has bought into. It’s a hard decision, but I’m sticking with my boots.

“Father,” I say loudly, maintaining my fake voice, “I’d like to take a holiday, now that the negotiations are complete.”

My brother is glaring at me, but I ignore him.

President Nailin shouts, “Of course! Shall I have Lima book a few weeks at the Sandy Oasis like last year?”

Shocking how predictable my father is.

I pretend to consider it. “Hmm, maybe…” I say. “But I’m also considering doing something a little different…something a bit more exotic.”

“What did you have in mind?”

I glance at my brother. His head is cocked to the side. It makes him look even younger than he is.

“I’d like to travel inter-Realm, to the Moon Realm. I think it’ll be a good way to show the Moon Dwellers that we appreciate their support. You know, by having a holiday there, spending some Nailins at their shops.”

“Absolutely not,” my father says.

I really thought he’d go for it, that my lie was a good one, believable, sensible. So I don’t have a backup plan. Killen is snickering, which doesn’t help.

“Why not?” I ask, really wanting to know what has prompted my father’s quick and decisive rejection.

“It’s just not proper,” he says simply.

I’ve never hated him more than I hate him now. It’s the way he says it more than his words. As though such a trip would be like me sleeping with the rats—no, worse, with the cockroaches. He wants me to be all smiles and winks when I’m in the other Realms renegotiating our so-called contracts, and yet I can’t even take a simple holiday there?

Killen’s nodding, wagging his head up and down like a dog. “It wouldn’t be proper, Brother,” he parrots. Now I kick. My aim is true, connecting solidly with my brother’s shinbone. To his credit, he doesn’t cry out, although I know it hurts, can see it all over his face. He winces and holds his breath, trying to stifle a groan of pain.

“You’re right, Father, Brother. How silly of me. Have Lima book my usual.” I’ve lost my appetite. Before standing up I take another shot at Killen under the table, and from the shade of purple his face turns, I know I’ve hit the same spot. It’s the only thing satisfying about the meal.

Chapter Seven

Adele

“What do you know of my father?” I say. It comes out as a croak, because I stop breathing when my heart rises into my throat. I gulp the words back down, trying to clear a passage. I take a deep breath.

“Only that he’s probably alive,” Tawni says.

I don’t think the words will come out right, so I hope she’ll anticipate my next question.

“How much of our conversation did you hear?” Tawni asks.

Damn. I’m hoping for answers, not questions. I’ll have to speak. I try a single word: “Enough.” It comes out better this time, but still isn’t my natural timbre.

“Look,” Tawni says, “I’m sorry I didn’t open up to you before, but we’d only just met. The things I know are dangerous…”

She glances left and right, like the walls might have ears. She’s making me nervous. Although the snippets I’d heard of Tawni and Cole’s whispered conversation intrigue me—particularly the stuff about Tristan—I’m not interested in that now. I only care about one thing.

“It’s okay. Just tell me about my dad.”

Tawni takes a deep breath. She looks stressed, her brow furrowed and eyes narrowed and intense, like something heavy is weighing on her. She says, “As you probably gathered, my parents are traitors. They live amongst the Moon Dwellers, but work for the Sun Dwellers. They’re spies for the president. I heard them talking one night. They thought I was out with my friends, but I’d returned early with a stomachache. They spoke about how Tristan is different from his father, how he cares about the people from the Lower Realms, even if he enjoys the comforts of the Sun Realm.”

Her words are interesting, and typically I’d be hanging on every single one, but I’m still missing the point. “What does that have to do with my father?” I blurt out.

Tawni stops abruptly, her eyebrows rising. “Sorry. Your father first—then the other stuff.”

She sits on the bed and motions for me to join her. I don’t feel like sitting; I’m too wired to do anything but pace around the room, but I don’t want to argue as I’m afraid it’ll delay the conversation further. I sit next to her, tapping my toe rapidly on the stone floor.

Tawni looks at me with sincere blue eyes and says, “My parents were the ones who recommended that your parents be taken away.”

It wouldn’t sting any more if she’d slapped me across the face. My parents dragged away in the middle of the night, out through the kicked-down door; Enforcers swarming through our home, smashing picture frames and tables and chairs and anything they could get their hands on; me, fighting like an animal to defend my family, who were eventually wrenched away anyway. The most disturbing image from that night: my father’s eyes, intense and scared, not fearful for his own life, but for mine and Elsey’s.

All because of Tawni’s parents. I don’t think kids should be judged by what their stupid parents do. Tawni’s words from before suddenly make sense.

I want to walk away from her, to leave her and her evil family behind forever, but I stay. First, because I owe her for sitting down and talking to me in the first place, in the Yard; for not walking away when I was rude and acting like a nutter. Second, because she still hasn’t told me everything she knows about my father—and I have to know. And third, because I want to believe in her words about kids having the potential to be different than their parents. I want to believe it for Tristan’s sake. Because if he isn’t different than his father, then all my thoughts and feelings over the last day have been fake, pure fantasy.

As I try to make sense of my thoughts, of my feelings, I realize Tawni’s crying. Her earlier strength gives way, her body crumples, she tucks her face into her hands. I know she’s been putting on a front—an attempt to be strong, to chase away her sadness with a brave face. She thinks I’m going to leave. She doesn’t know I have three reasons to stay.

I feel warmth in my bones, welling up from beneath my feet, until it reaches the top of my head. The warmth is compassion for Tawni. She didn’t ask for her parents to be traitors. And from what I understand, their treachery caused her to run from them, to leave home all alone, and to eventually be caught and brought to the Pen. No, she isn’t like her parents at all.

The sudden compassion I feel reminds me of my mother. I always think I’m more like my dad, but now I wonder if there isn’t a lot more of my mom in me than I realized. I hope so. My mom is a special soul.

Instinctively, I put my arm around Tawni and pull her close. Her eyes flick open for a moment, red and wet, and then reclose as she buries her head in the nook between my shoulder and chest. “I’m so sorry, Adele,” she moans.

I say nothing—there’s nothing to say. I just hold her while sobs shake her body. I rub her back, smooth her hair—even kiss her forehead. Those were the things my mother used to do to me when I was scared—usually when still stuck in the throes of a waking nightmare about drowning, my greatest fear. Slowly, Tawni’s body stops shaking and her muffled sobs relent. Her choked breaths deepen and grow consistent. For a moment I think she might’ve fallen asleep.

But then she says, “Why are you forgiving me?”

I haven’t said a word to her, certainly haven’t uttered the words I forgive you, but I guess my actions speak louder. But I haven’t forgiven her, not really, because there’s no need.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I say.

Her puffy eyes look into mine as she sits up straight again. “Thank you,” she says.

“My father?” I say.

Her words come out in a rush, without pause to breathe. “He’s been taken to a camp set up for traitors—my parents called it Camp Blood and Stone—where the prisoners are made to work in some of the most dangerous mines in the Moon Realm. I understand it’s somewhere in one of the Northern subchapters; my parents mentioned subchapter twenty-six, I think.”

“What about my mother?” I say, realizing Tawni hasn’t mentioned her. She was very specific: Your father is alive.

“I don’t know,” Tawni says, “they only mentioned your dad.”

“How did you know they were talking about my dad?” My questions are coming rapidly now, as all of the investigative skills that my father taught me come back.

“They said that the traitors they’d turned over to the authorities had two daughters, Adele and Elsey. Your name isn’t that common, so when I heard it and then later you told us about your parents, I made the connection.” Tawni crinkles her nose, like she knows what my next question will be and is dreading it. But I have to ask it.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night when you realized?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I should have. We’d just met and I usually talk to Cole about stuff before I do anything. He’s my best friend. Has been for a long time.”

I’m not mad at her. She was in a tough position, not knowing how I would react when she told me, and yet she told me anyway. She could’ve just kept it to herself, told me to go stuff it when I eavesdropped on her, but she didn’t. She did the right thing. She’s not like her parents.

“What about the other stuff?” I ask.

“You mean about Tristan?” Tawni says, understanding immediately what I mean.

I nod.

Tawni says, “We should include Cole in the conversation.”

My heart sinks. Cole. For a moment I’ve forgotten about him. He looked so angry at me. I’ve just met the guy, so I shouldn’t care what he thinks about me, but to my surprise, I do. Probably because of what he did for me yesterday during the riot. Or perhaps because he’s Tawni’s best friend, and she seems like a good person, so that must mean he is, too. Or it might just be because I actually like him. Certainly his sarcasm works well with me.

“Will he still be pissed off at me?” I ask, frowning.

Tawni laughs. “Don’t worry about him. Sometimes he has a bit of a temper, but he makes up for it by forgiving and forgetting faster than anyone I know.” Wiping the tears from her cheeks, Tawni rises, offering her hand to help me up. I take it.

I allow her to pull me down the hall. Already some of the juveniles are leaving the cafeteria, looking unsatisfied by their breakfasts, heading outside for another long, boring day spent lounging in the Yard.

When we enter the crowded eatery, I notice Cole right away, sitting alone in the corner. Thankfully, he’s facing away, so he doesn’t stare at us as we approach. When Tawni slides onto the bench across from him and he sees her tearstained face, he nearly knocks over the table as he leaps to his feet.

“What happened? Are you okay?” he says. His eyes flit back and forth between Tawni and me, one minute showing concern for his friend and the other angry and glaring, like how he’d looked at me earlier.

“I’m fine. Please calm down, Cole,” Tawni says, reaching across the table to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder. At first his body stiffens at her touch, but then he relaxes and melts back into his seat. For a second I’m jealous of the kind of relationship they have. It’s a true friendship in every sense of the word. I’ve never had that kind of friendship—probably never will. There isn’t room for it in my world.

I tense up, waiting for the next spout of anger from Cole. It doesn’t come.

“I’m sorry,” Cole says.

Never would I have expected those to be his next words. To be honest, I don’t understand.

“What for?” I say.

The corners of Cole’s mouth turn up slightly, a complete one-eighty from his tense expression a moment earlier. The steely twinkle I saw in his eyes the day before is back. “For my temper,” he says. “Tawni tries to help me with it, but it usually gets the better of me. Sneaking around and spying on us wasn’t right, but my reaction was even worse. I should’ve let you explain.”

“Thanks,” I say. Tawni’s crying coupled with Cole’s quick forgiveness makes me feel even worse about what I’ve done. “And I’m sorry for eavesdropping. I won’t do it again.”

Cole dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “Even,” he says. The way he says it makes me believe my transgression is like a distant memory to him, soon to be forgotten entirely. Tawni wasn’t kidding about him.

“Can I get you something to eat?” she says.

I nod, sliding out of the booth to let her past. “Anything not green, not slimy, and not still moving,” I say wryly.

Cole chuckles. “Good luck with that,” he says.

Tawni marches off, her hands fisted and her head firm, as if she’s on a mission. Meeting my criteria will be a mission, I think.

When Tawni is gone, Cole says, “How are you feeling?”

“Feeling?” I say absently, trying to decide how to respond. In truth, I have no idea how I’m feeling. In the last twenty-four hours a lot has changed in my life. Two new friends, the strange pain I felt when I saw the president’s eldest son, my dad being alive: it’s all too much to take in, to process. I mean, I’m happy—no, make that extremely happy, ecstatic, over the moon—that my dad might be okay, but it feels weird, too. For one thing I don’t know anything about my mom’s whereabouts. Also, for the last six months I’ve been trying to come to terms with the possibility that my parents are dead, executed as traitors. Now there’s hope that at least one of them is alive…I dunno, it just feels weird. Then again, I’m not sure it really matters that he’s alive. It’s not like I will ever get to see him again. And I’m sure that the conditions for him are awful to the point of complete misery. So that isn’t much to live for either.

I almost shout at myself aloud. Thankfully, I keep it inside, opting to scream in my mind: No, no, no! You’re better than that, better than a quitter! Dad would be ashamed by such thoughts! I know then what I have to do: rescue my father and find out whether my mother is still alive. Oh, and also take a detour to find my sister, too, if I have time. Should be easy, simple, no problemo! Or impossible. It’s definitely one or the other.

I still haven’t answered Cole’s question. I’m not sure how long it’s been since he asked it, but probably awhile, because he’s looking at me strangely, like I have poo on my face. While I’ve been battling with myself in the comfort of my own head, I can only guess at what weird facial expressions I was making.

“I’m guessing you’re not sure how you feel?” Cole says.

Bingo! Give the guy a prize. I am impressed by Cole’s recognition of my feelings without me having said a single word. Maybe he is a mind reader. I hope not. With my muddled thoughts, having a mind reader around will be far too embarrassing.

“Yeah, I’m a bit confused right now.”

“But I bet you want to go rescue your dad,” Cole says.

Crap! He IS a mind reader! Or possibly just very perceptive. I’m hoping for the latter. “Yeah, and my sister and mom, too, while I’m at it. Should be easy,” I say.

“Especially with us around,” Cole says.

“What should be easy?” Tawni says, returning with two plates of gunk that are meant to be food. To her credit, the gunk on my plate isn’t green, slimy, or moving. But it is brownish and gooey. I take a bite, swallowing quickly before my taste buds have much of a chance to linger on the flavor.

“Rescuing Adele’s family,” Cole says. “It shouldn’t be a problem. Only small hurdles to get over, like escaping from the Pen, crossing hundreds of miles of cave networks while avoiding detection by Enforcers, breaking into at least one maximum security prison, and then breaking back out. Piece of cake.”

I groan. “I was trying to be positive,” I say. “In any case, I’m doing it alone, so it’s not your problem.”

“Wrong,” Cole says.

“Right,” I retort.

“Look, whether you like it or not, we’re going to help you,” Cole says.

I stare directly into his strong eyes, trying to get him to back down. About three seconds later I look away. What am I thinking trying to beat Mr. Power Eyes in a staring competition—I can’t even beat myself in the mirror.

“Why would you do that for me?” I ask.

Cole shrugs. “You’re growing on me.” His bottom lip doesn’t pout the way it normally does.

“Lie!” I declare, raising my arm in victory before it’s even confirmed.

Cole laughs and Tawni nearly spews out the spoonful of yellow goop she has in her mouth. “You’re right, Adele, you’re not growing on me. That would be disgusting. Hair grows on me, foot fungus on occasion, too, due to the shameful hygiene of the guys’ bathrooms, but not other people, and most definitely not you.”

His eyes are twinkling even more than before. I grin. “So what’s the real reason for wanting to help me?” I ask.

“I’ve got nothing against you, nor your magical mysterious love affair with the sun prince”—I try to interject, but Cole sees it coming and raises a finger, silencing me—“but I just don’t trust Tridlan one bit.”

“Tristan,” I say, “and there’s no love—”

“What?”

“His name is Tristan. You said Tridlan.”

“Did I?” Cole says, throwing his hands up and feigning ignorance. I realize he’s mocking me. I want to be angry, but his mannerisms make me smile.

“Yes, and I was in pain when I saw him so, trust me, I’m not in any hurry to get near him again.” Although I would like to know what caused it.

“Anyway,” Cole says, “him being the son of the president and all, it’s not easy for me to be as trusting of Triftan as you guys are.”

I ignore his repeated mispronunciation of Tristan’s name and try to focus. It’ll be great to have friends help me—at least to get out of the Pen. But I still don’t understand their motives, which bothers me. At least not Cole’s. Tawni’s probably trying to make up for the actions of her parents—to prove that she’s better than them. Also, she seems to just be a nice person, willing to help a friend in need, even a new friend like me. But Cole’s a mystery. It doesn’t help that he jokes around so much, which makes it even harder to get a read on him. He has no reason to help me.

“Seriously, why do you want to help?” I repeat.

His eyes darken. “Okay, look. I’m just really tired of everyone getting screwed over by the Sun Dwellers. I’ve been in juvie once before, when I was eleven. I had this teacher, Mrs. Witchikata. She was really kind, really pretty, always saying nice things to me. What can I say? I fell for her—head over freakin’ heels.”

“You’re joking,” I say.

“Me? Joke? Never,” Cole says. “Anyway, one day I told her I loved her. Mrs. W would never have reported it, but a nasty little Year Five kid overheard and told the principal, who told the authorities. Unauthorized flirting, they called it. I got six weeks in the Pen. Since then, I’ve always wanted revenge.”

Tawni giggles. I look at her, then back at Cole. “La la lie,” I say.

“Almost, smarty,” Cole says. “It was a half lie. All the stuff about Mrs. W was BS—in fact she was about ninety-five years old, two hundred pounds overweight, covered in warts, with a mean streak a mile wide. I hated her guts. But I did give you the truth about why I want to help you. The Sun Dwellers are creeps, period.”

From experience, I can’t argue with that.

“Okay,” I say. I believe him. It certainly fits with what little I know about the male species. Their motives are generally simple: fun, honor, sex, food, pride, revenge, sex. Pretty basic stuff.

“Okay?” Tawni says, confirming.

“Yeah, we’ll escape together.”

“And then go rescue your family,” she says.

I haven’t thought that far ahead, but I figure I can talk them out of it when the time comes. “Uh, yeah, whatever. So how do we pull it off?” I say, leaning in.

Cole dips his head forward conspiratorially and lowers his voice, half-covering his mouth with one of his hands. “I know a guy who can get one of the guards to turn off the electric fence for a few minutes, maybe ten if we’re lucky,” he says.

I gawk at him like he’s an alien.

“What?” he says. “We were thinking about trying to escape once so I looked into it.”

I don’t have to confirm that he’s telling the truth—his face is dead serious. “Okay. If we get your guy to turn off the fence at say…midnight, two hours after lights out, we can sneak out of our cells and climb the fence,” I say.

“Our cells will be locked,” Tawni points out.

“There’s a trick for that,” I say. “I’ve done it before. Get a small piece of cardboard or plastic from somewhere, anywhere, and when you shut your door for the last time at night, slide the plastic between the door and the frame, blocking the deadbolt. When the door automatically locks, it will still click, but you’ll be able to open it.”

“Nice,” Cole says, nodding. I smile. I’m glad to be able to bring some level of expertise to the table.

“Right,” Tawni says, “so at five minutes to midnight we leave our cells. Adele and I will be together and we’ll see you”—she gestures to Cole—“at the fence. We’ll meet in the shadows in the northeast wing. When the electricity goes out we start climbing.”

Cole’s eyes narrow and he screws up his face. “How do we tell the time?” he asks.

“We’ll have to base it off of the guards’ patrols,” I say. “Start counting from the ten o’clock lights out. Approximately every fifteen minutes a guard will go by—watch through the slot in your doors. Once seven patrols pass we’ll know it’s about quarter to midnight. Then we’ll just have to count in our heads for ten minutes—six hundred seconds. Then we go.” I’m feeling confident—probably too confident—but it’s a good feeling, one I haven’t felt in a while. Anything’s better than just sitting around waiting to turn eighteen and be transferred to a maximum security prison.

“When should we do it?” Tawni asks.

“How about tonight?” I say, feeling eager butterflies in my stomach.

“That’s pretty tight,” Cole says. “I’ll have to check with my guy to see if it’s possible on such short notice.”

“It better be,” I say. Acting in a hurry is better than taking a long time to plan our escape. That way the dirty guard won’t have time to rethink his choice to help us.

“We’ll need money to pay him,” Cole says. “You know, the guard who helps us.”

I knew it sounded too good to be true. I don’t have any money and certainly no way of getting any. But I ask anyway. “How much?”

“At least fifty Nailins I expect.”

My heart sinks. I haven’t seen that much money in my entire life. It might as well be a million. Even if we come up with a way to raise some money, we won’t be able to get that much in ten lifetimes. I close my eyes tightly and clench my teeth, trying to stifle a scream. I need a miracle.

“I can provide the money,” Tawni says.

My eyes flash open and I look at the skinny, white-haired girl beside me. I glance at Cole. He doesn’t seem surprised. In fact, it’s like he expected her response. I realize that when he mentioned the money he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to Tawni the whole time.

I turn back to Tawni. “You have access to fifty Nailins?” I say in disbelief.

“More if we need it,” she says. “When I got caught trying to go interdistrict without a travel permit my parents were all over me, asking me why, why would I do such a thing? So I gave them a BS story about how I really wanted to see the Lantern Caverns of the ninth subchapter and how I never thought they’d let me go.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face, grinning. “They bought it, and although they couldn’t get me out of doing time in the Pen, they were able to make my stay here as easy as I want it to be. I could have had a plush room on the third floor, five-star meals, access to a telebox, pretty much anything I want.”

“Then why do you sleep in a crappy cell next to me?”

Tawni’s face falls. “Because if I took advantage of what my parents could do for me, then I’d be just as terrible as them. They don’t know where I sleep, and the guards won’t tell them. When they visit, the guards move me upstairs for a few hours. I swear to God, Adele, I’m not like them—never will be.”

“Truth,” I say solemnly.

Tawni nods. “In any case, I still have access to an account they set up for me with the warden…I mean with the concierge.” I chuckle at her little joke. “There are more than two hundred Nailins in it.”

Cole whistles. “I didn’t know you had that much dough. How about sharin’ some with an old friend of yours?”

Tawni smirks. “We’ll need all of it if we’re going to pull this off.” She lowers her voice again. “First to pay off the guard and then to travel across the Moon Realm.”

I nod. “Thanks, Tawni. And you too, Cole. I wouldn’t stand a chance without your help.” I realize then that I don’t have to be alone anymore—can’t be alone, can’t stand it for one more second. I hit a new low the previous day and then everything started moving up again. It all started with a bit of pain. My downward spiral is finally over.

It reminds me of something my dad said one year at Christmas, when we didn’t even have the money for presents, or fancy food, or anything. He said, “Sometimes, girls, you have to hit your lowest low just before you hit your highest high. It makes you appreciate the good things so much more.” Right now is starting to feel like one of those times. Yeah, maybe meeting a couple of friends and coming up with a plan to escape from a juvenile delinquent facility isn’t the best of times in my life, but it isn’t the worst either, and for that I’m thankful.

We leave the cafeteria long after we arrived—we’re the last to go. Although we aren’t satisfied by the food, we’re still satisfied. By other things. More important things. Life-changing things. I am going to rescue my family, and hopefully myself at the same time.

Yeah, things are looking up.

Chapter Eight

Tristan

Ahhh, a holiday at the Sandy Oasis. It has everything anyone could ever want. Soft, plush beds to sleep on. Warm, sandy beaches (they even simulate waves and paint picturesque ocean views). Half-naked girls ready to throw themselves at any celebrity who happens to make eye contact.

I throw up in my mouth when we arrive.

Roc is carrying my bags while my security detail protects me from the girls.

You’re probably thinking that I’m a big wimp to let my father dictate the terms of my holiday so easily. I could’ve pushed back harder, tried to force him to see my point of view. But you see, the thing is, my father doesn’t like being pushed around. And I could tell he was in one of his moods, more stubborn than the lovechild of an ox and a mule. So I played along.

Roc and I aren’t staying in the Oasis. Not for long anyway.

We’re going to the Moon Realm. The back of my head is buzzing in anticipation. I hope the girl’s still alive when we get there. If she is, I’ll demand that she tells me how she did it. How she caused me so much physical pain just by looking at me.

We reach my room with a record low of only three girls offering to have my babies. I guess I’m losing my touch. From the looks in their eyes, I think they were offering to have them, like, right then, immediately. I didn’t make eye contact for fear that they’d rip off their clothes and throw themselves at me and my entourage.

The room isn’t really a room. More like an entire wing of the hotel, comprised of ten distinct rooms, only five of which are bedrooms. The others are sitting rooms, standing rooms, massage rooms, and kitchens. I don’t even count the six bathrooms as rooms. The cost for a single night would feed an entire subchapter of the Moon Realm for a year.

Luckily we aren’t staying long. “Quick and unexpected action is the most effective in battle,” my fighting instructor used to say. I’m about to put his advice to the test. Perhaps not in a traditional battle, but in a battle nonetheless. A battle to take back my life.

I ask my security guards to wait outside, to monitor the four doors for any fake-tanned girls trying to gain access to my suite. When they’re gone, I say, “Is this going to work, Roc?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” Roc says.

“Cut the sir crap, Roc, please,” I say. “We’re about to embark on a rogue mission and I want you to be with me as a friend, not as a servant.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Roc says, grinning from ear to ear. I grin back, swatting at him playfully. He punches at me and for a moment there’s a good chance it’s going to escalate into another practice fight, but then there’s a sudden knock at the door.

A guard enters: a giant with no neck and fists the size of boulders. His nose looks like it’s been broken a dozen times—it’s flat and wide. Although I expect to have to translate a series of grunts and hand signals, he surprises me by speaking perfect English in an unexpectedly high voice.

“You have a visitor. He says he’s expected.”

“Name?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Kruger.”

“He’s okay,” I say.

The guard leaves, closing the door behind him, and a minute later the door reopens and another guy walks in. Compared to the guard, this guy looks tiny. He’s about my size. Well, exactly my size actually, both in height, weight, and body type. Athletic build, six-two without shoes, a hundred and eighty five pounds dripping wet. It always amazes me how I can just snap my fingers and make things happen. That’s something I like about being who I am, living where I live. Can I really give it all up that easily? Can I really walk away from it all? Something tells me my jaunt to the Moon Realm will only be temporary. Before long, I’ll be doing my father’s dirty work just like always.

I have no idea how they found someone who so closely resembles me in such a short time, but I don’t really care about the details. His face even kind of looks like mine. If he wears a hat and sunglasses, the guards won’t be able to tell the difference. Although each member of my security team would rank well across the entirety of the Tri-Realms when it comes to muscle, their IQs would likely sit in the bottom quartile.

“My money?” Kruger says. This guy gets right to the point, which is fine with me.

I wave Roc forward. He extracts a paper envelope from his pocket, which clinks as he hands it across. “A hundred Nailins,” he says. “Count it.”

The guy shakes his head and the parcel at the same time. “No need. It’s all there,” he says, as though he’s done so many shady deals that he can count the coins just by the sound of their clinking. Maybe he can. What do I know?

Next, Roc hands him some clothes, identical to the ones I’m wearing. A gold tunic, a silver bracelet, brown moccasins. He even gives him a pair of my blue silk boxer shorts, just to be thorough. “Put those on,” I say.

The guy strips right in front of us—clearly modesty is low on his priority list. I turn away, removing my own clothes and swapping them for a black tunic, black pants, and black boots. While I add a dark hat and sunglasses to my getup, Roc provides Kruger with a similar pair of sunglasses and a floppy, white beach hat. A current edition of a Sun Dweller magazine and a bottle of expensive wine from my father’s personal stash complete the façade.

With a nod, Kruger slides the money into the magazine and heads for the door. Roc trails after him. We’ve agreed that if the fake me leaves without Roc it will raise eyebrows; Roc goes everywhere with me. I hide off to the side, behind the red velvet drapes that provide privacy at the poolside windows. They exit, and just before the door closes, I see the gaggle of guards surround them. Kruger’s head is tilted slightly downward, so there will be even less likelihood he’ll be recognized as anyone but me. The door closes and I hear Roc’s muffled voice as he explains to the guards that my guest will be resting in the suite while I’m at the pool.

I’m not worried. They’ll buy the story. After all, they aren’t really trained to question their masters. Plus, they’re trying to protect me from those who might hurt me, not from escaping. I’m not a prisoner—not technically.

I slip back around the drapes and peek through the window. A few minutes later, the dummy me and my entourage enter the pool area. Because we arrived in the early afternoon, it’s already packed—finding a place to sit would be near impossible for any normal person. But I’m no normal person, at least not to these people. It’s all been prepared ahead of my arrival. A carved-out section of the patio, complete with tables, chairs, a vase of flowers, trays of food. To my disgust I notice a couple of deeply tanned, fake-boobed girls standing ready to fulfill my every desire. No doubt they’re a gift from my father.

I hope I never see him again.

Do I really mean that?

Roc leads the imposter to the reserved area and motions for the guards to stand in a surrounding circle, blocking “me” from view of all the rubberneckers who are already standing up and trying to catch a glimpse of the president’s son. That makes me laugh.

Before leaving, I run my fingers along the hilt of my sword. Although my father insisted that my training include more advanced weaponry, including various types of guns, I’ve never felt fully comfortable with them. For one, the Moon Dwellers and Star Dwellers have very few guns, which is one of the reasons their rebellions have been quashed so easily in the past. Is that fair? They can never hope to fight for equality if the very weapons they have to fight are not equal.

Screw you, Father, I think, sliding my sword back into my belt.

It’s time to go.

I leave the suite, taking a minute to scan the hallway for any guards who might’ve remained behind, or for any hotel staff who might witness my escape.

The hall is empty.

I go the opposite way down the hall from where we entered, intent on using the private exit, specially designed so celebrities can leave without being noticed. It’ll be guarded by one of my men, but that won’t be a problem. He’ll be looking for someone trying to get in, not for someone on their way out.

I tiptoe down the stairs, cognizant that any scuff of my feet or scrape of my toes might echo to the bottom, thus alerting the guard to my presence. I have to maintain the element of surprise if I want to avoid an ugly confrontation.

I reach the bottom without so much as a tap of my feet on the stone steps. The thick security door is bolted shut; I raise the lever gently, hoping it’s been oiled recently. When it doesn’t creak, I breathe a sigh of relief. So far, so good.

I take a deep breath, trying to concentrate. To focus my mind. To prepare myself for swift and decisive violence. To incapacitate, not kill. I have no hatred for my guards, no desire to harm them. They aren’t smart enough to think for themselves. They just follow orders. Maybe that’s not a good excuse, but I let them have it.

Using my shoulder as a battering ram, I burst through the door, bobbing my head left and then right to locate the guard. He’s surprised, but alert, already reaching for his gun. But I already have my sword out and am ready for combat. Before he raises his arm in defense, the point of my sword is at his throat. I’m not sure if he recognizes me beneath my sunglasses, but in a few hours it won’t matter.

As soon as he drops his gun, I swing around behind him and clamp his chin between my forearm and bicep, slowly tightening the force on his neck. At first he fights it, but then his feet stop kicking, his arms stop waving, and he goes to sleep. I wait a few more seconds before releasing him, just in case he’s faking it, and then lay his unconscious body to the ground, kindly propping his head up on his hip bag. Before I leave I steal his sword for Roc. I leave the gun; it’s not really my style.

I slip around the edge of the resort, but no one’s nearby; everyone’s drinking cocktails and splashing around in the pool. In some ways, I envy them. Do I still have time to change my mind? I could go back to the guard, tell him I was testing him—that he failed. In ten minutes I could be enjoying the cool water and cold drinks. Living the life I was born to live. Would that be so wrong?

Gritting my teeth, I slip around the side of the resort.

I make my way back to the arriving and departing visitors’ entrance, and stride confidently past the greeters. They’re too busy welcoming some big shot Sun Dweller and don’t even seem to notice me pass by. The dark clothing probably helps in that regard, too.

I wait for Roc at the mandated location, near the south end of the transporter platform. I hope we’ve timed it right, that Roc will have enough time to meet me. If I have to I’ll leave without him, but I really don’t want to. I tap my toe on the stone platform nervously.

The ground rumbles as the transporter approaches.

Still no Roc.

The transporter bursts through the end of the tunnel.

Still no Roc.

A whoosh of air hits me as the transporter rolls to a stop.

No Roc…and then—

Roc appears at the other end of the platform, running hard toward me, fear radiating from the whites of his eyes.

He crosses half the platform and I’m still wondering why he looks so scared. Yeah, the train will be leaving soon, but he’s made it with plenty of time to board with me. The platform is empty; no one else in their right mind would be traveling from the hottest resort in the Sun Realm to the Moon Realm.

He’s almost to me when his pursuers arrive, charging through the resort entrance and gunning straight for us. Evidently I’ve underestimated my guards, or Roc has done something stupid, or maybe both, but whatever the case, they know they have to stop him. It’s likely they haven’t worked out exactly what’s happening, just that something is going down that isn’t supposed to.

When Roc reaches me I grab his arm and run with him onto the transporter. To his credit, Roc smartly thinks to hit the door close button repeatedly.

“Doors closing,” the speaker says. “Nonstop to subchapter six of the Moon Realm.”

The doors begin closing and we peer through the tinted windows to catch a glimpse of our pursuers. When the doors are halfway closed I think we’ll make it. The guards realize they’re too late and intelligently veer off toward one of the front sections of the transporter, but they’re still at least five long strides away.

They’ll never make it.

One of them dives headfirst at the rapidly closing door, thrusting his arms in the tiny crack and using his elbows like a wedge to pry it open.

“Damn,” I mutter, as they board the train. “What happened?”

Roc’s eyes are wild, flitting from side to side, unable to focus on mine. “I don’t know—I just freaked. I tried to sneak away, made some excuse about needing to go to the bathroom. One of your guards said he’d escort me, that he was bored anyway. When I said I’d be fine on my own, he started asking questions and I got flustered and just started running. That’s when they came after me.”

“Damn,” I say again. I should’ve known Roc wasn’t cut out for this type of work.

“What are we going to do?” Roc says. His face is as white as a ghost’s. He’s probably been under more stress in the last five minutes than in the last five years combined.

I glance through the small window in the door at the end of our car. Two cars ahead I can see the guards making their way toward us, transferring cars swiftly, methodically.

The doors close and the transporter silently leaves the station.

“Remember all that training we’ve been doing?” Roc’s eyes don’t light up the way they usually do when I mention training. Not this time. He isn’t ready for this. But he’ll have to be anyway.

I put both my hands on his shoulders, look him in the eyes. “This is gonna be okay, man. I promise. We’ll do this together.”

I hand him the stolen sword and raise my own.

The guards enter our car.

I’m not sure whether they know who I am yet, so I can’t depend on my true identity to protect me from the sharp swords they’re brandishing. After all, they’ve just left the pool, where they think I’m wasting away the afternoon, getting drunk and looking to score with one of my desperate admirers. Not that I ever do that. But they might think there’s a first time for everything. They probably think Roc has stolen something and I’m his accomplice.

They’ve got guns, too, but they’ve left them holstered for now. One of them is chuckling to himself, like this is a chance for a little fun.

Anyway, they come at us with blood in their eyes, swinging to kill, or at least maim. I know these guys are out of Roc’s league, accomplished fighters, but I also know I’ll need his help if we’re going to survive the next five minutes—or even the next five seconds.

I block both their swords with my own, feeling their collective strength as I’m thrown back against Roc. Pushing Roc hard against the side of the car, which is moving faster and faster, already nearing its top speed of two hundred miles an hour, I spin hard to the left, ducking under another sword that wants to lop my head from my shoulders.

Roc cries out as he slams into the wall, which draws the attention of one of the guards. The distraction provides a short reprieve, as now I’m only facing one guard. I deftly slip under his attempt to gut me like a fish, simultaneously launching my own attack, slashing him hard across both legs. I avoid his chest and head—I still don’t want to kill anyone.

He goes down like a sack of potatoes, dropping his sword and screaming in agony.

I turn back toward Roc, who’s also crying out. The other guard has him cornered, slashing at him with short, flashing strikes. Roc’s doing his best to maintain his swordfighter’s stance, but each time he parries a blow, it seems even less likely he’ll be able to block the next one.

I charge the guard from behind, dropping my sword and tackling him hard to the floor. His sword clatters to the ground next to Roc, who kicks it out of range of the guard’s scrabbling fingers. I swing my elbow hard, crashing it into the back of his head. He slumps, unconscious.

Turning back to the other guard, who is writhing on the floor in the fetal position clutching his legs, I pick up my sword.

“No!” Roc cries, when he thinks I’m going to run him through.

But I’m not going to kill him. I spin the sword around and use the long handle to give the guard a major headache. He stops flopping about, stops yelling. Lies there, silent.

Roc’s face is even whiter now, like it’s powdered with chalk. “You okay?” I ask.

Roc seems unable to speak, taking short and uneven breaths, his fists balled and legs stuck firmly shoulder-width apart, slightly bent at the knees—just like I’ve taught him. He’s going into shock. I need to snap him out of it.

“Roc, stay with me, man. It’s going to be okay, we’re safe now.” I know I have to secure the guards—they’ve probably taken a lot of collective hits to the head over their lifetimes and their recovery time will be shorter than most—but I’m worried about Roc, so I take care of him first.

I put an arm around Roc’s shoulder and the other on his elbow and lead him to a seat. He’s trembling slightly, his body reacting to the sudden decline in stress. Once he’s seated, I look him in the eyes. “All okay,” I say. He’s staring at his feet, refusing to meet my eyes.

I try to make casual conversation to snap him out of his funk. “Remember the last time we were in the sixth subchapter, Roc?” He continues to stare at the floor. “We were riding on that float, trumpets playing, people cheering—when it tipped over. You remember that? It was chaos, Roc. A mob of bodies, mashed up against each other, nearly getting trampled to death. But we survived it. And we just survived an attack by two highly trained guards, Roc. We’re just fine. You did great.”

Finally, his chin rises ever so slightly, and he manages a grin. “You’re talking to me like I’m a child,” he says.

I laugh. Good old Roc. “I thought you were in shock,” I say.

“I think I was…or nearly was,” Roc says. “Thanks,” he adds.

“Hey, what are friends for?” I say lightly. I don’t want him getting all emotional on me. There will be time for that later.

Luckily, in his haste, Roc didn’t forget the pack that we prepared together. In it is a long coil of rope. Using my sword, I cut off four small sections and use them to bind each guard’s hands and feet. I stuff the bodies under the seats at the other end of the car, as far away from Roc as I can get. Their swords and guns clatter onto the tracks beneath the transporter when I throw them out the door. Roc watches me do all this with interest.

When I come back and sit next to him, he turns to me and says, “That was my first real fight.”

“You did great,” I repeat.

He laughs. “How do you figure? I was screaming like a banshee and on the verge of sudden death throughout the entire thing.”

“You didn’t die,” I say. “That’s why. And everyone is on the verge of sudden death in a swordfight. All that matters is who doesn’t die.”

The guards stir halfway through the trip and start yelling. I wrap cloth around their mouths to shut them up.

Roc is better for the rest of the transporter ride, telling upbeat stories about when we were little, the trouble we used to get into. He might be overcompensating for the way he’s really feeling, but I’m not about to stop him; it’s better than listening to him talk about near-death experiences.

At some point along the way, the well-lit tunnel dims, as we cross over the border into the Moon Realm. Less electricity is provided to the commoners. Their leaders have signed a contract so it’s okay. Yeah, right.

An hour or so later the transporter begins to slow, pulling into a dead Moon Realm station. Moon Dwellers don’t travel much; they’re too busy trying to survive. I’m somewhat concerned there will be a welcoming party waiting for us: either Moon Dweller soldiers acting on my father’s orders, or Sun Dweller soldiers who somehow managed to get there in front of us. But there’s no one waiting with guns, or swords, or handcuffs. I dare to hope that perhaps the only guards who know what is happening are tied up in the last car on the train. Despite the low traffic, they’ll eventually be found. We need to be as far away from the sixth subchapter as possible when they’re discovered.

We exit, our swords tucked under our clothing, and Roc carrying the pack. I scan the platform for any signs of trouble. There are only three people in sight. A cleaner scoops rubbish into a long-handled dust pan. An old woman steps onto the transporter a few cars in front of us. There’s no way she is going to the Sandy Oasis. More likely the transporter is headed deeper into the Moon Realm, sending our tied-up pursuers far away from us. The third person is a platform attendant, who eyes us warily—he probably isn’t used to many Sun Dwellers stepping onto his platform.

I approach him, keeping the cap of my hat low to shield my face. I’m still wearing sunglasses. Although it’s unlikely he’ll recognize me, I still need to take precautions. So I change the tone of my voice slightly, making it gruffer and deeper. I say, “Where can I catch the first transporter to the fourteenth subchapter?”

He looks at me like I’m crazy, like he’s never heard such a request in all his life. But then he says, “Platform seven. Just around the corner.” He motions in the direction we need to go. He doesn’t offer any information on when the next transporter will arrive, but Roc already checked the schedule. It’s due only ten minutes after our arrival.

“Thanks,” I growl.

We round the corner and my eyes widen when I see the next platform. Based on the noise level—which is almost nonexistent—I expected to find another empty platform. Not so. Instead, the platform is packed with people, shoulder to shoulder, back to front, most of them staring straight ahead. No one speaks. They’re like statues.

I check my watch. We’ve arrived eight minutes late, which means the train will arrive any second. It’s early evening—quitting time. I’ve heard that jobs are becoming so scarce in many of the Moon Realm subchapters that some people commute to other subchapters to work, and then return home at the end of the day. That must be what these people are doing.

We join the crowd, wedging ourselves between a fat guy and an even fatter lady, trying to blend in. We get more than a few suspicious glances—it doesn’t help that I’m wearing dark sunglasses.

I hear a rumble in the distance and the crowd pushes forward, anticipating the train’s arrival, anxious to get home. The train arrives and the doors open. It’s empty; apparently subchapter 6 has a lot more jobs than subchapter 14. By the time we push, jostle, and elbow our way onto the car, all the seats are taken. We fight our way to the wall and lean against it, trying to get some breathing space. No luck. The biggest man I’ve ever seen in my life stands right next to us and raises his gigantic arm so his sausage-like fingers can grasp the handrail. Out of his exposed armpit wafts the smell of dried sweat and too many days without a shower. He burps, letting out an even worse odor, one I can’t easily identify, but which reminds me of rotten onions.

It should be a terrible ride, but it isn’t. After all, I’m doing something for myself, making my own choices. For once in my life.

Chapter Nine

Adele

It has all been arranged. The greedy guard has been paid. Tawni has withdrawn all of the money from her account. We’ve broken three pieces of thin plastic off of a cheap food container that we stole from the cafeteria. We’re ready.

All we have to do is wait.

Sometimes in the Pen waiting is dangerous. Although a lot of the kids are wrongly convicted—screwed by the system, like me, I guess, and probably Tawni and Cole, too—there are plenty of bad kids in here as well. Real bad kids. Kids that’ll knock an old lady over on the road, steal her walker, and then break it down and sell the parts. Like the giant tattooed guys I’d been dealing with in the last couple of days.

There’s also a lot of violence in the Pen. Kids form gangs, fight over turf that doesn’t belong to anyone, try to control the cigarette and booze trade.

I am no stranger to violence.

I remember my first week in the Pen. I was scared, didn’t know anyone—which didn’t change much in six months—didn’t know what to expect. I was sitting in the Yard, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, working on my leave-me-the-hell-alone vibe, when I saw a fight break out. I’m still not sure what it was about—one guy looked at the other guy’s girlfriend maybe. Anyway, all of a sudden the punches started flying. And I don’t mean like a schoolyard fistfight, where one kid gets a bloody nose and it’s over. This was a no-holds-barred, savage, kick-him-when-he’s-down kind of fight. And neither guy would relent. They were both twice as big as me and had clearly fought before. By the end of it they were both covered in blood, staggering around like they were drunk, probably suffering from concussions, or worse. Eventually one of them went down for good, but that didn’t stop the other guy from stomping him into the ground until the guards finally came to break it up. I never saw either of the kids again. For all I know the guy on the ground is dead and the other guy is now an Enforcer for the Sun Dwellers. Bottom line: the Pen isn’t a friendly place.

Early on, I had a little trouble from one of the guys. I can promise you he wasn’t bothering me because of my brains. He wanted something else, something I wasn’t about to give him. His legs are still broken more than four months later.

No one messed with me after that—at least not until that day with Tawni. I’m not sure if it’s because of the message I sent with my fighting ability, or simply because my lack of hygiene makes me less and less attractive with each passing day, but whichever it is, I’m thankful for it.

I don’t have a problem with violence. I’ve grown up in a violent world, where miners are killed every day by cave-ins, and Sun Dweller Enforcers roam the streets cracking the knees of anyone unwilling to cooperate with them. My dad taught me to only use violence when provoked.

Today is one of those times.

I’m sitting in the Yard by myself. We’ve just finished going over the plans one final time and now Cole and Tawni are walking along the perimeter of the fence, doing what Cole likes to call “his zoo thing,” staring at any people passing by on the outside, growling and carrying on like a caged animal. I guess he does it for kicks.

I showered after breakfast for the first time in weeks. I did a way better job than usual, scrubbing all the nooks and crannies, even rubbing the bar of soap through my hair. The water was freezing, but I suffered through it. I smell good for the first time since entering the Pen. I want to be as clean when I leave as when I arrived. Call it a symbolic cleansing of sorts.

No one, besides Tawni and Cole (and a few obnoxious girls in the bathroom), have spoken to me in months, but now a gang guy saunters up, staring at me the whole way. It’s the guy who approached me before, when I first met Tawni, when I first saw Tristan. The tatted-up gang leader with the big muscles and the small brain.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says, in the exact same way he did before. Like I said, no brains. My dad used to say the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s the definition of crazy. Either way, it sprang to mind when the guy spoke.

“Like I told you before, leave me alone,” I say.

“Not gonna happen,” he says. “Not this time. You see, you’re looking even better today, and there’s something I want. And when I want something, I get it.” I’m trying to act tough, but inside I’m trembling, scared shitless, but I learned a long time ago that inside the Pen you can’t show your fear. The others thrive on it, smell it, gravitate toward it, like bats to blood.

I could run from him, try to hide, perhaps avoid him for the rest of the day until we escape, but that’s not how I was raised.

My father taught me to fight.

I stand up, finally making eye contact with him. His dark eyes are vicious and uncaring.

“You ready to play,” he says, licking his lips, eyeing me from top to bottom and back up again. I don’t wait for him to make the first move, which is another thing my father taught me. Especially not when your opponent is bigger than you.

I kick him hard and below the belt. Then I follow it up with a roundhouse kick to his head, which has dropped to waist level as he clutches his groin, groaning in agony.

I hear a yell, which likely comes from one of his mates, who are surely watching the exchange with interest, getting a good laugh up until the point I’d kicked him. Then I hear shoes pounding on the barren rock. Coming toward me. But I’m not worried about the footsteps, because strangely enough the Pen has a code of sorts. With the exception of multiple gang member brawls, fighting is limited to those involved in the fight. There is no jumping in, no ganging up. You can watch, but not intervene. The code won’t protect me the following day or the next week, when, had I been staying in the Pen, I would most definitely have to fight the rest of the gang members in succession, but I’m relying on it now.

“Get up, boss,” I hear one of them say. I almost smile. Verbal encouragement is permitted. The guy he refers to as boss is a tough guy, and he would get up despite the brutality of the wounds I’ve already inflicted on him, but I’m not about to let him, not about to underestimate him like he has me.

So as soon as he pushes up to his knees I kick him in the face again. He spins away from me, lifting slightly off the ground before crashing onto his back. I think his skull bounces off the rock because blood starts seeping from the back of his head where I didn’t kick him. This time he isn’t getting back up.

And then Cole and Tawni are at my side, grabbing a shoulder each, backing me away from the semi-circle of gawkers who have formed to watch the painfully lopsided fight. It is over before it ever really starts. A fast fight is a good fight, my father always used to remind me during my training.

Tawni takes my hand and pulls me over to my stoop. I close my eyes, dip my head into my hands, start trembling. My whole body is shaking, like a virulent flu has attacked my insides all of a sudden, giving me a bad case of the shakes. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the rush of adrenaline that comes with extreme violence. I’m no kind of adrenaline junkie, am not addicted to it, don’t crave it. Although I’m prepared to engage in violence when I’m forced to, I don’t particularly like confrontation. Unfortunately, confrontation seems to like me quite a lot.

The last time I fought in the Yard—when I victimized that guy’s legs and sent a message to the rest of the inmates—I’d cried afterwards, in my cell, alone. I’d never wished more to have my parents with me, to comfort me like a child, to hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay.

This time, however, I have Tawni. I’m not crying this time, but I’m distraught, exhausted, both mentally and physically. She wraps an arm around me, pulls me close, holds me. Normally it would be a bad idea to show such weakness in front of the rest of the “guests,” but I don’t care. We’re leaving and I’ll never look back.

My thoughts are interrupted by Cole. “How’d you do that?” he says.

“Preemptive strike,” I say simply, my voice muffled through my hands.

“No. I mean, where’d you learn to fight like that?” he persists.

“I told you I know how to fight.”

“But where’d you learn it?”

“My father taught me,” I say, opening my hands and raising my head. Tawni is still holding me, and where it had felt good a second earlier, it now feels weird, I think because it’s such a public place and Cole is watching. I give her an awkward look and she seems to get the message, withdrawing her arms.

Cole’s looking at me with those strong eyes of his. Clearly he’s perplexed by me, like I’m a puzzle. But I’m not really. It’s simple: my father was taught how to fight by his father, my grandfather, and he taught me. Growing up, he never let me rest on the fact that I’m a girl. Not in the world we live in. He said everyone will need to know how to fight eventually given what’s coming. I’m not sure what he meant by that.

I was a good student and loved our training sessions together. From hand-to-hand combat to shooting slingshots, to fighting with a staff, I relished every new lesson. He was hard on me, but I didn’t mind. I just knew I wanted to spend time with him and it was as good a way as any to do it. I remember the day he told me I was ready. I didn’t understand. He said he’d taught me everything I needed to know. I didn’t feel ready.

My father is not a violent man. He told me never to use my training except to defend myself or others. “Never be the initiator, never the aggressor.” Including my most recent fight in the Pen, I’ve only fought three times in my life, outside of training. I haven’t lost yet, unless you include the skirmish with the man-giant that Cole pulled me out of. But I don’t, that was hardly fair.

Although I had a good teacher in my father, he said I have a natural talent for fighting. I would tell him I got it from him, but he always countered that I inherited my talent from my mom. I never understood that. My mom is the least violent person I know. With the exception of the night she was taken, I’ve never seen her so much as lift a foot to squash a bug. When I asked her about it, she just shook her head and said, “Your father has a big mouth sometimes, Adele. He’s the fighter, not me.” I never really believed her, but that’s all she’d say.

Cole looks like he’s about to ask another question about my fighting, but I wave him off with a hand. “I’d really rather not talk about it right now,” I say. I’m glad when he doesn’t push it any further.

To his credit, he doesn’t so much as mention fighting the rest of the afternoon, or the evening for that matter. The last day in the Pen seems to sprout wings and fly away. I think it’s because I can’t wait to get out of this dump.

Night falls. Not that it makes things look any different. Outside the Pen it’s still the dull gray that it always is. Inside the Pen it’s still fluorescent white, painfully bright in most areas. Tawni and I walk to our cells for what I hope will be the last time. After a quick and knowing sideways glance, we push through our respective doors. As I close the steel barrier, I insert the plastic square between the bolt and its hole.

Ten minutes later the speaker announces lights out and I hear the lock click. It sounds different than most nights—not the hollow click announcing my nightly imprisonment, but a duller thwap! that confirms the plastic has done its job.

The waiting is painful—each fifteen-minute interval drags on until I’m straining to hear the clap of the guard’s footsteps on the gray-painted stone floor. By the third guard, it feels like an hour has passed since the last guard clipped past my cell. That’s when I start worrying.

At first it is just a nagging voice in my head that says something isn’t right. But soon it becomes a shout that says that the guard’s patrol pattern has been altered, that someone knows about our attempted breakout, that even now they’re handcuffing the wayward guard who took our money. Perhaps it’s already past midnight. Perhaps the fence is still charged and ready to shock us into oblivion when we touch it. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

I try to think about my family to take my mind off of my nerves. I desperately want to see them again. For the past few months I’ve done my best to forget them, letting their smiles fade from my memory like a hunting bat drifting into the gloom. Elsey, with her contagious optimism and proper way of speaking. My mom, with the heart of a lion and an abundance of compassion. My dad, the fighter, quick to smile, slow to anger. My rock, my hero.

The fourth guard comes. Eleven o’clock—if the patrol pattern hasn’t changed. My mind is relentless, and soon my heart joins in the fun, hammering in my chest, striving to pound its way through my bones and skin. But I’m handling it. Barely.

Until my lungs decide to join the party.

My breaths start coming in ragged heaves, short and choppy, until I’m gasping for breath. It’s like my whole body—all its parts, internal organs, and nerve endings—decide to mutiny at the exact same time.

That’s when I lose count. I can’t remember if the last guard I heard was the fourth or the fifth. I’m thinking fifth, but I can’t be sure. When the seventh—or is it the sixth?—guard goes by, I know I have to play it conservatively. This is one time I can’t be late.

So I block out all my kooky, mutinying body parts and start counting. I put every last ounce of concentration and brain power into keeping count, maintaining a steady rhythm, treating the act of counting like it’s the most complicated math problem.

Right on six hundred, I pull my door open and step into the dim hallway. Ten seconds pass and Tawni still hasn’t emerged. I think I must be too early. It’s probably eleven-forty and the next guard will be coming soon—the guard that should have triggered my counting. But then I have a very bad thought. What if I’m too late? What if I missed two guards passing and it’s really twelve-ten now? What if Cole and Tawni waited for me, and when I didn’t come, carried on the plan without me?

Tawni’s door creaks open, and, like a shadow, she emerges. I take a deep breath and approach her. “You count slow!” I hiss.

She raises her wrist, displaying the digital numbers on a wristwatch. 11:55. “Sorry, I forgot I had this,” she whispers. “I guess you got excited and counted too fast.”

I don’t know why the twelve o’clock guard chooses to come down the hall at that moment. It’s possible he’s just bored, choosing to start his circuitous route through the complex a few minutes early to pass the time. Or perhaps Tawni’s watch is slow, as well as my counting. Maybe he’s right on-time. Whatever the case, all of a sudden he’s here and we have nowhere to hide.

When he sees us standing in front of our cells, he stops, looking confused. He rubs his eyes, as if he thinks the shadows are playing tricks on him.

We run.

It doesn’t take him long to realize we’re real. He opens fire on us with the big gun he’s hefting. Yeah, he actually shoots at the backs of two defenseless teenage girls who are inside a secure facility, presumably for the petty crime of breaking curfew. I don’t know where the Pen hires these psychos from, but I make a mental note to write a letter to the government about them. The same government that abducted my parents. Yeah right, like they’re going to listen to me.

At first I don’t realize what’s happening. As I flee, I feel a weird rush of air burst past one of my ears, and then see a spark to my right when something glances off the wall. It isn’t until we reach the end of the hall and I see the bullet holes that I know for sure that we’re being shot at.

Somehow we manage to get down that first hall without getting shot, but we aren’t even close to being out of the mines yet. We start to turn right, to take the fastest route to the Yard, but are forced to veer left when we see three more guards charging toward us. A few more bullets whiz past, shot by the original guard. I hope he hits the other guards by mistake.

The three new guards are yelling to the other guard to “Stop freaking shooting!” which gives me hope that perhaps they aren’t all so trigger happy. With a parade of slapping feet behind us, we take the long way around to the Yard.

As we round the next bend, the sweat is dripping into my face and I have to use the sleeve of my gray prisoner’s tunic to wipe it away. I try to stay with Tawni, but her legs are longer than mine and her long graceful strides soon edge her several paces ahead. Just as she passes a corridor on her right, a guard steps out, facing me. He’s holding a thick black nightstick and looks ready to use it.

I leap, aiming a high kick at his face and hoping he’ll get the worst of whatever collision is about to occur. I catch him high, just above his left eye, but not before he’s able to take a half swing with his club. Thank God he doesn’t have time to wind up the entire way. CRACK! I feel the rod slam into my ribs, sending shivers of pain through my stomach and into my chest.

There’s a cringe-worthy crunch! as I land on top of him, one foot on his head and the other on his chest. I think I might’ve broken his sternum. Somehow I manage to keep my footing and stumble off of him, using my momentum to continue moving forward.

Tawni hears the commotion and stops, waiting for me to catch up. I try to yell, “Keep running!” but it comes out as a wheeze—I’m having trouble getting air into my lungs after the hit from the nightstick. I wave Tawni on with my hand and she gets the message. She turns and continues running, but at a slower pace, until I’m able to get alongside her. We run abreast at my slower pace, cutting through the back entrance to the cafeteria, past the benches and long tables, and out the front entrance. Each step sends shockwaves through me, and my stomach heaves, threatening to toss up whatever gunk I ate for dinner.

Once out of the eatery, we cut sharply to the left and push through the outer door in tandem, crashing each of the double doors into the stone wall in the Yard. Compared to the air inside the Pen, the outside air feels fresh and quickly fills my faltering lungs.

A headache starts in my skull, maybe from the exertion or the explosions of gunfire that are still ringing in my ears. Or from something else. It’s the first headache I’ve had since seeing Tristan. But there’s no time to think about all that.

A dull light illuminates us for a moment, before we have a chance to duck against the wall. Cole is waiting just outside, in the shadows.

“Could you be a little quieter!” he hisses. “Someone’s gonna hear us!”

“Too late for that,” I choke out.

“They’re after us,” Tawni says, grabbing Cole’s hand and pulling him toward the fence.

We have no idea whether Cole’s guy came through for us, but by God we’re going to try anyway. Cole finally seems to grasp the urgency and powers ahead, reaching the fence about five seconds before us. He uses the time to rip his prisoner’s tunic over his head and chuck it against the fence.

Nothing. No crackle of electricity, no smell of burning cloth, nothing. The fence’s power is off—but for how long?

We aren’t about to sit around and place bets. Cole already has his tunic on and is a quarter of the way to the top when Tawni and I start climbing. As usual, she gets in front of me immediately, using her long reach to skip as many rungs as possible. I hear a shout from the Yard, but don’t risk looking back. I have to keep climbing. Stretching my arms over my head makes my stomach throb and my crushed ribs grate against each other, but I push through it, even when the pain grows so bad that I start seeing stars.

We’re so close I can practically smell the freedom.

So close.

And yet so far.

Cole is straddling the barbed wire at the top of the fence, trying to avoid getting poked somewhere that will have a permanent impact, when I hear the next shout. It isn’t from the Yard this time, but from the street outside the fence.

This time I look. I don’t even have to turn my head, just have to look down. Half a dozen guards, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, which are pointed right at us, are shouting for us to get down.

We’re trapped like rats.

My head pounds in rhythm with my heart.

Chapter Ten

Tristan

When we exit the transporter, it’s getting very dark in subchapter 14, but it’s only early evening, perhaps seven o’clock. The day lights on the roof of the cavern—which are already dim to begin with—are nearly extinguished, simulating twilight. I’m glad. It makes it easier to avoid being spotted.

Although most of the time the many subchapters in the Moon Realm blend together in my memory, becoming one continuous subchapter in my mind, I have a pretty good idea of the layout of subchapter 14 because we just visited it. Roc also has a map—he has a map for every place in the Tri-Realms—and we use it, along with our memories, to navigate our way from the transporter station, through the streets past the familiar government buildings, and into the light commercial district, near where the Pen is located.

I still haven’t worked out what to do when we get there.

We emerge from a crowded street, full of people bartering goods and services for their next meal, and see the intimidating fence surrounding the Pen. It’s a formidable obstacle, complete with barbed wire and signs warning of “Electrified Fence—Keep Back!” It certainly makes you appreciate being on the outside of it.

I feel a strange pull toward the Pen, but I resist it, trying to be patient. It feels like someone’s poking me in the back with pins. Not like the stabbing-knife pain from the last time I was here, but a lesser, more prickly pain.

The rock yard beyond the fence is empty. It’s getting late and the inmates are probably in their cells. I’ve never visited the Pen before—never had a reason to—so I don’t know their rules around prisoner visitation.

We have a choice to make. Hole up for the night and wait until morning to try to get inside the Pen, or give it a try now, at a time which will be considerably more suspicious. I manage to tear my eyes from the Pen and we head for a hotel.

The only option in near vicinity to the Pen is a ratty old building across the road. The ancient clerk at the front desk has a wispy white beard and pockmarks covering the whole of his face.

“We’d like a room for the night,” I say gruffly.

The guy doesn’t bother to look up from his newspaper. “Which one would ya like?” he says.

“Do you have anything available that overlooks the Pen?” I ask.

The man starts to chuckle, but then starts coughing—a heaving, wheezing blast of air from his mouth that reeks of disease. When he gets control of his lungs, he says, “We currently have one hundred percent availability.”

I guess I should’ve known, considering the number of people commuting out of the city every day. There’s no reason for travelers to stop in the 14th subchapter.

“Top floor, dead center view of the Pen,” I say.

“Room twelve thirty-five,” the man says, handing me a key. He’d slipped the key from a peg on a board without even looking at it. Roc and I make eye contact; his lips are curled into a smirk that I’m pretty sure mirrors my own.

The room is more like a closet, but is clean at least, with painted-white stone walls and slate floors. A single bed fills most of the room—we’ll have to duke it out for bed rights. There’s a shared bathroom in the hallway, but with no guests other than us, we’ll have it all to ourselves. It’s not the Sandy Oasis, that’s for sure. I could be having a massage right now. Am I crazy?

I close the door.

First we check the view. For someone wanting a view of the Pen—like us—it’s a good one. The Pen is dark and quiet. I can picture the girl sitting on her bed in her cell, wishing to be anywhere but there. I don’t dare to picture her on a slab of rock in the morgue.

But even so, if I can somehow get her out of the Pen, no doubt she’ll be pleased, willing to answer my questions about her use of voodoo dolls. That’s my best theory as to why when I’m near her it feels like I’m being tortured.

I feel the familiar pull toward the Pen, my scalp tingling. No headache yet, but I know it’s there, just below the surface, waiting to come out.

It’s freaking weird.

“I’ve got to find out if she’s alive tonight,” I say suddenly.

Roc glances at me, raising his eyebrows. I’m ready for him to advise me that I should wait until morning, that I should do the responsible thing, be patient, but to my surprise, he says, “I know. Let’s go have a look.”

When we pass the front desk, the same old man is sitting in the same position, reading the same paper, like he’s glued to the seat. Perhaps he has a neck problem, which explains why he again doesn’t bother to look up. Or perhaps he just doesn’t like guests; or more specifically, doesn’t like us. It doesn’t bother me—the fewer questions and looks we get the better.

The security at the front gate of the Pen is light—only a single guard with an automatic weapon mans the station. The prisons are all secured by Sun Realm employees, so they have access to more advanced weapons than most people in the Lower Realms.

I remove my shades, as they’ll make me stick out even more wearing them at night. I hope the low-brimmed hat will be sufficient to hide my face. I approach the guard with my head down, but I can feel him eyeing us.

“Hoping to visit an inmate,” I say casually.

“A guest?” the guard replies.

I almost say what? but then realize we’re talking about the same thing. Funny how they call their prisoners guests. “Uh, yeah, a guest,” I say.

“Visiting hours are over. Come back between ten and two tomorrow.”

The guard doesn’t sound like he’ll easily change his mind, but I have to try anyway. “Is there any chance of an exception?” I say.

“No,” he says simply, his voice sounding tired, like he hates having to constantly have this conversation with people. I consider playing my son-of-the-president card, but decide against it as I don’t really want to give away my identity just yet. There’s a good chance the press will get wind of it and then my father will send guards to bring me back. Plus, I don’t want to rely on my name, or my father, for this mission. I might regret it, but for once I just want to be a random guy. Tomorrow I might change my mind, but not tonight.

“Okay, we’ll be back at ten in the morning,” I say.

The guard doesn’t answer, just stares at us. No, it’s not at us, more like through us, like we aren’t even there. We leave.

I know it isn’t a good idea to roam the city, especially at night, but we have to eat so we go for a walk. The subchapter has seen better days. Although the cavern it’s built in is magnificent, rising hundreds of feet above our heads and extending many miles in each direction, the town itself is deteriorating. Most of the shops and restaurants are boarded up, having insufficient business to exist. When people don’t have money, they can’t buy things—simple as that. I expect it means the remaining restaurants will be crowded, enjoying the benefits of being the only show in town, but I’m wrong.

The buzzing in my scalp lessens with each step away from the Pen.

We pass a tavern. Through the window I can see a lone drinker propped on an elbow, sitting on a stool at the bar. Nursing a drink. And I mean nursing. He’s sipping it like it might be the last drink he’ll ever take. Maybe it is. Maybe things are so bad that he spent the last of his money on the drink, and plans to commit suicide later tonight. I don’t know. Things like that don’t happen in the Sun Realm.

We get to the end of the street without passing another open eatery. Turning left, I hear the distant murmur of music playing. Halfway down the block the soft glow of candlelight drifts through an open doorway. The sign above the door simply says, Pizza. Not seeing any other options, we make for the light.

Entering the pizzeria, I let Roc step in front of me as I see half a dozen heads turn toward us. The music playing is by some Sun Dweller rock band, The Stone Crushers, I think, and has an up-tempo beat that makes you want to get up and dance. No one is dancing tonight. They are, however, eating pizza and it smells pretty good.

There’s no one to greet us so we just take a couple seats and wait for service. None of the other customers pay any attention to us. A few minutes later, a short bald man with horn-rimmed glasses pushes backwards through a set of swinging doors. He’s wearing a red apron and balancing four circular trays of pizza across his outstretched arms.

“Who ’ad the cheese?” he grunts.

Every hand in the place goes up except ours. He quickly dishes out the pizzas and collects a few coins from each party. Then he turns toward us. “What’ll ya have?” he says.

“Whaddya got?” I ask. When the guy’s eyes narrow, I realize I should’ve just said cheese pizza, because I know he has it. Instead, my simple question instantly draws more attention to us than I want. I glance at Roc. He’s chewing his nails off one by one.

“You’re not from around ’ere, are you?” the guy says.

“Just visiting for a day or two,” I say, hoping it will satisfy him and he’ll go back to serving us.

He raises a single bushy eyebrow. “Travelers, huh?” he says. “We don’t get many travelers. Where ya from?”

Now I know we’re in a bit of trouble. I can tell him the truth, tell him we’re Sun Dwellers, but I have no idea what effect that will have. Will he and his patrons be excited that Sun Dwellers are visiting their subchapter? Or will they be angry, ready to have a political discussion that involves their fists and our faces? All it takes is one Moon Dweller with a chip on his shoulder to cause us serious problems. On the other hand, if I lie, tell him we’re from some other subchapter, he might ask questions that I’m not able to answer. I’ll have to keep lying, spinning myself deeper and deeper into a web of deceit.

I opt for truth, for better or worse.

“We’re visiting from the Sun Realm,” I say.

Suddenly, it gets so quiet I can almost hear the sound of one of Roc’s chewed-off nails drop to the floor. It even feels like the music stops playing, although in reality the song just happens to end at the exact same time.

“The Sun Realm, eh?” the pizza man says. I know that everyone inside is listening to our conversation now, slices of pizza dangling from fingertips, some in mid-bite. I know the man isn’t going to let it go in a hurry. I’m glad the restaurant is only lit by candles—it’ll be near impossible for him to identify me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Never served a Sun Dweller before,” the guy says, his light tone switching to heavy right about the time he says the words Sun Dweller. I sense a hidden meaning behind his words: It’s not that he’s never had a Sun Dweller in his pizzeria, but that he will never serve a Sun Dweller, even if they’re his only customers.

“Fair enough,” I say, standing up. “We’ll take that as our cue to leave.”

The pizza man puts a hand on each of my shoulders and pushes me firmly back into my chair. “There’s a first time for everything,” he says.

I’m not sure what he means. That he’s going to serve us like any other customers? Or that he’s going to head back into the kitchen and cook up the most delectable, hot, gooey, poisoned pizza he’s ever made? Whatever the case, I’m not going to take any chances. As soon as the owner barrels through the swinging doors to the kitchen, I’m back on my feet. Roc’s up at the same time, knowing without asking what our next move will be.

We move toward the door.

Two big men block the exit, standing tall with their arms crossed. Not good. I don’t even know where they’ve come from. I don’t recall seeing them in the restaurant—and if they had been, we would’ve seen them moving across the room to block us. They could’ve come from outside, but I probably would’ve heard them scuffle across the threshold, unless they’re professional sneaks. There’s a staircase that rises up from just to the right of the entrance, however, presumably leading to sleeping quarters for the bald pizza man. Perhaps he has sons who live with him, who, upon overhearing our conversation—key words being sun and dwellers—thought it polite to pop down and say hello. Of course, these men are staring right at us and their lips aren’t exactly moving; if not “hello,” I would take “good evening,” “welcome,” or even “hiya” at this point. No words—just stares. If these guys are his sons, they’re genetic freaks, more than twice the size of their dad.

“Excuse me,” I say, still trying to avoid a confrontation. They don’t move, just stand there staring. I try to squeeze through the middle of them, but they inch closer together, shoulder to shoulder. I attempt to skirt around them, but they move like a single organism, blocking the side. The only option left is through them. So be it.

I take a few steps back and charge.

The feint is as important as the attack itself.

I fake like I’m going to try and club each of them over the head with a different one of my fists. Because all of my activity is aimed high, they counter with high defenses and attacks of their own. The guy on the left covers his head with his arms and hands to block my attack. The guy on the right goes on the offensive, attempting a haymaker punch intended to end the fight quickly, possibly breaking my jaw or giving me a mild concussion.

At the last second I throw my head back and launch both feet forward like torpedoes. Each boot heel hits one of the guy’s knees. I have so much forward momentum that the impact is like getting hit by a concrete block. I feel their knees buckle, crack, bend back the wrong way. And I hear their screams of pain, a harmonized “ARGHHH!” that will surely bring the pizza man running back out of the kitchen.

They tumble backwards out the open doorway and I land on them in a mess of arms and legs, at least two of which contain broken bones. Not mine.

While I attack, Roc is not idle. He’s already out the door, grabbing me under my arms, hoisting me back on my feet. And then we’re running.

The guys with the broken kneecaps won’t be chasing us, but we don’t know who else might come to their rescue. Given our first taste of subchapter 14 hospitality, we aren’t about to stick around and plead our case to the locals. Apparently, all those screaming, cheering girls—the ones chucking underwear—at the parade the day before live outside the town.

We don’t hear anyone pursuing us, but we don’t stop running until we’re back inside our hotel lobby.

The hotel guy should look up, considering the way we burst through the door, panting and sweating and out of control. But he doesn’t. He isn’t reading his paper anymore either. He’s rolled it up and is using it as a pillow, his craggly old cheek resting upon it, smudging the print all over his face. Buzzing snores arise from his vibrating lips. Deep sleeper, I think. Hear no evil, see no evil. The perfect place for us to stay.

I never thought I’d be so happy to see the inside of that tiny shoebox room. Roc and I sit on the bed and look at each other, our eyes wide. Then we’re laughing, in between taking deep, heaving breaths, happy to just be away from that terrible pizzeria.

“What was that all about?” Roc says.

“I dunno. I guess they don’t like us,” I say.

“More like hate us.”

I nod. “Good thing they didn’t recognize me.”

“We can’t stay too much longer in this place,” Roc points out.

“I know. But I have to at least try to see her, to do something, to make sure she’s okay.”

“Then we have to do it tonight. We can’t linger, Tristan.” Roc’s eyes are dark and serious. I value his counsel, even when I don’t want to hear it.

“We’ll go in the middle of the night,” I say. “Two in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.” My stomach is growling, but I ignore it.

It’s only nine, so we’ll get five hours of sleep. I let Roc have the bed. It isn’t often he gets something that I don’t. Roc sets an alarm and goes straight to sleep. I linger, taking the time to brush my teeth and shower in the empty bathroom.

By the time I get back to the room, Roc’s breathing heavily, twitching slightly on the bed as he dreams about getting chased by angry guards, or perhaps deranged pizza chefs.

I take my place on the floor, using the extra pillow to rest my head on. The stone is hard under my back, a terrible contrast to the plush mattress I’m used to sleeping on.

Before I drift off to sleep, I think about how I fainted when I pictured the Moon Dweller girl. Was it some weird neurological response to a stimuli of some sort? I hope I won’t faint when I meet her—it’d be hard to ask her questions while unconscious.

I sleep, either dreamlessly or without memory of my dreams.

We wake up, not by Roc’s alarm clock, but by the muffled sound of gunshots in the distance. Before I’m fully awake I know where the sounds emanate from: the Pen.

I leap to my feet, reaching the window at the same time as Roc. My back is aching from sleeping on the hard, stone floor. I’m not used to it.

We huddle together, gazing across the road and through the fence. The Pen is dark and quiet—like before. Gunshots ring out once more. Although the sound is stifled, both by walls and distance, neither Roc nor I have any doubt as to the origin: a semi-automatic weapon. Countless times we’ve heard similar sounds tremor through the walls of the palace, a result of army training exercises nearby.

I spot movement along the fence. I point it out to Roc, and we watch as a dark form creeps in the shadows, moving silently toward a door leading inside. The figure reaches the door and waits. A minute passes without gunshots or movement from the ghost.

The hollow door clangs open, ringing like a bell across the outer courtyard, through the fence, and into our ears. Two forms spill from the Pen, momentarily thrust into the glow of a single light illuminating the entranceway. They move quickly out of the light, joining the shadow in the shadows. Although they’re only visible for a split-second, a mere wrinkle in time, I know without a doubt who they are—I suddenly feel dizzy.

Roc seems to recognize that something’s wrong, and manages to thrust an arm behind me, catching me just before I collapse. “Tristan?” he says.

Thankfully, I don’t pass out this time. My legs feel like rubber and the whole room is spinning, my head thudding like a war drum, but I hang on to consciousness. Roc holds me up until the feeling passes, my head settling into a less painful throb.

“It’s her,” I say. “We have to go.” Although she didn’t look at me, I felt the warmth of her eyes hit me, like a blast of hot air from a furnace. She’s alive! Although I’ve been trying to convince myself that she survived the encounter with the big guy the day of the parade, in my heart I believed it had ended in tragedy, that I’d never get to ask her the questions I need to.

Before leaving, I risk a final glance out the window, hoping I won’t be affected by seeing her again. There are a few stabs in my spine, but nothing serious. The threesome reaches the fence and starts to climb. “No electricity?” I say aloud.

A group of guards, at least six, I think, charge out into the courtyard. They’re headed straight for her, toting guns and nightsticks.

Time to go.

Roc’s already in the hall, looking back like he expects me to be right behind him. I cross the room in two long strides. We tear down the hall.

If the twelve flights of stairs have a hundred and forty-four steps, I think my feet touch about thirty-six of them. It’s a wonder I don’t trip and tumble all the way to the bottom, breaking every bone in my body.

We rush past the sleeping deskman and into the cool night.

We freeze on the sidewalk when we see the scene before us.

Chapter Eleven

Adele

The explosion rocks the still night air like a freight train crossing a rickety wooden bridge. I cling to the fence for dear life, as superheated air whooshes past me with the force of a stick of mining TNT.

We’re lucky. Damn lucky.

The bomb blast knocks out a section of fence twenty yards to the left of us, leaving us relatively unscathed. Had we chosen that part of the fence to climb, we would’ve been hurtled to our deaths on the unforgiving rock slabs in the Yard.

The good news: The bomb has also taken out every last guard in the Yard behind us. Evidently they were running along the fence when it hit, trying to get to where we were climbing. Their bodies are scattered throughout the Yard, some quite a distance away from each other, tossed like ragdolls by the power of the explosion. I don’t know if they’re dead. Frankly, I don’t care.

The bad news: The guards on the other side of the fence were as protected as we were. They’re still standing under us, still aiming their guns at us. Given the stress they’re under—what with all their friends out cold on the other side and the bomb going off—I’m afraid they might just open fire and ask questions later.

We’re frozen in place, waiting to be torn apart by hot steel bullets. All watching the guards, waiting. It’s horrible. An eternity in hell wouldn’t be worse than these ten seconds. Or maybe it’s only five. I don’t know—all I know is it’s bad.

My whole body is crackling with a sharp pain in my bones. Did I get hit by one of the bullets back in the Pen and not even realize it? Or maybe shards of shrapnel are all throughout my body, ripping and tearing. I quickly scan my tunic for blood. Nothing.

Dark shadows move along the tops of some of the buildings, running, running, and then stopping, heaving something over the side…

BOOM!

The next bomb hits a building across the street from the Pen, directly beyond our section of fence. A maelstrom of glass and rock rubble rains down upon the guards and they do what any other well-trained officers of a fine juvenile delinquent facility would do when three of their guests are trying to escape: they run. For good measure, they even throw down their guns to allow themselves to run faster. I’ve never understood the expression turned tail and ran until now. If the guards had tails, they most definitely would’ve turned just before they took off.

I glance at the tops of the buildings, scanning for the shadows. There’s movement somewhere in my peripheral vision, but I can’t seem to pinpoint it. Who are the shadows? And why the hell are they blowing up subchapter 14 of the Moon Realm, of all places? My guesses are: 1) Sun Dweller military are attacking our subchapter because we only pay 80 percent taxes instead of 82 percent; 2) fed up, underpaid miners have gone crazy and are determined to destroy everything in sight; or 3) other Pen inmates have managed to get their hands on incendiaries and are shooting them off from the roof.

Cole swings his leg over the top and starts climbing down the other side. I’m still frozen in place, trying to process all that has happened. As I watch Cole shimmy down, I can see the hole in the building in the background. The scorching hole is about three times his size, making him look extremely fragile and exposed all alone on his side of the fence. Not that Tawni or I are any more protected.

I’m glad Tawni is there, because I’m not thinking clearly. I’m ready to continue my ascent to the top of the fence, to finish what we started, carry out the original plan, when she brushes past me, heading back down on the Pen-side of the fence.

“C’mon, this way, Adele,” she says.

Duh. Why fight gravity and barbed wire (and my aching bones) when we can go through the fence? Given a full fifth of the fence has been toppled, it’ll be far easier to just walk straight out.

We make it down without incident and climb over the mangled fence. We fight through a few nests of barbed wire, but it isn’t too difficult. Just as we get on the street side of the fence, we see Cole waving wildly from down the road. Hurry! his body language screams.

Alarms begin whooping in the background, coming from the Pen. Jailbreak alarms. For us. The jailbreakers.

We run. We run because we’re worried about the alarms and the guards that will surely pour from the Pen as a result.

BOOM!

Hot stone shrapnel drills me in the cheek, snapping my head to the side. I see Cole and Tawni get pelted by similar flying projectiles, but none of us so much as considers stopping to check for serious injuries. I think we all know that the only thing to do is keep running, to try to get as far away from the commercial district as possible. Whoever is blasting away—the shadows on the roofs—isn’t showing any signs of stopping anytime soon.

It’s weird—the way the night can be lit up so brightly and quickly and then just as quickly return to darkness, lit only by the soft glow of the streetlights. That’s the way our run goes. Flash! And then dark. BOOM! And then silence. It’s eerie, like we’re in a war, bombs exploding all around us as we literally run for our lives.

The thundering explosions fade and the manufactured lightning grows distant as we escape the city limits, moving into the sparsely populated suburbs.

With each step another aching bone recovers, until I’m left feeling refreshed, like I just took a long nap. My body is strange these days.

None of us speak as we continue running, making our way around the huge stone columns that help support the cavern roof. I’m not sure how far or how long we run, or why we finally stop when we do. I think we all just stop at the same time, like robots, perfectly synchronized, slipping behind a high stone wall that rings one of the houses.

I’m breathing heavily—Tawni is, too. I’m out of shape. There isn’t much use for exercise inside the Pen. My mind is racing; my side is hurting. I feel a twinge of pain on my cheek and I flinch. Pressing a hand to my face, I feel the sticky wetness of drying blood. I guess the rock hit me harder than I thought.

“Do you…think…we’re safe?” I pant, directing the question at whoever has enough energy to listen.

Tawni hunches over, trying to catch her breath. Evidently she’s as out of shape as I am. Cole, on the other hand, has apparently kept up his fitness while on the inside. He doesn’t even seem winded.

“I expect we’re all right,” he says, glancing to his right and left, as if they might be surrounding us any second. “Especially given everything else that’s happening.”

Everything else. If only we knew what everything else is.

“What do you think is happening?” I say.

Cole laughs. “Uh, I think our subchapter is getting bombed to hell and back again.” He laughs again.

“No kidding,” I say. “I meant who do you think is doing it? And why? I saw people on the roofs of some of the buildings—or at least their shadows. They were the ones throwing the bombs.”

“My guys,” he says. “I paid a little extra to get a small diversion to ensure we’d get away.”

A day earlier, before I knew him at all, I might have believed him. Not anymore. “Lie,” I say. “Is now really the time for sarcasm?” Despite myself, I smile. “Are we really free?”

Tawni’s breath is mostly back. She rises to her full height, once more towering over me. “For the moment we are,” she says. “As long as we don’t do anything stupid and get ourselves caught.”

“Or killed,” Cole says.

I cringe. My mind is clearing and already I’m analyzing the situation. It’s like a puzzle. There are certain tasks we need to complete, in a certain order, and wrapped around them all is the requirement that we can’t get caught. The first task is obvious.

“We need to get rid of these tunics,” I say.

Cole smirks. “Yeah, I was thinking going naked was a good idea. They’d never expect it.” He starts to raise his tunic over his head, revealing his strong dark legs and a pair of tight, black briefs.

“That’s more than I wanted to see,” I say, looking away.

When I look back he’s lowered his tunic and is winking at me. I shake my head.

“Where are we going to get different clothes?” Tawni asks. “I mean, I’ve got money, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to walk into a shop wearing these.”

“Yeah, plus we’ll be public enemy number one after the breakout. Our faces will be plastered all over town,” I say.

“Do you think so?” Tawni says, suddenly looking excited. “I would die to see my parents’ faces when they see me on the news.”

“I knew I should’ve had them retake my mug shot,” Cole says. “I think I blinked during the first one.”

“No amount of retakes would be able to help you,” I say dryly.

Cole stares at me, his eyes widening and his mouth opening wide to form an O. “My gosh, Adele. Was that…was that a joke? Well played.”

I play-punch him in the arm and am surprised when he winces. At first I think he’s kidding, but then I notice the slight tear in his tunic. “Are you hurt?” I ask.

“I think we all are,” he says. “But nothing serious for me. Are you guys all right?”

Tawni glances at me. “Just a few cuts on my arms. I think Adele is hurt the worst.”

I raise a hand to my face, once more feeling the stickiness. “Nah,” I say, “it’s a scratch. Probably looks a lot worse than it is.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Tawni says.

Damn, I was hoping not to talk about my crushed ribs—where the prison guard smashed me with his club—just yet. Evidently Tawni saw more than I thought. “It’s not that bad, really,” I say. “I’ll deal with it once we find a better place to hide.” I try to breathe evenly, despite the pain.

Cole looks at me suspiciously, and then at Tawni. I squeeze my fists tight, hoping they’ll both just let it go. Thankfully, they do.

“Okay, where should we go?” Tawni asks.

“First, we need clothes,” I say, bringing our strange conversation full circle.

“I can help with that,” Cole says. “We’ll just go shopping somewhere less visible.”

Tawni frowns, clearly not understanding his meaning, but I get the message. “You want to steal them?” I confirm.

“Not steal, just borrow,” Cole says. When Tawni gives him a look, he adds, “We can even leave some money for them if you want.”

I’m not that comfortable with the idea of stealing from innocent people, especially because things are so tough in our subchapter at the moment, but it’s not like we have much of a choice. Tawni, however, isn’t such an easy sell.

“I’m not stealing from anyone,” she says firmly.

“Shhh, keep your voice down,” I say, glancing at the house for any signs of activity.

“Don’t worry, Tawns, I’ll do the stealing,” Cole volunteers. “Consider the clothes a gift from me and don’t worry about where I get them from.”

“No,” Tawni says, lowering her eyes and putting her hands on her hips. I’m not sure why she has such a big problem with it considering our situation. I guess she’s just a person of principle, unwilling to budge on certain things. It’s probably caused by her parents—her way of proving she isn’t like them, isn’t willing to cross some line in her head. I’m more of a realist.

“We don’t have much of a choice,” I offer.

Tawni’s eyes brighten all of a sudden, like she’s just thought of something. She’s really pretty when she gets excited. Her blue eyes sparkle against the whiteness of her hair. If she’d been born in the Sun Realm, she probably could’ve been a model in one of their fashion magazines. Funny how our lives are so affected by where we’re born.

“What?” I say.

“We’ll get the clothes from my parents’ house…my house,” she says.

“I’m not so sure that’s—” I start to say.

Tawni plows ahead. “My dad’s a big guy, like Cole, I think his clothes will fit perfectly. I can wear my own clothes, of course, and you can wear my mom’s clothes. Don’t worry, she’s shorter than me, about your size, so it should work. C’mon, let’s go,” she says, before either of us has a chance to disagree. “We should be able to make it there in less than an hour. It’ll still be pitch-black when we arrive.” She grabs my hand and starts pulling. She seems to like to do that, and normally it would bother me, but for some reason with Tawni it doesn’t, maybe because of how willing she is to help me.

Cole just grunts and follows us. Given how long he’s known Tawni, I guess he knows how hopeless it is to argue with her when she sets her mind to something.

Stopping to catch our breaths was a bad idea. At least for me. My body is completely frozen up. My thighs and calves burn from the sprint through the Pen, the frantic climb up and then back down the fence, and our distance run across the subchapter. My back is sore and pleading with me to take a break—just rest for a minute, or even thirty seconds, please!—and my bruised side, well, it gave up on pleading long ago and is practically screaming at me to stop. I want to look at it, but am afraid to stop, because I might not be able to start again if I do. Plus, Cole and Tawni will see it then, too, and it might be too hard to convince them I’m okay. Instead, I just ignore my body. I’m sure it will punish me later.

We try to stay off the main roads, sticking to the shadowy fringes of houses and properties. As we walk, we talk, speaking in hushed tones. We can still hear the dull boom of explosions in the distance, can see intermittent flashes of light exposed against the dark backdrop of the giant cavern, but they’re neither loud enough nor bright enough to wake the sleeping Moon Dwellers. Closer to the city, I’m sure it would be pandemonium.

Tawni says, “I think it’s the Sun Dwellers.”

“What reason do they have for attacking?” Cole says. “They’ve got a sweet deal with us, and your boy Tristan”—he motions to me—“was just here shaking hands with the leaders and mugging for the cameras.”

“I don’t think it’s the Sun Dwellers either,” I say, although I’m not sure why.

“Of course not,” Cole says. “Your lover boy and his people could do no wrong.”

My face flushes, but in anger, not embarrassment. “I never said that!” I hiss, a bit too loudly. Tawni gives me a look and I lower my voice. “What’s your problem anyway? We know nothing about Tristan—I know nothing about him. All I have to go on is that seeing him gave me a headache and that Tawni heard he’s an all right guy from her parents. That’s it. For all I know it’s a bunch of crap. He might be a total creep. Regardless, it doesn’t matter. I’ll probably never see him again.”

Even in the shadows I can see that Cole is shocked by my outburst. Maybe he isn’t the only one with a temper. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

I feel bad right away. I really don’t know anything about Tristan, and he’s not here anyway. Cole is. One of my two friends at the moment, willing to risk his life to help me escape. I try Cole’s tactic of forgiving quickly. “It’s okay,” I sigh. “Look, I don’t like the Sun Dwellers any more than you do—that I can promise you—and they did abduct my parents, but seriously, I just don’t think they’d start bombing us all of a sudden. Like you said, they’ve got the leaders in their back pocket. Why would they ruin such a good thing by beating us down even more?”

“Sorry,” Cole says again, hanging his head. Suddenly I feel even worse about snapping at him.

Tawni says, “You guys are probably right. But if not the Sun Dwellers, then who?”

“If I had to guess,” Cole says, “I’d say it’s a Moon Dweller rebellion.” When I frown, Cole explains. “You know, like a civil war. An uprising of Moon Dwellers who are sick of our leaders getting into bed with President Nailin.”

“No way,” I say, without really thinking about it. I don’t even want to consider the possibility that we would destroy our own stuff, our own buildings, the fruits of our labors. Would my father, who’s somewhat of a revolutionary himself, support such tactics? No, I think, more certain of the answer than I’ve ever been of anything in my life. “No way,” I say again.

“Then who?” Cole asks. “Not the Star Dwellers. They don’t even have guns, much less bombs. They’ve got knives and bows and slingshots, and that’s about it. Not bombs.”

I know he’s right, which leaves the Sun Dwellers, the Realm with the greatest resources. I try to think of any other possibility. I have no idea, but something about the timing seems far too coincidental. “Do you think it was someone trying to help us?” Even as I say it, it feels stupid. No one knew we were leaving. And anyway, who would want to help us?

“Not likely,” Cole says.

Eventually, everyone stops talking and we trudge along in silence. It’s probably safer that way anyway. After what feels like miles, Tawni finally says, “We’re here.”

It is a good thing, too, because with every step my legs threaten to topple underneath me. I yearn for a soft bed, for a comfy pillow to rest upon.

“We’ll have to sleep in the shed,” Tawni says. Cole and I groan simultaneously. “We’ll stay there at least until morning, when my parents leave for work, or wherever it is that they go every day.”

I sigh. “Won’t your house be under surveillance?” I say. “We did just escape from prison.”

“Not this quickly,” Tawni says. “With the bombings, they’ll have more important things to worry about. Plus, with my parents’ connections to the Sun Realm, there’s no way they’d allow surveillance of their property.”

I mull it over, hoping she’s right. “Okay,” I say. “Lead the way.”

We steal across the front of the house, which is bigger than most in the Moon Realm, at least five times as big as my house. My eyes have adjusted to the dark (plus there are small night lights along the front walk), so I can make out artsy rock formations littering the landscaping. They’re hand-carved and probably cost a fortune. We easily zigzag our way through them and I guess that Tawni could guide us without injury even if she was blindfolded, such is her familiarity with the landscape.

I can’t see much of the house, except that it looms up like a fortress in front of us. Compared to most homes in the Moon Realm, and particularly in our humble district, it’s as big as a palace. I can’t wait to see it when the dim cavern daylights are illuminated.

We reach a medium-height wall separating the back from the front. Raising one of her long legs, Tawni clambers over it easily, like she’s done it a thousand times. Following her lead, Cole hops over the barrier swiftly and looks back at me, as if he’s considering offering me a hand over. I pretend not to see him and, against my better judgment, place my hands firmly on the top of the wall and push off hard, using it to vault over the top. Although I clear the wall easily, I pay the price on the landing, feeling the jolt of my feet on the stone through my entire body, particularly around my battered ribs.

It hurts like hell, but I grit my teeth and dare myself not to show any discomfort. Cole’s watching and I don’t want to look weak in front of him. I don’t know why. He’s already seen me fight, knows I’m tough, knows I’m strong and capable. Maybe I’m just trying to prove my toughness to myself.

Regardless, I don’t think it works. Cole pretends not to notice that I’m in pain, but I think I see a twinkle in his eyes and a casual smirk on his lips. I brush past him and follow Tawni around the house.

The backyard is even bigger than the front, possibly bigger than my parents’ entire property. In the center of the space is an in-ground pool, probably the only one in the entire subchapter. The still waters glow an eerie blue, lit from beneath by underwater pool lights which evidently stay on all night. I try not to think about how much that would cost—and that it’s funded by the sweat and blood of people like my father.

The shed is past the pool. It isn’t what I expected. When you live in relative poverty, the word shed fosters an image of a tiny stone cubbyhole, crumbling around the edges and filled with rusty tools, spiders, and the occasional bat. Not a four-room building with running water, electricity, bunk beds, and shelves of food. Maybe I’m going to get a bed after all.

Tawni pushes open the door without a key and slips into the darkness. We can’t risk turning on the lights, so she gives us a brief tour using the soft glow of her digital watch. Then she breaks out a can of beans, which we eat at room temperature, a box of salty crackers, and a tube of some kind of mint jelly. Although it shouldn’t be, the food is amazing, and we eat frantically. It’s a good thing there are no lights, because I don’t even stop to wipe the crumbs or juices from my mouth.

We risk turning on the faucet and cupping our hands to drink. My throat is so dry the water burns slightly on the way down. The second gulp goes down better.

No one speaks until we finish all the food.

When the last cracker is gone, Cole says, “Will your parents come in here in the morning?”

“No,” Tawni says. “Never. I’ve never seen either of them in here.” Her voice is thick with distaste. “They think it’s beneath them. These are the servants’ quarters. They used to live with us, but it became too expensive, so now they just come during the day to clean and cook and maintain the place.”

I’m shocked. Disgusted. The rest of us are barely scraping by and Tawni’s family has servants. Seriously! I want to say something but I hold my tongue, because I know she’s uncomfortable with the set-up, too. It isn’t her fault. Like I said before, you have no control over what situation you’re born into.

Cole changes the subject. “What happened to you guys in the Pen?”

I’d almost forgotten that he only saw the butt end of our escape from our cells. It feels like all three of us have lived through the entire thing together.

I give him a taste of his usual sarcasm. “See, Tawni and I were playing poker with a few of the guards, when it came time to meet you. We thought they’d let us go because, by that point, they owed us a bundle of money. Instead, one of them whipped out an Uzi and started firing away. We ran like bats out of hell, leaping bullets and fighting guards the whole way. It was crazy.” Maybe not all true, but it was crazy.

“Mostly lies,” Cole says in the dark. “But a hint of the truth, the crazy part, right? Oh, and I expect you did get shot at, too.” He’s good, all right, but I’m not about to tell him that.

“Okay, the true story is…”

I tell him the full story, downplaying the incident with me and the guard who stepped in front of me, but totally milking the “barrage of bullets whipping past our heads, tearing our clothes—I think I felt one trim off a lock of hair.” I don’t mention the mysterious aching I felt on the fence.

“Let me see where the guard hit you with the stick,” Cole says when I finish.

I don’t want to. Don’t want the sympathy. Don’t want them to worry about me. I know it’s bad, but probably not as bad as it looks.

He won’t leave me alone until I show him.

Even using only Tawni’s watch light to see, my side looks awful when I raise my tunic. Already my skin is marbled with purple and blue at the top and green splotches at the bottom. The shape doesn’t look quite right, like I’m missing a rib or two.

To my surprise, Cole laughs. If I’m expecting sympathy, I don’t get it. “You’ll live,” he says. And then: “I’ve seen worse from a single punch on the schoolyard.”

I thought I didn’t want sympathy, but then when I don’t get it, it makes me mad. It’s probably just lack of sleep, the pain I’m in, the gamut of emotions I’ve felt this night—or I’m just a head case. Probably that, too.

Tawni is nicer, immediately tearing off strips from one of the bed sheets and wrapping them around my stomach and side to support my battered ribs. I grumble about her pampering, but afterwards I’m glad she does it, because my ribs stop hurting temporarily.

The servant’s bed I sleep on is more comfortable than the one I’d slept on growing up. I practically melt into it. Although I’m too tired to be excited about having escaped the Pen, I do smile in celebration just before I fall asleep.

Chapter Twelve

Tristan

I shudder when a flash of blinding pain blurs my vision. Shaking my head and blinking, I try to regain control of my body. When my vision returns, it’s not a pretty sight.

They’re surrounded with no hope of escape. I don’t know why of all nights they’ve chosen this one to attempt to gain their freedom, but I know if we don’t help them they won’t make it. She won’t make it. For all I know, the guards might shoot first, rather than try to apprehend them. For all I know it might be another policy, like no visitors allowed outside of certain hours. The gunshots we heard earlier certainly point to that conclusion. I can see the new guards on the first day of training. Lesson 1: Always shoot guests attempting to escape.

Not a nice way to treat your so-called guests.

I can see her halfway up, frozen in place, eyeing the guards on the outside of the fence. Even between the tightly woven chain links, she looks fierce and strong. If she was a type of energy, she’d definitely be nuclear.

I’m coiled tighter than a snake ready to strike, my muscles tensed and flexed, my fists balled, my feet naturally assuming a runner’s stance. I start to sprint toward them just as the bomb explodes. It’s louder than a cannon in the quiet night, and I can feel the shockwaves from the force so strongly that they stop me dead in my tracks.

Frozen in place, I’m unsure of what just happened, or what to do. The acrid smell of smoke and dust fills the air. I can’t see the guards on the inside, but presumably they’re taking cover or were injured by the bomb blast. The guards on the outside are still pointing their guns at the prisoners, but they’re pacing, nervous, much less sure of themselves than they were a few seconds ago.

Compared to the second bomb, the first was like getting hit by a feather. The incendiary tears through the hotel above us, maybe through the exact room we’re staying in—whether by coincidence or design—sending shivering tremors through the street below our feet. I lose my footing as a crack widens in the stone beneath me. I roll hard, narrowly avoiding falling into the widening tentacle in the street. Instinctively, I cover my head, curling up in the fetal position. Heavy chunks of stone shower down, battering my defenseless body. Some of the rocks are sharp, having splintered off dangerously, piercing my skin. If one penetrates my eyes I’ll be instantly blinded.

When the rubble shower ends a few minutes later, I sit up quickly, scanning my surroundings. Roc hasn’t fared much better than me, although he’s sitting up, too, rubbing a nasty red bump on his head. His clothes and face are covered in gray dust.

“You okay?” I say.

He coughs and gives me a thumbs-up sign. I turn my attention back to the Pen. The guards on the outside are gone, their guns scattered haphazardly on the ground. The escapees are gone, too.

She is gone.

“Tristan!” Roc shouts behind me.

I turn, and then, seeing him gazing at the hotel above us, follow his line of sight. Several columns of heavy stones are wobbling precariously, on the verge of toppling.

“Go, go, go!” I shout, running hard toward the Pen’s fence line. I hear Roc’s footsteps pounding behind me, and then a dull, machine-gunning clatter as the stones collapse.

I whirl around, saying the quickest prayer of my life for Roc. He’s fine, having escaped the impact zone just in time. With Roc safe, my thoughts go to her. But then I remember someone else: the deskman at our motel.

Without explaining to Roc, I rush back to the building, leaping heavy stone slabs and piles of smaller rubble along the way. The doorframe is mangled, but still holding itself up amidst the pressure of the collapsing floors above it. I slip through, rapidly locating the old man. Despite his seemingly innate ability to sleep anywhere and through anything, he finally met his match when the bomb hit, or perhaps when the roof partially collapsed.

I’m not sure what happened to his desk—perhaps it’s splintered beyond recognition—but it isn’t there anymore. In its place: the old man—and a huge slab of stone that has him pinned to the ground. Finally, his head is up, his wild eyes looking at me, scared and helpless, begging me to save him.

The stone slab is far too big for me. Even with the adrenaline cocktail coursing through my veins, my first effort at lifting it is fruitless. It doesn’t budge, not even a little. The task is like trying to lift the very earth on my shoulders, a feat only accomplished by Atlas—and I’m no god. While my mind races, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Roc pushes me gently aside and slides a thick metal pole beneath the stone. I have no idea where it came from, but I know exactly what he’s doing—making a tool, a lever—and so I locate a good-sized roundish stone that I’m able to roll over. Together we push it under the pole. Overall, I’m the bigger of the two of us, so I push down hard on the end of lever, using my entire body weight to force it to the ground. The stone is massive, and even with the lever, it strains against me, trying to thwart my attempt. Eventually the lever moves down an inch, and then two, gaining speed as I gain leverage. I’m straining so hard that I have to close my eyes for fear they’ll pop out of my skull.

I feel the pole drop suddenly beneath me and hear a loud crack and a thundering crash. Even with my eyes closed, I know what happened. The pole snapped in the center like a twig, releasing the stone. The man was crushed, broken beyond repair. I slowly open my eyes.

Roc is holding the man, who is not crushed, not broken—at least not beyond repair. Evidently I raised the stone a sufficient height for Roc to slide him out safely before the lever snapped. For that I thank God.

Roc is smiling, helping the man to his feet. The guy is clearly injured, so we each flop one of his arms over our shoulders and half-carry him out of the cracking building. As we pass through the doorframe, the rest of the roof collapses, kicking up a cloud of dust around us as we escape.

We’re lucky. The old man is even luckier.

I’ve never felt so unsure of what to do next. I guess because I’ve never been in such an unbelievably confusing situation. We hear booms echoing around the town as more bombs hit, presumably destroying other buildings. There are shouts in the distance, both from the Pen and from other streets. Other people, probably just like us, trying to decide what to do, where to go, figure out what’s going on.

“He needs medical attention,” Roc says, looking at the man.

“I’m fine,” he grunts.

“No…you’re not,” I say. “Where’s the nearest hospital?”

“It’ll have been bombed, too,” he says gruffly.

He has a point. Nowhere feels safe at the moment. But still, out in the open I feel like we’re too exposed, like at any second another bomb might land at our feet. We have to keep moving.

Roc seems to be thinking the same thing. We both start moving, forcing the injured guy to come with us. We turn the corner, but stop immediately when we see the scene in front of us. Smoke, rubble, buildings collapsed and collapsing. People running. We skip that street and head another block down. The next street is quieter, not yet hit by any explosions, perhaps not a target of the attack by…well, by whoever is attacking—I have no idea who.

We travel another half-block without event and then hear a noise as we’re passing an old building on our right. “Psst,” a voice says.

A woman is waving at us from down a set of stairs, from inside a doorway. “Psst,” she says again.

“Yes?” I say, unsure of how to respond to such a strange greeting.

“Do you need help?” she says.

We do need help—desperately need help—so I say, “Please.”

She beckons to us with one hand. We make our way down the steps awkwardly, trying not to bang the man’s already battered legs on the stonework. The woman turns sideways and shepherds us through the door and onto a small landing. Below us steps descend into darkness.

Once we’re all inside, the woman closes the door and says, “You’ll be safe down here.” She moves past us to the stairs, holding a long candle in a small ceramic bowl high above her head. We follow her down, carrying the old man between us. The stairway is wide enough for us to walk three abreast.

At the bottom is another door, which the woman opens. As she enters, she says, “I’ve got three more.”

We poke our heads through the doorway, into a small cellar. It’s crowded. Not including us and the woman, there are eight others. Four candles identical to the one carried by the woman are positioned in each corner of the space, providing spheres of light that overlap in the center.

“Make yourselves at home,” the woman says, before exiting back the way we came and closing the door behind her. We gingerly lower the old man to the floor, next to a couple of kids who are staring at us with wide eyes. They can’t be more than six years old.

“Thank you,” the man says, his voice cracking. His demeanor has changed slightly, as if he’s been softened by our persistent willingness to go out of our way to help him. I wonder what made him so hard in the first place. Perhaps it was just the cruelties of life—the faltering economy, old age, living in a cave—but I sense it was something more specific. He wears a wedding band but hasn’t once mentioned his wife, out of concern or interest or anything. I guess that he’s lost her already.

Roc sits down next to the man and I follow suit. My back to the rock wall, I take in my surroundings. The place is only about fifteen by fifteen feet. It reminds me of a small wine cellar—perhaps that’s what it is, or used to be. No wine adorns its walls anymore. I’d be surprised if anyone can afford wine in this subchapter these days. Regardless of what it used to be, or could’ve been, it will serve well as a bomb shelter now, deep under the ground-level rock surface.

In addition to the two kids, there are three women and three men. Two of them hold hands and are younger, sitting next to the kids, probably their parents. The young wife looks fearful, maybe not for her own life but surely for her children’s; her eyes dart about nervously, always returning to her young ones. The other four are older, gray around the edges, with serious faces that would fit in perfectly at a funeral. Well, at least three of them look that way. The fourth—a short, frail man with an impressive mop of gray hair—is wearing the biggest grin you could imagine. I wonder if my mother’s threat from my childhood—that if you make a face for too long it will get stuck like that—has cursed this man. Perhaps in the throes of an extremely merry moment, his face was frozen in the biggest smile of his life.

“Crazy weather we’re having out there,” he says, somehow managing to keep his smile unchanged while he speaks. He’s looking right at me so I feel obliged to answer.

“I think we’re under attack, sir,” I say, assuming his comment is made from senility, rather than lighthearted humor.

“Silly child, I know that, just trying to get a little laughter going in this damn dismal place.”

I don’t particularly like him referring to me as a child, but I’m also not going to start a fight with a crazy, big-smiled old man, not after our experience in the pizzeria. Instead I say, “Oh. Ha ha.” My laugh comes out even faker than it is. And it’s pretty fake.

“Geez, it’s like trying to get a nun to laugh in a bar in here,” the guy says, still smiling. “How’d you end up lugging around ol’ Frankie here?”

The hotel deskman suddenly has a name.

“Don’t call me that, Chet. It’s Frank—I’ve told you a million times,” Frankie says.

“We were staying at his hotel,” Roc offers.

“Hotel? Ha! That dump’s more like a dormitory.”

Frankie glares at him, burning a hole through him with his eyes.

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” I say, trying to get on Frankie’s good side. Instead, he just shifts his glare to me. I guess the whole saving his life thing has worn off.

“So you’re travelers then? What part of the Moon Realm are ya from?” the funny guy asks.

Probably remembering how well I’d handled a similar question in the pizzeria, Roc answers this time. “Subchapter six,” he says. “We’re just here for the night. So many of your people have come to work in our subchapter that jobs are scarce, so we thought we’d have a look around at what you have to offer.”

I hold my breath, hoping he’ll buy the lie.

“Ha!” the man exclaims, so loudly he makes me jump slightly. “You’re Sun Dwellers if I’m an eternal optimist.” I freeze, waiting for the trouble to start. As if he senses my discomfort, he adds, “Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with us. We won’t give you any trouble. Name’s Chip, ol’ Frankie was just messin’ with me earlier when he called me Chet. He’s always purposely gettin’ my name wrong, callin’ me all kinds of things like Chaz, Chris, and a whole lot of other names I can’t repeat in public. What did your mothers call you, anyway?”

“I’m Tristan,” I blurt out. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Roc glances nervously at me. He probably thinks I’ve lost my mind.

“I’m Roc,” he adds quickly.

“Tristy and Rocky…” the man says, moving his tongue in a circle as if he is rolling the names around in his mouth to see how they taste. “They’re good names, boys.”

I should just let it go. But I don’t. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If anything, my mother should have named me Damn Fool. “It’s not Tristy, it’s Tristan,” I say sternly. “And we’re not boys.”

The man chuckles, high and mirthfully. “You’ve been hangin’ out with ol’ buzzkill over here for too long,” Chip says, motioning to Frankie. “But as you wish, Tristan the Man.”

“You can still call me Rocky,” Roc offers unhelpfully.

I think we’re out of the woods—clumsily dodging a bullet. Wrong again.

“Heyyy, wait a minute,” Chip says. I know exactly what the perplexed tone in his voice means. He has another question, probably a lot more questions. Because he’s probably figured something out. “You say your name’s Tristan, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, but you can call me Tristy if you really want to,” I say, backtracking, hoping it will help, even though I know it won’t.

“You’ve got a very famous name, young man,” he says. “What’s your last name?”

I go blank. Not a single real Sun Dweller last name pops into my head. All I can think of is: “Goop…and…no…I…mean…Troop.”

“Tristan Goopandnoimeantroop? What kind of name is that?” Chip says, laughing again.

“Sorry, I’m just a little lightheaded from all the smoke out on the street,” I say, shaking my head and trying to appear confused—not that it’s that hard for me. “My last name is spelled T-R-O-O-P-E, and is pronounced True-Pay. It’s French.” I’m feeling clever all of a sudden.

“Tristan Troop-ay, huh? Are you lyin’ to me again, young man?”

I have the perfect comeback for that. “No,” I say, not even convincing myself.

I get the feeling he may have worked it out already, and is just enjoying himself, watching me flounder in my scummy old pond of lies. I cringe, waiting for him to seal the deal.

“So you’re not Tristan Nailin, the son of President Nailin, the boy wonder who will one day become the most powerful man in the Tri-Realms? You’re not that Tristan?” Chip asks, his smile growing even wider—impossibly wide—spreading from ear to ear.

“I think you have me confused with—”

“Ha! We’ve got a real treat tonight, everyone. Tristan Nailin himself, in the flesh! Well, bless my lucky stars!”

My instinct—especially after our encounter in the pizza shop—is to be ready to fight, but the man’s tone sounds light, friendly even. Either he’s a very good actor or he has nothing against me.

With unexpected swiftness, his tone changes. “Your father is a real piece of work, son,” he says in a low voice.

“And me?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“Eh, I think you’re all right, kid.” I’m so overjoyed by the fact that he doesn’t harbor any ill feelings toward me that I manage to ignore him calling me kid again. He continues: “I have a good sense about people, ya know? Just like I could tell you were lyin’ earlier, I can tell you have a good heart. I think maybe you could be the one to make some positive change when you become president.”

“I’ll never be president,” I say honestly.

“For heaven’s sake, why not?”

I scan the room. The others in the cellar are listening to the exchange in silence. Their dark eyes feel like those of silent executioners. I hope it’s just my imagination.

I know I should stop the conversation now—for God’s sake, shut your big, fat mouth!—but I tell them anyway. “I’ve run away. We’ve run away.” I look at my interlocked fingers in my lap. “I don’t want anything to do with my father or the Sun Realm.” A whirl of energy spins through my stomach as I realize: That’s the first time I’ve said that and truly meant every word.

The guy with the smile winks at me. “You see? I told you I knew you were one of the good guys.”

I change the subject, cutting my losses. “So who do you think is behind the attack?” I ask. Despite his age, the guy does seem perceptive, and I really think he might have some valuable insights. Instead, Roc jumps in.

“I think your love for that girl is so strong that it causes explosions,” he says playfully.

“Roc, no,” I say, but it’s too late. The talker seems to enjoy clamping his mind around whatever topic is on the table.

“What girl?” he says, leaning forward.

I warn Roc off with my eyes. “Just a girl,” I say. “But I don’t even know her.”

“A girlfriend?” he guesses, ignoring my rebuttal.

“No, nothing like that. Just a girl,” I say, hoping that will end the conversation. But Roc isn’t ready to let it go. Good friend.

“Yeah, Tristy and his girlfriend just had their first date,” Roc says, smiling brightly. “They almost even spoke to each other this time.” I want to slug him, but I don’t think a spat of violence will win me any points with the Moon Dwellers.

“A Moon Dweller?” Chip asks, a gleam in his eyes.

I wait for Roc—who’s suddenly feeling talkative—to answer, but instead he puts his palm out to indicate it’s my turn. I wish there was a table I could kick him under.

“Yes, she’s a Moon Dweller,” I say. “I just need to ask her a few questions.”

“Well, why aren’t you with her? ’Specially at a time like this.”

It’s a good question. Now more than ever I want to find her, to figure out why every time I see her I feel ready to pass out. I don’t think the guards recaptured her, but I can’t be sure, as I was a bit busy dodging flaming rubble at the time.

“I don’t know where she is,” I say, dropping my head.

“I might be able to help with that,” Chip says. “I’m somewhat of an amateur private investigator. Where’d you last see her?”

I know I’m approaching a dangerous level of truth, but I’ve told them so much already—hell, they know I’m Tristan, the Tristan—so I decide to just go for it. I need help, and if they can provide it, then I have to accept the risks. “Okay, look. Here’s the thing…” I tell them nearly everything. The sharp pain I felt the first time I saw her; our escape from the Sun Realm; how she was trying to escape from the Pen when the bombs starting blowing up all around us; and, finally, how she was gone when the smoke cleared, like a magician performing a famous disappearing act.

When I finish, I sit back and wait for a response. I’m not sure what to expect.

Everyone starts talking at once, asking questions, making comments. The young mother exclaims, “That’s so romantic!” while her husband says definitively, “You’ve got to go after her.” The older couple, who’ve previously been silent, speak in succession: “I bet they went north,” one says, while the other says, “No, south, she must’ve gone south!” Even the kids get involved. The little girl says, “Tristan, do you think you’re meant to find her?” The boy is more interested in the action than the romance. “Were you scared when the guards pointed their guns at her?” he asks.

When the chatter dies down somewhat, I hear a voice from my right, from the door, which is now slightly ajar. The woman who invited us in is standing there—I didn’t even notice her arrival and have no idea how much she’s heard. “She’ll be laying low for a few days with her friends, until things die down. You might only have one chance to find her, because as soon as she makes a move, she’ll run as fast and as far as she can.” The woman sounds wise beyond her years, like she’s experienced everything that life has to offer. “What do you reckon, Chip? She’ll head for the northeastern suburbs most likely; at least at first, don’t you think?”

I realize that Chip is the only one who hasn’t yet reacted to my story, and I turn to him, hoping he’ll have a revelation, something that will give me some kind of direction.

“Yeah, northeastern suburbs because they extend the furthest from the commercial district, where most of the bombs were hittin’. She won’t stay in one place long, though, and eventually she’ll have to find a way out of the subchapter. Can’t use conventional means, as she don’t have travel approval, unless she can find a forger in a hurry, although I don’t know how she could pay for it. I reckon she’ll try one of the mining tunnels on the subchapter border, up near where she’s probably already hiding.”

The woman adds, “You’ll also want to find out more stuff about who she’s with, the other two escaped prisoners, because it might change what they do.”

I scan the room, looking each person in the eyes, and waiting for any more advice. When silence ensues, I say, “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

Somehow I know they’ll keep my secrets. I don’t know why they would. I guess maybe they’re just good people. Real good people. The kind you call friend; the kind you stand up for; the kind you fight for. I don’t know what’s happening above me, but I vow in my heart to help these people, somehow, some way, some day. To do whatever it takes to give them a better life.

We leave, Roc and I. Explosions continue to rock the night around us, but they’re less intense and less frequent. The streets are empty, everyone having taken shelter.

We run back to the Pen, where the fence is still destroyed, and the courtyard still strewn with guards’ bodies. No one is around, probably hunkering down until the bombing ends. We stop at the point along the fence line where I last saw the girl. Consulting the map, we identify the best route to take out of the city.

“This way,” Roc says, taking the lead as navigator.

I follow him, hoping and praying that we’re doing the right thing.

Chapter Thirteen

Adele

Sometimes I wonder whether people are inherently good or inherently bad. I’d like to think good, or even neutral, like we can all make the choice for ourselves.

After a quiet morning in the servants’ quarters at Tawni’s parents’ house, we move inside once we’re sure it’s safe. Although we don’t plan to linger much longer, we’re careful to cover our tracks so no one knows we’ve been here. The longer it takes them to find our trail, the colder it will become and the safer we’ll be.

The whole morning I think about Elsey. She’ll be our first rescue, because she’s closest and I know exactly where she is. It’s all I can do to stop myself from running off alone to save her. I need to be patient. One thing at a time.

Tawni’s house is even more impressive than I’d imagined based on my glimpse in the dark. Standing three stories tall, it has more than a dozen rooms. The floors are marble and swirled with illustrious blue and green patterns. Winding staircases rise majestically in at least three places, providing access to the upper floors. The entire place is spotless, a testament to the quality of the servants that work here.

We’ve gotten lucky; it’s one of the servants’ two days off. And, as Tawni expected, no one from the Pen has shown up yet.

We turn on the telly, hoping to find out what’s happening in subchapter 14. There are two major news stories being run over and over again. The headline story is about the bombing. We were all wrong about the culprits. I’m shocked, to be honest.

While we’ve all been hating the Sun Realm—for its unfair policies and outrageous taxes—the Star Realm has been hating us. The whole time I’ve been thinking the Star Dwellers are like a younger sibling to us, different but on the same side—but they’ve taken a different approach. The video from Vice President Meriweather, the leader of the Star Realm, explains things.

He blames us for the oppression by the Sun Realm, says we let them go too far, that we set a precedent that forces the Star Realm to comply with unfair contractual terms. He says our leaders are spineless, gutless—which I tend to agree with—and that until we remove them from power and agree to join their rebellion, they’ll continue to bomb the living sheetrock out of us. Earlier, I assumed subchapter 14 was the first target, and it was, but it was only one of many first targets. Overnight a dozen subchapters were bombed, although none as heavily as ours.

Tawni and Cole are as shocked as I am. “If we kill each other, then where will we be?” Cole says, exasperated. He refuses to sit down while watching the broadcast, and now he’s pacing, throwing his hands around as he rants.

“It will only make the Sun Realm more powerful,” Tawni agrees.

“But the Star Dwellers are right, in a way,” I say. When I see the looks on my friends’ faces, I explain, “I don’t mean in bombing us—not that. Just about our leaders. They’re just puppets for President Nailin, right? He dictates the terms, and they agree to them in exchange for a bit of money on the side.”

“Yeah, true,” Cole says, “but why not just come and talk to us about it, rather than chucking bombs around?”

“Maybe they did,” I say. “Maybe we ignored them.”

I think Cole might blow up, lose his temper again—he’s certainly in one of those moods—but he doesn’t. He chews on the side of his mouth like he’s chewing on my words, trying to understand them, and then says, “If that’s true then they should be removed from power. As far as I’m concerned, there should be a rebellion, but not against us, against the Sun Dwellers, by both us and the Star Dwellers.”

“But so many people will die,” Tawni says.

“People are dying now!” Cole shouts. He lowers his voice, looking around as if the walls might have ears. “Just more slowly. The life is sucked out of us day by day, as the Sun Dwellers take more and more from us. One day they’ll take our souls.”

He has a point, but I’m more interested in something else. “Where the hell did the Star Dwellers get bombs from? They have no money, no resources.”

Cole raises his eyebrows. “Where indeed,” he says.

“Maybe they’ve been planning this for a long time,” Tawni says. “Maybe they’ve been saving for this.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But there were a helluva lot of bombs going off in a helluva lot of subchapters. That would require years of saving to buy or build that many bombs.”

“Not if they had support by a traitor in the Sun Realm,” Cole says.

Before I have a chance to respond, the second breaking news story comes on, so we turn our attention back to the telebox.

The next story is all about us, referred to as “the escaped guests from the Pen,” who are deemed to be “armed and dangerous.” Our photos and names are stuck to the bottom of the screen while they show footage of the destroyed fence, the downed guards, and the dropped guns. Without explicitly saying it, they imply that we’re responsible for the whole mess, rather than admitting it was the Star Dweller bombs that caused the destruction.

Next they give information on who to call if we’re spotted. Security checkpoints are being added to all major subchapter borders, and roadblocks are in place to search vehicles that may be hiding us. The penalty for harboring “the fugitives”—meaning us—is a life sentence in the Max.

The lead investigator, which basically means hunter of humans, is speaking live from the Sun Realm, and will be traveling to subchapter 14 to personally begin the search. His name is Rivet, and his face is what sparks my thoughts about the inherent nature of the human race.

I don’t know where they found this guy, or what hole he’d been hiding in, but he’s the epitome of evil. His face is cold and hard, with black eyes that are so close together they appear beady, like a snake’s. Fierce black eyebrows rim them in a perpetual frown. His mouth is the snarl of an angry dog. A three-inch scar cuts one of his cheeks in half. He has a low-cut Mohawk and multiple piercings in each ear, which fits in perfectly with the dozens of tattoos that litter his muscular frame. Everything about him screams intimidation.

His words are cold, like icicles, and I almost feel like he can see us through the screen, directing his threats right at us. He keeps his comments brief: “I cannot reiterate this enough: We must apprehend the fugitives as quickly as possible. They’re armed and extremely dangerous. Their sentences range from murder to treason, and they deserve to be locked away for the rest of their miserable lives. This office pledges to hunt them down and bring them to justice, to be tried for their new crimes under the law. Thank you for your time.” Cameras flash and reporters yell out questions, but Rivet is gone, having disappeared back inside some government building.

“Murder?” I say. “I was in for treason, but they didn’t even mention your crimes. We didn’t kill anyone, they can’t say that!” I’m angry and flustered. I knew they wouldn’t be fair to us—have never been fair to us—but I don’t want people to think I’m a murderer.

“There’s something I should tell you,” Cole says, finally sitting down on the floor.

I glance at him, but then back to the telly as the next segment begins. It’s a review of each of us—our pasts, our crimes, our sentences, that kind of thing. They start with Tawni and brush past her pretty quickly, saying Cole and I are bad influences on her and that her sentence is much lighter—for the minor charge of illegal interstate traveling.

“My parents are hard at work doing damage control again,” Tawni says sullenly, as if she would prefer to be depicted as a hardened criminal.

They move onto me next, turning my parents’ slight rebelliousness into an act of high treason, framing it like we’re a family of thieves and spies, not satisfied until we destroy everything from the Star Realm to the Sun Realm. They go into a lot of detail about how it makes sense that I’d try to escape, given my life sentence. By the time they’re done with me, I even feel slightly ashamed of myself, although I’ve done nothing wrong.

The broadcast ends with Cole, touting him as the ringleader of our little gang, noting that he is “as cunning as he is dangerous.” I grin at him when they say that, expecting him to take it as a compliment, but he looks away, his lips a straight line, unreadable.

I wait for them to tell Cole’s story about the bakery, his attempted theft of six loaves of bread, his apprehension and short juvie sentence.

I find out the truth.

There was no bakery, no bread, no mild sentence. Cole duped me. The way his eyes sparkled when he told the story, his attention to detail, his effortless laugh: it all made me believe without a doubt that he was telling the truth. The true story paints a much grimmer tale.

According to the reporter, Cole attacked an Enforcer without provocation. The Enforcer was conducting a routine search of Cole’s neighborhood, looking for anything suspicious—they do that from time to time. They don’t need search warrants; just a badge and a uniform authorizes them to go wherever they want, whenever they want. Cole jumped the guy and killed him, broke his neck cleanly. They say it was instant death and that Cole is a murderer. Cole was sentenced to life in prison, just like me.

The segment ends and Tawni clicks off the telebox.

I stare into space in silence. I’m upset that Cole didn’t tell me the truth, but even more upset with the information in the broadcast. Although I haven’t known Cole for long, I know enough about him to realize that he wouldn’t kill someone without a damn good reason. I want to ask, want to know the real story, but also know that Cole has to want to tell me. I don’t want to force something out of him that he prefers to remain buried. So I just wait. A few minutes go by in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Cole still won’t make eye contact with me—his face turned away—although I look at him a few times.

Tawni’s the first to speak. “Cole, she’s one of us. She should know.”

Cole finally turns his head, and I see what he’s been doing in silence. Crying. His cheeks are slick with moisture and his eyelashes beaded with tears. It scares the hell out of me. In the short time I’ve known Cole, I’ve found there to be a strength in him that’s beyond anything I’ve seen in someone before. It makes me want to be his friend, to depend on him, to count on him. But now he looks broken, destroyed, devastated. The pain on his face is utterly complete, cracking his cheeks with jagged lines.

He starts slowly, building momentum as he unloads his pain. “There were three of them,” he says, “but I thought there was only one.”

“Enforcers?” I ask.

He nods. “When I came home from school he was in the house. My younger sister, Liza, had stayed home sick. My parents were both out, working, like always.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. Before he starts again, a fresh stream of tears dribbles from each eye.

“He was on top of her,” he continues, “trying to take everything from her. God, Adele, she was only eleven.” I feel my own batch of tears well up and I fiercely blink them back. If Cole can’t be strong, I need to be strong for him.

“I was like a raging bull, full of anger, and I felt stronger than ten bulls. I was on him before he even knew I was there. Liza’s tunic was half-ripped and he was trying to pull it off of her. She was incredible, Adele, not giving an inch, kicking and clawing and fighting to the bitter end. Eventually he would’ve subdued her, but not before taking a bit of a beating. My sister was strong, like me.” Although his face remains mournful, I detect a hint of pride in his voice. But as much as I want to, I can’t ignore his use of the word was. It’s there in the back of my mind, tormenting me.

“I pulled him off of her with two hands, threw him against the wall. He wasn’t prepared for a fight. His hands and voice were pleading, begging for me to let him go. I wonder if I should’ve.”

“No, Cole,” Tawni says. “If you’d let him go he would’ve just made up a story about you attacking him and the end result would’ve been the same.”

Cole hangs his head and bobs it up and down, like he wants to believe her but knows he never will. He says, “I was in a rage, not to be reasoned with—you know my temper. I grabbed him and slung him into the wall headfirst. I spun him around, cradled his head, and wrenched it hard to the side. I didn’t even know how to do it properly, but I guess brute strength was enough. I can still hear the bones in his neck cracking. I know I should be sickened by it, but I’m not; I relish the memory.”

I relish that part of his memory, too. The Enforcer was pure evil, inherently bad for sure. If anyone was deserving of death, it was him. I want Cole to stop his story there, but I know he can’t.

“The other two Enforcers were upstairs when it happened,” he says. “They were looting our few measly possessions of value. My mother’s gold wedding band. My father’s steel-toed boots. Taking our stuff while their buddy took my sister.” Cole’s face remains tearstained, but there are no new flows. His eyes are strong again, flashing anger. I would’ve pitied any Enforcer who walked into the room at that moment.

“I guess they heard the commotion, because they came down quietly, their guns out and ready to shoot. But I wasn’t ready to fight anymore. I was holding Liza, helping her cover herself with a blanket. She was bawling, kissing my face, begging me to take her far away from that place. Our home, the place where we’d had so many happy memories, grown up together, had become dirty to her, a prison of filthy nightmares. She would’ve cast it off forever, Adele.”

I’m crying. I don’t know when I started, but once the taps are turned on I can’t seem to stop them. I feel ashamed, like I’ve let my friend down in his moment of need. But he doesn’t seem to notice, like crying is the natural thing for me to do.

“They pointed their damn guns at us, screamed for us to ‘Stand up! Stand up!’” He wipes his face with his sleeve. “One of them checked the other Enforcer, realized he was dead. They separated us, moved us apart, kept screaming at us. I didn’t understand what was happening until they shot her, my Liza, oh, my poor sweet Liza!” Cole’s head is tucked in his hands, his entire body shaking with sobs. I’m bawling. Tawni’s crying, too, but more constrained. She moves to Cole’s side and rubs a hand on his back.

I think the story is over, but a few minutes later Cole looks up, dripping tears from his chin. “They waited for my parents to get home. I was in shock, sitting there numbly, waiting to wake up from the horrible nightmare. I almost charged them, daring them to shoot me—preferring if they would—but I didn’t because I knew I had to explain to my parents why their little girl was dead on the floor. They hadn’t even bothered to cover her body with the blanket.”

The only thing I can do for Cole now is to listen, although God knows I don’t want to—don’t want to know the truth—not anymore. Desperately want to believe the comedic story about him juggling the loaves of bread.

“My parents walked through the door like they always did, holding hands, laughing, as happy as anyone in the Moon Realm ever was in those days. I screamed out, tried to tell them everything in a single breath, but I was denied even that. They shot them before they’d even registered what was happening.” No, no, no, no, no! I can’t take any more of the story. I bury my head in my shoulder, sob uncontrollably, like he’s telling me the tale of my own parents’ deaths.

In a strange reversal of roles, he waits patiently for me to get control of my emotions. When I force my head back up, he continues. “I fought like a wild animal, trying to force them to kill me, too. I really thought they would, especially when I started throwing anything I could get my hands on at them. But no. They ran around, dodging the things and laughing, mocking me, enjoying themselves.”

“Cole, I’m…I’m…” I can’t get the right words out—there are no right words.

“I know,” Cole says. “So now maybe you can see why I just can’t trust that Tristan is good, not when he comes from up there.” He motions to the ceiling, like he’s pointing to the heavens.

“I thought…I thought you were jealous or something,” I say, right away wishing I hadn’t.

Thankfully, Cole laughs it off. “Jealous? I mean, you’re not a bad-looking girl, Adele, very pretty actually, but I’m not really into…how do I put this delicately…you.”

Now I laugh, too; it sounds hollow and foreign to me, like it’s something I haven’t experienced in a long time. “Sorry, I realize it was stupid now,” I say.

He waves me off. “So that’s my story. I’m the murderer in the group, I suppose.” His eyes are steely again, but I can still feel a weakness behind them, a vulnerability. I’ve only just met him, but he already feels like a lifelong friend, like I’ve known him forever. Instinctively, I move over and hug him, squeezing so tightly that if he wasn’t as thick as a bear he might pop. It feels so good to be hugged by someone again, even under such awful circumstances. Earlier, I’d gotten a taste of it when Tawni held me close after my fight with the gang leader, and now I’m suddenly addicted to human contact, like I need it to survive. I don’t want to let go, but after a few seconds I do, not wanting to make things awkward between us, or to give him the wrong impression.

He’s smiling. I feel we’ve made a major breakthrough in our relationship, which has seemed somewhat strained at times. Tawni’s smiling, too. She already feels like my sister, after all we’ve been through together in such a short time.

My real sister’s face pops into my mind once more. “It’s time to rescue Elsey,” I say.

“Where did you say she is?” Tawni asks.

“She’s in an orphanage not far from here. It’s just across the border into the slums.”

“We should be leaving soon anyway,” she says. “It’s not safe to linger here.”

“I thought you said they wouldn’t look for us here,” I say, frowning.

“Of course they will,” Tawni says, a twinkle in her eyes. “Just not right away.”

Before leaving, we make sure that everything is put back to how we found it. We “borrow” a couple of old packs that Tawni says her parents will never miss, and fill them with nonperishable food from the storeroom. Unlike most residents of subchapter 14, Tawni’s family has enough supplies to last them for months, if not years. We only take items that are available in plenty, to ensure no one will notice they’re missing. Although we expect to be able to find plenty of water along the way, we fill a couple of jugs from the servants’ quarters with fresh water from the well. Then we nab a few waterproof flashlights before tying our packs shut.

Lastly, Cole and I raid Tawni’s parents’ closets for things to wear. Tawni points out the items that her mom and dad never wear, so they’ll be less likely to realize they’re gone. We stuff our gray prisoner uniforms under a mattress in the shed. Tawni grabs a few old tunics from her own closet and we head out the back door.

Daylight is more dangerous for us. We don’t necessarily expect that if someone spots us that they’ll call the hotline and report us to Rivet, but we also can’t count on silence amongst our people—Tawni’s parents proved that.

The one thing we have going for us is that even during the daytime, so little electricity is provided to our subchapter that the overhead lights don’t provide enough light for someone to recognize us unless they’re practically right next to us.

Still, we stick to the shadows, pausing to look all around before moving across open spaces. Block by block we make our way out of Tawni’s neighborhood. When the houses change from solid stone to crumbling bricks, we know we’ve reached the slums. I think we all feel safer now.

The slums are exactly as you’d expect. All the houses, if you can call them that (they’re more like tiny sheds), are in major disrepair. Kids run barefoot in the streets, playing knights and barbarians with rocks and cardboard swords. Dead, staring faces sit at windows, as if waiting for someone to come save them. No one is coming. Except us, and we aren’t there to save them.

Unfortunately, the orphanage is in the dead center of the slums. Because there’s so much more activity in the slums than in most neighborhoods—none of the people seem to work and none of the kids seem to go to school—we’re especially careful. Despite only covering about ten blocks, it takes us nearly two hours to reach the orphanage. I’m ready to scream when we finally arrive.

The orphanage is probably the best-maintained structure in the slums, but it still isn’t fit to live in. Certainly not for children. I feel my hands squeeze into fists so tight that my knuckles start to ache. Things were bad for me, but they might be worse for Elsey.

The dilapidated door hangs precariously by a single hinge, unable to fully close. At least half the windows are broken, either by old age or a few well-aimed rocks from the neighborhood monsters. There are holes in the roof and cracks in the steps.

We can’t see any activity through the windows in the front. The orphanage is ringed by a crumbling stone wall, high enough to block our view of the rear yard.

When it appears the coast is clear, we take turns climbing the wall while the others cover us—not with guns but with eyes, ready to whisper a warning if someone is coming. We all make it into the side yard safely. We creep toward the back.

As we approach the corner of the building, we can hear voices. Children laughing, children shouting, nursery rhymes: that sort of thing.

I’m leading and am about to peek around the corner when I feel something whiz past my head. I duck and throw myself flat on the ground, suddenly believing that we’ve been discovered and that someone is shooting at us.

Cole chuckles, somewhat loudly. A cloth ball rolls away from us into the side alley—the cause of the whizzing. Just as I regain my feet, a young girl, no more than seven, rounds the corner, nearly colliding with me. She stops like she hit a wall, and prepares to scream, opening her mouth wide and leaning her head back.

Cole grabs her, covering her mouth with his big hand just in time. Her muffled scream sounds no louder than the distant echolocation squeal made by a hunting bat. She starts kicking, so I run to her and start talking in a low, soothing voice, trying to comfort her.

“It’s okay, little one. We’re not going to hurt you,” I promise her. “We’re just looking for someone—my sister.” She still looks scared, her eyes wide and her breathing strained and ragged through her nose, but she’s calmer, no longer struggling so much. “Do you promise not to scream or run away if my friend lets you go?” I ask.

She thinks about it for a minute and then nods slowly. I hope she isn’t lying.

“Let her go, Cole,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow, but complies, releasing the girl and stepping back. She doesn’t run, doesn’t scream, just stands there staring at us. Then she says, “They’re going to wonder where I’ve gone,” she says in a tiny voice, more fit for a butterfly princess than a little girl.

“Okay,” I say. “You can go back. But first, do you know a girl named Elsey?”

The girl’s eyes light up at my sister’s name, and I know we’ve gotten lucky.

“Oh, yes!” she says, twirling her brown curls with one of her fingers. “Elsey and I are the bestest of friends. She’s older than me, but she says I’m old for my age anyways.”

It sounds like something Elsey would say. She’s always liked playing with younger kids, making them feel grown up, special. I used to think she might become a schoolteacher. But that was before my parents were abducted.

“Can you tell her Adele is here to see her?” I say. “And help her find an excuse to come around this corner?”

The girl is even more excited now, flapping her arms as if she’s ready to fly off to find my sister. “You’re her sister! You’re her sister!” she exclaims.

“Yes, now please go tell her.”

The girl starts to race off, but then stops, whirling around to retrieve the ball before scampering back behind the orphanage. Smart girl.

We wait against the wall, expecting an Enforcer to appear at any second, having been ratted on by the sweet little clever girl.

Instead, like a mirage, my sister appears, running so fast her legs are a blur, her jet-black hair swishing around behind her. My day is a rollercoaster of emotions. The demon drop of Cole’s story has given way to a higher high, practically bursting through the cavern roof. My heart is literally soaring, rising out of my body and smiling upon me from above.

Elsey slams into me with such force that she nearly topples me over. Although we’ve only been apart for six months, a mere blip in our lives, it feels like we haven’t seen each other in years. She seems to have grown, both physically and in maturity. Only ten, her pale face looks wizened, young but worn.

“Oh Elsey,” I sigh, holding her tight against my chest, her legs wrapped around my hips. She’s still a child, above all. Forced to endure far more than a child should have to endure. Far more than anyone should.

I want to hold onto her forever, but time is short.

“Let me have a look at you,” I say, gently lowering her to the stone slab alley. My breath catches as I gaze on her face. She’s breathtaking, has always been, with doll-like features that are so perfect they must have been carved by a master sculptor. She’s always been more beautiful than me, but I don’t mind, for she is a pure spirit. I can tell by the way her jaw sticks out now that six months in this place has hardened her, but in her violet eyes I can see the same pure energy she’s always had.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Elsey,” I say, tearing up slightly.

“I’ve missed you so much, Adele,” Elsey says earnestly. “I couldn’t believe it when Ranna said you were here. I ran as fast as I could.” She scrunches up her face, like she’s making a wish. “Are you here to get me out?” she says hopefully.

I nod. “Yeah, but we’re not exactly allowed, so we’re going to have to do it sneakily.”

“I knew you’d come!” Elsey exclaims. “Big John kept telling me I was crazy, that you were stuck in the Pen forever, but I always said he was wrong, even when he called me names. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Of course, but there’ll be time to talk about all that later. We’ve got to go.”

“But I’ve got to say bye to Ranna!”

“There’s not time, El, I’m sor—”

I’m cut off when Ranna tears around the corner, hissing, “Miss Death is coming!”

Elsey seems to understand the urgency of the situation. With a conviction that has been her trademark for all ten years of her short life, she hugs Ranna, pulling her friend’s head into her heart. “I’ll never forget you, Ranna,” she says. “Our hearts are one.” If you don’t know Elsey you’d think she was crazy. But that’s just Elsey. Everything is dramatic, although in this case it’s probably warranted.

“I’ll never forget you either,” Ranna parrots, like a miniature version of El.

I grab El’s hand and we run back down the alley. Tawni is already over the wall and Cole is waiting to give Elsey a boost. We follow closely, hearing a cry from behind just as we slip over to the other side. Miss Doom, or Death, or whatever, I think.

“Quick, I know a shortcut,” Elsey says, running in the opposite direction we’re planning on going, simply assuming that we’ll follow her. We do.

And it’s a good thing, because at that moment I hear a yell from far back, out on the street where we’d been heading. I half-turn, curious as to who is pursuing us.

I’d recognize that demented face anywhere: Rivet.

Chapter Fourteen

Tristan

Roc and I have been walking for over an hour, making our way to a spot on the map. We hope it will give us a shot at finding her.

It’s the middle of the night. We’re tired. Neither of us speaks as we force ourselves to put one foot in front of the other, time and time again, trudging onwards.

Through the first part of the suburbs, people are out of their houses, wearing sleeping tunics or just undergarments, watching the fireworks in the distance, speaking in hushed voices. They’re so transfixed by the scene before them that they barely pay us any attention. We’re just a couple of wandering nomads.

After a while we see fewer and fewer people, as the explosions dull to a distant rumble, not loud enough to wake the sleeping. We march on, passing through a ritzy neighborhood—at least by Moon Dweller standards—with bigger houses and well-kept streets. Whoever lives in this neighborhood has done something to please my father, that’s for sure.

We transition into a lonely slum, littered with garbage in the streets and cracked sidewalks. It’s a bit scary, to be honest. Even when I visit the Star Realm, I stay in the finest they have to offer, not really witnessing the true living conditions. Without speaking, Roc and I pick up the pace, moving swiftly through the downtrodden neighborhood.

We pass a lonely orphanage, named The Forgotten Kids. True, but a bit pessimistic, especially for the kids. It’s weird to think how different my own childhood was. In a way, I was forgotten, too. Growing up, I was always the last of my father’s priorities. He always had something very important to attend to. I guess no matter what conditions you live in, you always have complaints—your bar is just set at a different height.

We make it through the slums without event. The map shows at least twenty miles of sparsely populated terrain. Within it is a network of caves called the Lonely Caverns. But we’re far too tired to attempt it tonight. We find a couple of large boulders and seek shelter behind them, rolling out our bedrolls and hoping for sleep.

I doze fitfully, having alternating nightmares of explosions rocking the night and the girl’s sad face. Both send shards of glass through my back and head. Even my dreams have become a series of pain and mystery.

I awake to find Roc sitting up, studying the map.

“Morning,” he says, noticing my movement in his peripheral vision.

I notice that he doesn’t add good to the beginning of his greeting. I guess compared to our normal breakfast routine—Roc bringing me fine meats and fruits in bed, and then me sharing it with him—there isn’t much good about this morning. All we have to eat are dried fruits and nuts, and a few blocks of thick wafers, which we managed to steal from the army storehouse before we left. And the change from our soft palace beds—ugh. Splinters of pain shoot through my back, the consequence of the dozens of sharp rocks beneath my bedroll. I shrug it off and focus on the positive.

“Good morning,” I reply cheerfully. For, despite our modest breakfast and sleeping situation, I’m ecstatic. In fact, I’ve never been happier. For the first time in my life I’ve woken up without the weight of my father on my shoulders. And I’m doing something I want to do. I know it’s selfish, but my whole life I’ve been doing whatever my father asks of me, and I desperately need a chance to live my own life. Even if it’s only to find out about…

“A girl?” Roc says into his map.

My head snaps up from our pack, where I’m rummaging through for food. How does he do that? I think. How does he always seem to know exactly what I’m thinking? “Huh?” I say, trying to hide my amazement.

“Are we seriously risking our lives all for a girl? One who you’ve never met?”

Roc’s tone sounds angry. “I’m sorry, Roc. I just have to know why I faint every time I see her. I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but—”

“No, it’s fine, Tristan,” Roc says, finally making eye contact with me. “I volunteered, remember? I’m just a little tense, that’s all—not used to all this dangerous stuff. I agree there’s something to it all, I just don’t know what. It’s worth exploring. I just wish she’d stop and let us catch her.” He grins and the tension melts away, but I’m not sure if the discussion is really resolved.

“Thanks,” I say. “Think of it as part of your training. A very real part of your training. How about we practice with the real swords for a while? It might help you to relax.”

“Sure.”

For the next hour I show him the subtleties of using a real sword. By the end, he seems more confident, performing the various maneuvers with ease. It’s just the basics, but it’s a start.

“What time is it?” I ask when there’s a break in the action.

I don’t bother to look at my watch. Usually Roc is responsible for dragging me to anywhere I need to be.

Roc says, “Early afternoon. Why?”

“We should get moving,” I say, worried that we’ve tarried in our hideaway for too long.

“First we need to find out more about our quarry,” Roc says. “Remember Chip’s and Coral’s advice?”

“Who’s Coral?” I ask.

“The lady who led us down to that cellar. Well, I don’t really know her name—she never told us—but I thought she was deserving of a name anyway, so we don’t forget her.”

Funny Roc. But he’s right, of course. We have no idea where she might be headed—we’re just guessing at this point.

“Okay, let’s move along the edge of the caverns. Maybe there will be a shop or something where we can find a telebox.”

We travel for more than two hours before we come to a large cave mouth, near the southern entrance to the Lonely Caverns. Sure enough, there’s a small stone shack with a stand, set up just outside the caves. A middle-aged man with a long, salt-and-pepper beard dozes in a hammock, an unlit pipe dangling from his chapped lips.

All around him are piles of goods, some used, some new. All for sale. It seems a bit out of the way for a shop, but he has plenty of inventory, so I assume he gets some business. There’s also a decent selection of preserved food, like dried meats and fruits.

As we slalom through the piles of stuff, I hear the low murmur of a voice. I head toward the sound. At the very back of the area, sitting on a table, is a small telebox. It’s hard to believe the man has sufficient electricity to operate a telebox, and yet, there it is, broadcasting the news.

I move closer, tilting my ear to pick up the low volume, when I hear a booming voice from behind. “What can I do for ya?”

I spin around to find the man standing close to us, much smaller than his voice suggests. He eyes us warily, as if he thinks we’re thieves looking to capitalize on his midday slumber.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” I say. “We didn’t want to wake you. We were hoping to watch your telebox for a few minutes, if that’s okay? We’ve heard lots of rumors about the bombings, but we wanted to hear it for ourselves.”

“Customers only,” he says, pointing to a sign above the telebox that I hadn’t noticed.

“Of course, of course,” I say. “We have Nailins.” I motion to Roc, who promptly unzips the pack and extracts a handful of gold coins.

The man’s eyes widen. “You look familiar. Who the hell are you?” he asks.

“Customers,” I say simply. “Now, we’ll take ten packs of those dried meats and twenty of the fruit. What will that cost?”

“Usually my customers just barter,” the man says, almost to himself, “but I guess that would be about five Nailins.”

“Give him ten,” I instruct Roc. “For the exemplary service and use of the telebox.”

I turn my attention back to the screen. I massage a knob to raise the volume, not worried about the man’s reaction. He’ll probably let me to do anything I want after the tip he just received.

We’ve already missed the latest report on the bombing, which, not surprisingly, is the lead story. But a close second is the report on the guests who escaped from the Pen. First they show a guy, Cole something, large and dark-skinned. In his mug shot he appears angry, which isn’t that surprising considering he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The thought of the Moon Dweller girl traveling with him scares me. The report notes that the Cole character has no family left and therefore, he’ll probably try to get out of the subchapter.

Next they show a girl named Tawni, with stark-white hair and long, thin features. I recognize her immediately as the girl who was sitting next to the dark-haired girl the first time I saw her. Tawni is painted by the media as a good kid who made some bad choices, the latest being her choice of companions in the escape from the Pen. Her parents are prominent, wealthy figures in the subchapter 14 community. They show a photo of her house.

“Oh my gosh,” Roc says, watching over my shoulder, “we passed by there last night!”

I glance at him. “You think they might’ve been hiding out with her parents?”

“Possibly,” Roc says.

“We’ll check it out before we go into the caves.”

Finally they show her. Her sad, green eyes suddenly fill the screen, and then the rest of her features follow as they pan out of the strange choice of close-up.

She’s even prettier than I thought. Her face is flawless. Her lips are in a tight line, but behind them I can feel the warmth of a smile that hasn’t been used in a long time. Her cheeks are pale, but well-constructed. Her hair is radiant black, cascading down from her head and in front of her shoulders. Not only beautiful, she looks capable, a more important trait in the world she lives in. But her beauty is meaningless to me. I need answers. Seeing her on the screen, I don’t feel the pain I did when I twice saw her in person. Curious.

At least now she has a name. For the few days since I’d first seen her, she’s just been a face, an idea, but now the name Adele Rose shivers through my mind and body like the wings on a moth.

She was in the Pen for treason, although the report doesn’t provide any details on what she had done specifically. Her parents are noted as traitors, too, but no information is given on their whereabouts, and one can only assume that they’ve been executed in accordance with the law. But I know differently.

She has a sister, too, ten years old and living out her childhood in an orphanage in a rough part of town. A slum. The slums.

Roc and I look at each other at the same time. “She’s headed for the orphanage,” I say as Roc nods vigorously. “Maybe already there and gone.”

“You don’t know that. We have to check,” Roc says.

“Let’s go.”

Roc settles up with the shop owner and shoves the food into our pack. I’m already halfway down the path, back the way we came. The lights above the majestic cavern are dimming, simulating the impending darker gray of dusk. I feel warmth in my skin, although there’s a chill in the air. I think it’s the warmth of determination. Although I was determined before, now that I know her name, it’s like she’s finally become real to me, more than just a bearer of pain or wielder of psychic power.

Roc catches up with me at a slight jog and I immediately match my pace to his. We make our way back to where we camped, hoping we’ll be able to find safe passage into the slums. The news story motivates us, and we make it back in half the time. Just as the large boulders we’d camped behind appear in the distance, we hear the scurry of frantic footsteps approaching from the path that leads to the slums.

“Down!” I cry, not that either of us need to hear it. We’re both already diving for the rocks, flattening ourselves and crawling behind the biggest stones we can find on the barren landscape.

Just as we hide, a form bursts from behind a large boulder, racing along the track dangerously fast. He’s big, man-size, dark. A second shape emerges, with white, flowing hair and long strides. Big, dark-skinned guy, white-haired girl: it doesn’t take a mining engineer to figure out who they are.

I hold my breath, watching the entrance to the slums, hoping and praying she will emerge. No, not she—Adele. I’m shocked when the third figure scrapes from the path, short legs pumping wildly, dark hair pulled into a ponytail. My first thought is: she’s much shorter in person. But then I realize my mistake when a fourth figure appears.

There’s no mistaking her this time. Athletic strides, fiercely determined expression, piercing green eyes—it’s Adele. Icy tentacles stab at my back, but not as fiercely as the last time.

My mind is a black hole; my heart is a stallion. The stallion in me wants to jump up, say, “Adele, we have to talk,” but thankfully my mind’s black hole implodes upon itself, evaporating and returning clarity of thought.

The orphanage. Her sister. A small girl who resembles Adele. It’s clear what has happened. They’ve broken her out. And the way they’re running—like the wolves of hell have been unchained behind them—means that someone is chasing them. Enforcers perhaps. Or orphanage security, if there even is such thing.

Wrong and wrong.

The Devil himself emerges behind her, running with purpose, perfectly balanced and efficiently functioning, like a machine. A very evil machine. I know that face, that form, all too well. Rivet. The best of my father’s special purpose unit. And the most evil. The most like my father. He’s chasing Adele and her friends.

Behind him is the rest of his unit: half a dozen special purpose personnel with big guns and sharp swords. Death on twelve feet.

Adele and her friends look like they might turn toward us, but then they veer left, up a slight rock hill, heading for the mouth of one of the Lonely Caves.

Rivet is gaining.

Without thinking, I stand up and run hard, cutting the distance between them like a knife, willing my legs to fly. I ignore a blast of thunder in my skull as the headache returns. My hand draws my sword instinctually, using small movements to conserve strength. My heart is pounding, not from the urgency of the run, but because I know Adele is so close, and yet she might never know I’m even here. I hear footsteps behind me and know right away that Roc has my back. He and I both know he’ll be no match for the highly trained soldiers, but he’s my friend—a true friend—and he’ll go down fighting, whether to the grave or to a prison cell. Just like me.

Rivet is like a heat-seeking missile: Such is the intensity in his venomous eyes and the way his stare is locked on Adele that he doesn’t even see me coming. One of his men shouts something as I approach, but he ignores it, thinking it’s just a standard war cry, an adrenaline-induced whoop! of the chase.

When a collision grows imminent, I lower my shoulder and target his chest. The timing is perfect.

I hit Rivet just before he starts up the hill, ensuring his momentum hasn’t lessened whatsoever, creating a human shockwave that sends tremors through both our bones. But I’m the aggressor in the collision, and I’m ready for it, so he takes the worst of it by far. He’s knocked off course, his feet momentarily leaving the rock and his body contorting awkwardly in midflight until he thuds onto a hard slab of rock more than fifteen feet away.

There are people who, if hit that hard, at that speed, might die. Unfortunately, Rivet isn’t one of them. Not even close. He is pure strength, sporting more muscle around his fingers and toes than most people have in their biceps, back, or abdomen. Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Plus, he’s wearing a thin layer of moldable body armor. The hit would’ve hurt, but to Rivet, pain is pleasure, all part of the game.

I glance up the slope to see if she’s gotten away okay. To my surprise she’s at the top gazing down, watching my fight with Rivet. I want to run to her, to grab her and shake her, demand answers. But that is madness. Rivet will just kill us both. I need to give her time. It’s the hardest thing in the world to push her away when I’m so close to discovering the truth.

“Adele!” I scream. “Run!” I don’t have a chance to see if she listens to me, because I sense movement to my left.

The sick puppy is on his feet and drawing his sword before I even have a chance to say Bring it! which is probably good because it would just make him even angrier.

As it is, he’s angry enough, charging me like a steamroller. Clang! The impact of his blade on mine jars my teeth, threatening to dislodge each and every one of them. His next swipe nearly takes off my head, but I manage to duck at the last minute.

Roc reaches my side, and I use one of my arms to thrust him behind me, out of danger. He has improved steadily during our training sessions, but he isn’t ready for the big leagues.

Rivet’s men surround us, jeering and taunting as their boss and I circle each other. Roc is like my unattached tail, hovering behind my butt. I look into Rivet’s eyes, hoping for some indication of mercy. I see only death. I’m a good fighter, but it’s too much. There are just too many of them. We’re both going to die, and I haven’t even spoken to Adele, haven’t had a chance to ask her a damn thing. The only satisfaction I have is that I’ve given her a slim chance to escape, although I’m not sure why it’s so important that she goes free.

But I reserve my final thoughts for Roc: how I let him down, how I led him from the safety of the Sun Realm to the dangers of the Lower Realms, how his death is my fault, too.

Ziiiip! Something whirrs through the air, sounding odd next to the raucous cries of Rivet’s men. “ARGH!” one of the men roars. Rivet and I both risk a glance away from each other to see what’s happening. A large guy with a patch over one eye is slumped to his knees and clutching his heart. A sixteen-inch shaft protrudes from his left breast, finned at the end. Blood dribbles from his mouth as he dies.

A chorus of zips and whirrs fills the air as arrows rain down on us. Realizing we’re under attack by a seemingly deadlier foe than Rivet, I grab Roc and thrust him down, falling next to him flat. Cries of pain echo through the cavern as each of Rivet’s guards is taken out by precision targeting. Not one arrow so much as grazes our skin. They aren’t shooting at us—at least not yet.

I hunt for Rivet, but he’s gone, either having lurked off or dove for cover somewhere. It’s too much to hope that he’s been killed along with his men. I scan the bodies anyway, looking for their leader. He isn’t amongst the dead. I finally spot him by pure luck, as a stray beam of dome light catches the tip of his sword as he skulks off, escaping over a rock embankment and back toward the slums.

I stay down, preferring not to be mistaken for one of Rivet’s men.

Our saviors approach, their faces cloaked in shadow by dark-brimmed hats. Most of them clutch bows, cocked and ready to kill, while others have swords, like us.

The leader stands over me, his sword pointed close to my chin.

“I’ll be damned,” he says. “If it ain’t Prince Nailin himself. If I hadn’t heard the news this mornin’, I’d never have believed it. You’ll make a pretty prize for the Star Dwellers indeed.”

Chapter Fifteen

Adele

No beast of reality, or creature of imagination, is as terrible as mankind. Or as loving. It’s a contradiction. I’ve always liked contradictions. Today I see both sides of the coin unveiled in gruesome and beautiful imagery, captured by my eyes and filed away in my mind, like still shots taken by a world-renowned photographer.

First the terrible: Rivet. I can see the bloodthirsty gleam in his eyes at the end of the alley. He shouts something, to his men most likely, and then comes after us.

I’m surprised when I catch up to Elsey first. She was in the lead, but is now falling behind as Cole’s powerful legs and Tawni’s long strides outdistance her. I urge her forward with a soft nudge on her back. I have no idea where her shortcut leads, but I hope it will be to a place we can hide.

Hiding is our only option. Fighting will be futile, as Rivet will have a horde of men with him, armed to the teeth and ready for action.

In the distance I see Cole and Tawni drop out of sight, presumably cresting a rise and banking down a slope. Glancing back, I can see Rivet gaining on us, flanked by his men. They look like robots, rigidly pumping their arms opposite their strides, programmed to obey only one command: kill.

“Go, Elsey, go!” I urge, trying to use my mind to magically lengthen her short legs.

We reach the spot where the others dropped away and feel gravity pull us forward, down a steep slope. Dusk is falling upon us rapidly—the overhead cavern lights dimming—and it’s getting hard to see our feet on the gray stone. A sprained ankle or a slight stumble could cost us our lives.

Thankfully, our steps are true and we reach the bottom of the slope, veering left to where another trail leads up to a cave mouth. Cole and Tawni are waiting for us at the top.

I shouldn’t look back, but I do. Rivet is already halfway down the hill, having silently sped up, moving inhumanly fast, as if sensing that an end to the chase is near.

Elsey and I try to find an extra gear to allow us to reach the top of our slope before Rivet reaches the bottom of his, although I know in my heart the feat is impossible. We’re caught and I know it, but I wasn’t raised to be a quitter. We push on. My thighs burn and my calves ache. My head throbs from the physical and mental stress of the chase.

I glance up to see how close we are to the top. I’ll never forget the look on my friends’ faces. They’re staring past me, toward our pursuers. But their faces aren’t those of helpless prey about to be captured; rather, they look astonished, their eyebrows raised and mouths open.

We reach the top and I look back, blood pumping in my forehead.

I involuntarily imitate their expressions, raising my own eyebrows and opening my own mouth. I’m genuinely shocked by what I see.

Rivet is on the ground, rolling to a stop. Has he fallen? I don’t think so. A simple misstep wouldn’t capture Cole’s and Tawni’s attention so completely.

That’s when I see him.

Despite the dim lighting, I recognize him instantly, both because he’s one of the most famous faces in the Tri-Realms and because my headache is back. He’s carrying a long sword, standing stoically, waiting to fight Rivet. His blond, wavy hair is ruffled although there’s no air moving through the cavern. He looks strong, confident, heroic. Clearly, he’s saved us. So he is a hero of sorts.

He looks at me, locking eyes, like before. Also like before, the pain reaches a fever pitch, so intense it almost brings me to my knees. He screams my name: “Adele!” At first I think he’s beckoning me to him, but his second word clears up any confusion: “Run!”

Despite the urgency in his tone I remain frozen, my heart and head pounding, watching what will happen next.

Rivet attacks, launching himself with an animal frenzy at Tristan. In a manner I can only describe as professional, Tristan blocks the attack and jumps back. I notice someone behind him, also carrying a sword. A friend of Tristan’s most likely, or so I hope.

Protectively, Tristan holds the other guy back with one arm while parrying and dodging Rivet’s strokes. The rest of Rivet’s men arrive, surrounding them. No! I think.

We have to do something. He’s saved us and now he’s going to die for us.

I take a step forward, but a strong arm holds me back. “No,” Cole says firmly. “We have to go. It’s suicide.”

I try to struggle free, but Cole’s grip is iron. Tears spring up as I try to wriggle away. “Let go!” I yell. “Please, they’re going to kill him!”

Tawni’s face appears in front of me. She pulls Elsey beside her. “Think of your sister,” she says.

My body collapses, all fight gone from it. As much as I’m willing to throw my life away in an effort to save Tristan, the causer of pain, I know I can’t abandon Elsey. Not after all she’s been through. Not after all we have been through. I am all she has. And she is all I have.

I let myself get half-dragged, half-carried into the absolute darkness of the cave. I feel numb. Tears continue to well up and stream down my face, but they feel cold, emotionless, a neurological response to a stimulus, nothing more.

I barely notice as we cut a random path through the cave network. In the back of my mind I know we’re in the Lonely Caverns. Although we haven’t necessarily meant to come this way, it is the perfect place to hide from Rivet. I remember the kids at school telling stories of the Lonely Caves, how kids are always getting lost in them, dying of starvation, or falling down bottomless pits. I used to fear the caves, but now they feel like a sanctuary.

I can hear Cole and Tawni whispering, making quick decisions about which side tunnel to take next. They’re taking the most convoluted route possible, almost trying to get us lost in an effort to lose Rivet, who will surely be pursuing us again soon, if not already. But with each twist and turn, they recite the full list of the directional changes we’ve made so far out loud, trying desperately to remember the way back. I try to memorize what they’re saying, as a backup, but get confused halfway through. I’m still not thinking clearly, am still a bit of a mess.

But listening to the sounds of their voices also helps.

Eventually I get control of my body and am able to save Cole a lot of effort by walking on my own again. When I do, Elsey appears by my side, illuminated by the flashlight she’s carrying. I notice that I have one as well—we all do. Funny how I can’t remember them being turned on or even someone giving one to me. We fall back from the others right away.

“Adele,” she says, her violet eyes radiating compassion. “Are you okay?”

I put my arm around her as we walk. What can I say? Actually, Elsey, I’m a complete wreck because a guy I’ve never met, a guy whose very presence brings me immense physical pain, a guy whose father abducted our parents, is dead, all because of me.

Instead, I say, “I’m okay now, Elsey, sorry to scare you like that.”

“I wasn’t scared,” she says. The matter-of-fact way in which she says it makes me believe her. Perhaps my sister is made of a tougher substance than I am. Or maybe she’s just too young to understand the true horror of what has just happened, is just happy to have her big sister back.

“You’re very brave,” I say.

“What happened back there? Who was the guy that saved us? He knew your name, Adele.”

My face tightens and I try to get control of my emotions—take a deep breath. “It was no one,” I say.

“Tell me,” Elsey says. “I’m not a child anymore.”

There’s so much truth in her eyes that I know she’s right. Although she’s only been at the orphanage for six months, she’s changed, matured. Ten years might’ve passed in her mind. I can’t always protect her anymore.

I decide on the truth. “This might sound impossible…in fact, I’m not sure I believe it myself…I might’ve been seeing things…I was probably mistaken, but—”

“Adele, please, just tell me,” Elsey says, interrupting my ramblings.

I take another deep breath. Why is this so hard? Just say it. Say it. Say it! “I think it was Tristan Nailin,” I blurt out, feeling dread wash over me, as if by speaking his name I’ve cemented his fate.

I expect Elsey to giggle, to look at me with knowing eyes, to say Sure it was, Adele, I believe you, using the sarcasm that I taught her. She surprises me by saying, “I thought so.”

“You what?” I say, unable to hide my surprise.

“He looked like Tristan,” she says with a slight nod of her head. “I mean, not as good looking as in the magazines, but…”

“I thought he looked even better,” I say, surprised at my own words.

Elsey eyes me curiously. “Since when did you think Tristan was handsome?” she says, sounding more grown up than ever.

“I don’t. It’s just…never mind.”

Elsey smirks at me. “You can tell me the whole story later.”

It dawns on me. Why was Elsey so easily convinced that it was Tristan? She doesn’t seem to find it strange at all that he appeared out of nowhere in a remote part of the Moon Realm. “Elsey….why’d you think it was Tristan? Was it just because he looked like him?”

Now she giggles, finally sounding her own age. “Because of the news, of course.”

My heart flutters and I know she’s about to tell me something important, so I stop and call to Cole and Tawni, who come jogging back, their eyebrows V’d in concern. “What’s wrong?” Cole says.

I motion to Elsey to speak. “Tell them what you were about to tell me,” I instruct.

Elsey’s eyes widen. “You mean, you don’t know?” she says incredulously.

“We’ve been kind of…busy,” I say.

“Right,” she says, changing her tone to that of a lecturer. “Well, all the kids gathered in the big room to watch the telebox this morning, like we always do. This kid we call Wiz suggested we watch the news, like he always does. He always gets voted down and we watch something else, but this morning he put it on before anyone could say anything. You guys were all on the screen.” She waves her hand across us.

“We saw that,” I say, hoping that isn’t her big news.

She changes course, her voice softening as she says, “I just knew you would come for me, Adele.” Finally, she fully sounds like a little girl again, the little sister I remember, before life’s challenges forced her to grow up before anyone should have to.

I put an arm around her. “I’ll always come for you. Now, what else did you hear on the news?”

Elsey’s eyes light up. “That Tristan ran away from home!” she exclaims.

“What? He…ran away?” I look at Tawni and Cole, who are staring at me.

“Yep. And apparently he was headed for the Moon Realm, subchapter six I think they said.”

“That’s only a single train ride from here,” I say, finally connecting the dots.

“He was coming to find you,” Tawni says.

Cole shakes his head. “C’mon, seriously. These strange feelings and headaches and all that crap again? Coincidence I reckon. If he really was trying to get away for a while, he probably just picked a place where no one would think to look for him.”

Elsey touches my arm. “Why would Tristan have been coming to find you? And what does he mean by headaches?” she asks.

I tell her everything. Cole stalks off and pretends not to listen, but Tawni stays by me, even holds my hand for part of it.

Elsey is ecstatic when I finish. “He did come for you,” she says positively. Under her breath, she says, “No matter what that other guy says.”

It’s then that I realize we haven’t had time for introductions. “Elsey,” I say. “This is Tawni. My friend,” I add.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Elsey,” Tawni says. “Adele’s told us so many nice things about you.”

At that, Elsey beams.

“Cole,” I say, a bit louder to get his attention, “come meet Elsey.”

He saunters over, his dark skin glowing a strange orange color under the illumination of the flashlights. “Hi, Elsey,” he says. “I’m Cole.”

My sis sticks out her hand and shakes Cole’s big paw. “Tristan was looking for my sister,” she says definitively.

“Oh, great. Now it’s three against one,” Cole says, grinning. At least he doesn’t seem frustrated anymore.

“He wasn’t looking for me, El,” I say. And if he was, it means he likes causing me pain, almost like it’s his purpose in life. Although now that he saved us, that doesn’t make sense either.

“Good,” Cole says. “The sooner everyone gets that through their heads the better. We need to keep moving. I think we’ve probably done a good enough job of losing ourselves in here, but they’ll keep searching until they find us.”

We walk for hours. Time seems to stand still inside the caverns. Cole and Tawni give up on trying to remember which route we’ve taken. I think they realize we aren’t going to be going out the way we came in.

The caverns are ominous and scary, and yet beautiful at the same time. Around every bend is another stalactite or stalagmite, some impossibly big, some carved by nature into complex patterns, more intricate than a master carver could ever hope to emulate on a museum statue. We pass under giant stone archways, and cross natural rock bridges, some so thin that we have to crawl across on our stomachs, trying not to look down at the never-ending drops into darkness on either side. The color of the stones darken as the miles pass under our feet, changing from the reddish brown of subchapter 14 to the dark grey of whatever subchapter we’re moving toward.

Much of the time we are able to walk upright, the jagged ceiling rising well above us. But at other times we’re forced to stoop, or even crawl.

I’m beat, so I know Elsey must be tired, too. At first she keeps up a constant chatter, talking about anything and everything. She talks about her time in the orphanage, asks a million questions about the Pen, and tries to get us all to agree that we’re on a fantastic adventure. Eventually, she ceases talking completely, so I know she’s getting tired. We need to stop, but none of us seems to want to make the call. I think we all feel that every additional footstep gives us a greater chance of survival.

As we walk, I notice Elsey’s tunic sagging in the back. “El,” I say, “is there something in your back pocket?”

Not stopping, she reaches behind her and extracts a gleaming metal slingshot, fitted with a thick rubber band. She holds it behind her. “Ranna gave it to me,” she says by way of explanation.

I take it from her, examining the handle. Cut into the wide hilt is a slot, which I flip open with my thumb, holding my breath. Inside is a compartment full of round metal pellets—ammunition. Maybe she’s changed even more than I thought. She’s never been the type to shoot slingshots before. Play with dolls, yeah, but not weapons.

“Take care of this, El. It’s a really nice weapon,” I say, handing it back. She pockets it and we continue trudging along.

Cole, who is leading, finally stops and sits on a flat stone rock that looks like someone has put there as a bench. He says, “I think we’ve gone far enough. It must be the middle of the night. Even Rivet will have to stop for sleep.”

Tawni checks her watch. “It’s after three,” she says.

We’re all too tired to disagree. Or even to eat. Instead, we go straight to bed, four ducks in a row, pressed up close to each other for warmth. Cole and then Tawni and then Elsey and then me.

“He’s not dead, you know,” Elsey whispers.

“Who?” I say, although I know the answer.

“Tristan.”

“Oh.”

“If something’s pulling you together, then he couldn’t have died. He might be captured, tortured even, but somehow he’ll find you.” I can’t tell if her words are wise beyond her years, or simply the vivid imagination of an innocent child. Either way, they comfort me. I don’t remind her that whatever force is at play, it’s more likely pushing us apart.

“G’night, Elsey,” I say

“Love you, Adele.”

“Love you, too.”

Although I’m sure it’s hours later, it feels like I start dreaming the second my eyes close. My dream isn’t of Tristan, for which I’m strangely relieved. It’s like I know that if I dream of him I will only see death. His, not mine. Thankfully, my mind gives me a reprieve from all my questions about him. Of course, the alternative isn’t much better, full of a different pain.

I dream of war. The Star Dweller army is destroying all of the Moon Realm, running rampant across the subchapters. It’s like I’m on the outside of a looking glass, watching the horror unfold before my eyes. For some reason I’m not angry at them. I know they’re just tired of being the scum of the earth, treated like rats by the Sun Dwellers. Used, abused, stepped on.

The Sun Dweller army is coming, their legions of troops marching forward, their red armor polished and gleaming. I can see them, but the Star Dwellers can’t. I scream, try to warn them, but no one can hear me through the mirror. No one except Rivet, that is, who is leading the Sun Dweller army. His black eyes look right at me, challenging me to come down. I don’t want to, but I know I have to.

I swim through the mirror, pushing it to the side and behind me, like it’s made of a strange viscous liquid. Gravity grabs me and pulls me to the ground. Rivet smiles as he tightens his grip on his gun. He pulls the trigger and shoots me through the heart.

You know how they say you can’t die in your dreams? I do. The pain is so intense, so real, that I cry out in my sleep. But still I don’t wake up, clinging to life in my dream by reaching for a sky I have never seen, as life ebbs from my broken body.

I die tonight.

When I do wake, I’m surprised to find myself very much alive with three familiar faces hovering anxiously over me. “We’re here, Adele,” Tawni coos. “It was just a dream.”

“So real,” I murmur. “I died.”

Elsey’s face is clouded with concern. “You’ll never die,” she says.

“You got that right,” I say, trying to put on a strong face for my sister although I feel weak from the nightmare.

“We need to eat something and then keep moving,” Cole says. For all the emotion that Cole displayed when we were at Tawni’s house, he seems equally emotion-free now. Rigid, soldier-like. It doesn’t bother me.

We eat quickly, swallowing the tasteless canned beans in gulps, like it’s a race.

Because of Tawni’s watch, we know we’ve only slept three hours and that it’s still early in the morning. Cole suspects that Rivet and his men have slept even less, so we need to keep moving. When we start out, I’m already dreading the day’s hike. My ribs are sore and tender, but by gritting my teeth and breathing through them, I can control the pain.

Elsey seems to have slept better than me, bouncing along beside me and chattering away. “I’m so glad to be out of that orphanage,” she says. “Some of the kids were nice, and I’ll miss Ranna for all of eternity, but the rest of it was dreadful. We all slept in the same room and ate the same porridge every day. They only let us go outside once a day, and the rest of the time we had to do chores around the place. Once a month they let us take a bath. How was the Pen?”

“About the same,” I say. “Maybe a bit better, to be honest.”

“Where are we going?”

“To find Mum and Dad.”

“Really? You think they’re alive?”

“Tawni thinks that Dad is. And I bet if he is then Mom is, too.”

Elsey’s eyes light up. “We’ll rescue them, won’t we, Adele?”

“Of course,” I say, not sure at all.

It feels good knowing where my father is, even though getting him out will be the equivalent of a suicide mission. Between knowing about my dad and having Elsey around, I feel like I’m at least half a person again, a significant improvement over the empty shell I had become. But there is still a huge part of me missing, because I haven’t saved my dad yet and don’t even know where my mom is. I wonder where she is, what condition she’s in. Despite my assurances to Elsey, I know there’s a good chance she’s dead. I try not to think about it.

Chatting with Elsey makes the day go by so much faster. She’s like our little motivator, constantly saying positive things in her very proper-sounding way. Once she’s done grilling me about what I’ve been doing while we were apart, she focuses on Tawni and Cole, asking them even more questions. They tiptoe around some of the serious things we’ve already discussed, and focus on telling funny stories from their childhoods.

All in all, it isn’t a bad day, and before I know it, we’re stopping again for the evening. We haven’t eaten since the morning, so we’re all famished. We devour our canned food again, except this time I actually enjoy it. I don’t think it’s the taste of the food, though; I think it’s just that being free of the Pen and back with my sister makes the bland food taste better—it’s the taste of freedom, I guess.

When we finish eating, Cole brings up the topic we’ve all been ignoring. “How the hell are we going to get out of these caves?” he says.

“Are we lost?” I say, making a bad joke.

Tawni laughs anyway—snorts actually, because she’s taking a sip of water when I speak. That gets us all laughing, with Elsey’s infectious giggle keeping it going for a long time. Even Mr. Serious joins in, smirking at first, then chuckling, and finally full out laughing. We all need it.

“If we just keep going, we’ll come out somewhere eventually, right?” I say.

“How much do you know about the Lonely Caverns?” Cole asks.

“Not much. They connect three or four subchapters, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Cole says. “For each grouping of subchapters there’s a cavern that acts as a hub to connect them all. The Lonely Caverns are the hub for subchapters fourteen to seventeen. They’re used by miners to travel from mine to mine. The miners stick to the main tunnels, which we left almost immediately. According to the maps I’ve seen, the caverns are a hundred square miles.”

Tawni adds, “And we’ve made so many turns that we don’t have the first clue as to which direction we’re headed. We may have been traveling in circles all day, or we may have cut a path straight across—impossible to say for sure.”

“Best guess?” I ask.

Cole says, “I think we’re going to end up somewhere in subchapter sixteen. We headed straight east when we first entered, and I’m pretty damn sure we haven’t cut back across any of the main tunnels, so that means we’re still headed east, unless we got completely turned around and are now headed south and west again, back the way we came. We should know soon enough, because we’d end up rejoining the main tunnel.”

“Okay,” I say. “So we just keep walking?”

Cole shrugs. “No other choice.”

Chapter Sixteen

Tristan

These days not many people believe in God anymore. I’m not sure I do sometimes. Those above, in the Sun Realm, are enjoying themselves too much to stop to think about whether they’re blessed. And those below, in the Moon and Star Realms, are too jaded. My mom did, though. She believed with all her heart that there’s a greater power out there, one that cares about us, watches over us. She said bad things still have to happen, because they help us learn and grow, but that in the end we’ll be saved.

I could use a little saving.

I wake up with a nasty bump on my head. I don’t even remember getting hit. It throbs like hell.

I try to sit up, but it’s difficult with my arms and legs tied.

It’s dark. Not like a cloudy night with the moon and stars blocked, like I’ve seen in books; dark like the sun, moon, and stars don’t exist, which they don’t in our world. Plus there are no overhead cavern lights, no streetlights, no houselights. I work out that we’re in a cave pretty quickly.

It all comes flashing back. The girl—no, Adele—running, being chased by my father’s demons. My intervention. Rivet’s gleaming eyes. Our salvation by the same men who surely now hold us captive.

You’ll make a pretty prize for the Star Dwellers indeed.

From the man’s words, it doesn’t sound like they’re Star Dwellers, unless he’s talking about them in the third person. I don’t think so.

A light flashes in the dark. It moves closer.

The man holds the torch in front of my face. It burns my eyes while they try to adjust. I shut my eyelids tight, and then slowly open them, squinting for at least a minute. The whole time the man waits patiently for me to get my eyes fully open.

When I do, I gasp. I know he’s the man who spoke to me earlier, the one who killed Rivet’s men. He isn’t wearing his hat this time, and I can see his face, which is what makes me gasp. Half his face is swollen red and bubbling with blisters. Whether a lifelong disease or a fresh scar, I do not know.

“My face got damn near blown off by the heavy artillery,” he growls. “Pretty sight, ain’t it?”

“What do you want?” I ask.

“From you?” he says. “Nothin’. All you gotta do is come with us. I hope I’m not makin’ it sound like you’ve got a choice. ’Cuz ya don’t. Yer comin’. As sure as the sun ain’t shinin’, yer comin’.”

“Who are you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just a guy. A guy fed up with bein’ crapped on by yer kind. For once the damn Star Dwellers got the right idear. Fight back.”

“But they’re killing your own people.”

“Eh. So they’ve got their target a bit mixed up. But it’s workin’, ain’t it? We’re goin’ to join ’em, and others will, too. So the plan worked, eh?”

My head is spinning, half because of what this guy is saying to me, and half because of the blow I took to the head, probably from the butt of this guy’s gun. “Look, man, I’m not the one you want. I’m not like them. I hate my father. I’ve left the Sun Realm and I’m not going back.” The words sound true off the tip of my tongue, but are they? Could I really give up everything? For what? What if Adele’s dead already? What if she’s not, but I never find her? Or what if I find her and she doesn’t have any answers and tells me to leave her the hell alone? It’s not out of the realm of possibility. Would I go back?

I blink away the answer to the last question because it makes me feel weak and pathetic. Spineless.

Yes.

I take a deep breath and continue. “Just let me go and I’ll stay out of the whole thing. Please.” I feel like I’m begging, my voice higher pitched than usual, all toughness stripped from it, leaving just a child’s voice.

“Okay,” the man says.

“Really?”

“Nah, just messing with you. Ha ha ha!” The guy’s laugh is as rough as the chipped stones around us. “Yer my prize, kid. We can use ya. Yer one hell of a bargainin’ chip.”

He leaves the torch nearby and moves off into the darkness. Using my elbows as levers, and by twisting and balancing on one shoulder, I manage to get into a seated position so I can take in my surroundings—or at least what I can see of them.

Roc is sleeping nearby, his forehead marked by a puffy, red welt. They haven’t bothered to give us blankets or pillows or anything, so my body is sore and cold from lying on the hard cavern floor all night.

There are several other men sleeping nearby. I’m sure there are more, at least a dozen, but the light from the torch only extends in a small sphere. I assume we’re somewhere in the Lonely Caverns, most likely not very far in, as the men won’t have wanted to carry our limp bodies for very long.

I have no idea how long we’ve been out, but I hope it wasn’t long, for with each passing minute Adele is traveling further and further away from me.

How twisted is fate? Pretty twisted, I’d say. Mangled and knobby; old and decrepit. Every time you’re granted a stroke of good fortune, it’s offset by a calamity. Like Adele escaping from prison right when the Star Dwellers attacked. Sometimes good luck is even caused by something bad. Like when Adele’s path crossed ours at that exact fateful moment. Had Rivet not been chasing her, perhaps she would have arrived later, and I wouldn’t have seen her. We might’ve missed each other by taking different routes, like two companies of miners passing in the night, unknown to each other.

My father doesn’t believe in fate. He says we make our own fate. So far, he’s been right about that. I sort of believed him until now. But after everything that’s happened, I know there are other forces at play. Forces that want Adele and me to meet, for some reason that I can’t yet grasp.

Roc stirs in his sleep and then opens one eye, clamping it shut again immediately when the light hits it. He raises a hand to his temple, gingerly feeling around the red bump, cringing each time he touches a raw nerve.

“You okay, man?” I whisper, trying not to wake the other guys.

“I think so. You?”

“About the same. Just a knock on the head. I think it was done gently enough to avoid any permanent damage. I think they want us alive to use as hostages.”

“Hostages for what?”

“They’re taking us to the Star Dwellers, who will then try to get to my father through me.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“Not much we can do. Go along for the ride, I suppose.”

A familiar voice echoes through the cave. “That’s right! There’s nothin’ you can do!” Each of the men around us awakes with a start, some of them jumping up and grabbing weapons, looking for someone to fight.

“It’s just me, you idiots,” the voice says, as a figure steps into the light. It is the guy with the burnt face. “Time to move,” he says.

“Move where?” I ask.

“None of yer damn business,” he says.

With impressive speed, the men get packed and move out. I ask for water but am denied. They do, however, unbind our feet so we can walk easily. Our hands remain tied in the front. I smile when they don’t bother to retie them behind our backs. In the front allows us lots more room to maneuver in the event that an opportunity arises.

But no chances for action come up today. Our march feels endless, especially with no water to quench my burning throat. Roc and I are separated—sandwiched in between two guys each—so we aren’t able to talk to each other. When I do risk a question to one of my guards—a simple Can I stop to go to the bathroom?—it’s answered with a rough jab to the abdomen with the end of his rifle.

Not a good day.

Twice we hear echoing voices bouncing off the walls from somewhere in the cavern. We stop suddenly and everyone strains to listen for more sounds, trying to discern who it might be or what direction it’s coming from, but all we get is silence, and it’s near impossible to determine where the sound originates from. I wonder if it’s Adele and her friends, somewhere in front of us in the caverns, moving by some twist of fate in the exact same direction. Or it might be Rivet with a new troop, replacing the men who were killed by our captors. Whoever it is, they stay out of our way and we out of theirs.

I don’t know the Lonely Caverns well, but from studying Roc’s map I know enough to realize we’re sticking to one of the four main tunnels, which intersect at a hub near the middle. We’re essentially using the cavern as a conduit to move to another subchapter.

At the end of the day’s march, my legs are on fire and my wrists rubbed raw by the constant chafing of the tight ropes that bind them together. My mouth and esophagus are so dry I can’t swallow. My head started pounding halfway through the day, and it’s all I can do to ignore the urge to collapse and curl up into a ball. I’m sure Roc’s day hasn’t been much better than mine.

Thankfully, they sit us down together while they prepare the evening meal, probably because we’re easier to guard if we’re in one place. Roc looks like hell, his face pale and his eyes barely open, and I wonder if I look any better. One of the guards finally shows mercy and gives us two gulps each of some kind of liquid that tastes like dirt. It’s the best dirt I’ve ever tasted, and I’d drink the whole bottle if they let me.

Speaking is difficult, but I don’t know whether we’ll get another chance, so I use my recently moistened tongue to lick my chapped lips and attempt a few sentences. “You gonna be all right, Roc?” I say.

Roc manages a tight smile and says, “It’s nothin’ compared to all the chores you make me do around the palace.”

I grin. I know Roc will be all right as long as he keeps cracking jokes. “Speaking of which, I’ve got a few for you this evening if you don’t mind?” I say.

“As long as it involves knocking a guard or two on the head and getting the hell out of here, I’m game.” I’ve never heard Roc say anything that violent before and for some reason I find it really funny. It appears that our little trip away from the Sun Realm is changing him already.

“If you take six, I’ll take the other six,” I say.

“How ’bout I take three and you take nine,” Roc counters.

“Seven and five—that’s my final offer.”

“Deal,” Roc says.

We should probably take the time more seriously, try to come up with a real plan, but I think the little bit of joking helps more than anything else would.

We don’t knock any guards on the head tonight. We’re just too tired. Plus, they keep two watchmen awake at all times, who are charged with guarding us and the camp at the same time.

Despite not having a pillow or blanket for the second night in a row, I sleep like a dead man, nestling my head in the crook between my forearm and bicep.

When I awake, the pain in my head is gone. I struggle to a seated position and look around. Roc smirks at me. “How’s your head?” he says.

“Never felt better,” I say honestly.

“Mine, too. I think there was some kind of medicine in the drink they gave us last night.”

“Probably a slow-acting poison that will kill us in a few days.”

“Probably,” Roc says.

One of the guards is watching our exchange with interest. He’s a stocky guy with a shiny bald head and graying beard. He says, “My daughter thinks she’s in love with you.”

Roc says, “Me?”

I laugh.

Baldy says, “No, you,”—motioning to me—“the one with the good head of hair and pretty-boy smile. She’s got a poster of you up in her bedroom. Cost me a whole week’s pay. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t get an autograph when I have the chance.”

I’ve had some strange requests in my life, but this one takes the cake (if we had any cake, that is). The whole world is exploding, we’ve been captured by a gang of misfits, and one of my captors wants an autograph?

Of course, after he unbinds my hands, I give him one. It’s not like I have a choice. I sign his canteen and he even lets me have a drink from it in exchange. “Thanks. Might be worth somethin’ someday,” he says. Unfortunately he doesn’t repay the favor by leaving my hands untied.

No one else speaks to us this morning. But they do let us walk together this time. I guess they’re feeling more comfortable that we aren’t going to try anything, probably because they can tell we’re getting weaker from the lack of food and water.

I hope we can make them pay for that mistake.

It’s another grueling march, although it’s broken up when we stop for a break upon reaching the hub, a huge cavern that was carved out decades ago. Four gaping tunnels branch off on each side. We sit on manmade stone benches that were erected for travelers. The men seem less serious, joking and laughing as they eat. They give us small chunks of the dried meat we’d bought a couple of days earlier and a swig of water. The food and water, along with whatever medicine they’d given us the previous night, leaves me feeling somewhat refreshed. If we’re going to try something, now is the time.

When no one’s looking, I silently draw Roc’s attention with a quick flick of one of my fingers. Right away I can see the fear in his eyes. He’s right to be scared: the next few minutes could kill us.

I wait patiently for the perfect moment to launch the plan I have in my head. Half the men have wandered off and are doing a bit of sightseeing, checking out the multitude of intricate carvings etched by travelers into the rock walls. They’re spread out, which is bad, but no one is covering the entrance to the tunnel we’ve just come through. That’s good, because I’m hoping to go back the way we’ve come anyway. It’ll make them less likely to pursue us.

Four of the others, including the leader with the deep voice, are engaged in a heated discussion about Tri-Realm politics. That leaves two guys who are sort of paying attention to us, although more and more they’re distracted by their friends—I can see their eyes flicking back and forth between us and them.

One of them turns his back to add a comment to the conversation.

Only one guard now.

His eyes are on me, but it’s a blank stare, like he’s looking without really seeing. I can tell his mind is on the conversation behind him. I rise silently, trusting it will take a few moments for his brain to register what his eyes are seeing. Before he knows what hit him, I…well, I hit him. Club him over the head with my tied-together fists. I hit him hard enough that he won’t be getting up anytime soon. He doesn’t cry out and the others are too distracted to notice.

There’s a knife hanging from his belt and I manage to extract it by the hilt, the blade naturally gravitating toward my wrist ropes. I caress the blade back and forth, keeping one eye on the group of debaters. I saw through one rope and it falls away. I pull my wrists apart sharply, separating the weakened strands of rope.

The knife slips from my fingers.

I’m in a time warp, where seconds tick by like hours. I can see every turn of the knife as it flips end over end to the ground, moving in slow motion. It clatters loudly on the stone floor.

For a second everyone is confused, so I take advantage of the situation, grabbing the guard’s gun—which is conveniently located on the ground between his feet. I point it in the general direction of the cluster of debaters.

I pull the trigger.

The automatic spray of bullets fires wildly above the men, but it has the desired effect. Some drop flat on their stomachs, while others take off running in the opposite direction. Relying on the distraction, I spin and take off the other way. I expect to have to herd Roc in the right direction, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see him halfway to the tunnel entrance, carrying our pack and both swords awkwardly with his bound hands. It’s a good thing, too, because by the time I reach the halfway mark, the bullets and arrows start flying all around me.

Luckily, as perfect as their aim was when they rescued us from Rivet’s men, their aim is equally off the mark this time, probably a result of the frantic nature of the shots coupled with my erratic movement away from them. Plus, I’m firing haphazard bursts of bullets over my shoulder, which surely distracts them. The closest shot is an arrow that catches a loose bit of my tunic, tearing off a tatter of cloth.

A few more bullets rip bits of rock from the ground at my sides, but nothing gets close enough to worry me. I charge into the tunnel, practically knocking Roc, who is waiting just inside, flat on his buttocks. The next problem: it’s freaking dark in the tunnel and I don’t have time to stop and pull a torch from our pack. Even if I did I wouldn’t use it, as it would only draw more attention to our whereabouts.

I loop the gun strap over my shoulder to free up my hands and help Roc sling the pack around his neck. I tuck my sword into its scabbard and use Roc’s sword to cut his hands free. I’m wasting too much time, but it will be easier with neither of us bound. I grab Roc’s hand to ensure we can stay together.

Although I was quite observant as we approached the hub—looking for side passages, dangerous obstacles, etc.—I’m still worried that at any moment we might slam directly into a rock wall or boulder, ending our smooth escape and breaking our Sun Dweller noses.

I count the strides as we run, trying to estimate where the first side tunnel is. I know we’re getting close. “Slow up, Roc,” I say. I pull him to the left until I brush against the tunnel wall. “Stay along the wall.”

I release his hand and feel along the wall, moving more quickly now that I have something to guide me. We hear a cry from behind, as one of our pursuers enters the tunnel. They can’t see us, but we can see them—a half-dozen torches glow behind us.

Suddenly the wall gives way to my left. “This way,” I hiss, turning the corner and continuing to use the wall as a guide. I know our only hope is to make enough turns that they’ll have to continuously split up to ensure they don’t miss us.

“Faster,” I whisper. I pick up the pace, moving rapidly along the wall. Roc is awesome, obeying my commands to perfection and moving noiselessly behind me.

“Switch sides,” I say, pushing off from the wall and wandering blindly until I find the wall on the opposite side.

I hear voices behind us. They aren’t cries from the chase anymore—more like a discussion. Deciding what to do at the side tunnel. Who will search it versus who will continue down the main tunnel. I ignore them and keep feeling for the next gap.

It comes soon, leading off diagonally to the right. “Bear right,” I say, moving into a new tunnel. If the men do what I expect them to do—continue cutting their numbers at each fork in the road—it will mean that six will follow us down the side tunnel, and now only three will pursue us into the angled tunnel tributary.

I move even faster, running now, praying it’s not a dead end. It’s freaking scary running in complete darkness, especially when you have no idea what’s up ahead. At any moment we could fall into a deep pit, crashing onto jagged rock spikes at the bottom. Or we might plunge into the depths of an icy underwater river with a fierce current, sucking us deeper underground where we’ll drown.

Because of fate, or the blessings of a higher power, or just plain old dumb luck, none of those things happen. In fact, the best possible thing happens: we reach a small tunnel hub. The rock wall gives way to my right, but I can tell it isn’t a new tunnel because of the arc of the wall. Typically a tunnel hub links between four and eight other tunnels. I have no idea how many this hub will have, but it doesn’t really matter. As long as the guys behind us don’t guess right.

“Hub,” I say for Roc’s benefit. “Count with me. We’ll take the third side tunnel on the right.”

“Yes, sir,” Roc says, managing to mock me even in the worst situation.

I pass a gap in the hub wall. “One,” I say.

“One,” Roc parrots.

The next gap is almost immediately after the first. “Two.”

“Two.”

The third gap is a bit further, but only by a yard or two. “Three,” I say, cutting sharply to the right.

I barely hear Roc’s muffled, “Three,” as the floor drops away beneath me.

Chapter Seventeen

Adele

Elsey is saying something beside me, but I’m not listening, lost in my thoughts. Then I realize her head is cocked to the side and she’s staring at me as we walk. She’s asked me a question.

“Wha…what?” I say. She gives me a look. “Sorry, I’m just a little…distracted.”

“Have you met Tristan before?”

“No,” I say.

“Then how’d he know your name?”

“From the news I s’pose.”

“Do you think he’s de—”

“No!” I exclaim, louder than I’d planned. My voice echoes dangerously through the caverns. Ahead of us, Cole and Tawni stop and look back—Cole glares at me while Tawni stands with her hands on her hips.

“Sorry,” I whisper. “No more talking for now, El.”

We walk for the next three hours in silence. We don’t take any side tunnels, afraid that we’ll get turned around and end up going in circles. The tunnel gradually gets thinner and the ceiling lower, until we’re forced to march in single file, slightly stooped, Cole then Tawni then Elsey then me. It’s claustrophobic.

When my back begins to ache so badly from the awkward posture that I think I can’t go any further, I hear an elated cry ahead of me. I hasten my steps, realizing I’ve fallen quite far behind. A minute or so later, the tunnel emerges into a small alcove. By small I mean the four of us are barely able to fit. But that’s not what made someone—Tawni, I think—cry out.

I gasp at the wall of water before us. Our path is completely blocked by a waterfall, streaming so effortlessly from above that it appears as smooth as a mirror, the surface marred only by Tawni’s hand, which is stuck into the flow.

“It’s cold,” she announces, cupping her hand and taking a small sip. “And clean, too, I think.”

After our long day of marching, we don’t need further invitation. We line up along the waterfall, drinking until the water is dribbling down our chins, soaking our clothes. It feels wonderful. After we satisfy our thirst, we wash our arms, legs and faces, feeling refreshed for the first since escaping the Pen.

The waterfall alcove is as good a place as any to stop, so we do, rationing the food in our packs, which are feeling lighter and lighter.

“What should we do?” Tawni asks. I dread backtracking, trying to find another tunnel to go down, more of the same rough rock walls and single file marching.

“I’m going to see what’s behind that waterfall,” I say, standing up.

“Be careful,” Tawni cautions, “it might drop into a pit.”

“Cole, hold me back,” I say.

Cole joins me at the waterfall and holds my left arm with two hands, lowering himself into a well-leveraged crouch.

I push my hand into the streaming water. It tickles my skin and splashes me in the face, so I turn my head to avoid getting water in my eyes. I force my arm further in, until the water is hitting my elbow, and then my shoulder. Still my hand hasn’t made it through.

“You got me?” I say.

“Yeah,” Cole grunts, straining a bit. “Not too much further though.”

With a deep breath, I duck my head into the icy stream, gasping slightly when the water hits me. All of my weight is being held by Cole now, as I lean over the edge of whatever abyss the falls empty into.

And then I’m through. Although the water is all around me, I can tell that my fingers aren’t being pelted anymore. Mission accomplished. I try to lean back, but gravity’s hold is too strong. In fact, I feel like I’m being pulled downwards. Behind me I can feel Cole’s fingers slipping off my arm as water pours down my head and shoulder.

I’m going forward, not back, that much I know. If I simply let myself slip from Cole’s grasp, I’ll fall awkwardly, potentially hitting my head on a rock, and will most definitely end up taking a dive to wherever all the water’s going. I have no other choice.

I wrench my arm free from Cole and leap.

The water pummels me from above as I fly through the air, as if the liquid has suddenly grown arms and is grabbing at me, trying to pull me down. For all I know, there might be nothing behind the waterfall, just a big dark void, spiraling downward all the way to the earth’s molten core.

My foot lands on something hard and twists to the side. I let out a slight cry and tumble over, skinning an arm on the unforgiving tunnel floor. Complete darkness surrounds me. I don’t have a light. I lie on the ground for a moment, panting, my heart beating faster than a miner’s in a rock cart race. I can hear water rushing all around me. Not just behind, but in front, too. At first I think it’s just the echo of the waterfall I jumped through, but when I crawl forward a few feet, I find that another waterfall blocks my way.

Suddenly, I have a desire to leap through the next waterfall. And then the one after that, if there is one. Hesitating for a moment, I come to my senses and feel my way back to the original waterfall. Through the tinkling water, I can hear faint voices yelling. I jump back through.

Slam!

I crash into Cole, who’s just on the other side. His reflexes are quick and he manages to half catch me in his big arms, dragging me to the ground with him as I bowl him over.

Cole is on his feet in a second, his face darkening even more than it already is. “Of all the stupid, childish things to do!” he roars, looming over me.

Of course, being me, I’m shocked by the reaction and just stare at him.

I look around slowly and see that Tawni is hugging Elsey, who is crying, tears rolling over her lips. Then it dawns on me. They thought I was dead. I jumped through a mysterious waterfall, let out a scream, and then they didn’t hear anything from me. I hadn’t even thought to—or bothered to—yell back to them that I was okay.

“I was going to fall,” I say dumbly.

“Tawni was about to help me pull you back when you jumped.”

“Oh.”

“You scared your sister half to death. All of us, Adele.”

“Sorry,” I say weakly.

“Not good enough,” Cole says.

“Really sorry?” I say it like a question, which also is not good enough. “Look,” I continue quickly, “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. It was really, really stupid. Please forgive me. El?”

Elsey pulls herself away from Tawni and runs to me, throwing her arms around me and holding me so tightly I can barely breathe. By the time she releases me she’s almost as wet as I am. “Of course I forgive you,” she says. “I thought you were gone.”

“I’ll never leave you,” I say.

“You will if you keep doing stupid things like that,” Cole grumbles.

His forgiveness will take longer to earn.

Tawni comes over and puts an arm around me. “Try to be more careful. We’re like family now.”

A wave of emotion wells up unexpectedly. I get choked up, literally trying to swallow her words down as they seem to get stuck a dozen times in my throat. I’m teary-eyed, but not to the point of overflowing. It’s been so long since I’ve had any real friends and now I’ve grown closer to these two in just a couple of days. Wild, thrilling, scary, emotional days, yeah, but still only days.

I realize I love them both. Tawni for her good heart, logical mind, and overflowing compassion for others. Cole for his quiet strength, fierce loyalty, and righteous anger—I don’t even mind his temper.

I wave Cole over, and after a few seconds’ pause, he joins us in a group hug. I’ve never felt more loved in my life.

It only lasts about a minute—a glorious, beautiful minute—before Cole gets embarrassed. He releases us and says, “Uh, what was behind the water anyway?”

“A landing and then another waterfall,” I say.

“This has the makings of a comedy sketch,” he says, managing a slight grin. His face has returned to its normal dark color.

Note to self: group hugs diffuse tempers, I think.

I grin back. “Why don’t you and I go check it out?” When Cole gives me an I-don’t-think-so look, I quickly add, “No more insane leaps of faith, I promise. I just have a good feeling about where this might lead.” And I do. Something about it just feels right. Or at least more right than going back. Plus this tunnel will be safe for us. No one who actually knows their way around the Lonely Caverns would ever think to go down this particular tunnel.

“Fine,” Cole says grudgingly. “How far is the jump?”

“Maybe five feet,” I say.

Cole nods. “Ladies first. When you get across, move back and I’ll jump five seconds after you.”

Elsey looks worried so I give her an extra hug. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be back in just a couple of minutes.”

“I’ll never forget you,” she says dramatically.

“Yeah, you, too, El.”

I grab two of the waterproof flashlights that we stole from Tawni’s parents, hand one to Cole, and then easily leap through the waterfall onto the landing. I flick on the flashlight and move back. A few seconds later Cole splashes through the liquid wall.

The light doesn’t reveal anything unexpected. We’re in a tiny section of nondescript cave that, except for the waterfalls at either end, could have been anywhere in the caverns.

“How are we going to test the next waterfall?” Cole says.

“Simple—we jump through,” I say.

“You said you’d be careful. That doesn’t sound careful.”

“I am going to be careful,” I say, smirking. “You’re going to try it first this time.”

Cole’s reaction confirms that he bought it. His eyes narrow, he looks at the ceiling, and he throws his hands over his head. It’s good to know he’s gullible sometimes. “I’m just kidding, Cole. Temper, temper.”

His face softens and he even manages a smile. “Good one,” he admits. “So what’s the real plan?”

“Chuck a rock and listen for the sound.” Maybe it isn’t a much better plan, but it’s still better.

Cole shrugs and pokes around along the side of the tunnel with his flashlight until he finds a decent-sized rock. “Should make plenty of noise,” he comments.

“Do it.”

Hefting it over his shoulder like a miner, he gets a running start and launches it into the waterfall. We both put our ears close to the streaming water, and are rewarded a second later when we hear the rock crack against something hard. The sound comes so quickly that it’s unlikely the rock fell very far.

“It might’ve hit a sheer wall and dropped straight down,” Cole points out.

“It sounded like it bounced.”

Cole nods. “Ladies first,” he says.

“Wuss.”

Cole suddenly scoops me up and makes like he’s going to throw me through the fall. Yeah—I scream. “No, no, no!”

He puts me down. “You looked really scared,” he says.

“Good one.”

Turning back to the waterfall, I get a running start and plow through it, leading with the waterproof flashlight. I emerge on the other side amidst a spray of water. Surprise, surprise. It’s another mini-tunnel, with yet another waterfall at the end.

“C’mon through!” I yell.

Cole arrives and laughs when he sees the wall of water cascading down from the roof. “How much you wanna bet when we try to go back there’s always another waterfall?” he says.

The thought of being stuck in an endless cycle of waterfalls and sections of cave, coupled with the fact that I’m soaked to the skin, makes me shiver. “No bet, but I hope you’re wrong.”

The rock Cole threw is lying in front of us, slightly chipped but large enough to be effective again. The stone is heavy, but I manage to heft it with both hands, swinging it from side to side once and releasing it through the waterfall. A second later we hear the same telltale clatter.

“Same time?” Cole says, extending his hand.

Corny? Absolutely. But I’ve always wanted to do something like that, so I nod and grab his hand. We mouth a count to three and then jump through simultaneously. This time we’re in for a surprise.

First of all, we don’t need our flashlights anymore. Dull light slides into the tunnel beyond us. There’s another waterfall, but not like before. It isn’t a wall of water blocking our path. Instead, the tunnel ends in a small pool of water, which is fed from underground rivers pouring in on either bank. The pool overflows at the far side, dropping off into the cave where the light is coming from.

I glance at Cole and then we walk forward, perfectly synchronized. Without talking about it, we wade straight into the water. It rises above my waist to my belly button, whereas for Cole it only gets to his hips.

We reach the end of the pool, where the water tumbles over the edge. My heart stops and I gasp. Spectacular! is the word that comes to mind when I see the view. We’re on the edge of a cliff, looking out upon a Moon Dweller city. Like most man-made Moon Dweller cities, thick stone beams rise high above the buildings, from floor to roof, protecting against major cave-ins.

Around the edge of the cliff, numerous waterfalls pour out into a massive reservoir that runs along the edge of the cavern. Each waterfall is different, but equally magnificent. Some are thin, high streams, skimming the edge of the cliff and cascading down in an unpredictable liquid spray, while others are thick, powerful falls, exploding in a thunderous display of power and beauty. And there is everything in between, too.

Our particular waterfall is of average height compared to the others, but still rises at least fifty feet in the air. By peering over the edge we can see that we’re on a rock overhang, which allows the water to pour into the reservoir unobstructed. Although I’m not really afraid of heights, I pull back from the edge, feeling slightly lightheaded.

“Damn,” Cole says. “The good news: we’ve made it to the sixteenth subchapter, also known as Waterfall Cave. The bad news: there’s no way down.”

“Except to jump,” I say.

“If you’re crazy.”

I’m not any keener to launch myself down a waterfall than Cole is, but it does make sense, in a twisted logic sort of way. “We’ve got to get into the sixteenth subchapter, right?” Cole nods, biting back a response. “So, if we find another tunnel that leads there, an easier one, it will likely end at a travel checkpoint and we’ll have to show our papers. We don’t have any papers, Cole. Plus, our faces are all over the news. We’ll be recognized and apprehended immediately. Our only choice is to do something crazy.”

Cole looks over the edge again, biting on his lip as he considers my proposal.

The dull light is coming from the city’s overhead cavern lights. The brightness is about normal for daytime in the Moon Realm, so it might be anytime between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. “We’ll wait until it starts to get dark so we won’t be seen. It’s a reservoir, I’m sure it’s deep enough.”

At that moment Tawni and Elsey splash into the tunnel, panic written all over their faces.

Chapter Eighteen

Tristan

We awake to a piercing shriek that echoes through the caves. I have no idea where I am or how I got here. It’s becoming a bit of a bad habit for me.

“What…was…that?” Roc says from beside me.

“I don’t know, but I’m not sticking around to find out,” I say. I try to sit up but find it’s impossible. My arms are tied to my sides, my feet together. It feels like I’m in a straitjacket.

“Oh God,” Roc says. “What now?”

We hear another piercing scream and then high-pitched frantic cackling. The cackling continues for a bit, sometimes rising in volume and other times lessening. It makes it hard to tell where and how far away it’s coming from.

“What do we do?” Roc says.

“Wait,” I say. We don’t have much of a choice. We’re lying in the dark, bound as tight as a caterpillar in a cocoon, with no idea where we are. Waiting seems like the only option. “Do you remember what happened?” I ask.

“All I remember is the ground dropping away and then sliding a bit. Then everything went black.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” This is not good. We’ve successfully managed to escape one captor, only to find ourselves at the mercy of another. One that might be much less likely to give us food and water.

“Let us go!” Roc screams suddenly, scaring the bejesus out of me.

“Bloody hell, Roc. What was that?”

“Sorry. I’ve been awake for a while, trying to get you to wake up, too. I guess I’m going a little stir crazy.”

“Ya think?”

“Are my delectable delights ready for tasting?” a shaky woman’s voice calls from somewhere. More cackling.

Now I know we’re in real trouble. Whoever this lady is, she’s madder than a wingless bat. “Roll,” I hiss, turning over and forcing my body to move toward Roc’s voice. I bang into him before he has a chance to get going. He finally gets the hint. Two revolutions, three. Four, five, six. As I come out of my sixth spin, I’m blinded by a light shining directly in my eyes.

“Hee hee hee! Are my scrumptious scamperers scampering again?” the woman’s voice says from right next to me.

When she shifts the light into Roc’s eyes I get a glimpse of her face. I cringe. Her head is mostly bald, with only a few wisps of gray hair protruding from her scalp. She has no eyebrows and a bit of dark stubble on her chin. Her nose is long, overhanging and casting a shadow on her thin white lips. Her blue eyes might be pretty were they not on her face and filled with madness.

“My palettable pretties are awake!” she exclaims, showing off a mouth with only a handful of teeth, perhaps seven or eight total. Her red tongue looks abnormally long, like a serpent’s, glossing over her teeth and lips.

Ignoring us once again, the woman busies herself with something that we can’t see.

“We shouldn’t even be here,” Roc says, a bit of anger entering his voice. It’s unexpected. I’d expect him to sound scared, or at least worried, but no, he sounds angry.

“If you have something to say, Roc, just say it,” I say. Now isn’t the time to pick a fight, but I want to know what’s on Roc’s mind.

“We’re chasing after a girl you’ve never even said two words to,” he spits out.

“Wrong, Roc. I’ve said exactly two words to her,” I snap back, my temperature level rising.

“I don’t think saying Adele! and Run! counts as having spoken to her,” Roc says bitterly, imitating my voice, but making it sound nasally and girly.

“I didn’t make you come!” I growl.

He doesn’t have a response to that, so we both lie in silence, which is worse than arguing, because the old woman is talking to herself. In between speaking to us, she’s saying things like, “A finger for breakfast, a hand for lunch, an ear for dinner, munch, munch, munch!”

That’s when I realize what she’s doing: preparing a fire. And above it is a spit, constructed with a pile of rocks on both ends and a metal bar across them. It’s about the length of a human, I realize.

Roc and I figure it out at the same time. “She’s going to freakin’ eat us, Tristan!” Roc hisses, temporarily forgetting his beef with me.

We can see the flames from the fire casting shadows on the cave walls, and smell the smoke as it blusters off the growing fire.

Suddenly, anger courses through my veins, pumping fresh blood to my extremities. We’ve worked so hard to get this far, taken so many risks, and this woman is going to end our journey before, as Roc pointed out, I’ve had the chance to say more than two words to Adele?

Screw. That.

Pure determination floods my body for the first time in my pampered life. It’s out of my control, my actions those of my body, not my mind.

I spin hard, rolling right at the woman, whose back is still to us. I collide hard with her ankles, tripping her backwards over me. I keep rolling…right into the fire. Like I said: it’s my body doing the thinking, not my mind. It isn’t a great plan, but it’s all I have.

I feel the heat from the flames licking at my torso, trying to penetrate the thick nest of ropes around me, tear through my clothes, scorch my skin. The fire is a cannibal, too. Luckily, the fire is still small enough that my head and legs are outside of its range, although the smoke is choking me. I hold my breath and wait two seconds, three.

When the heat becomes unbearable and I’m sure the ropes must be on fire, I spin backwards and out of the fire. The old woman has staggered to her feet and I collide with her again, once more knocking her over. This time she falls in a heap on top of me, her face coming to rest right in front of my own. Her breath stinks and I can feel her bony knees and elbows poking into my ribs and legs.

“You filthy brat!” she screams, nearly bursting my eardrums and sending a splattering of spit into my eyes.

I can still feel the heat of the flames as they bite at my ropes. I hope the tethers are sufficiently weakened by the fire. They have to be.

I head-butt the woman right between the eyes, causing her to let loose a shriek that should only belong to dark demons from the realm from which nightmares are born. She flops to the side and away from me.

Using every last ounce of strength I can muster, I strain at the bindings, trying to break them. Evidently I lingered in the fire longer than I thought—longer than I probably should have. The ropes break away easily, black and brittle from the flames, which are finally dying.

Scrambling to my feet, I pull away the remaining strands and search for my sword. The old woman is writhing on the cave floor, shrieking and shouting obscenities, clutching at her face. I find the swords crossed on the ground near Roc, next to our pack.

It’s as if I’ve never used my hands before—I’m unable to control them. They’re trembling badly and it takes me more than a minute just to get a grip on my sword. Under normal conditions, cutting the ropes away from Roc would be a simple task, but I feel so shaky I’m afraid I might accidentally amputate an arm or leg.

“Deep breaths,” Roc says, making me realize that I’m breathing in short, ragged huffs. I’m sure my face is wild, probably more crazy-looking than the old woman trying to cook us alive.

I take a deep breath. Then another. It helps. My hands stop shaking, my breathing returns to normal. “Thanks,” I say.

After cutting Roc’s hands free, I hand him the sword, letting him finish the job. The woman has grown surprisingly silent, lying motionless in a heap. When Roc is free, he hands me my sword, which I sheath, retrieves his own sword, and then shoulders the pack.

We’re about to leave when the woman suddenly screams, leaps to her feet with speed and quickness that’s almost supernatural, and charges us, her hands outstretched and curled into clawed hooks.

I scream, and Roc screams even louder. I’m getting pretty sick of the old woman’s antics, and am too tired to consider that she might still be dangerous, which is probably a good thing.

I push her. Hard. Right at the fire. She stumbles and falls into the flames, wailing the whole time. We don’t wait to see what will happen to her.

We run into the darkness, which becomes deeper as we get further from the fire. The space narrows and forms a tunnel, and soon we’re running blind, yet again. Roc manages to get a light out of our pack and flick it on.

We should’ve kept running in the dark. The images that flash into view will forever haunt me, burned into my memory till the day I die.

Skeletons: some fully intact and leaning against the wall; others broken and mangled, scattered on the floor; yet others mounted on the walls like trophies—here a skull, there a foot. It doesn’t take a genius to know they didn’t die from natural causes, that their flesh was bitten off by ragged teeth.

If I hadn’t had so little to eat in the last couple of days I’d throw up all over myself. Instead, I dry heave, as my stomach pulses repeatedly in an attempt to upchuck anything that’s left in it. Roc’s doing the same, bent over his knees, convulsing.

I spit out the little bile that has forced its way into my mouth, steal the light from Roc, and shine it further down the tunnel. The trail of skulls ends just a few feet down the path; nothing blocks our escape.

“C’mon, man,” I say, flicking off the light and tugging at Roc’s elbow. Huddled together, we shuffle through the dark, until I’m sure we’re far enough away from the…the stuff.

I turn the light on just in time to see that the tunnel is curving tight to the left. Roc seems to be recovering, so I release him and let him walk on his own.

It isn’t until we’ve walked for a couple of hours that I feel safe again. Neither of us has spoken, lost in dark thoughts, reliving the horrors we’ve just experienced.

Finally, Roc says, “All those people…” His voice sounds numb, like he still doesn’t really understand what we’ve seen.

“Nothing we can do for them now.”

A few more minutes of silence, and then Roc says, “Tristan, I’m sorry about what I said. I was just scared, that’s all.”

I grit my teeth. As angry as I was when he questioned our pursuit of Adele, I have to admit that there is some truth to it, which makes me even angrier. I feel foolish. Stupid! “No, Roc. You’re right. I dragged you into this mess. And for what? To find some ridiculous Moon Dweller girl who causes me pain every time I get near her. What the hell are we doing out here?”

Roc sighs. “I have thought that at times,” he says. “But then I think how noble it is that you’re taking a risk, defying your father. I don’t know how it’s all going to end, but if we don’t go, we might regret it for the rest of our lives. I feel like maybe we’re meant to be doing this.”

Roc sounds so solemn as he speaks, as if our trek across the Moon Realm is a sacred quest and not just me chasing after some random girl, who happens to be an escaped convict and possibly dangerous. He also makes it sound like we’re in it together. It isn’t my quest, but his, too, and he’s in it to the end. Given the argument we had just before we were about to be roasted on a spit, it’s a complete one-eighty for him.

“So we keep going?” I say.

“I was just trying to make you feel better,” Roc says with a smirk. “It’s not like we have another choice—can’t go back.”

He’s trying to downplay the wisdom in his words, but I know better. He isn’t just trying to make me feel better. He truly believes—like me—that we’re meant to be on the path we’re on, for better or worse. Better would be finding Adele; worse would be falling into the evil clutches of a mad cannibal woman with super strength. My guess: we might end up somewhere in between.

But Roc’s words have more than just cemented my belief that we’re doing the right thing. They also make me think about what we’re doing and why. To this point, it’s been all about finding Adele, keeping her safe, and potentially, if the fake suns and moons and stars of the Sun Realm align, questioning her about why being near her causes me such agony. But now it feels like there’s some deeper purpose to it all, one I want to explore.

“What did you mean when you said you thought we were meant to be doing this?” I ask as we continue walking.

Roc wrinkles up his face, squints his eyes. “I don’t know, it’s probably nothing, but…”

“What?”

“I just feel like we have a chance to make things better. You know, for everyone. I mean, the secrets your father is keeping from the moon and Star Dwellers, people should know that stuff.”

It’s been a while since Roc and I have spoken about my father’s secrets. Well, one particular secret really. I’m one of only a handful of people that know, but I told Roc anyway. At first I was stunned, but later I realized it wasn’t that surprising. It is my father, after all. I don’t see the connection to our current situation, though.

“What’s that got to do with us?” I say.

“I don’t know. It popped into my head just now. It feels like we’re in the middle of something big, or at least something bigger than what we thought.”

“You think Adele’s involved in something?”

“No…I mean, I don’t know, maybe. In any case, that’s not important. What’s important is what we do at the end of all of this, or maybe at the same time, whichever makes more sense. I think we need to tell people about what your father is doing.”

I think about it. I guess I’m not as big a thinker as Roc. I’m so focused on my own little world, my own feelings, that I don’t really consider whether we could—or whether we should—do anything to help other people, particularly the moon and Star Dwellers. I remember during the bombing when the Moon Dwellers helped us, took us in, guided us. People like that deserve a better life.

Despite the plethora of thoughts running through my head, all I reply is, “Maybe you’re right.”

“As usual,” Roc says.

We have no idea where we are, so we just keep walking in a straight line, hoping to emerge from the Lonely Caverns soon. We still have plenty of food in the pack—our Moon Dweller captors hadn’t even bothered to empty it out. Still, if we don’t find our way out soon we’ll have little chance of tracking down Adele.

Thus, I’m ecstatic when we run into one of the main tunnels through the caverns. I’m cautious, too, because I have no idea where our captors were headed—for all I know they might be just in front of or behind us, waiting to pounce. We move swiftly through the main tunnel without incident, meeting no other travelers.

It’s late at night when we reach the entrance to subchapter 16, the land of the waterfall caves. Although we’ve received no authorization to travel within the Moon Realm, we purchased some fake papers before leaving the Sun Realm. As we use them at the border, I keep my head lowered and my hat on to ensure I’m not recognized.

“Mr…Garber…from the Sun Realm,” the border guard says. “It’s a pleasure to have a Sun Dweller in our humble city.” He says something similar to Roc, and lets us both pass straight through. A man wearing miner gear behind us is being patted down for weapons. They’re asking him question after question about his reason for entering subchapter sixteen, whether he’s carrying any weapons, whether he’s received proper authorization to travel intra-Realm, and on and on. Even in his own Realm, being a Moon Dweller hurts this man.

Anger courses through me but I don’t turn around, try to forget about it. Now’s not the time.

At long last we’re back to civilization. Or at least the closest to civilization that my father’s ridiculous taxes allow the Moon Dwellers to be. The subchapter is dark, but has a decent number of street lights. I can’t speak for Roc, but I’m desperate for a real bed.

We head for the commercial district. I can vaguely remember the city zoning—a domed, circular cave with a reservoir around the outside and the city built outwards from the center—from my previous visits, but Roc remembers far better, so I let him lead.

Although we feel relatively safe, we stick to the shadows, avoiding passing directly by any late-night strollers, and choose a deserted street from which to select a hotel. And it’s a good thing we’re careful. We’ve just taken a shortcut through a seedy alley, and are about to turn onto a main street, when we hear a chorus of footsteps moving toward us.

We shrink back into the alley, deep into the shadows, and peer to the street beyond. A group of Sun Dweller troops—at least eight—run past us, moving toward the city center. I only see the leader for a moment as he flashes by, but I’d recognize him anywhere.

Rivet is back in the game.

Chapter Nineteen

Adele

“They’re here!” Tawni exclaims.

“Who?” I ask, above the roar of the waterfall.

Tawni and Elsey splash into the water to join us. They’re breathing hard, already soaked from head to toe like us, a result of jumping through the series of waterfalls.

“Rivet, I think,” Tawni says. “We heard them coming down the tunnel. A man was talking—I think I recognized his voice from the telebox.” Tawni’s eyes are wide and white.

“We don’t know that they’ll come through the waterfalls,” Cole says.

“Yes, they will,” I say. “They’ll have maps. They wouldn’t have wandered down this tunnel by mistake. It’s probably a shortcut.”

“But how will they get down?” Elsey asks. Her eyebrows are raised and her head cocked to the side. She looks more like a child than she has since we rescued her, innocent and naïve.

“They might have ropes,” I say. “But we don’t.”

Finally, Cole agrees with the opinion I’d already voiced. “We’ve got to jump.”

“And it’s got to be fast,” I second. “They could come through any moment.” I glance at the waterfall, expecting Rivet’s scarred face to emerge from the water in slow motion, his teeth replaced with fangs, his fingers sporting daggers for nails.

The waterfall remains untouched.

I feel like the hourglass on our lives is all but empty. We don’t have time to sit around sipping tea and eating muffins and discussing the pros and cons of jumping off a cliff into untested waters. Plus we don’t have any muffins. Or tea.

“Me first, then El, Tawni, and Cole,” I bark. I don’t have time to wait for agreement from the others. Waiting means death.

I step up and jump, not allowing myself any time to chicken out.

I should’ve at least thought about how I would jump. In my mind I’d pictured a perfect swan dive, floating through the air with grace and elegance. But my body instinctively tries to go straight down, feet first. Because of my uncertainty, I end up halfway in between, my body horizontal, chest facing down.

Belly flop time.

My heart is in my throat, and I’m feeling something between utter fear and complete elation. There’s no time to think, but at the last minute I try to turn my body to improve my landing. It doesn’t help.

When my shoulder hits the water I think I might’ve jumped too far and landed on the stone—that’s how hard the impact is. Rather than a splash, I make more of a vicious thwap! when I enter the water. Pain shoots through the nerves in my shoulder, running quickly down my arm and into my hand. When I feel myself sinking, however, I realize it’s the water that has literally put the smack on me.

The water closes in around me and I’m transported into the belly of my childhood nightmares. Falling down the well; thrashing in the water; sinking into oblivion; no way out. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt scared of water. Growing up, my dad forced me to conquer my fear, taught me to swim. Slowly, I grew to love the feeling of water rushing around my body. No! There’s no well—not this time. I can escape this nightmare.

Ignoring the pain and bad memories, I kick upwards. Once, twice, thrice: finally breaking the surface. I want to scream with pain, but I hold it inside me, trying to get through it by punching the water with my uninjured arm.

I look up and realize I’m still directly below the tunnel entrance. By kicking hard, I manage to get far enough away from the landing zone that I won’t accidentally break someone’s fall with my head.

I see Elsey jump. Her launch is more timid than mine was, but far more effective. She drops feet first in a perfect pencil dive, barely making a splash as she cuts through the water. Although I watch closely in case she needs help, I’m not worried about her; like me, El is a strong swimmer, and clearly a better jumper. A few seconds later she bobs up, smiling, like it’s just a normal day down at the swimming hole.

“That was glorious, wasn’t it?” Elsey says, swimming over.

“Not the word I would choose,” I mumble, rubbing my shoulder while treading water using only my feet.

Seconds later, Tawni’s white hair whooshes from above as she executes the perfect swan dive that I’d imagined for myself. “Just great,” I say, my shoulder hurting worse than ever. Or perhaps it’s my pride. It’s definitely one or the other.

At least I did better than Cole, whose big dark body flails down from above like he’s being attacked by an angry horde of flapping bats. In the meantime Tawni has resurfaced, so we all have a good laugh when Cole creates a liquid mountain upon smacking into the water.

My laughter doesn’t last long, however, as twenty seconds pass and Cole has yet to reach the surface. Even under the dim glow provided by the overhead cavern lights, the water looks as black as oil.

I squeal as something grabs me, pulling me under. I kick away from my attacker and come up spluttering. Tawni and Elsey are laughing.

“What the hell was that?” I say.

A deep voice from behind me says, “That was for laughing at me.” It’s Cole.

“How’d you even know I was laughing? You were underwater.”

“I just knew,” Cole says, a twinkle in his dark eyes.

“Well, what about them?” I say, motioning at the other two. “They laughed, too.”

“You were laughing harder,” Cole says, his face as serious as stone.

I shake my head. “Rivet could be right behind us, we shouldn’t be messing around. We’d better keep moving.”

If Rivet and his new gang of men are in the tunnel above us, we never see them, which suits me just fine. I hope I never see his evil mug ever again.

It feels strange being in a Moon Dweller city again. Although we’ve only been out of subchapter 14 for a few days, it’s the longest I’ve ever been away from the place. I know I shouldn’t be nostalgic but I am. Maybe subchapter 14 hasn’t been particularly kind to me as of late, but I still have a ton of happy memories there, before everything got so messed up.

The other weird thing is that we’re just passing through. It feels like after such a long, hard journey through the Lonely Caverns, we should stay awhile, see the sights, try the local fare—I don’t know, something. But that’s not an option. We’re wanted criminals, our faces known across all the Tri-Realms. There are probably plenty of Moon Dwellers who would be willing to help us, but we have no idea who we can trust. Someone pretending to be our friend could turn us in a second later, seeking a reward.

We’re dripping wet, traveling on the outskirts of town, trying to decide what to do next, when Cole says, “I don’t think this city has been bombed, has it? Just normal Moon Realm deterioration.”

We can’t see much from where we are, so I stop, trying to remember the view from above the waterfall. The city had looked pretty amazing, and definitely intact, a far cry from the smoldering wreckage of our subchapter.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“I hope they stop that dreadful bombing soon,” Elsey says.

“Me, too, El. Me, too.”

“I’m simply famished,” Elsey says.

I’ve been ignoring my hunger for three days now, but suddenly at the thought of food, my stomach constricts, groans, twists up.

“I could eat,” Cole says, opening his pack. It seems like he’s always hungry.

“Not that stuff again,” Elsey says. Despite her overdramatic description of the food in the orphanage, she’s already growing tired of our canned beans.

“We could all use some real food,” Tawni notes.

“Sure, let’s just waltz into town, looking like we crawled out of a sewer, pop into a café, shove a fistful of Nailins at the owner, and walk out with a bunch of food,” I say.

“For your information, I was thinking of something a bit more discreet,” Tawni says.

I sense the slightest hint of anger in Tawni’s voice, which is unlike her. If she starts getting mad at my misplaced, ill-timed sarcasm, this is going to turn into a long trip. Perhaps it is time to take a risk—for all our benefit.

“I could go steal some loaves of bread,” Cole offers. “I’m good at that.”

To be honest, I’m shocked. Now that I know the true story—that there was no bread, only heartache and pain—I can’t believe he can still make such a joke. To me it’s more proof of his strength. That he can be such a happy, funny, good person, after all he’s been through, is simply incredible. I even manage to laugh at his joke—because I know he wants me to.

Tawni smirks, quickly snapping out of her rare bad mood. “I was thinking more like we wait until nightfall, sneak into the city, and have Elsey pay someone to get us some food.”

“Why Elsey?” I ask.

“Because her face will be less likely to be recognized,” Tawni says, shrugging. “I’m sure she’s been on the news, too, but she’s not a wanted criminal.”

“I don’t know…” I say.

“I’ll do it,” Elsey says. When I frown, she says, “I can do this, Adele. I know I can. Please let me help.”

I take a deep breath. It makes sense and I’m tired of beans, too. “Okay. On one condition: that we stay close by in case you have any trouble.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Elsey says, waving me off as if my suggestion is the most obvious thing in the world.

The cavern returns to its natural shade of black as night falls and the lights are extinguished. The street lights remain on, but barely cast enough light to highlight the roads. We wait patiently in the dark, slowly drying out, until we’re sure it’s safe. Although I’m anxious to keep moving, I actually enjoy the break, and use it as a chance to speak to Elsey.

“Are you okay, El?” I ask. Cole and Tawni have walked away, on a mission to find the least conspicuous way into the city.

“I am now,” Elsey says.

“But before?”

“I tried to be optimistic, like Father always taught us,” she says, wrinkling her button nose. “But I was depressed sometimes. If it wasn’t for Ranna I would have felt so alone, I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Tried to run away?”

“Maybe.” Elsey looks at me with a seriousness that is far older than her age. “Do you miss Mother and Father?”

“Of course, El.”

“Oh, so do I. So much I can hardly breathe sometimes.”

“We’ll find them,” I say, making a promise I intend to keep.

“I’m so glad you made friends, Adele. How long have you known Cole and Tawni?”

After hearing how tough things were for her, the last thing I want to do is depress her with my sad story in the Pen, and how, until a few days ago, I’d felt even more alone than her. But I also can’t lie to my sister—never could. “I’ve known them a little while.”

“And Tristan? I know you told me the story, but have you really only been interested in him for a few days?”

“I’m not interested in him, El. Not really. I just want to know why I get a headache whenever he’s around, that’s all.”

“Mmm,” she says.

I don’t have a chance to ask her what she means by that because the others return, excited.

“We found a route that’s pretty dark the whole way to the center,” Cole says, smiling.

They’re still thinking about getting real food, but I’m thinking about what to do afterwards. We can’t stay in subchapter 16—not with Rivet and his gang roaming somewhere nearby. We need a plan to get to the Northern subchapters, specifically subchapter 26, where my dad might be a prisoner. Camp Blood and Stone.

“Okay, food first,” I concede. “Then what?” I hate asking the question without having some brilliant suggestion, but I can’t seem to think. Sometimes I feel like I’ve only got two brain cells, and even when I rub both of them together nothing seems to happen. This is one of those times.

“We’ve been talking about that, too,” Tawni says. “And I think we’ve got it figured out. Why do we need to keep trekking through the dangerous inter-Realm caverns, being chased by a gang of bloodthirsty men with a license to kill us, when we could ride all the way north?”

“Ride?” I say. “You mean, like on a train?”

“Of course a train, what else? They have night express trains, direct from subchapter to subchapter. We could disguise ourselves as nomads, cover our faces, and buy a ticket. Even if they recognize us, we’ll be long gone before anyone has a chance to do anything about it.”

The thought of saving us hundreds of miles of walking and getting to my dad faster at the same time is tantalizing, but it also screams suicide. “I don’t know…” I say. “Seems a bit risky.”

Cole says, “This whole thing is risky. All I know is we’ve got to do something unexpected or we’re gonna get caught. Let’s give it a try, and if we get caught, I promise to let you say ‘I told you so.’”

“I’ll relish the opportunity,” I say, not mentioning the fact that if we get caught we’ll be dead.

The city is beckoning to us, and the thought of food is making my mouth water. As planned, we pick our way through the city via alleys and small side streets, staying out of sight like ghosts in the night.

Eventually we find a small café that seems to be open and still taking customers.

“Showtime,” Cole says, gesturing to Elsey.

I scowl, still not completely comfortable with my sister’s role in our operation, but I bite my tongue and manage to keep my thoughts to myself. Before I can even consider changing my mind, Elsey gives me a quick hug and sneaks away, sticking to the shadows, moving toward the café, which is conveniently located on the corner of our alley and the main street.

I watch as she spots a Dumpster and moves behind it, peeking out at the road.

A family of four passes her: a mom, a dad, two girls. They remind me of my own family in the old days. The girls look happy, holding hands with their parents and skipping along. It’s good to know that even in the Moon Realm some people are still happy. Of course it helps that their parents haven’t been abducted and their city bombed, but still, happy is happy.

Elsey wisely ignores the family, waits for a better target. An old man with a bad limp and a rickety old cane hobbles past. Perfect. Elsey evidently thinks he’s a perfect candidate, too, because she sticks her head out a bit further and must make a noise, because the man stops and peers into the gloom.

He changes direction and moves toward her, taking ages to reach her behind the Dumpster. I tense slightly, ready to spring into action if needed. I’m not sure what I expect; I guess that maybe the old man is faking his injury and will suddenly smack her over the head with the cane and carry her away. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t.

Apparently, Elsey is able to convince him to help, because he hobbles off a minute later, and Elsey gives us the okay sign using her index finger and thumb. I reply with a thumbs-up.

Waiting for the man is as boring as watching rocks being eroded by the flow of an underground stream. He takes so long. I swear he must be in there negotiating a peace treaty, not just ordering some food. In any event, I manage to keep my eyes open until he reemerges holding big cloth bags. He struggles under the weight of the bags, readjusting his grip and switching arms several times before finally reaching my sister. I see her hand him the pouch of Nailins as payment. As we’d instructed her, she waits until the man limps onto the street and out of sight before tiptoeing back to where we’re hiding.

Her eyes are wide with excitement and her smile gleeful. “How’d I do?” she asks.

“You were perfect,” I say, meaning it.

“You did really well,” Tawni adds.

“Your first solo mission was a complete success,” Cole says.

Elsey beams. By the way she looks at him I think Cole’s compliment makes her the happiest.

It’s amazing what a little money can buy these days. The spread of food is impressive, even with four of us eating. We each get a sourdough roll, two pieces of bacon, a sizable hunk of some kind of cheese we never could’ve afforded growing up, a sort of root we call hyro, a cinnamony potato dish, and a small flask of warm tea. The icing on the cake is literally the icing on the cake. We split two pieces of dark chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Down in the Moon Realm—at least in our subchapter—chocolate is scarce, and very expensive, so the fact that the café had it, that we could afford it, and that the old man thought to ask for it, is a small miracle. My only mistake: eating way too much too fast. By the time I finish eating I’ve crossed the line between pleasantly full and disgustingly stuffed.

“Uhhh,” I groan.

Elsey is nibbling daintily at the corner of her cake. “You okay, sis?”

“Other than being on the verge of throwing up, I’m fine.”

“Here, a little extra cake might help wash it down,” Cole suggests, pushing the chocolate toward my face. I don’t even have a chance to tell him how obnoxious he is, because the food is coming back up.

I barely have time to turn my head before I throw up. Although it’s disgusting and unpleasant, I feel better afterwards. I even let Cole’s antics go without revenge.

When we finish eating, we pack the leftover food (which isn’t much), and begin the second phase of our plan: operation night train.

I’m still not very comfortable with the idea, but I’ve committed to it, which means I’m going to do everything in my power to help us be successful. It’s just the way I am. For me it’s all in or all out—no middle ground, no wishy-washy, no excuses.

Continuing to use back streets, we manage to get pretty close to the rail station. We hide in the shadows, performing reconnaissance, waiting for the right time to make a move. The area around the station looks pretty deserted, although every once and a while someone passes by and goes inside. In the entire subchapter, the lighting is the best in this area, which is good for most travelers. Unfortunately, we aren’t most travelers, and would prefer utter darkness.

After twenty minutes or so of no one passing us, Cole hisses, “We can’t wait here all night.”

“Now or never,” I agree. We each don the hoods attached to our tunics. It’s a cool night, so the hoods are unlikely to draw any special attention to us.

We leave the safety of the dark and stride out into the light. We walk side by side, at a normal but purposeful pace, eyes ahead, ears listening for any signs of discovery. With every footstep I expect to hear a shout, a whistle, alarm bells, something. Something saying We gotcha!

We make it inside the terminal without drama.

The ticket window is straight ahead. As we previously agreed, I take the lead on buying the tickets. I walk up, trying to appear confident, like I buy train tickets all the time, like I belong here. At the same time I keep my head lowered slightly, trying to cast a shadow across at least part of my face.

“Three adults and one child for the next train to subchapter twenty-six,” I say, attempting to keep my voice steady. I lock my knees to stop them from shaking.

At first the guy behind the counter—a short, grumpy-looking fellow with gray stubble and more nose hairs protruding from his nostrils than most people have in their nose—is indifferent to me, his voice monotone, like a robot.

“Three and one to twenty-six,” he repeats. “Next train available…”—he pauses, consults a timetable—“…departs in six minutes. Express train.”

He’s just going through the motions, which is fine by me, but I know the hard part is still to come.

It comes. “I need travel vouchers for all adults,” he says, finally glancing up over his glasses at my face. His boring, emotionless expression changes in an instance. It’s just a slight twitch, a flash of recognition in his eyes, but I can see that he knows who I am. Smartly, he pretends not to. I wonder if he’s got a big red security button somewhere underneath his desk. I can see both his hands, but he might be able to press it with his knees.

“Look, buddy, we don’t have travel vouchers, but you probably already guessed that. But we do have this.” I spill the pouch of shiny gold Nailins out onto his desk. “If you keep quiet you can have them all.”

At the sight of the money, the guy’s eyes light up and his fat lips twist into a greedy grin. “Done deal,” he says without hesitation. He stamps four tickets and hands them to me in a stack.

I know we aren’t out of the woods yet. Because the guy is willing to accept a bribe, he’s also probably prone to dishonesty, like accepting said bribe while still planning to turn us in to the authorities. At least we have tickets.

With only a few minutes until the train’s departure, we don’t have time to bet on whether the guy will stick to our deal. Instead, we hurry through the automatic ticket turnstiles, praying he’s given us real tickets. With each swipe of one of the tickets, the gates open and allow one of us through.

The train has just pulled into the station, its doors open and waiting for us to board. A few passengers straggle off, but they are so haggard from the long journey that they don’t even look up as we pass.

“Last car,” I say, leading the group into a light jog. The last car will ensure we’re away from any other passengers who happen to jump on the train just before it leaves.

We’re halfway to the rear car when an alarm goes off, blaring through the silent station. Red lights flash. There’s maybe a minute before the train departs.

We run.

I hear a shout from behind us and twist my head to see men jumping over the turnstiles. They aren’t looking for a free ride—that’s for sure. They’re after us. And leading the pack: Rivet.

We run harder. Thirty seconds to departure.

We reach the last car and board. I try the manual door levers but they’re jammed. Just in case I’m not strong enough, Cole tries them, too, but reaches the same conclusion. We’re at the mercy of the train being on time.

Pressing our faces against the glass, we watch as Rivet’s group splits into two. One group, led by a big black guy with a wicked barbed-wire tattoo around his exposed bicep, heads straight for us, trying to beat the doors. The other group, led by the demon—also known as Rivet—veers left and boards the train about three cars in front of us, thus ensuring they’re at worst traveling with us.

I’m not worried about the second group at the moment. The first group is closing in, running full speed, their eyes heavy with violence.

The doors start to close.

The guys are so close I think they’ll make it. My instinct is to shrink back toward the back of the car, away from the doors. Cole has a better idea.

“C’mon,” he says, urging me to move up to the closing doors. We inch forward until we’ve created a human barricade. The big guy in the front tries to charge straight through us. Without planning it, Cole and I kick at the same time. I catch him hard in the knee and hear a crunch as it bends backwards the wrong way. Simultaneously, Cole lays into him with a boot in the face, using his foot like a sledgehammer.

“Argh!” the dude roars, falling backwards into his friends.

The doors close.

* * *

I can see them through the glass, several cars back, pacing around, punching the walls, acting like they’re on drugs. Maybe they are. Something to make them even more violent—as if they need that.

At first I think there might be a way for them to get to us while the train is still moving, but now I don’t think so. We’re seemingly safe for the moment. I know it won’t last.

We haven’t spoken since the train started moving. I don’t think any of us has the words, or knows what to say. Even Elsey seems to be lost in her thoughts, perhaps mulling over the flash of violence she witnessed by me at the train doors. Tawni is standing in the corner, leaning against the wall, staring out the window as the rocky tunnel flashes by. Cole is seated, his head down, one foot tapping rapidly on the floor.

According to Cole, who seems to have a pretty good handle on these sorts of matters, the train ride will only take two hours, being an express. Although I know we’re traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, the ride is so smooth it barely feels like we’re moving.

An hour goes by in silence. Typically I’d be comfortable with the quiet, as I grew used to it during the endless hours I spent alone in the Pen, but for some reason I can’t stand it now. With every second that goes by, the screaming in my head gets worse, until I can’t take it anymore.

“Urrrrr!” I grunt, making a weird growling, gurgling noise from the back of my throat.

Everyone looks at me. Elsey grins nervously. Tawni raises an eyebrow. Cole laughs, of course. “Are we there yet?” he asks, purposely sounding as whiny as possible.

I take a deep breath. I need to calm down, try to get a grip on the anxiety I’m feeling. I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack.

“I hope so,” I say, trying to sound tough. I’m secretly dreading our arrival, afraid of not being able to protect my friends, my sister. Afraid of what Rivet will do. Afraid of what Rivet will tell me about Tristan if I get the chance to ask him. At the same time, the waiting might be worse. It’s like pulling a splinter of rock from your foot. Although the pain is minor with it in your skin, over time it becomes more and more uncomfortable, until it’s unbearable, leaving you making weird grunting-gurgling noises like some sick animal. Left untreated, the splinter pushes deeper into the skin, becoming a part of you. The only treatment is to pull it out, swiftly and painfully. When the doors open at the end of the line, we’ll have no choice but to remove our own rock splinter.

“What are they going to do to us?” Elsey says, sounding like a normal kid, instead of my older-than-her-years sister.

I want to reassure her, but I also don’t want to lie to her. I hesitate for a moment, trying to formulate the right words, but Cole answers for me. “Nothing,” he says. “They’re not gonna touch any of you. I’ll make sure of that.”

Coming from Cole, it isn’t just talk. As he cracks his knuckles, I can see a level of determination in his face that exceeds even his normal level of strength. As much as it comforts me, it also scares me, not because of what he might do to Rivet and his gang, but because of what they might do to him. Although I don’t voice it, I vow at that moment to do whatever it takes to protect my friends, even if it costs me my life. There are some things more important than your own life. Like friendship, and love, and trust, and goodness.

We speak very little during the final hour, but for some reason it doesn’t bother me anymore. I’ve made my vow, as has Cole, so there’s nothing else to talk about. We have no strategy, except to run from Rivet until we’re forced to stand and fight. Then we will fight.

I feel the train slowing and my heart skips a beat.

Chapter Twenty

Tristan

“It’s Rivet!” I hiss. “What do you make of it?”

“Exercise,” Roc says.

“Exercise?”

“Yeah. They’re just out for a midnight run. You know, to keep in shape.”

“No chance they’re in pursuit of Adele?” I say sarcastically.

“Nah.”

I’m glad to have the old Roc back, the one who jokes in even the most serious situations. “I think we should join them, I’m feeling a bit out of shape, too.”

Roc nods, grinning.

We steal from the alley and jog along the street, moving silently on only our toes. We probably don’t even need to be as careful as we are, as Rivet and his men are making so much noise they wouldn’t hear the grind of a drilling machine following them.

Our quarry reaches the city center and enters the train terminal. We follow as close as we dare. The moment we enter the station, the emergency sirens go off. I whirl around, half-expecting a squadron of troops to surround us, but there’s no one.

“Hurry,” Roc says, “we’re going to lose ’em.”

I spin around and start chasing Rivet again, who’s doubled his speed, heading straight for the turnstiles to a waiting train. Ticketless, his men hop the barrier. Finally, I can see why they’re in such a hurry.

Four figures are running along the platform, evidently aiming to board the last car. They’re all wearing hoods, so it’s difficult to distinguish individual features, other than height. But still I know. There are four of them, one much shorter than the others. Plus Rivet is chasing them. It’s her. Adele. Her sister. The other two fugitives.

Following Rivet’s lead, we launch ourselves over the ticket machines. There’s no way we’re going to catch Rivet’s men, much less Adele and her friends. I extend an arm to stop Roc.

“Wait, let’s see what happens,” I say.

We watch as Rivet’s men split up, half boarding a car in the middle of the train and the other half zeroing in on the last car. We’re flush with the doors of the first car, which start to close. One of Rivet’s men tries to jump on the rear car but is met by at least two feet, which knock him back.

I slip through the crack in the doors and pull Roc in after me.

My mind is racing. We’re on the train. Rivet and his men are on the train. Adele, her sister, her friends. We couldn’t have coordinated it any better if we’d tried.

“It’s like fate,” Roc says, reading my mind. Maybe my father was wrong about fate after all.

“Where are we going?”

As if in response to my question, the train starts moving and the speaker drones. “Nonstop to subchapter twenty-six.”

“Subchapter twenty-six? But that’s where—”

“Camp Blood and Stone,” Roc finishes. It’s another classified thing I’ve told him.

“But why would Adele go there?” I say, thinking aloud. It hits me like a sucker punch from a one-armed man. “Her parents!” I exclaim.

Roc’s eyes widen. “Yes,” he says. “It has to be. The reporter said they were traitors. There’s nowhere else they would’ve been taken.”

“She’s trying to get her family back. First her sister and now her mom and dad.”

Just then I have a flashback from the last thrilling train ride we had. Waiting in the car. Watching as the two guards switched cars, moving along the train toward us. Slipping onto our train. The fight.

I rush down the car, not bothering to explain to Roc. Reaching the end I tug at the door. It’s either stuck, locked, or not a real door, because it won’t budge. I peer through the glass window, looking into the next car. It’s empty. So is the one after that. I’m not sure how many cars are empty before I spot movement. I can barely make out moving black blobs several cars in front of us.

“It’s an express night train,” Roc says, approaching from behind. “There’s no car-to-car access. The train won’t stop because of the security alarms either. They’re fully automated.”

“How do you now so much about Moon Realm trains?”

“That’s what they pay me the big money for.”

When I turn around, Roc’s grinning. “What’s so funny?” I say.

“Well, besides my witty sense of humor, the fact that we’re on this crazy train headed for sure death brings a bit of a smile to my face.”

“You’re an odd one,” I say.

“That coming from Mr. Pain-at-first-sight-chase-the-girl-who’s-causing-it-all-over-the-Tri-Realms-getting-kidnapped-by-rebels-and-cannibals.”

“Hey, there was only one cannibal, not plural.”

“True,” he says.

With at least a couple of hours of travel ahead of us, I settle into a booth. Roc selects a seat opposite mine. I think about Adele. Why the hell is she causing me so much pain? Is she even aware she’s doing it? I think about what I’ll say to her if I ever catch up to her, how I’ll demand answers, threaten her if necessary. Although I’m not sure threats will work with her. She’s so different than the girls I’m used to. So much stronger, there’s no doubt about that. The proof: escaping prison, navigating through the Lonely Caverns, fighting off Rivet’s men, attempting a suicide mission to rescue her parents from one of my father’s traitor camps. All pretty gutsy.

But I can also tell there’s a tenderness to her. I felt it when she looked back at me when I was fighting Rivet. Like she felt sad that I should have to struggle for her sake. But still:

The pain.

“Tristan?”

I look at Roc. I’ve been staring into space, but that isn’t unusual for me these days. Roc’s staring at my hands. I look down and realize they’re clasped tightly and I’m running them over and over each other, fiercely massaging them. I stop, separate them, place them on my thighs.

“You okay?” Roc says.

“Uh, yeah. Just a little nervous, I guess.”

“About what to do when the train stops?”

“Not what to do,” I say. “How to do it.”

“You’ll do it,” Roc says. “We’re here for a reason. I sense it.”

I search Roc’s brown eyes for the truth. For a moment I sense it, too, try to snatch it out, but then it fades away, disappearing, just like all the good things in my life always seem to do. Sometimes Roc seems so confident and serious, like now, and other times so helpless, like in the midst of a fight, or when we were captured.

I try to turn my philosophical thoughts off and focus on the task at hand. “Right, I’ll need your help, Roc, there are just too many of them for me to handle on my own.”

Roc’s wise eyes turn fearful in an instant.

“We’ll get through it together. I won’t let anything happen to you,” I say, knowing we might both be dead by day’s end.

Roc nods, purses his lips, seems to resign himself to the certain violence that’s headed our way, like a meteor on a collision course with Earth.

“We’ll have the element of surprise,” I continue, “but that will only help us at the very beginning, so we have to take advantage of it. Rivet will head straight for Adele and we’ll just have to hope she and her friends can hold him off until we get there. We’ll pick off his other men from behind, one at a time. We’ll each take a different one until they’re all gone. Yell if you’re in trouble and I’ll do whatever it takes to get to you. Understood?”

“Yes, sire,” he drones, but I can tell he appreciates the direction.

“Once we’ve downed all the men, I’ll head for Rivet while you try to find a safe place for Adele to hide. They may think we’re foes, so you’ll have to convince them otherwise.”

“I’ll convince them,” Roc promises.

* * *

The train slows and I stand. Roc follows suit, looking rather sick. He tries to pull his sword from his sheath, but it gets stuck three times before he can get it out. I know now is the time for a big speech, something to energize him for the battle ahead. My mouth feels sticky and dry, so I take a sip of water. I don’t know what I plan to say, so I just start speaking, hoping my heart will do the rest.

“Roc,” I say, “you’re my brother. Always will be.”

Short, concise, simple; but I mean every word, more than anything I’ve ever said before. And it seems to do the job. Roc’s hand stops trembling and tightens on his sword, his eyes change to a steely brown, his jaw firms up.

“I’m with you, Tristan. I’d die for you.”

Tears fill my eyes but I blink them away. Now is not the time for tears. “And I you,” I say.

The train rolls to a stop. A heavy mist roils outside the window. Subchapter 26 is dark, but not completely. Something is lighting the sky. We’re standing flush against the doors, trying to be the first off—every second will be important in the deadly game we’re playing. The doors open and we step out into the mist.

I feel a thud in my head. She’s near.

It turns out the mist is not mist, but smoke. The air is filled with the suffocating acrid stench of war. The platform trembles as a bomb explodes in the distance. The bombing has reached the northernmost subchapter.

I can’t see through the thick smoke, but I run along the train anyway, hoping that Adele is still alive when I reach the end.

When I see Rivet his back is to me. His men are so focused on what he’s telling them that they don’t see me. I fade backwards into the fog and bump into Roc.

“What is it?” he whispers.

“They seem confused as to what to do. Rivet’s giving them orders, but they’re not rushing the end car like they probably wanted to. The war’s distracted them, I think.”

“Can we get around them?” Roc coughs. His eyes are already red from the smoke. We need to get away from the noxious fumes. They aren’t thick enough to kill us right away, but prolonged exposure surely won’t be good.

“I don’t know, but we have to try.”

We drift right, moving further into the smoke, trying to carve a wide arc around Rivet. Already the smoke is clearing, however, and it won’t be long before we’re able to see them and them us. The bombing hasn’t stopped—we can still hear the rumble of explosions in the distance and intermittent flashes of light—but it’s moving away; hence, the clearing smoke.

Ahead and to the left I see dark figures huddled together. Not Rivet and his men. We’re past them. Adele and her friends—has to be.

As we move toward them something stabs me in the back.

I cringe and almost cry out, but no…I haven’t been stabbed—not exactly. It’s her. Adele.

My head pounds, my back aches.

* * *

Adele

“Something’s not right,” Cole says, gazing out the window as the train pulls into the station.

“There’s so much smoke,” Tawni says.

I try to speak but my voice catches. There’s a lump in my throat. The Star Dwellers are bombing subchapter 26. My father is out there somewhere, unprotected, maybe already a victim.

Older-than-her-age Elsey grabs my hand, squeezes, and says, “He’ll be okay.”

Although I know she doesn’t have any proof for her statement, it’s comforting. The doors open and I feel a shockwave of pain flower in my head.

He’s here. The realization comes as a shock, but I know it’s true. Somehow, someway, Tristan has found us again. Why? I guess I’ll have to ask him if I ever get a chance.

I expected us to race from the train the second the doors opened, but the situation has changed. We can hear booming explosions in the distance. It’s so smoky that we can barely see anything outside.

Cole says, “Elsey should hide in the train. They’ll think we’ve all left.”

I like the idea of hiding Elsey away somewhere, but not leaving her all alone. She isn’t too happy with the idea either. “No! I’m coming with you,” she says.

Cole looks at me, hoping I’ll back him up. “We can’t just leave her here,” I say. My mind is racing. Rivet might already be running down the train line, headed for us, and we’re still in the car, like sitting ducks.

“Move!” I say, pacing to the door and pulling Elsey, who’s still holding my hand, with me.

I step out, turn to face the other end of the train. The smoke—thick and puffy when we pulled into the station—is dissipating already. Likely a bomb exploded near the train station just before we arrived. Although it’s getting easier to see, I don’t see our hunters. I can only see maybe two cars down, and Rivet’s gang is at least three away. Maybe even four or five—it’s hard to tell.

Cole and Tawni step out next to us. “Where the hell are they?” Cole says, thinking out loud.

I feel someone approaching from the left, out of the mist. I quarter-turn to see two dark shapes moving toward us. Rivet—has to be.

“Run!” I hiss.

We take off away from the platform, staying in a group, although Cole and Tawni could easily outdistance Elsey and me anytime they want to. I hear thumping footsteps on the stone behind us, someone chasing us. I don’t look back, don’t want to see Rivet’s bloodthirsty eyes.

As we move away from the platform, the smoke disappears completely. It’s strange how it’s clustered around the train. The bomb must’ve hit really close to the tracks.

Ahead I can see the twinkling lights of subchapter 26. It seems everyone has their lights on, probably because of the bombing, although being able to see won’t protect them from death by explosion.

I hear the footsteps getting closer, hear a shout, but can’t make out what the voice says. It doesn’t sound like Rivet’s snarl, but it might be one of his men. It’s weird. I felt scared when I first started running, but everything changed at some point. It’s like a magic trick, where a magician turns a rock into a bat or something; except it’s my fear turning into anger, to the point where I feel capable of great violence. Even when I fought in the Pen, I never felt capable of anything. I just did what I had to do and hoped for the best. But now I feel strong, like I can fight Rivet, even though he’s a highly trained soldier.

Enough is enough.

I whirl around, my head full of explosions, ready to face him.

They’re right on top of us, having closed most of the distance. I just react, swinging a high kick in self-defense. I catch my pursuer under the chin, knock him off his feet. He rolls onto his stomach. His companion stops dead in his tracks and just stares at me.

He doesn’t look like a trained killer. He’s holding a sword, but it doesn’t look natural; it looks more like he’s holding a bread knife. Brown-skinned with brown eyes, he appears more shocked than anything.

“Who are you?” I say, wondering if I’m making a big mistake.

The guy opens his mouth but no words come out. The other guy, the one I leveled, groans and rolls over, showing his face.

I gasp.

It’s Tristan.

My vision goes black but then returns. Black and then back. It cycles for a few seconds, until my mind seems to make sense of him being so close to me. My vision returns, steady, consistent. But the headache doesn’t fade, keeps ham-ham-hammering away.

At this point it would probably make sense to run to him and apologize profusely for having practically knocked his head off. Like I said earlier: I don’t always do the right thing in social situations.

“Why are you chasing us?” I demand. It’s time for questions and answers. I ask, he answers. Simple.

“Trying…to…help,” Tristan murmurs. Weird. He’s massaging his head although I know for a fact I kicked him in the jaw.

“Oh,” I say. I guess I should’ve guessed that.

“What happened?” Cole says, appearing with Elsey and Tawni beside me. They must’ve stopped when they realized I wasn’t with them.

“It’s him,” Elsey whispers. “Tristan.”

“I know,” I say.

“Why’d you hit him? I thought you wanted to talk to him,” Cole says.

“I didn’t hit him, I kicked him,”—I elbow Cole hard in the stomach—“and shut up about the other thing.” I’m mortified. How could Cole say something so stupid? Tristan’s going to think I’m just another school girl with a crush on the president’s son. Yeah, I want to talk to him, but not like one of his fans. Like a real person with real questions.

“You should probably help him up,” Tawni suggests.

“You help him up,” I retort. My social skills are falling apart at the seams. I’m just shocked, is all. I didn’t expect to see him. Truth be told, I thought he was dead. Thankfully, his friend helps him up.

Tristan approaches me. His midnight blue eyes are hard, like steel. Each time they meet mine I feel a jarring thud of pain and I have to look away. What is he doing? Why is he here? It makes no sense. I’m nobody, and he’s the prince of the Tri-Realms. Why is he causing me such pain? I want to shout at him, shake him, tell him to leave me alone, but my mouth doesn’t seem to work.

He extends his hand and takes mine, which still hangs loosely at my side. When our skin touches daggers slice through my back. “Oww!” I yelp, arching my back and pulling away. I look at him sharply, but I see he’s in a similar position, cringing at some unseen pain. What the hell? Is he feeling what I’m feeling?

He shakes his head, looks at me narrowly. “I’m Tristan,” he says.

Before I have a chance to respond, Cole yells, “Get down!” and tackles us both to the hard ground.

***

Tristan

I can’t believe she kicked me! And with a wicked roundhouse no less, powerful and precise. Although I’m in pain—both from the kick and from her very presence—I try to hide it as I reach out to shake her hand. When she doesn’t raise her arm, I reach down and take her hand, lifting it for her. As my fingertips contact her skin, she burns through me, ripping me apart one chunk at a time. I jump back, almost cry out but swallow it down. When I look through suspicious eyes, I see she’s hurting too. Did I do that to her?

I swallow hard, say, “I’m Tristan.”

When the big dark guy yells Get down! and smashes us both to the ground, I think it might just be some kind of a joke. Like maybe that’s how Moon Dweller teenagers have fun; a kick in the jaw to show affection, a hard tackle for a laugh. Of course, my thoughts make no sense considering we’re in a warzone and being tracked by one of my father’s psycho thugs.

Our bodies are so close together and she grabs my arm as we fall. On the ground, she clings to me, her hands warm on my skin. I’m in a trance, unable to tear my gaze from her sparkling, emerald eyes. The pain is there, all around me, but it’s not as strong as before, as if our single touch—our hands brushing against each other—broke the curse. But no, that’s not right either, because the pain is still there.

I hear a yell and Adele looks away from me. I wince, feeling physical pain when our eyes unlock. She pushes off of me, gets up.

Something flashes past my field of vision.

I follow her to a standing position and see why she pushed away so suddenly. Her big friend, the one who tackled us, is charging toward Rivet, who is further down the platform, fitting an arrow into his bow. An arrow—that’s what flew past my head. He has all the resources of the Tri-Realms at his disposal, and he’s shooting arrows. He’s enjoying this, doesn’t want it to be over quickly.

Adele lets out a yell and chases after her friend. “Take El somewhere safe!” she calls over her shoulder to her white-haired friend.

This can’t be happening. I can’t let it happen. Regardless of whether she’s trying to hurt me with her weird stares and fire-hot touch, I have to save her. Rivet will rip them both to shreds. I don’t doubt their fighting ability, but am just being realistic. Rivet is a pro and a sadist. A deadly combination.

I start after her.

* * *

Adele

Why did he touch my hand, hurt me like that? And why did Cole knock us over? Is the whole world going crazy? Something moves behind Tristan. Glancing past him, I see Rivet let loose an arrow. Cole lets out a roar as it pierces his shoulder, the sharp tip exiting through his back. Blood spatters from the wound. His entire body torques hard to the left, forcing his head around toward me.

Those eyes. Dark, serious, strong. I know what he’s going to do.

Despite the excruciating pain he must be in, Cole turns and charges Rivet. This is it. All his pent-up emotions: first and foremost, sadness; then anger; misery, loneliness, and desperation follow; all sprinkled with a lust for revenge, hidden well by sarcasm and joviality in stressful situations.

It’s suicide—I have to stop him.

I push away from Tristan and race after Cole. Rivet’s next arrow zips past us, narrowly missing Cole’s legs, my stomach, and Tristan’s sprawled-out form.

I brush past Tristan’s friend, whose mouth is opening and closing like a fish out of water. He looks shocked by the whole situation, unable to cope with what’s happening. I’m probably in shock, too, but I don’t have time to think about it.

So I won’t slip, I avoid stepping directly on the trail of blood that Cole leaves in his wake. Cole’s faster than me, reaching Rivet twenty feet ahead. Lifting his bow, Rivet tries to get off another shot, but Cole plows into him, sending the arrow twanging end over end into the air. The bow flies out of Rivet’s hands and clatters harmlessly to the stone.

On top of Rivet, Cole is in a rage, pummeling him with iron fists. Five other men charge out of the thinning smoke, aiming to help their leader. I’m ten feet away when I hear Rivet yell, “Get the girl!” in between taking punches from Cole.

His men stop just short of him, hesitate, and then follow his order, rushing past him and toward me. I’m running so hard it’s difficult to stop, but I manage to plant one of my feet, only skidding slightly on the stone before stopping.

They’re already right on top of me. The first one has a sword and a gun in his belt, but leaves both hanging, probably in the mood for some hand-to-hand fun against a helpless girl.

Not so helpless.

I duck under his haymaker punch, kneeing him in the groin and then cracking him in the back of the head with my elbow as he flies past. He crumples to the ground. Seeing what I did to the first guy, the other four decide against the idea of fighting fair, and whip out their swords. Still no guns. Are they trying to take us alive?

They’re too close for me to run. I have to dodge their swords and somehow manage to win. I have to do it for Elsey, for my father in Camp Blood and Stone. For my mother wherever she is. For myself, too.

One of the guys swipes at my arm and I dance away. He wasn’t really going for me, though. It was a fake, a feint, a trick maneuver to get me moving in the direction he really wants. A highly trained swordfighter’s move. Mid-swing, he reverses his blade and sends it slicing in the opposite direction, right into where I’m moving. There’s no way he can miss.

I close my eyes.

* * *

Tristan

I’m impressed by the big guy. He’s manhandling Rivet like a rock cutting machine on a boulder. Then the other guys show up and go straight for Adele. I sprint so hard that I don’t really see how she takes the first guy down, but it looks quick…and impressive. The others pull out their swords.

Adrenaline is a weird thing. I’ve heard of miners who are able to lift massive boulders off of their friends who’ve been trapped by a cave-in. Boulders they have no business lifting and which, after the fact, they can’t budge even an inch. Well, the adrenaline makes me run faster than I’ve ever run before. There are a few steps where I swear I don’t feel my feet touch the ground, as if I’m running on air alone.

One of the guys fakes a move and then attacks in the other direction. It’s a professional move, but he’s so focused on her that he doesn’t see me coming. Clang! I barely get my sword in front of the stroke before it cuts Adele in half.

I shove her out of the way and jam my sword into my surprised opponent, whose eyes roll back into his head before he topples to the ground. The other three swing at me simultaneously, two getting in each other’s way and missing completely. I parry the third’s stroke and slip my sword between two of his ribs, thrusting upwards for good measure. As he falls, blood bubbles from his lips.

The other two improve their communication in a hurry, circling to opposite sides of me and closing in. One goes for my head while the other aims for my legs. I hop over one sword while blocking the headshot with my blade. Using my off hand, I backhand the guy that tried to cut off my legs, stunning him and knocking him backwards.

The guy that wants my head on a platter continues taking aggressive strokes at my neck, but I block them all, and manage to slash his hand, causing him to drop his sword. He throws his hands up in a request for mercy, but I’m not in the mood so I stab him in the heart.

Searing pain rips through my body as the final guy slashes me across the back. A cheap shot but this is a fight for life or death. I’m rooting for both life and death. Life for me; death for Rivet’s guys.

I spin around and block his next attack—a jab at my midsection. My back is on fire and starting to spasm, making it hard to hold myself up. I need to end the fight or I’m toast. I swing desperately for the guy’s head, but I’m not as fast as before, my energy waning as the adrenaline burst expires.

He easily ducks my attempt and slashes at my leg, splitting my thigh open and forcing me to the ground. He looms over me, his sword black and ominous under the night sky. Raising the hilt above his head, he prepares to thrust the point through my chest.

Goodbye, Adele, I think, I hope my death isn’t what you wanted all along.

* * *

Adele

My death is painless. For that I’m thankful. The sword makes a weird clanging sound when it contacts my body, like I’m made of metal. Weird. I feel myself being shoved back, tripping, falling to the ground.

I feel fine.

I open my eyes, wanting to see what really happens when you die.

I hear the shriek of metal on metal so I turn my head to see what’s happening. Tristan! I’m not dead. He saved me and is battling my attackers, cutting them down, defeating them one by one. I watch in awe until there’s only one left, who takes a cheap shot at Tristan’s back. It looks bad, but Tristan reacts well, getting back in the fight.

Then suddenly he’s down, on the verge of death, a fish about to be shot in a barrel. “No!” I manage to scream.

Out of nowhere his friend appears, holding a sword in front of himself awkwardly, like a jouster with a long spear. Although the maneuver appears amateurish, it gets the job done. His sword pierces the guy through the back, causing him to drop his sword, which is pointed tip down, right over Tristan’s fallen body.

The sword falls like a guillotine. At the last second Tristan roars and rolls sharply to the side, the sword thudding dully on the stone. His friend kneels beside him, his face pale, despite his naturally brownish skin.

I scramble to my feet and head for Tristan, but stop when I see movement out of the corner of my eye.

Amidst my own battle, I forgot about Cole, who was winning against Rivet when I last saw him. I don’t know what happened since then, but the tables have turned, and Cole is on his back, getting smacked around by Rivet pretty badly. With a roar, Cole pushes Rivet off of him and staggers to his feet. Rivet snaps to a standing position with a karate move, and launches himself fearlessly at Cole, whose nose is bleeding profusely over his lips.

Cole hits him in midair, but Rivet’s forward motion is too powerful, knocking him to the ground.

I want to help—have to help; to freaking do something, anything—but I’m frozen in place, shocked by what’s happening.

In one swift motion, Rivet swings around Cole’s back, clamps his arms around his head, and jerks it violently to the side.

I’ll never forget the image, never forget the crunch of breaking bones. Precious, life-giving bones.

“Oh God, please no,” I whisper, my eyes filling with tears. Not him. Please not him. Take me. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s had enough. Oh, Cole. Not Cole. Beautiful Cole. Please come back.

I hear a wailing, an eerie, awful pealing, that sounds more animal than human. I realize it’s me. The sound is coming from my throat, unrequested, but appropriate.

I know I’ll never get over this moment, will never cope with the loss I’m feeling, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do something about it. For him. For Cole.

No plan, tears streaming down my cheeks, I stride toward Rivet, whose bloodied face is filled with satisfaction, his eyes gleaming, his lips twisted into a deranged smile. With both arms outstretched, he flicks his fingers back to himself, as if to say C’mon! It’s unnecessary. I’m coming.

He could use one of the weapons hanging from his belt: his sword, his gun, his razor-sharp dagger. But that isn’t Rivet. He lives for the challenge. He stands with his fists clenched, snarling as I approach.

The few times I’ve fought before, I’ve used fast, powerful strikes, ending the fight as quickly as possible. This time I try the same tactic.

I aim a kick at Rivet’s groin, but he dodges it with unexpected speed, catching my leg in midair and swinging a kick of his own toward my head. I try to duck, but it’s difficult with him holding my leg. Adjusting the arc of his attack in mid-kick, Rivet’s foot slams into my ear. Fierce pain shoots through my skull as Rivet releases my leg and lets me tumble to the ground. My head is ringing and I’m seeing stars.

I look up, and between the flashes of light that disturb my vision, I see Rivet standing over me.

Now he has his knife out.

* * *

Tristan

My attacker is a strange creature, growing a sword from his stomach. At least that’s what my mixed up mind thinks. That is, until I see the spot of blood widening around the blade. He drops his sword.

It’s headed straight for my head—my eye, to be more specific—but I’m so shocked I just watch it fall. In my distorted mind it looks beautiful, like a falling star, sprinkling magical stardust on everything in its path. Subconsciously, I know it’s a deadly sword, and the stardust is just the reflection of distant lights on the broad side of its steely blade.

Awe battles reason.

At the last second, reason makes a surge and I spin away, narrowly avoiding being impaled by the star, which, of course, is really a sword.

A rough hand pushes my attacker to the side and he falls away. A face appears. My friend—my beautiful friend. Although he looks as white as a ghost, Roc is grinning.

“You look injured,” he says, kneeling down and inspecting the gash on my leg.

“A minor wound. Not deep,” I say. “Where is she?”

Roc cranes his neck and then moves aside, points at a fleeing figure, moving quickly away from us. Adele, her long, black hair billowing behind her, runs like the hounds of Hell pursue her. With my eyes, I follow her path to its likely destination and see Rivet watching Adele charge right at him, goading her with his hands, standing overtop a fallen figure. The big, dark guy. Adele’s friend. Oh no.

Based on the crumpled body, the sneer on Rivet’s face, and Adele’s mad dash toward Rivet, I suspect her friend is dead. She isn’t running away from Hell, she’s streaking toward it, without regard for her own life.

I hope her friend isn’t dead, but if he is, I certainly don’t want to add Adele to the list of casualties piling up. Ignoring the intense pain that courses through my leg and back, I push to my feet and chase after her, limping badly.

Adele is like a raging beast, attacking Rivet immediately with a kick similar to the one she used to knock me down. He’s more ready for it than I was and easily catches her leg and punishes her with a vicious kick to the head. Dread fills my heart as I see Rivet remove a knife from his belt.

I swat away the dread like a pesky mosquito. Nothing can stop me. No amount of pain, no distance, no obstacle can prevent me from getting to her, killing Rivet, saving her.

Or so I think.

My brother appears from the side, seemingly arriving out of thin air, traveling through some crack between dimensions. He’s flanked by a dozen men. There isn’t time to ask questions. The whys and whos and whats can come later. I lower my head and charge between two of the men, but they’re big and strong. It’s like hitting a stone block. My feet keep moving, churning, trying to push them out of my way. I’m screaming something—I have no idea what—but they won’t move, won’t relinquish their grip.

One of the guys twists around behind me and locks my arms behind my back.

Adele is already dead. Too much time has passed since Rivet pulled out the blade.

It’s over, all over. All is lost. My mother. Adele. Roc will be imprisoned—maybe worse. My life is over.

Killen’s in front of me, saying something. I can’t hear, don’t care to hear. Nothing he can say will matter to me. All of our childish kicks under the table, our childhood fights, were nothing compared to this. He’s no longer my brother in any sense of the word, blood included.

Adele is already dead.

I lunge forward and head-butt his moving lips.

He goes down hard, but is on his feet in seconds, kicking me in the ribs, punching me in the face, spitting and snarling at me. Screaming at me. I still can’t hear him and don’t react to his physical abuse, which makes him even angrier. There’s no physical pain that can eclipse the emotional anguish I feel. The only antidote to how I’m feeling is death. I hope Killen will finish me off.

Although I’m sure Killen wants to kill me, he doesn’t. But only because he fears my father more than anyone. Bringing home a dead brother won’t sit well with my father, not because he values my life, but because of what I know. He needs to know who, if anyone, I’ve told his secrets to. I could’ve told half the Moon Realm by now. Yeah, me dying will create far too much damage control, which is a headache the president won’t want.

Eventually he stops beating me. Through my bloody, swollen eyes, I see them drag Roc forward. He’s badly beaten, too. They sit us next to each other, back to back so that we stay up.

My hearing finally returns in a blast of noise. Bombs are still thundering around the subchapter. Roc is groaning. My brother is speaking. “Why, my dear brother, were you following this filthy traitor all over the Moon Realm? Answer me, or she dies.”

Huh? My head is throbbing so badly and my mind is so muddled that I don’t really understand what’s happening. My brother is asking me about Adele, I think, but he’s threatening me with her life, which is meaningless. He can’t take something away that’s already gone. “Already dead,” I manage to whisper.

“No, brother—not dead. You can add Rivet’s murder to her list of offenses.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Adele

I’m not going to die until Rivet does. If we both die, that will still be a victory. A way for me to honor Cole.

Using my legs like scissors, I clamp them around one of Rivet’s legs and roll, forcing his knee to buckle to the side. He lets out a cry of pain as his cartilage twists. I move faster than I’ve ever moved, kicking to my feet in one swift motion, a move my dad showed me countless times, but which I’d never been able to master.

Rivet’s knife falls out of his hand and to the side. I scoop it up and attack, plunging the blade deep into his chest before he has a chance to react. His eyes widen and his lips let out a strange groan, a ghoulish gurgle usually reserved for the damned. Which he is. Or is about to be. Blood trickles from his lips and his life ebbs away. Justice is served.

I’d hoped my revenge would lessen the pain of the loss, but it doesn’t. Now that Rivet is dead, the pain resurfaces, flowing out of my eyes in rivers of tears. My breaths shorten and I find myself gasping and sobbing. The urge to wrench the knife from Rivet’s chest and stab it into my own is so strong I see my hands clench around the hilt.

An image of my sister fills my mind. Then my father. My mother. Tawni, my only friend. Tristan. Tristan is last, his very presence so full of questions.

At the moment my grip loosens on the knife, strong hands pull me up and away from Rivet. I don’t know what is happening, but am powerless to stop it. On both sides of me are gargantuans, guys so big they could’ve only been manufactured by a steroidal experiment. They drag me to a cluster of similar-sized giants.

As they pull me into the circle of bodies, I gasp when I see who’s in the center. First I see Tristan’s friend, the scared one, the hero. He’s beaten to a pulp, his face puffy and red. Next to him is Tristan, equally battered.

A young boy, no older than fifteen, is talking to Tristan. “…answer me or she dies,” he says.

I hear Tristan mumble, “Already dead,” through bloodied teeth and swollen lips.

“No, brother—not dead. You can add Rivet’s murder to her list of offenses.”

They dump me in front of him. Although his eyes are too puffy to widen, I see a spark of recognition flash across the blue orbs. He really believed I was dead. He must’ve seen Rivet hovering over me with the knife, just before he was captured by these goons. He didn’t see me kill him.

The teenager called him brother. Then that must mean… I pry my eyes from Tristan to take another look at the brat. From the different angle I can see the family resemblance immediately. To Tristan; to the president. Tristan’s brother—his name is Killen, I remember. Clearly not the same type of guy as Tristan. Or at least I hope they’re different. Very different. Opposites would be good.

The fierce sound of bombs detonating resonates all around us. It’s a full-scale attack on the city.

Tristan is still staring at me, almost smiling—if that’s possible in his current state.

“ANSWER MY QUESTION!” Killen roars, kicking Tristan in the stomach with the heel of his boot.

Tristan grunts, drops his head to his knees, spits out a chunk of blood. Lifts his head and speaks through gritted teeth: “I’ll tell you everything once Adele is safe.”

Even in his condition, the way he says it sends pulses along my skin. He’s trying to save me again. The Why? question again. Does he want to hurt me or help me? He needs to make up his mind.

The bomb explodes so close that the shrapnel should rip us apart. Only it doesn’t because of the wall of burly Sun Dwellers ringing us.

They take the worst of it.

The men who aren’t killed by the sharp blades of metal spinning in every direction are knocked off their feet by the shockwave that follows. I am, too, getting blasted into Tristan, landing on him hard, kneeing him in the chest and elbowing him in the head. I feel so bad when I see the look of pain flash across his face.

But there isn’t time for sympathy. We might only have one chance to get away. I start to pull him to his feet, when suddenly another set of arms is helping me.

“Tawni!” I practically shriek when I see my friend next to me. “Where’s—” I start to say.

“Elsey’s safe. We have to move.”

Tawni helps me get Tristan to his feet, and I’m about to rope one of his arms around my shoulders when I hear a shout. “You’re not going anywhere!” Killen roars, striding toward me. He probably thinks I’m just a normal, weak girl.

I forearm him in the face and use a sweep kick to trip him up. Still full of rage because of everything that’s happened, I add a couple of kicks to the skull for good measure and to ensure he doesn’t come after us.

I turn my attention back to Tristan, who’s swaying and looks like he might collapse, or vomit, or both, at any second. Tawni is helping Tristan’s friend get to his feet.

The guards that weren’t killed by the bomb are pushing to their knees, trying to regain their feet. I have the urge to pick up one of their dropped weapons, blast them to pieces.

I take a deep breath and the urge passes. I settle on kicking each of them in the ribs so they collapse back on their stomachs.

We hobble away in tandem, just a couple of four-legged, four-armed, two-headed beasts. Me and Tristan. Tawni and Tristan’s friend. As Tawni leads, I remember. “What about Cole?” I say, my eyes welling up once more. I choke, trying to get the words out. “I mean—his body.”

“Adele, we can’t,” Tawni says, her eyes full of compassion. Unlike me, she isn’t crying, isn’t emotional. I don’t understand how she can be so strong when her best friend has been brutally murdered right in front of us.

“But how are you—”

“I’m not okay, Adele. Not even close. I just can’t think about it right now. Please.”

I understand. Somehow she’s blocking out the pain, the anguish, everything. I wish I could do the same.

We get to the stairs and descend from the train platform. Thick, chemically smoke stings my eyes and the smell of fire burns my nose. The station is on the edge of the city, so we’re able to slip down a deserted street and get lost in the maze of intersections. Well, I’m lost. Tawni seems to know exactly where we’re going.

Thankfully, it’s a short trip, because Tristan and his friend are moving painfully slow and getting slower by the minute. We reach a nondescript building with a black door. Bodies are strewn on the street outside. The stone road is all torn up in chunks.

Tawni stops.

“What is this place?” I ask, eyeing the bodies, my stomach threatening to heave.

Tawni shrugs. “Don’t know. The door was wide open. No one was inside. I think…” She doesn’t have to say the rest. They’re all dead. They must’ve been outside when the bombing started, got caught with nothing to protect them. Why are the Star Dwellers doing this?

She helps Tristan’s friend limp up to the door, and knocks firmly three times. A second later the door opens.

“Adele!” Elsey wails, seeing my disheveled appearance and bruised skull. It probably doesn’t help that I’m covered in blood from the cuts on Tristan’s head, which is slumped on my shoulder. I’m a mess.

“I’m fine, El, but these guys need medical attention.”

“I found supplies,” Elsey says, holding the door and letting us pass. When we’re all in, she says, “There’s a basement. We should be safe from the bombing there. Follow me.”

We follow my stalwart sister down a hall to a landing, where crumbling steps lead downwards. She lights a thick candle, which is good, because otherwise we’ll surely break our necks on the crooked, uneven staircase.

The room at the bottom is like a tomb, surrounded by heavy stone block walls. Another candle sits in the corner, shedding soft yellow light on the room.

I’m not sure how she did it all so fast, but Elsey has managed to prepare for our arrival. She has almost everything we need: towels, a bowl of water, some kind of paint-on antiseptic in a black jar, long, thick bandages, crispy wafers for eating, more jugs of water. She’s even managed to find a couple of pillows and two thin mattresses to make things more comfortable for the wounded.

I help Tristan lie on his back and Tawni does the same for his friend. They both groan as they settle in. I know nothing about first aid, but Tawni seems to have it covered.

Inspecting their wounds, she says, “You’re going to be just fine.”

She begins working with what Elsey has provided, wetting a couple of towels and handing one to me. I try to mimic her gentle cleaning motions. Tristan’s friend almost seems soothed by the wet towel, but when I touch Tristan he stiffens. My arm stiffens, too, as pressure builds in my head. It’s different now, though, less intense, as if my body is adjusting to whatever force Tristan is using against me.

I go about cleaning his face first. He has a deep cut above his right eye, which has bled all down his face. Although I’m cleaning all around his eyes, he keeps them open, watching me. His gaze is electric, powerful, and although I try to focus on what I’m doing, my gaze keeps flitting back to his royal blue eyes. Each time they do, I feel more and more drawn to him. It’s the weirdest thing: although neither of us says a word, it feels like we’re getting to know each other, getting comfortable together.

Every time I touch him, even through the wet cloth, bursts and zings of pain shoot up my spine.

The swelling in his face is getting worse, his cheeks puffy, his eyes half-closed. Nothing I can do about that. Time will have to heal his wounds.

I finish with his face and move on to his leg. I’m not sure how to go about it. He’s wearing filthy black pants that look like they’ve been through a war. There’s a long slice in the fabric from his upper thigh to his knee. Between the shredded flaps of cloth I can see a wicked red gash. If I clean the wound through the hole in his pants, it will be too hard to bandage it. There’s really no choice. My face warms as I feel Tristan watching me examine him. I can sense that he’s reading my mind, coming to the same conclusion as me.

I don’t say anything, continuing to “get to know him” without words. I tug at his pants, but they won’t budge because he’s lying on them. Kindly, he lifts his hips, grimacing slightly, and I’m able to pull them off. Thankfully, his dark tunic is reasonably long, covering his undergarments. His legs are long and strong—sinewy muscles run down them. I’m no expert, but I’d say he has really good legs.

Ignoring the flush I feel in my cheeks, and hoping Tristan can’t see it in the dim lighting, I focus on cleaning out the wound. Fresh red blood wells from his skin as I wipe away the dark blood that has congealed on the surface, but I manage to stop the bleeding by applying pressure for a few minutes.

“I’ll do your back after we bandage everything on the front,” I say.

He dips his head in a slight nod, still staring at me. “Thank you,” he murmurs.

Tawni is already finished with Tristan’s friend, whose face is as bad as Tristan’s, but who doesn’t have the added leg and back wounds. She shows me how to apply the antiseptic and helps me bandage his leg. I might’ve felt somewhat jealous when she touches him, but her movements are so professional that it doesn’t bother me at all.

Time for more embarrassment.

“Sit up,” Tawni says, putting an arm behind Tristan’s back. I follow suit, helping to push him forward from the other side. “Arms over your head.”

Obediently, Tristan raises both arms. Robotically, she pulls his shirt off.

I do everything in my power to maintain an indifferent expression when I see his body. Inside I’m thinking wowowowow! His chest and shoulders are sculpted from years of training, his stomach flat and hard—his back looks as if it’s been chiseled from stone, but is mottled with scars—from training I guess. A vicious slash runs diagonally across it, from his right shoulder to his left hip. It’s deeper than the cut on his leg, but not bleeding as much.

He flips over onto his stomach with a grunt, and we get to work cleaning the wound. After applying a generous coating of antiseptic, we bandage his skin, wrapping the cloth around his entire chest to provide support as it heals.

I notice a thumb-size, crescent scar toward the top of his back, directly on his spine. It looks different than the others, more fresh, more interesting. I want to ask how he got it, but my mouth won’t open.

Finished, Tawni says, “You’ll need to change these every couple of days.”

Finally, Tristan’s friend speaks. “Oh, I don’t think he’ll mind that at all,” he says with a wink. Or at least I think it’s a wink—it’s hard to tell on his battered face.

“Shut it, Roc!” Tristan hisses. Beneath the purple and black of his deeply bruised face, I think I detect a hint of pink added to the palette of colors. I wonder what the son of the president has to be embarrassed about. Not much, I expect.

“Roc—is that your name?” Tawni asks.

“It’s what my mother called me,” Tristan’s friend replies. “I’m Tristan’s best friend, I mean, servant, I mean, only friend.” Roc half-laughs and then cringes from the pain.

“Thank you for your input, Roc,” Tristan says.

“My pleasure, your majesty.”

I find their banter enjoyable, especially after the events of the day being so dark and heavy. It’s a welcome break from it all. But it can’t last.

“Where’s Cole?” Elsey says suddenly.

Everything flashes back into my mind. Rivet’s snarl; the violent way in which he broke Cole’s neck; the sickening crunch of bones; leaving our friend’s body out there, not giving him the respectful burial he deserves. Tears well up again. I’m really getting tired of all the crying.

My reaction is nothing compared to Tawni’s, though. She bursts into tears, throws herself on the floor, weeps into her hands, her body shuddering and shaking. I want to cry, too, to let it all out—or whatever is left of it—one more time. But I know I have to be strong for my friend, like she was for me earlier. It’s her turn to grieve.

I crawl over to her side, sit by her, rub her back tenderly, stroke my hand through her hair. “Shhh. It’ll be okay, Tawni. He’s in a better place now—with his family again.” I don’t know why I say it—I’m not even sure I believe it—but I guess I want to believe it. It’s what Cole deserves: relief from all his subearthly pain.

I glance at Elsey, whose face is stricken, her mouth contorted and her eyes sharp, and say, “El, I’m sorry, but he didn’t make it.”

She looks like she wants to cry but she doesn’t, not so much as a single tear. Even growing up, she was never much of a crier. If she got hurt or disappointed she’d always just go silent, preferring to keep her emotions on the inside. That’s what she does now, shifting to the corner, hugging her knees, staring into empty space.

“Thank you for your help, and I’m so sorry about your friend,” Tristan says. “If we hadn’t chased after you, maybe he would have survived. I feel responsible.”

“No!” I say fiercely. Tristan isn’t going to take the blame for this. Rivet’s the one to blame, and whoever sent him after us—the president, or his advisors, or whoever. “It wasn’t your fault. You tried to help us.”

“We just got in the way,” Tristan says softly, lowering his head.

I shake my head. “This is our life,” I say. “As Moon Dwellers it doesn’t seem to matter who does what, it always ends in tragedy.” Even I am surprised by my words. They sound so defeatist. Perhaps because I feel defeated.

“Maybe we can change things,” Roc says.

“How?” I say blankly. Change is so far from my mind I can barely even focus on it; I’m just trying to survive.

Tristan says, “Use my reach. I might not act like my father, but I’m well known across the Tri-Realms. If I can convince others to join the cause, maybe we can change things.”

“The cause?” I say. “What cause? All I see are Star Dwellers blowing up Moon Dwellers, Moon Dwellers acting like sheep, Sun Dwellers ruling over all. There is no cause.” I am starting to annoy even myself with my pessimism. Snap out of it! I scream in my head.

“We are the cause,” Tristan says. “That is, if we want to be.”

“We?” I say. My mind is racing. My sister is in a faraway place, Tawni is a mess, and I’m talking to two guys, who’ve been beaten to a pulp, about a revolution. This is not at all how I expected things to go with Tristan. I haven’t even had a chance to ask him about why I’ve got a headache again—a headache caused by him.

“Well, I don’t know, we haven’t really thought much about it yet,” Tristan says.

Great, I think. I’m joining an ill-planned revolution now.

“Look, guys, I appreciate what you want to do, but I’m just trying to find my parents.”

“In Camp Blood and Stone?” Tristan asks.

I freeze. “Yes, how do you know that?”

“I know a lot of things. You know, because I’m the president’s son and all.”

“Well, we’re going to be leaving soon to rescue my dad, so…”

“We’re coming with you,” Tristan says.

Coming with me? Why would he do that? Why would he even offer? Here he is talking about revolutions and changing the world, and he’s willing to risk his life to help a random Moon Dweller, who happens to be an escaped convict, rescue her father from a secure prison where he’s being held on charges of treason? I just don’t understand.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because…because…”

“Because he’s been chasing you all over the Moon Realm—of course he’s gonna do it!” Roc exclaims.

“Chasing me? But…but…” I’m about to ask why, but I already know the answer. I’ve known it the whole time, but chose to ignore it.

He feels pain when he’s near me, too.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tristan

Things get pretty awkward after that. No one really speaks, and I barely make eye contact with anyone. Adele’s friend, Tawni, eventually stops crying and we all agree that we need to sleep. Adele and her sister go and find a few more thin pads to sleep on.

My leg and back are throbbing, but their pain is nothing compared to the endless thudding in my head. I can’t help wondering whether it’s from the beating my brother’s goons gave me, or from being near Adele.

When Adele and Elsey return with the sleeping pads, her embarrassment is clear and red on her face. There isn’t much space to stretch out, so we’ll have to cram tightly together.

Does she want to sleep next to me? I hope so. Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not thinking about trying anything with her—I’m not that kind of guy, plus the room is like a sardine can and I’m in no condition to do more than lie in one place. Consider it more of an experiment. I want to see if my body can handle being near her for an extended period of time.

Tawni seems to know it, too, which only seems to redden Adele’s face further, as Tawni lays her mat near the edge of the room, against the wall. Roc seems to sense the unspoken plan, too, pulling his mattress to the opposing wall, leaving plenty of space. The bastard smirks the whole time he’s doing it.

That leaves Adele, me, and Elsey. Adele could position Elsey in the middle, between Adele and I.

She doesn’t.

“Here you go, El,” she says, helping her sister lay out her pad next to Tawni. She places hers next to mine, while I fill the gap between Roc and her. She leaves the candle to burn itself out.

She sits down slowly and cautiously, as if taking significant care not to accidentally brush past me. She stretches out stiffly, lowering her knees and head to the floor in jerky motions. I lie like a dead person, staring at the ceiling. I’m acutely aware when Adele sprawls out next to me, mere inches from my body. The pain builds in my head and I rub at my temples absently.

Everyone else seems to fall asleep immediately, exhausted from one of the longest days of our lives. I can hear heavy breathing on all sides. I can’t sleep, though. Not with her so close to me. I can’t manage to deepen my breaths, or relax my body, or even close my eyes: all the standard requirements for sleep. The throbbing is still too intense for sleep. So I just lie as still as a stone, my eyes glued to the ceiling, which is getting dimmer by the minute as the candle’s wax melts away.

After an hour I’m getting worried I’ll be up the whole night. A lot of good that will do me when my body’s trying to recover so we can break Adele’s father out of jail. So I try to sleep, try to forget who’s sleeping next to me, try to blink away the pain in my skull. Close my eyes. The headache starts to subside, fading into the night. It’s replaced by a buzzing in my scalp, not painful, but not pleasing either. Just there. Something tingles in my spine. Not the icy stabs from before, but a constant shiver. Again, not bad, not good. Just present.

My eyes snap open when I feel something touch my hand, shooting pins and needles up my arm. I jerk my head to the right and stare through the deepening gloom at my hand, which is resting lightly on my hip. I hold my breath when I see what touched it.

Adele’s hand.

Her hand is resting gently on top of mine, her fingers sitting in the cracks between my fingers. It hurts, but like with my head and back, the longer we touch, the more the pain lessens. It’s like our nearness is the antidote to our nearness. Does that make any sense?

I glance over at her. Her eyes are closed, her breathing slow and even. She appears to be sleeping. Is she faking it? Or did she simply move in her sleep, her hand randomly slipping onto mine, a mere fluke of nature?

I feel her fingers push their way between mine, curling inside so they’re touching my palm. My heart leaps to the ceiling and tries to rip out of my chest. It settles back into place and demonstrates its enthusiasm by beating rapidly, sending shivers through my nervous system.

She’s awake, I can sense it. It’s no mistake that her hand found mine. She’s doing exactly what I wanted to do. Experiment.

My instinct is confirmed when I feel her thumb, the only finger not nestled under my palm, start to stroke the top of my hand. Gently sliding back and forth across it, sometimes making circles. Each motion sends shards, then slivers, then pinpricks of pain into my hand. Lessening pain. After a few minutes it starts to feel okay, then kind of good.

It’s weird how good it feels. It’s such a simple thing, the mere sliding of a finger across skin, but it sends tingles through my whole body. I close my eyes, like Adele, and begin slowly running my own fingers across hers. We carry on like that for a long time, at least an hour—maybe hours, I’m not sure; I lose track of time.

Is she expressing her feelings for me, her attraction? Or is she just experimenting, like me? I’m lying to myself again. As much as I want to believe we’re just experimenting with the pain, I know that’s not true. I’m enjoying this.

This is not what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to ask her questions and have her answer them. And then once I was satisfied, I would leave, maybe even go back to the Sun Realm, where I actually feel comfortable. Story over.

Why did I shoot my mouth off earlier, start talking about “a cause” and insinuating I could do anything to help the people of the Lower Realms? Can I really just walk away now? Is that really what I want? Already my brother will be telling my father what happened, what I did. There’s no going back. I’ll be shunned, maybe even thrown in prison, even if only a minimum security one in the Sun Realm, where I could live out the rest of my days in luxurious conditions.

But what if my father forgave me, said I was welcome back? Would that change anything?

I blink in the dark, try to answer at least one of the dozens of questions spinning through my mind.

I can’t answer any of them.

Eventually I fall asleep, still holding hands with Adele.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Adele

I wake up when Tawni says, “Hey, sleepyhead.”

I yawn and rub my eyes, opening them to look at my friend. She looks like her normal, perky self—not the devastated girl from the day before. I wish I could cope with things the way she can.

That’s when I remember the position I was in when I fell asleep: holding hands with Tristan. I sneak a glance down at my hand. It’s alone—safe. Whew, I think. It isn’t like I’m embarrassed that Tristan seems to have feelings for me—ecstatic would be a better word—but I’m not keen to have everyone know about it just yet. Am I getting ahead of myself? Did he really hold my hand because he wanted to or because he felt he had to?

I turn my head to see what Tristan looks like when he’s sleeping, but he isn’t there. Roc is gone, too.

“Gone with Elsey to do some recon,” Tawni says, guessing my question.

“Elsey?” I say, suddenly worried.

“It’ll be okay,” Tawni says. “They promised to be very careful and look after her.”

I nod, still worried.

I hear quick feet on the steps and then Elsey bounds through the doorway, practically crashing into me. “The bombing finally stopped!” she says excitedly. “We can go rescue Father.” Her smile is a mile wide. I’m amazed at her ability to bounce back from the horrific events of the previous day.

Slower steps thud down the stairs. I raise my head in anticipation of seeing him, hoping it won’t be awkward after our night together.

Roc’s head pops out. He’s wearing a wide smile, too, grinning like a banshee through the cover of his bruised face. I’m not sure what everyone’s been smoking, but I want some—clearly it’s good stuff.

Tristan follows behind him and my breath catches in my lungs. Despite his injuries—although the swelling has lessened, his face is varying shades of black, blue, and purple—he’s a sight, right out of the magazines. My vision blurs as a headache forms. Not a bad one though. They’re getting better each time I see him.

Really, really, freaking weird.

He looks at Elsey. “Did you tell them?”

Elsey grins at him. “Mission complete,” she says, standing at attention, her hand perpendicular to her forehead in a rigid salute. “Ready for your next order.”

“At ease, soldier,” Tristan says, laughing. “She really likes this role-playing stuff,” he says, explaining to me.

“She always has,” I say, “but she’s no soldier and you’re not a general.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“I’m just kidding—lighten up,” I say, grinning.

“Oh, sorry,” he says again.

“And enough of the apologies,” I say. I’m trying to act normal, but I’m not sure if I’m succeeding. I’m also trying to avoid making direct eye contact with him, for fear of worse pain coming back.

“Fair enough,” he says. “If I’m not the general, then who is?”

“I nominate myself,” Roc says.

“I second it,” Elsey says.

“Hey, don’t I get any votes?” I say.

“Nah, Tristan and Roc are really fun,” Elsey says.

“And I’m not?”

“Not as fun as them,” she says, grinning.

“Thanks a lot!” I exclaim, grabbing her and whirling her around.

“As general,” Roc says, “our first order of business is to eat breakfast. Then we’ll head over to the Camp of Death and Skulls and Crossbones and all that.”

“Camp Blood and Stone,” I correct.

“I think that’s what I said,” Roc says, chuckling.

Tawni hands each of us one of the wafers Elsey found the night before. It isn’t a very appetizing breakfast, but it’s better than going hungry. And it’s quick, which I like. I’m anxious to find my dad. He’s done so much for me in my life and now I have the chance to do something for him. I can’t fail him.

I also need the distraction. Although I try to keep up my side of the constant bantering that has begun ever since Tristan and Roc joined us, inside I’m still a wreck. I can’t block my emotions out like the rest of them seem to do. I feel bad that my heart ballooned the night before, when Tristan held my hand, feeling more alive than it has in months. I feel bad because Cole is dead, and yet I’m experimenting with my weird feelings. My heart feels as shriveled as a raisin one minute and then as big as a balloon the next.

We leave our little hideaway without seeing anyone. People are staying indoors after the previous night’s bombing. The smoke has cleared, revealing the extent of the destruction. It’s bad, but not irreparable, if only the Star Dwellers will let us rebuild.

Although the dusty streets are deserted, we walk single file, sticking to the edges of buildings, ready to dive for cover if any Sun Dwellers appear. Or any Star Dwellers. Probably any Moon Dwellers, too. We don’t know who we can trust.

Tristan is just in front of me, which I would know even if my eyes were closed. It’s like an invisible tether connects us now whenever we’re close. Not just the pain, which is still there; duller maybe, but there. The tether has low-voltage electricity surging through it, leaving me tingling. His strides look awkward, ginger, like he’s walking on eggshells, trying not to crack them. Each step is likely sending splinters of pain through his injured leg and back.

We speak in hushed voices.

“Where did your brother come from?” I ask.

“Although I’d like to say he was adopted, I’m pretty sure he came from my mom’s stomach, same as me,” Tristan says, grinning.

I shake my head and grin back. “No, I mean yesterday. How’d he know we were here?”

“I’ve been wondering that, too,” Tristan says, his smile fading. “If I had to guess, I’d say my father sent him as soon as Rivet reported that you were headed here on the train.”

I nod slowly. “But why’d he attack you like that?” I ask.

Tristan glances back and says, “We haven’t been getting along lately.”

That doesn’t really answer my question. “But why—”

“He’s not like me, Adele. He’s different—like my father. Not good.”

“So you mean bad, right?”

“Yeah, bad.”

“Which makes you good then?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t believe what my father believes, does that make me good? Or maybe I’m not good, because it doesn’t seem like anyone is these days. I’d rather classify myself as not bad.” He turns his head and manages a sideways grin, but I can tell that talking about his family is hard for him.

But I plow ahead anyway. Questions and answers, just like I planned.

“So you’re not like your dad or brother…”

“My father or brother,” he clarifies. It seems the distinction between dad and father is important to him. I wonder if it’s a sign of respect for the president or a lack of closeness with the man who helped create him.

“Okay—father. So if you’re not like them, does that mean you are like your mother?”

“I hope I’m like my mom was,” he says, once more changing my word slightly.

“Was?” I say, hoping I’m not probing too much.

Tristan goes silent for a moment and I worry I’ve offended him. We tiptoe across an empty intersection and duck behind another building. Roc is leading—he said he knows the way.

Finally, Tristan says, “My mom disappeared a while ago.” Although he says it calmly, evenly, I can feel a weight behind his words. The same kind of weight I feel in my own voice when I speak about my parents.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I heard about that on the news.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “It was better that she went. For her. I’ll find her someday,” he adds.

“I’ll help you,” I find myself saying.

He glances back. “I’d like that.”

The tingling in my body, which I’ve started to get used to, increases suddenly, like a surge of electricity, and I find myself giddy with excitement. I have the urge to rush to his side, grab his hand and walk with him. I restrain myself.

“Why is this happening?” It’s a cryptic question, but when he turns and I see his eyes I know he understands what I mean.

“I was hoping you’d know,” he says. He faces forwards once more. “I came after you hoping you’d know. That I’d be able to get answers out of you.”

I could be saying the same thing to him. Crap. Something is happening that’s outside of both our control.

Roc says, “Sorry to interrupt, but we’re approaching the boundary to the camp.”

I look around—all I can see are buildings. For a second I think Roc might’ve gotten confused, but when we turn the next corner, the buildings suddenly disappear and are replaced by a high stone wall. The wall is gray and sheer and would’ve appeared ominous, an impossible barrier between me and my dad, except there’s a gaping hole in it.

Scorch marks are burned along the edges of the breach, the result of a force so powerful it could’ve only been from an incendiary. Three times, I think. Three times we’ve been effectively saved by the Star Dweller bombs. At some point I’m really going to have to write the Star Dweller leaders a letter thanking them.

I chuckle under my breath at my own joke.

“What?” Tristan says.

“Nothing. I was just thinking how strange it is that I’d still be stuck in the Pen if not for the Star Dweller bombs. Or worse, I might be dead. They always seem to explode when and where I need them the most, like a guardian angel is helping me.”

“You think there’s something to it?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. More likely it’s just a coincidence. They seem to be bombing everything,” I say. Despite my nonchalant response, something tells me there is more to it. But it doesn’t make sense—can’t make sense. Why would the Star Dwellers be trying to help me do anything? They don’t even know who I am. They have much bigger problems to deal with now. Like how to win a war.

“I’m wondering where they’re getting all the weapons,” Tristan says.

My eyes jerk to his. We’d discussed the same thing, when the bombing first started. “You agree that it would be hard for them to get their hands on such advanced weaponry?” I ask.

“Yeah. Near impossible. At least, without help.”

My mind is whirling. Someone is helping them. And it would have to be someone from the Sun Realm. Could there really be traitors in the president’s midst?

I shrug off my thoughts and try to focus on our present situation.

We have a way in now, but I’m afraid to take it, afraid that the entire camp is destroyed, the prisoners left to die while the guards evacuated.

“It’ll be okay,” Tristan says, as if reading my mind.

“I know,” I lie.

The first bomb hits just as we’re creeping through the hole. Another day of bombing has begun. If we weren’t so used the sound of distant bombs, we might have mistaken it for something else, a piece of machinery firing up maybe, but by now we can identify the roar of thunder as not a fluke underground storm, but as the mirthful cry of pointless destruction.

Elsey cries out, but I manage to quickly slap a hand over her mouth, silencing her. We huddle together, hoping there isn’t a guard just inside the wall, close enough to hear the noise. Warmth and shivers flow through my skin as my arm brushes against Tristan’s.

He looks at me, his eyes serious. “Wait here,” he says.

I start to object, but he’s already gone, slipping inside the wall and around the corner. I see the hilt of his drawn sword flash before he moves out of sight. He moves remarkably fast considering his wounds. He’s still not moving normally, but his limp has lessened.

Roc must see the concern on my face, because he says, “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. I taught him everything he knows.”

I laugh. It’s high pitched and nervous, but a laugh nonetheless. It helps to calm my nerves.

We hear a quick yell and then a groan, followed by a thud. I’ve had enough of waiting and rush through the hole, expecting violence of some sort.

Instead, there’s only Tristan, grinning, standing over his fallen adversary.

I approach him, feeling my heart beat faster as the distance between us lessens. “Is he…dead?” I ask.

“Just unconscious,” Tristan says. His grin fades and he raises a finger in the air. “We have to hurry.”

I can hear a dull commotion further into the camp. Something’s happening. Something big, by the sound of it. Inside the wall we can see all the way to the main buildings, where the prisoners are probably kept. But the sound arises from further to the left, past a cluster of massive stone blocks stacked in a pyramidal structure.

I don’t know how I know, but I do: my father is here. Admittedly, being this close after not seeing him for so long makes me go a bit crazy. Okay, really crazy. I take off, leaving my friends behind, envisioning a joyous reunion with him, jumping into his arms, holding him to me.

It’s a long run, and my initial burst of speed wanes, forcing me to drop into well-measured, paced strides. Tristan catches up halfway to the pyramids, pulling alongside me, galloping in a strange limp-run, his breathing heavy, but not as heavy as mine. To his credit, he doesn’t try to stop me, to reason with me, like so many other guys would do. He seems to understand that I have to do what I’m about to do.

Whatever that is.

“What’s the plan?” he says as we run together.

Plan? Huh? The word sounds as meaningless to me as a phrase uttered in an ancient language by someone who forms words by clicking their tongue against the roof of their mouth. “I…uh…well…” I stammer. Finally, I say, “Get my dad?” What a plan! I even say it like a question, as if I’m not sure that’s why we’re sprinting across a barren prison camp. Good one, Adele.

Tristan deserves a medal for patience. “So go and kick some butt then?” he says. He tries to grin, but the pain of running with his injuries turns it into a grimace.

“Exactly,” I say. His assured tone gives me strength, and I feel like we have a plan, even though we don’t. “Are you okay?” I ask.

“Never felt better,” he says.

“Liar.”

The pyramids loom closer. They’re a lot bigger now that we’re close to them, rising hundreds of feet into the air. I veer right, heading for the outer edge of the first one in the line of three. Tristan follows, keeping pace and sticking close to my side. As we pass the corner, my eyes widen at the sight before me.

Dozens of other giant, gray pyramids dot the landscape, rising majestically above us.

The commotion we heard from a distance is getting louder and soon we can make out individual yells. It sounds like a battle.

I continue to steer us in the direction of the sound, but we still can’t see anything except the pyramids, which are staggered in such a way that they block the view in every direction once you’re in their midst.

“We’re close,” Tristan says. “Get ready.”

Ready for what? I have no idea, but I nod anyway. We pass a final pyramid and abruptly our vision opens to a wide open rock slab plain. A half-constructed pyramid stands a ways off. In front of the pyramid: chaos—the source of the noise.

A mob of prisoners are fighting the guards, who are using long whips and Tasers to hold them off. None of them have guns. Clearly the intention is to hurt, not to kill.

But the guards aren’t doing so well. We pull to a stop, and as we watch, one of the guards is bashed over the head by a shirtless guy wielding a rock. A prisoner. His body is covered in scars, some dark and ancient, and others fresh—some even ooze bright red blood.

There are hundreds of prisoners, all of whom are in a similar condition. None of the men wear shirts and they all have various injuries, likely caused by the sting of the guards’ whips. The women wear ratty tank tops and sport similar welts and gashes. But they’ve had enough.

The revolt is ultraviolent and for a few minutes we watch in awe as the prisoners start to gain an advantage. Although the inmates are taking a beating, the guards are dropping fast, being pelted with stones or bludgeoned by bare fists, a result of the overwhelming force that’s gathered to defy them.

The camp name suddenly makes sense. The Stones: the massive stone blocks used to construct the pyramids—they were likely constructed off the backs of the prisoners, a pointless exercise that appears to have no purpose other than to inflict pain. The Blood: the prisoners provide that when abused by the guards.

Now the guards’ blood is mixed with the prisoners.

Our timing is remarkable. That we arrive during such an event is incredible, to say the least. The timing is no mistake: the Star Dwellers’ rebellion has encouraged the prisoners to revolt, too.

“Do you see him?” Tristan asks.

“Who?” I say, watching the brutality with morbid curiosity.

“I don’t know, your dad maybe?”

Duh. The whole purpose of our being here. I scan the mob, hoping to see his dark mop of hair and neatly trimmed mustache amongst the prisoners. I don’t think about what it might mean if he’s not amongst the fighters.

I think my eyes sweep past him three or four times before I recognize him. Subconsciously, I know it’s him, because my gaze keeps returning to one spot, but my mind fails to believe what my brain registers. His black hair is long and disheveled, down to his shoulders; his mustache is accompanied by a thick, black beard, covering the better half of his face; his uncovered body, always strong from his work in the mines, glistens with sweat and blood and is as hard as the stones he’s forced to work with.

But there’s no mistaking his eyes. Emerald green and piercing, like mine. Exactly like mine. Looking into them has always been like looking into a mirror for me.

When he happens to turn toward me, searching for a guard to fight, he spots me and our eyes lock. I don’t know if he thinks I’m a mirage, a misfire of one of the thousands of synapses in his brain, but he just stands there staring at me. His shoulders slump as if even seeing a mirage of me is too painful for him to bear.

I wave at him.

His head perks up and his head cocks to the side. I guess maybe he doesn’t think a mirage can wave. Whatever the case, he takes off running to me. I charge toward him, wild with excitement. My legs feel as light as air. I’m giddy, gleefully childlike. A few of the guards see him break away and race after him, one of them snapping a whip at his heels.

Ignoring the crackle of the whip, my dad thunders toward me with reckless abandon. The gap between us disappears. Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

Crack! The guard slings the whip with practiced precision and this time it connects, wrapping around my father’s legs and tripping him up. He manages to brace his fall with his arms and skids to a stop ten feet from me, his arms immediately sheening with fresh blood from new scrapes.

We go for the guards. One for me; one for Tristan.

I choose the one with the whip. I’m not sure where this sudden need for revenge comes from, but I can’t seem to control it. First Rivet, because of Cole. Now the whip-carrying guard, because of my father.

The guard pulls the strap back and snaps it at me. I see it coming, ducking so low I’m forced into a roll, clunky and painful on the stone. I emerge from the roll on my feet and still moving at full force. I’m not sure a train could stop me at this point. It’s like I’m possessed by a demon, only observing my crazed self from afar.

When the guard sees the look on my face, his own face flashes fear, cheeks turning white and mouth contorting. I lead with an elbow, spearing him in the mouth with it and likely jarring a few teeth loose. Maintaining my momentum, I follow through with a shoulder to his sternum, flattening him onto his back and trampling overtop his chest.

I screech to a stop and look back. Tristan has the other guard at sword point, but then switches the blade to his left hand and punches the guy hard in the head twice. His head lolls to the side like he’s unconscious.

The guard I battered is groaning and writhing in pain. I don’t think he’s going to be a threat anytime soon, so I leave him and run to my dad, who’s pulling himself to his feet. Despite his aches and pains, he’s smiling, his arms outstretched.

Although it isn’t exactly as I planned in my mind, I jump on him, wrap my arms and legs around him, hugging him harder than I ever have before, not caring that he’s covered in a mixture of dirt and blood. “Dad…oh, Dad,” I murmur into his chest.

“My precious daughter,” he says, rubbing my back.

I hear Tristan say, “Not trying to spoil the reunion here, but we’ve got to go.” Reluctantly, I release my dad and turn to Tristan, who’s watching us with one black eye; the other is trained on the continuing battle between the guards and prisoners. I see what he’s worried about. A few of the guards have broken away from the fray and are gesturing at us wildly.

“C’mon,” I say, grabbing my dad’s hand and pulling him toward the closest pyramid. “I’ll take you to Elsey.”

“El’s here?” my dad says, following me.

“Yeah, I figured I’d pick her up on the way over. You know, right after we broke out of prison.”

“What!?”

“It’s a long story.”

Tristan limp-runs past us. I can tell he’s fighting through the pain.

“Follow me,” he says.

I’m not sure why I do it. I guess because I want to show my dad that I’m tough, that I’ve survived, that I’m the strong girl he raised. In any case, it’s probably just childish. “No, follow me!” I exclaim. I take off, sprinting past Tristan and around the first pyramid.

I glance back and see Tristan half-grinning, half-cringing, trying to catch up. My dad isn’t far behind him, looking lean and fast. Further back still is the group of guards, who have started chasing us. Great. Can’t they just leave us alone? Haven’t we been through enough?

To make it more difficult for the guards to follow us, I weave through the pyramids, cutting a random path toward the open flats that lead to the outer wall. I emerge from between two pyramids and into the open. Adrenaline is rushing through my veins, pushing me to fly, fly! I don’t sprout wings and take off, but I do run pretty fast—so fast that Tristan doesn’t catch me until we’re halfway across the empty space.

I look back to see where my dad is. He’s fallen behind a bit, unable to keep up with our younger legs. Or it might not be age that hinders him. It might be the weight of the abuse he’s been subjected to in the camp, rendering his body tired and weakened. Whatever the case, the guards are gaining on him—five of them, closing in like a net.

“My dad,” I say, pulling to a stop. Tristan stops, too, and we reverse our course. My dad sees us coming and slows up. He isn’t about to let us do all the fighting for him.

He turns just as we reach him. The guards are upon us. Five on three. Tasers and whips against fists and feet and spirit—oh, and Tristan’s sword, too.

A Taser lances out toward my father’s legs, but is blocked by a quick thrust of Tristan’s sword. A whip snaps at my head, but I duck and charge. I’m not full of rage anymore, but I do feel confident. Next to my father I feel invincible. He’s my teacher. The best fighter I’ve ever known. Although I’ve never seen him fight anyone for real, I’ve always believed he’s unbeatable.

I leap at the guard who missed me with the whip, kick him in the head, knock him over. Glance to my right.

My dad clotheslines two of the other guards, his heavy arms catching them in the neck and forcing them to the stone. Flopping on the ground, they gasp for air. Tristan has another one at sword point. Rather than finishing him off, he uses his forearm to send a shiver through the guy’s skull, knocking him senseless.

There’s only one guard on his feet. The new odds: three on one. He runs, dropping his whip and Taser and pride in a heap on the stone.

We run in the other direction. I let Tristan lead this time. I want to keep an eye on my dad. I can’t believe it was that easy—almost too easy.

A barrage of bullets keens past us and, instinctively, I duck and throw my arms over my head, as if mere flesh and bone will stop the hot metal pellets from hurting me. In front, Tristan yells out sharply and stumbles, clutching at his leg, which is slick and red. He’s been hit. The rest of us will be soon. It must not be bad, because Tristan manages to keep running, albeit less gracefully, with us in tow.

We reach the gap in the wall. The air is thick and heavy and smells of war. The bullets have stopped temporarily, presumably as our pursuers reload.

Tawni, Roc, and Elsey are waiting for us. We’ve led the danger right to them.

I look back, expecting a dozen guards armed to the teeth. One guy is running toward us, frantically trying to release an expired clip from his automatic weapon. It’s the guy who ran away before. He had time to get his gun but not the rest of his friends.

“Anyonegotanythingwecanshoot?” I ask in one breath. The guy’s gun will be loaded soon and we’ll be dead.

Tristan, cringing in pain, says, “Roc, did we pack anything other than swords?”

“Sorry, no,” Roc says. “You specifically said no guns.” He glances warily at the guy with the gun. He’s getting closer. The old clip falls away behind him and he pulls a new one from his pocket.

Then I remember: “Your slingshot, El,” I say.

Without hesitation, she extracts it and I reach for it.

“No,” she says. “I can do it.”

My instinct is to grab it from her, to whirl and shoot the guard. To take care of my family and end his pursuit. But there’s no time to argue. “Do it, El. Hurry,” I say.

My sister, who never trained with me and our father before, grasps the slingshot handle firmly. Surely, she’s never shot a human before, but it won’t be any different than a tin can or a rock post or whatever else she’s practiced on. In one swift motion she extends her arm, loads a pellet, and stretches the band back toward her chin. Rotating her torso, she locates our pursuer in the sights.

Despite all his bumbling, he’s finally managed to snap the new clip into his gun, and he’s just bringing the nozzle up to a firing position. El has maybe two seconds to get him before he gets us. Even as I stop breathing, she makes an incremental adjustment to her aim, as if she wants to hit him higher, in the head. A smaller target. No, I think.

The guard stops and aims his gun right at us. One second.

El fires, releasing the band with a dull thwap! To the human eye, the pellet moves as fast as any bullet, disappearing into the empty air as if it never existed at all. The only evidence of my sister’s shot is the groan from the guy as his head snaps back and he crumples to the ground, his gun landing on top of him, having not been fired.

“Yes!” I shout. “Well done.” Elsey’s face is hard and strong, and I couldn’t be prouder of her in that moment.

In a flash, her easy grin is back. Stoic Elsey is a little girl again, running toward my dad. “Oh, Father!” she exclaims, jumping into his arms, not unlike the way I did earlier.

“Are you okay?” Tawni says, directing the question at all of us.

“Fine,” I say quickly. “But Tristan’s been hit.”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “It grazed me—looks worse than it is.” The red blood is swarming over his leg and we’ll have to stop the bleeding, but not here, not now.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” I say.

“The bombs are hitting everywhere,” Tawni says. “They’re very close.”

“We have no choice. We’ll be caught if we stay here.”

My dad puts Elsey down, but she continues to cling to his waist. “Adele’s right,” he says. “Reinforcements will be sent to subdue the prisoners. Believe me, they will. Then they’ll search for us—plenty of guards witnessed our escape.”

“We’ll make it,” Tristan says. “We have to make it.” There’s a strange confidence in his voice. Not cockiness—he doesn’t seem like that kind of guy. Nor is it a statement made by someone who’s gotten everything he ever wanted since the day he was born—although he has. It sounds almost like a prediction. Sort of philosophical; sort of mystical. And the way Tristan glances at Roc—intense, knowing—it’s like there’s something they know, or think they know, that they aren’t telling us. Something important. Something life changing.

When I became a mind reader, I don’t know. I’m probably just imagining things.

My dad pulls away from Elsey’s grip and holds her hand, pulls her toward the exit. “Let’s go,” he says.

We creep through the rubble together. An explosion erupts somewhere nearby, sending dust and chunks of stone into the air. Another bomb hits further down the street, blasting the middle of a tall building. Weakened, the upper half teeters, leans, and then tumbles away, crashing across the road and into the next building, which crumbles under the weight. Beneath the buildings, people run out, frantically trying to escape the world that’s caving in on them.

None of them make it. Not a single one. There are at least ten souls destroyed—five crushed under the weight of the massive hunks of rock falling from above, the other five killed by a second missile landing in the center of their escape route. Like so many others from the last few days, the memory of our horrific flight through the subchapter 26 warzone is being tattooed into my brain.

We flee down a street that hasn’t been hit yet. Bombs are going off all around us. The smell of death is in the air. The smoke chokes my lungs and burns my eyes. Elsey is screaming so much that my dad eventually picks her up and carries her in his strong arms.

We pass through a deserted intersection filled with rubble. My mouth is dry from running and shouting and fighting. My legs are burning. I stumble on a broken stone, feel myself falling. And then a strong arm is there, grabbing me, keeping me on my feet. An electric touch: Tristan. Not grinning anymore. Lips pursed, serious. But also determined. I feel safe with him. He’s badly injured, but still strong.

Roc, who seems to have a good idea of the city layout, leads us to the left, down a side street that’s relatively unscathed. In fact, all the streets in this direction haven’t been bombed.

We soon find out why.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Tristan

Abruptly, Roc ducks into an alley. We follow him, mimicking his movements, flattening ourselves against the wall. I want to ask what we’re doing, but Roc’s finger is on his lips—for some reason, complete silence is important now.

Roc has good hearing, because I don’t hear anything for at least another minute. But then I hear it: the sound of marching feet. Hundreds of them, maybe more. It sounds like a parade. If the thumping feet are the beat of the snare drums, the periodic bomb blasts are the bass drums. The feet are getting closer. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Directly in sync with the beating of my heart.

When the first line of troops passes us I hold my breath. When I realize the soldiers are so focused straight ahead that they aren’t going to see us, I slowly release the air in my lungs.

At least a thousand soldiers march by, each wearing a star patch on their shoulders. Star Dweller troops. Although their sky-blue uniforms are old and frayed, they seem to be professionals, well-organized and confident. And they’re carrying shiny new guns, just another piece of evidence that someone from the Sun Realm is helping them. They look a little ragtag, yes, but deadly. Pissed off to the point of killing anyone who gets in their way.

When the last line of soldiers tramps past us and the drumbeat fades into the distance, we finally relax. Shoulders slump, deep breaths are taken, hearts slow.

“What’s going on?” Adele’s father asks. Other than hearing the bombs and listening to prisoner gossip, he wouldn’t have any idea what’s been happening while he’s been stuck in prison.

“Soon,” Adele says. “Let’s make for the reservoir.”

Once more, Roc leads the way. Although the bombing has finally stopped, I don’t feel safe. At any moment another contingent of rebels could happen upon us. They’ll shoot first, ask questions later.

Despite my fears, we reach the stream safely. Out of the city it’s darker, but much less scary. There won’t be soldiers or bombs here.

“We need to talk,” Adele’s father says.

“I know,” Adele replies. “But first his leg.” She motions to my gunshot wound.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“All over it,” Tawni says, removing a spare tunic from her bag. “You talk while I do this.”

“As quickly as you can, tell me everything,” Adele’s father says.

While Tawni tears off strips of cloth and bandages my leg, Adele tells her father her story. Some of it I know, some I don’t, which I listen to with wide eyes. Meeting Tawni and Cole. Their escape amidst the bombing. The news stories. Rivet. Their flight through the caves. The train ride. Cole’s death. By the end her hands are shaking so hard she has to clasp them together behind her back.

Her father folds her into his arms and I expect her to weaken, to cry. She doesn’t. She looks numb, like she’s in shock from everything that happened. To some degree, we all must be. There are so many emotions inside me that I don’t know which to focus on, which is the most important.

“Adele, it’s okay now. You’ve done so well,” her father says. He releases her, holds her out so he can look at her. “You said something about how the three bombings didn’t make sense to you?”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “The timing was too perfect. Without those bombs we might not have made it, none of us.”

He nods back at her, stroking a thoughtful hand across his chin. “Things aren’t always what they seem,” he says cryptically.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

Adele’s dad looks up, as if he forgot the rest of us were here. I noticed that when Adele told her story, she left out me and Roc, didn’t mention our injuries, which are written all over our faces. Was she trying to protect us in some way? I wonder how her father will react to having Sun Dwellers in their midst.

“Why are you here, Tristan?” he asks.

He recognizes me. I wasn’t sure if he did. In some ways I hoped he wouldn’t. When he asks the question, his voice is even, unreadable, but I sense he’s asking the question only because he thinks he has to.

Adele half-turns, still in her father’s arms, making eye contact with me. Electricity crackles down my spine. I take a deep breath, trying to figure out what the hell to say, how to explain something that has no explanation—at least none that I’m aware of.

“Something drew me to Adele,” I say. A breath whooshes out of Adele’s lungs. And is that a…a smile?

Adele’s father doesn’t look surprised. “She’s always been as beautiful as her mother,” he says.

“No, not that,” I say, flushing. Adele’s smile fades. “I mean, I’m not saying she’s not…I mean, she is…but that’s not what I meant.”

“What do you mean, Tristan,” her father asks, scowling slightly.

I take a deep breath, start again. “When I saw her—Adele—In the Moon Realm, it was as if just being close to her caused me pain.” I shake my head, wishing I had a more plausible story to tell. “I’m not talking emotional, mental, or spiritual pain, nothing so vague. It was real physical pain. And now I think Adele felt it too. Is that right?” I look at her.

She nods. “I did.”

Hearing her say it out loud sends anxious bats through my stomach. I don’t know what else to say. This is all too crazy.

Adele’s father’s frown deepens and he raises a hand to his beard, strokes it gently, as if thinking. “I wonder…” he says.

“Wonder what?” Adele asks.

He looks at his daughter, startled, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Nothing,” he says. “Look, I don’t know why we’re all here, or about all this pain stuff, but we have to make some decisions. Tristan, are you only here because you felt drawn to my daughter in the strange way you say?”

Before I can answer, Roc looks at Tawni. “Tell ’em,” he says.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Adele

I stare at Tawni. Why does she know something I don’t? Tristan is looking at Roc the same way—evidently he isn’t in the loop either.

“Roc and I talked while you were rescuing your dad,” Tawni says. “Elsey, too,” she adds, which makes Elsey smile. “Although Tristan and Roc ran away to find you, Adele, to ask you questions, there’s more to it. They’re different from other Sun Dwellers.”

“We’ve had enough of it all,” Roc says. Tristan nods in agreement.

“They don’t want to be a part of it anymore. They’ve decided to help do something about it.”

“We have?” Tristan says, smirking.

“Yes, we have,” Roc says, grinning back. “I just haven’t told you yet. Tristan’s going to use whatever influence he has to convince the Moon Dwellers to join the Star Dwellers, not fight them.”

Mine and Tristan’s eyebrows rise at the same time. Roc plows on. “Everything is such a mess. The Moon and Star Realms are going to destroy each other, making the Sun Realm even more powerful. We have to do this. It’s the only option.”

I look at Tristan. He looks at me. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. I want to make a difference. Do the right thing. Stop my father.”

“What about me?” I say.

“You’ll come, too. We could use a bit of muscle on our side,” he says, smiling.

I smile back, excited about something for the first time in a long time. Traveling with Tristan, figuring out what the hell it all means, by his side, fighting for good—

But wait. “What about Mother?” I ask. “What if she’s alive?”

My father’s eyes are dark, and not because of the dim lighting. “I don’t want to get your hopes up…” he says, his statement as wispy as smoke, trailing away into the dark.

“You know where she is,” I say. It’s not a question.

“The Star Realm.”

“But how…?”

“Typically all convicted traitors are sent to Camp Blood and Stone, but they wanted to separate us, so they took her below,” he says, pointing down at the ground. “There’s only one place they would’ve taken her.”

“The Max,” I say, understanding now. The maximum security prison in the Star Realm. The same Max that I would’ve been transferred to on my eighteenth birthday had we not escaped. Unbelievable to think how different things could have gone. That I would have found my mom had I just left things alone. But then my dad would still be in prison. And Elsey still in that awful orphanage.

I’m so tired. Emotionally, physically, mentally. All I want is to go with Tristan, to help him, to maybe get to know him, possibly hold his hand some more, learn more about our almost preternatural connection. And yet I say, “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?” Father asks.

“Go to the Star Realm. Find her,” I say. The words stick in my throat, but I push them out.

“No,” Father says. And again. “No. We’ll get you and Elsey to safety, and then I’ll go after her.”

“I can do this,” I say. “I’m not the girl I was a year ago. Or even a month ago.”

“I know you’re not,” Father says, “but it’s too dangerous. You’ve done enough.” He places a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve only just brought us together again.”

I lean into the warmth of his arms and he wraps himself around me. But I’m not giving in. While he thinks he’s comforting me, I’m comforting him. “I have to do this,” I whisper into his chest.

He pulls back sharply, his face paling. “Adele, I can’t let—”

“You trained me,” I say. “I always thought it was just for fun. I enjoyed it. But it was more, wasn’t it? You were preparing me. This is what you were training me for. In case our family ever needed help. So I wouldn’t be helpless.”

I hold his gaze, daring him to lie to me. He doesn’t. “Yes,” he says, his eyes cloudy.

I continue before he can pull his thoughts into a cohesive argument. “You have to protect Elsey. And you have to help mend the wounds between the Lower Realms. And I have to find Mother.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” Tristan says immediately.

“Me too,” Elsey chimes in.

“No,” I say, not wanting to say it. “Elsey, you need to stay with Dad. He needs you now.” She scrunches up her face, but then nods firmly and grabs Dad’s hand.

“And you…” I say, turning to Tristan.

He cuts me off. “We’ll find your mother first, then we can talk to the Moon Dwellers.”

“There isn’t time,” I say. “Plus, the Star Dwellers will kill you if they catch you down there.”

“They’ll kill…you, too,” Tristan says, his words catching in his throat slightly as he says kill.

“No, they won’t. Not if I tell them I’m joining their rebellion. That’s what they want, isn’t it? For all the Moon Dwellers to join them? But they won’t accept that a Sun Dweller wants to betray his own people. Especially not you.” My words are firm, my logic sound. Inside, my stomach is in knots, my heart crumbling beneath the power of my brain’s logic. Why are you saying this? Let him come with you! Someone else can talk to the Moon Dwellers.

Tristan is shaking his head, his mouth tight and grim. His eyes look misty. When he looks away from me I feel tears well up. I barely know him, and yet…my soul aches for him. I blink away the tears.

“Adele…” my dad says slowly, his eyes tired and apologetic, “you’ve been through so much, I can’t even imagine…”

“It’s okay,” I say, feeling a surge of strength in the very marrow of my bones.

My dad leans in close to me again. His voice is hoarse, merely a whisper, so the others can’t hear it. “I’m so sorry, honey. I want to come with you, want to protect you, but I…”

I already know he can’t. Elsey needs a father now more than ever. Plus, he can help open up lines of communication between the Moon Dweller leaders and Tristan.

Selfishly, I want him to come with me. I’ve been on my own for so long now, I just want my dad to be there, to tell me what to do, to protect me, to be my rock, like he’s always been. I’ve come so far. So far.

I see my dad’s face. I’ve never seen such pain in his eyes before. They’re wet and red and tired. I have to be strong for him.

I hug him again. “I’m strong, Dad,” I find myself saying. At first I think I’m just trying to act tough again. Then I realize it isn’t an act. The last six months, though hard, have chiseled me into a different person. I’m the same, but different. I’m no longer reliant on my father to protect me. I’m tough. A survivor. “I’ll be fine,” I say firmly.

My dad tilts my chin to look at me. His eyes are blurry. “I know you will, Adele. You’re an incredible young woman, courageous and strong. I’m so proud of you. Be safe.”

“Do you have any advice?” I ask, hoping for some of my dad’s usual pearls of wisdom.

“Remember the three bombings when you’re down there. Look for answers. You have good instincts and I think you’re right. Someone’s looking out for you and I have a feeling you’ll find out who while you’re in the Star Realm. Do what’s in your heart. And please, come back to me.” He kisses my forehead, holds his lips to my skin for a moment, his dark and tangled beard blocking my vision.

After all the crying I’ve done lately, I expect to be bawling now. But I’m not. Other than the few tears I blinked away, I feel strong and resilient. The fighter my father raised me to be. I’m about to turn away from him when, almost as an afterthought, he reaches into his shoe and extracts a slip of paper, shoving it into my hand.

“Dad, what—”

“Don’t read it now. Your mom asked me to give it to you if I ever saw you again. She said it’s important. I’ve pondered its meaning many times, but never got anywhere. Maybe it will mean more to you.”

“Thank you,” I say, my voice catching slightly. A message from my mother. I want nothing more than to unfold it and read it right now, but I listen to my dad and hold it tight in my hand.

I release my dad and turn to Elsey. “You were so incredible back there,” I say. “You saved us. Take care of Dad for me, okay?”

Elsey’s eyes widen. “I will,” she says solemnly. “Thank you for rescuing me.” She rushes to me and throws her arms around me. She’s not being overly dramatic this time—the situation warrants it. I hold her fiercely.

“I will never forget you, Elsey,” I say, speaking her language.

“Nor I you,” she replies. I kiss both her cheeks and then turn to Tawni.

Although I desperately want to, I can’t ask her to come with me. She’s done too much already, and the road ahead will be too dangerous. “Goodb—”

“I’m coming with you,” she says, interrupting my farewell speech before it ever really gets started. I burst into a huge smile, hug her. I don’t argue. Like before, I know she won’t take no for an answer, and I don’t want her to.

I go to shake Roc’s hand, but he gives me a hug instead. I don’t know him that well, but he seems like a good person. “Take care,” I say.

“Till we meet again,” he says.

Finally, I turn toward Tristan. He’s still frowning, his lips still tight.

“I’m going with you,” he says. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

I bite my lip, and realize my head is throbbing. “Tristan, believe me, I want you to. It’s just…”

“I’m going with you,” he repeats.

“They need you up here. The world needs you,” I say.

“You make me feel important,” he says wryly, allowing himself a tight smile.

It’s the funniest thing in the world for him to say, and I have to hold back a laugh. I make the son of the president feel important? “You are,” I say. “I mean, you could be. You have that kind of potential.”

“Potential…” he says wistfully, “that’s what my father always said.”

“Not like that,” I say. “You know what I mean.”

I can see the tension in the hard lines of his arms, the same arms that have saved me more than once, that have fought beside me for no reason other than that he feels pain when he’s near me. “We’ll meet again,” I say, wishing it was a promise I knew I could keep.

“You don’t know that,” he says.

Thud, thud, thud. My heart, not my head, although both are pounding away. “Father?” I say, looking at my dad in hopes of something…an answer to an unspoken question perhaps. Can Tristan come with us?

“I won’t tell either of you what to do,” Father says. “You’ve both proven you’re more than capable of making your own decisions…”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’,” Tristan says, quirking the corner of his mouth.

Father laughs and I love the sound, even if I don’t like what it means. “You have good senses too,” he says. “But we could really use Tristan here. If we have any hope of steering the Star Dweller violence away from the Moon Realm, that is.”

Tristan’s face twitches slightly. He knows what that means. He can’t walk away when people are dying. It’s not in him. “There are so many unanswered questions,” he says, moving a step closer to me. The pain in my head rises, but I don’t care, almost want it to. It’s worth it.

I take half-step forward, thinking about what he said. He’s right. I want to explore those questions with him, but I have to be strong, have to stand on my own two feet. He’s close enough to touch now. My body shivering slightly, I circle my arms around him, hug him. Something drew me to Adele. If he’s right, then we’ll be drawn together again, in time, won’t we?

And then, as I hold him, I realize I don’t feel any pain: just warmth, a faint buzzing in my scalp, a tingling in my spine.

I raise my chin and look up at him. A single tear creeps from his eye and meanders down his cheek. I wipe it away with the edge of my hand. Emotions are running through me, but I don’t trust them, not under the circumstances. I have the urge to kiss him. I grit my teeth and ignore the feeling, pull him close for a final squeeze.

He stops me, entwines his fingers in mine, like the night before, a magical moment of soft touches and finger grazes and so many feelings. The gray of the caves and the smell of smoke and the fierce, fierce weariness from fighting and running and running—they fade away.

And Tristan leans in, dipping his chin, so close, so close…and his lips find mine.

A shockwave of pain surges through me and I almost cry out, but then it’s gone. It’s gone and all I feel is the tenderness and moisture of Tristan’s lips, lingering on my mouth even as he pulls away far too soon.

I release Tristan and immediately feel the electricity leave my body. I feel numb again, unfeeling. I might be mistaken, but I notice a slight twitch on Tristan’s face when we pull apart, as if it hurt him.

My father clears his throat and my face reddens, but the embarrassment was worth it. Roc chuckles, says, “That was unexpected,” while Tawni and Elsey just beam at me. My gaze settles on my feet.

“Uh, where will you go?” Tristan says, also avoiding eye contact with my dad.

Honestly, I don’t know, can barely think. I’ve never been to the Star Realm, have no idea how to get there. I bore a hole through the dirt on my shoes with my stare, before finally looking up at Tawni, who only shrugs, a big smile still plastered across her face. A good team we’re going to be.

Roc chuckles again as he unzips his pack. “Here, take these,” he says, handing me a packet of maps. “Your complete guide to the Star Realm. I recommend following the reservoir around the city to the north”—he points in the direction we should take—“and then hang a right through the inter-realm tunnel. Typically you’d need clearance to get through it, but I expect no one is manning it because of everything that’s happening.”

I nod. “Thank you. For everything.”

I can’t bear to drag out the goodbyes any longer. I’ve just kissed Tristan—like really, really kissed him—and yet now we have to part ways. And I’ve just brought three-quarters of my family back together, and yet I have to leave them, too, to find my mom. The last quarter.

If she’s alive, I will find her—of that I’m certain.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tristan

She’s gone. I watch her long, black hair fade into obscurity, becoming one with the dark cavern walls. With each step further from me, I feel the pull toward her lessen, the energy leaving my neck and spine. When I turn away, I find her father looking at me seriously.

“She’s my little girl,” he says. I sense a protective undercurrent to his words, no doubt brought on by him witnessing our first kiss. Did I really just do that?

“I’m not like my father.”

“You already told me that,” he says. “Now you have to show me.”

“I will,” I promise. I stride to him, extend my hand. “I’m Tristan. Tristan Nailin.”

He takes my hand, squeezes hard, crushes my fingers. A test, maybe. Although it hurts like hell, I control my face, don’t cry out. “I’m Adele’s father,” he says sternly. I raise my eyebrows, intimidated by the serious man before me. My judge. My jury. Without his approval, I surely won’t get Adele’s.

He surprises me by breaking into a huge smile, chuckling under his beard. “Just kidding,” he says. “I’m not really that tough. Unless you do something to hurt my daughter, of course. Then I’m your worst nightmare. Name’s Ben. Ben Rose.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Rose,” I say.

“Just Ben is fine.”

“Thanks. And I won’t do anything to hurt your daughter—that’s a promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he says, leaving me and going to Roc and Elsey, who are dangling their feet in the reservoir.

I crouch down, put a hand on the stone. I imagine that I can feel small vibrations through the ground, the soft patter of her footsteps in the distance. I close my eyes and picture her green eyes looking up at me, her soft lips slightly parted. It had felt like she was about to kiss me, but then when she didn’t, I couldn’t stop myself, like I didn’t have a choice. Was it because of the pain? Did I subconsciously know it would relieve it? And why did it help?

I hope I’ll get the chance to ask her what she thinks.

I fear for her. The caverns are a dangerous place, and they get more dangerous the deeper you go. Cannibals, marauding gangs of thieves, and now legions of Star Dweller troops roam the depths, preying on the weak. Adele is not weak—she’s proved that every step of the way with her fighting, with the slingshot—but she’s also not invincible. Like when I started this adventure, I hope I’ll see her again.

I still don’t know what our feelings are for each other, or why they’re so strong, or even why they started with so much pain, but I want to find out. She’s like no one I’ve ever met before. So strong and capable—but tender and compassionate, too. At least that’s my first impression.

My only regret: I didn’t tell her what I know; about the Dwellers living on the surface of the Earth, the first of our people in almost five-hundred years to leave the Tri-Realms. It just never felt like the right time, and it’s not something you just blurt out, like a confession. I vow to tell her the next chance I get. Until then, she’ll live in my dreams, like my mom.

I gulp down a deep breath as I realize it’s true. I have no regrets about leaving the Sun Realm, even though now I know it’s probably for good. No regrets at all. I’ve changed. I’m no longer reliant on a soft mattress and a fluffy pillow and servants waiting on me hand and foot. I’m not addicted to the wealth and the power like my father. I’m the person my mother wanted me to be, the person I hope Adele needs me to be.

I kiss the tips of my fingers, touch them to the ground. “Farewell, Adele Rose,” I whisper.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Adele

The tunnel is right where Roc said it would be. He’s wrong about there not being any guards, though, but they’re both dead, lying awkwardly at the bottom of the stone staircase leading to the tunnel entrance. They’ve been shot and thrown down the stairs. I try not to look at their faces as we step over them.

We reach the top of the steps and I pause, looking back over the city. Thick smoke roils over the crumbling rooftops. A cheer rises up in the distance. The Star Dwellers have taken subchapter 26.

“My father gave me a note from my mom,” I say, my hand clenched tightly around the paper, crumpling it slightly.

“You should read it.”

“I’m afraid it will hurt too much.”

“Sometimes a little pain is good,” she says.

She’s right. After all, it was a little pain—okay, a lot of pain—that started everything with Tristan. I untighten my fingers, watching as red splotches replace the whiteness of my knuckles. I fold back the note, one corner at a time.

My mom’s faded handwriting is smudged in the center of the half-page.

You’ll know him when you see him, it says. And together you can save us all.

My heart sinks. I show it to Tawni. “A riddle,” I say. “I guess I was hoping for something more personal.”

Tawni scans the single line, says, “Maybe it is personal.”

I look at her. Think hard. “You mean…”

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe she’s talking about Tristan.”

It can’t be. My mom doesn’t know Tristan any more than I do. She doesn’t know about the pain his presence caused me, how he saved me, how the pain is mostly gone now. She knows none of it. And yet, something tells me Tawni’s right. The note is about Tristan. And me. But who are we meant to be saving, and how? My family? We’re almost there—all that’s left is to find her, but now Tristan’s not coming with us, so does that screw everything up? Although I can’t even begin to understand what she means, it gives me a small measure of comfort knowing that there’s someone out there who gets what I’m going through and why. My mother.

I fold the note and tuck it in my pack. “Thanks for coming with me,” I say to Tawni.

“I didn’t have anything better to do,” she says.

I laugh. “You know, you’re not like your parents at all.”

Her face lights up, her gray eyes shining slightly under the glow of the overhead cavern lights. “That means a lot,” she says, tearing up. “Cole said the same…” She can’t get the rest of the words out as she stifles a sob with the back of her hand.

“I know,” I say. “Cole said the same thing. Because it’s true. He would’ve come with us, too. I know it.”

Tawni hugs me once, still afraid to speak, and turns to the cave mouth. A year ago it would’ve looked ominous, like the mouth of a monster, the stalactites hanging from above its teeth, ready to eat us alive. But now it just looks like a cave. Another challenge.

And I am ready.

The End

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No Kinda Life

by

Ryan King

“Being a lawman’s no kinda life,” his father had told him in that deep gravelly voice. The man hadn’t seen the inconsistency in the fact that he was a lawman himself. “The law’s a bitch of a mistress’s to serve…worse one to actually have feelings for,” the tough old man had added on his deathbed, but by that point he knew it was no use. By then, Austin was already a Ranger.

Austin often thought his father had been right. Looking down the long dusty road made him uncharacteristically introspective. It was like any other by-way in the northern part of the New Texas Republic...dry, hot, and deadly. He could have made a good living as a blacksmith, or a farmer, or a scavenger like many did, but he found out early that his choices were either to serve the law, or get served up on it. Without the benefit of a badge, his fierce temper and highly emotional nature would have seen him hanged for sure. Beating fools, shooting bandits, and hanging criminals just seemed to come easy to him.

Ginger pawed restlessly beneath him, eager to move on. Austin patted her tan flank and spoke soothing words. He sat on a hill and gazed out to his right over the ruins of what had once been a large city. Gigantic buildings stood like metal and concrete corpses against a backdrop of dust and haze. The old stories said that in this city more cattle than could be counted went through the stockyards and slaughterhouses and out to feed a huge nation of people. Austin didn’t put much faith in the old stories; Amarillo looked like dozens of other wasted wrecks that were good now for nothing more than scavenging and ghost stories. He’d done some scavenging himself but didn’t care for it. It wasn’t the fear of dead Old Ones that bothered him, it was the idea that the Death Plague might still await them there somewhere, buried and ready to ravage the land again. Let others dig through old tombs for bits of metal and rock, thought Austin.

A circling buzzard to the north caught the tall man’s attention and he decided it was time to move on. He clicked his heals lightly to Ginger and she gladly started off at a canter. He skirted wide around the hollow mounds which were always filled with rusty steel and glass. These circled for miles round every old dead city and were inexplicably laid out in neat lines most of the time. Other long abandoned structures occasionally caused him to alter his course, all of them rotten and dead as old trees. He rode carefully for several hours around the ruins, watching for signs of sinkholes which were always a danger this close to the old cities. He finally came to the north side of the ruins and turned again towards his destination, the town of New Hope. Austin thought the name was likely ironical and expected it to be like hundreds of other towns he’d seen, desperately clinging to life and full of pragmatic people who wanted a Ranger in their midst as much as they would a rabid badger.

Like all the towns before, they’d cried for help not comprehending what they were asking for, and the Governor had sent one of his fabled Texas Rangers. Austin didn’t need to know the specifics of the problem; it would be the same as always…someone stronger was taking from someone weaker. The solution was also always the same…make them fight. Kicking and screaming against their will in most cases. The simple folks who cried out for deliverance all believed the same thing, that a Ranger would come with knowledge, and skills, and Lord help us, guns! They were all shocked when they realized they would have to fight themselves and worse that a Ranger brought with him The Law.

Most citizens of the New Texas Republic were spread out in small settlements away from the capital of Cooper. They lived in relative isolation and liked it that way. They paid their allotted taxes once a year, and sent their delegates to the required annual meeting, but otherwise they might as well have been in Kuba. They had their own traditions, rules…and laws. A Ranger frequently ran into trouble with bigamy, prostitution, and animal sacrifice. Sometimes they even encountered settlements offering human sacrifices to appease the Sun, or bring rain, or simply because their parents had done the same. None of these practices could be tolerated in a land struggling to maintain its population against the masses from the various Mexican Baronies to the south and the wild plainsmen to the north.

Austin saw smoke rising in the distance and figured he was close to New Hope. It was likely from a forge. A town this close to one of the old cities probably did well scavenging and trading metal. He pulled out an old weathered pair of binoculars and scanned the surrounding area. Through the haze, Austin could see cattle, sheep, and goats tended in scattered herds by young boys and girls. They carried metal rods to fight off wolves or boar and Austin knew they all were certainly deadly shots with their slings. Shepherds were good, he thought to himself. They knew how to fight off animals and protect their own. Fighting off men wasn’t that big a difference.

He rode forward slowly along the main north road. Nearly a mile ahead, Austin saw two figures separate from the herds and begin approaching him with easy rangy lopes. After several long minutes they came into closer view. Both were teenage boys, tall and thin, burned nearly brown by the fierce sun and wind. They wore a minimal amount of animals’ skins and were barefoot despite the rough blazing ground. Austin saw with approval that one of the two stopped about thirty yards away and loaded his sling while the other came closer.

Austin pulled up his horse and waited patiently as the boy eased forward with the metal rod held ready. It would have been comical if not for the fact that Austin was sure the boy watching could likely take his head off with a rock before he could run or shoot either of them. Both boys seemed far more interested in the horse than in Austin.

“I’m Captain Austin Reynolds of the Texas Rangers,” Austin said and the boy finally looked at his face. He drew back first at the deep ugly scar running parallel across Austin’s weathered face and then at the heavy revolver at the ranger’s belt.

Austin was afraid they might run or worse go at him with the sling. Even if they missed him, they might spook Ginger causing her to buck or maybe break a leg. “New Hope sent a message for help. Well, I’m it.”

The boy nodded, seeming to make up his mind. He turned to the other boy and waved him forward before looking back at the ranger. “I’m Dallas and that’s Jim. Glad you’re here. The Red Horde will be here in a week.”

Austin didn’t need to ask who the Red Horde was. It was surely one of the groups of raiders who came out of the plains to prey on farmers and ranchers in northern Texas. “Who do I need to talk to? You got a sheriff here?”

Dallas shook his head, “We did. Sheriff Taylor was killed in the last visit by the Horde. They took more than the agreed amount, he told ‘em that wasn’t fair, and they burned him in front of the town as a lesson to us.”

“And you all watched good I bet,” asked Austin growing cold and a little angry.

“Sure did,” answered Jim not catching the sarcasm, “made us all watch the whole time. Reverend Timmons cursed ‘em by The One True God and they made him watch as they burned the church. Then they blinded him.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Austin his face tight.

Dallas spoke up, “It was last year when they came.”

“Last year? So, what was your bloody hurry?” Austin asked through clenched teeth.

Jim looked confused, but Dallas was angry. “Look, mister, we ain’t fighters, we’re just farmers and shepherds and people trying to get by. Anyone says anything to the Red Horde and they kill them or take them away. It’s the time when they come every year and they’ll be here soon. It was the Sheriff’s job to mess with them, but now he’s gone so we need someone to do that for us. We need you to deal with them.”

“Deal with them?” asked Austin. “You want me to negotiate?”

Dallas looked confused again evidently not understanding the word. “We want you to talk to them, bargain for us. They’re hard men,” answered Dallas. “We don’t want any trouble or anyone to get hurt, just make them deal fair with us.”

Austin decided he wasn’t going to get any further and spurred Ginger past the boys towards the town at a gallop. Austin’s jaw clinched tight as did his hands on the reins and Ginger picking up the mood adding unnecessary speed.

The settlement took shape before him as he rode. The town was built around a crossroads where the north road intersected with the old east road. Buildings, homes, and shops lined the streets with vegetable and corn gardens in the rear. Austin slowed to a canter and heard the familiar clanging of a blacksmith. He passed the forge and saw a stocky muscular man hammering away at what would likely be a horseshoe or farm tool. A teenage boy held the hot metal with tongs while a slip of a girl that couldn’t have been more than six years old worked the bellows with practiced ease and precision. Few professions were more revered than a smith. Half the town probably made a living scavenging metal out of Amarillo to bring to this one man. He would in turn make the rusty junk into something useful and sell it to traders traveling the east road. Austin tipped his hat at the smith in respect as he rode past. The man looked up and without altering his rhythm nodded back between powerful blows.

Austin noticed that people were starting to watch him. Weary and curious eyes peered out windows. Men stopped their work to gaze at him suspiciously. The horse and the gun were powerful symbols, more so than the badge on his shirt. No one spoke or approached him and Austin continued on calmly. He spotted a large well ahead right in the middle of the crossroads. Austin also saw a gaunt figure by the well dressed in a tattered black robe despite the heat leaning heavily on a staff. The dark figure seemed to be waiting for Austin, and the townsfolk began peering from this figure to Austin expectantly as they came closer together. The man gazed up at Austin as Ginger picked up her pace, smelling the water. Near the well, the ranger saw that where the dark figure should have eyes there was nothing but raw empty sockets.

The man suddenly spread his arms and began to shout, “’They forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshipped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the Lord to anger!’” The man turned from Austin and appeared to be addressing the whole town, “In his anger against Israel the Lord handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress.’” The man’s voice was almost hypnotic and filled with power and Austin felt his skin prickle.

Reverend Timmons tuned back to Austin and pointed his staff at him, “’Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hands of these raiders!’” He smiled openly and blindly up at Austin and moved closer. Ginger spooked a little and started to step back, but Austin held her tightly in place by the reins. “Be welcome among this wicked people, ranger. The Lord has heard our distress and sent a judge to save us and remove our inequity.”

“Know where I can get a drink, old man?” asked Austin.

Timmons smiled. “But of course, this well behind me which the Lord has provided is filled with cool clean water.” The man motioned to his rear in a grand display.

“I was thinking of something a little bit stronger,” answered Austin.

Timmons nodded as if in understanding. “Aren’t we all, young man.” His voice took on its singsong tone again, “’The Lord said everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.’”

Austin was growing impatient and began to move on again, but Timmons stepped in front of Ginger. The ranger’s hand automatically dropped to the butt of his pistol. Timmons sensing the danger in the air held up his hand and smiled easily. “Bar’s down the street to your left, ranger. We’ll talk more later.” He stepped aside and went back to gazing south down the road.

Austin really didn’t need directions...he could smell the fermentation. He saw various stills set up at the front of a building near a sign showing a cup. As good a sign as any thought Austin since none of these folks could likely read. He trotted Ginger over to the railing near a water trough and dismounted. He tied her off as she began to lap up water. Austin reached under his saddle and pulled out his rifle from its leather scabbard. The horse and saddle were incredibly valuable, but the rifle was irreplaceable.

The inside of the old structure was large and deserted. People were surely gardening or scavenging this time of day. Austin saw a bar along one wall and numerous tables and chairs. This building obviously served a number of purposes for large gatherings. Austin walked to the deserted bar and knocked loudly on the worn wooden counter. Austin heard a snort from an adjacent room and then quiet cursing. A portly man walked from around the corner his hair disheveled and sleep in his eyes. He had an angry retort on his lips, but froze when he saw Austin. The two stared at each other silently for long seconds.

“You’re the ranger,” said the man finally.

“Reckon I am,” answered Austin. “You got any beer?”

The man seemed to recover himself and gain a practiced smile and gracious nature. “We do indeed sir. Best in the whole north counties. Made from barley and wheat and the purest water from our very own well.” The barkeep stared at Austin with his grin expecting some sort of reply. Austin stared back coldly. “Right,” said the man as he reached down and pulled up a trapdoor under the bar. He descended a series of stairs and Austin felt cool air float up from below. After a few minutes the man climbed slowly and heavily back up with an earthen jug in one hand. He placed the jug in front of Austin with a rough pottery cup and then removed the plug from the bottle. He started to pour, but Austin waved him away pouring it himself. He noticed with surprise that there was a good deal of carbonation and that the smell was rich and flavorful. Austin took a sip and was pleased with the wonderful flavor of the cool ale.

He set the cup down and nodded appreciatively at the barkeep. “It is good.”

The man smiled and seemed to relax some, “Thank you, sir, make it myself. Best in the northern counties!” He continued to stare at Austin as the ranger slowly savored the beer and ignored him.

“Uh…Sir,” began the barkeep hesitantly, “that will be a dollar please.”

Austin looked up and saw the man smile nervously. The ranger reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a leather envelope containing a folded parchment packet. The man’s eyes got wide at the sight of paper. Austin broke the governor’s wax seal and opened the paper. He turned it around so the barkeep could see the writing.

“This is a declaration on behalf of Governor Johnson. It says the town of New Hope has to supply all my needs and wants at no cost for the duration of my time here.” The man looked at the letter closely, but Austin could tell he couldn’t read. After a few moments, he folded the letter and placed it back in the leather envelope for safe keeping.

The barkeep looked flustered and uncertain of what to do, “Sir, this is highly unusual. I’ll have to talk to the mayor about this.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Austin. “Why don’t you go get him now while I wait here.”

The man stared at him for a few seconds more, clearly uncertain. He finally made up his mind and started towards the front swinging doors. He was almost gone when Austin stopped him in his tracks.

“Oh yeah, you better brew more of this beer. I’m going to be drinking a lot of it while I’m here,” the ranger said with a smile. “This might be the best beer in all of New Texas.”

The man smiled at the compliment and then regained his concerned look before departing in a hurry.

***

Austin was almost finished with the beer when the barkeep returned. Instead of being accompanied by the obligatory grey beard, possibly with some pitiful retinue, there was a strikingly beautiful woman. She was tall and had black hair in a simple, but flattering dark brown dress. Her dark almond-shaped eyes regarded Austin with intellect and without intimidation.

The barkeep seemed a little embarrassed, “Sir, the uh…mayor’s…uh…”

She broke the awkwardness with a good-natured smile and a slight bow, “My name is Antonia. I am the mayor’s secretary among other duties. He regrets that he cannot come to you at this time, but invites you to dine with him tonight at his house. Until then, he asks that I give you any service you require.”

Austin wasn’t sure whether to be angry or amused, but he invited her to sit beside him. The woman was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he’d seen in a long time. And in this place no less. “And what service could you provide?” Austin asked and then realized how brazen this might sound.

Antonia did not seem to take offense. “My talents are many Sir. Might I suggest we start with your written charter from the governor you showed Mister Elder earlier?” She referred to the barkeep who was nervously hanging on every word. Austin felt confident that everything spoken here would be blabbed all over the bar that evening, but maybe that was a good thing.

The ranger pulled the parchment out again and opened it carefully preparing to read it to the woman, but she held out her hand.

“If you do not mind, Sir,” she said courteously, “might I review the document myself?”

Austin was amused in spite of himself. She’d likely stare at it with the same incomprehension as the barkeep. Keeping his face neutral he passed the document over.

She started by examining the broken seal closely. The woman next felt the paper carefully and then smelled it in several portions. Austin was about to end the lady’s embarrassment, but she surprised him.

“This is good paper if I may say so. We produce our own parchment when needed, but nothing this fine,” she said appreciatively.

Austin held his hand out for the letter. “Would you like me to read it to you?”

Antonia smiled, “There is no need, sir.” She held the letter at arm’s length and read in a clear and unhesitant voice. “Hearye All Good Citizens of New Hope of the New Texas Republic which sends you greetings. On behalf of Governor Johnson, Texas Ranger Captain Austin Reynolds is authorized to provide all due assistance in regard to the matter of illegal raids from the north. He is also authorized to enforce and uphold all laws of the New Texas Republic as he sees fit and pass judgment on any case involving said law. The duration of his mission is at the discretion of Captain Reynolds, but is not to exceed three months time. The Citizens of New Hope are directed to provide Captain Reynolds all needed support including room and board free of charge. You are also directed to obey his directions and cooperate in any other way he directs. God bless the New Texas Republic and the town of New Hope. Signed Zachery Jones, Grand Commander of the Texas Rangers.” Antonia folded the parchment back up carefully and handed it to Austin calmly.

Austin was taken aback. She read better than he did and a woman no less here in the middle of nowhere!

“Sir,” she said breaking the silence, “the mayor I’m sure will talk to you this evening, but in the meantime what are your needs that this town can accommodate?”

Austin smiled, this woman seemed incapable of being ruffled. “For now they are simple: stable and fodder for my horse and the same for me. Doesn’t have to be fancy, but it must be clean.”

“Certainly,” she replied, “I had anticipated as much and prepared Sheriff Taylor’s place which also has a small shed behind it for stabling animals. Fresh hay and water has already been laid in for several days as well as the larder of the house stocked. If you do not feel comfortable preparing your own meals, you are welcome to dine at the mayor’s house.”

I anticipated, she had said. Just who was this woman who seemed to wield such power? “Thank you kindly. I’ll have another beer here and ask someone to show me the way.”

She smiled and nodded, “As you will, sir.”

“Just one more thing,” Austin said cautiously. “How did you learn to read so well?”

Her face showed no expression. “Like I said Captain Reynolds, I am a woman of many talents.”

“And what else do you do for the mayor?” asked Austin. He knew this was impolite, but he wanted to see if he could throw this woman off her game a least for a second.

Antonia smiled easily. “Whatever is required of me.”

Austin pried harder. “Your accent is odd. Where are you from?”

She stood purposefully, but in no hurry. “That is a story for another day…if we all live to see it. I will inform the mayor that you will see him at dinner tonight. It is typically served at sunset.” Antonia bowed slightly again, “It was good to meet you, captain. If you require anything further, ask for me at the mayor’s house. Until then good day and be welcome here,” she said before bowing and walking out the door.

Austin turned back to the bar and saw the barkeep peeking out from the next room with a frightened look on his face as if he’d thought the ranger would have murdered the woman in the bar. Austin broke the man’s trance with a loud and gruff, “Take my horse over to the Sheriff’s house and get him bedded down, but before you do that get me another beer!”

***

The mayor’s house was not difficult to find. It was the largest and nicest in town and located near the crossroads. He’d learned from others that the house was not a private residence, but where the mayor, who was elected for life, lived. Mayor Tel Collins had served for fifteen years and was expected to serve at least another twenty as he was filled with vigor and of good health.

Austin had learned other things in the bar. He’d continued to drink steadily, but not to the point of feeling tipsy. He knew bars were the greatest of gossip spots and men talked more easily around someone else who was drinking. None dared approach the ranger, but he could pick up pieces of conversation.

“…the Horde might be in a foul mood after last time, best we tread lightly…”

“…as long as they leave us enough to get through the winter we’ll be okay with what we’ve hidden away…”

“…that there’s the ranger, he’ll talk tough to them, show them whose boss, make um deal with us straight…”

And more of the same. Austin gathered what the general mood was. This job was going to be tough, but weren’t they all? He finally left and walked over to check on Ginger who was lazing away in the shade. Satisfied that she was fine, Austin went into the old sheriff’s house. The little dwelling was furnished, but had been cleaned out of any old personal affects. Austin found the water pump in back which must connect to the main well. He cleaned himself up and put on a fresh shirt. He next looked through every nook and cranny of the house until he found what he was looking for, a suitable place to hide his rifle and all the spare ammo. It wouldn’t stop a determined thief, but hopefully there wouldn’t be any of those.

Austin walked through the town and saw people going about their business, giving him a wide berth. Despite the outward appearance of normalcy, there was a turbulent undercurrent of fear and uncertainty. Most of that was due to the eminent arrival of the wild raiders from the north, but some was also likely due to the presence of Austin himself.

The sun was just beginning to set as Austin came near the mayor’s house and the well at the crossroads. He was relieved to see no sign of Reverend Timmons. He’d learned that the townsfolk took turns taking care of the blind man each night, feeding, revering, and caring for him like some sort of holy relic. Austin had to admit that even if the blind man was crazy, at least he wasn’t afraid. In fact, Austin suspected he was one of those rare individuals who would welcome death. It was hard not to respect such an outlook even if it wasn’t sensible.

Oil lamps were lit throughout the lower floor of the mayor’s house and Austin’s mouth began to water as he smelled roasted goat and lamb. He’d last eaten that morning, cold rabbit left over from the previous evening. A huge surly man stood at the bottom of the steps holding a giant club, not quite blocking the way. He eyed Austin pointedly, almost challengingly and the ranger stopped in front of him and smiled easily.

“I will damn well kill you,” said Austin evenly. He was pleased to see the arrogant and defiant look leave the man’s face and be replaced by uncertainly and the barest glimmer of fear. He stepped back out of the path and Austin walked past the man into the house without slowing or noticing him further.

Antonia must have been watching through the window because she opened the door before he could knock. She was now dressed in a deep blue gown with her hair pulled back and she was even more strikingly beautiful than before.

“You sure dress up nice,” said Austin.

She smiled courteously and nodded her head. “So do you, sir. Allow me to show you into the den and introduce you to the mayor.”

Austin followed her through brightly-lit and vibrant rooms filled with color and cleanliness, totally out of place in this frontier town.

“Nice accommodations for a mayor,” said Austin. “This is almost as luxurious as the Governor’s mansion.”

“Yes, the residence dates from the olden times and has remained in remarkable condition; even some of the furnishings are original. In addition the New Hope Mayoral position comes with certain rights and privileges such as taxes and tolls on trade along the east-west road which helps with the upkeep.” Here Antonia stopped and looked hesitant, almost nervous. She gazed at him a moment and then continued on, “I also manage a number of profitable enterprises for Mayor Collins as his obayol.”

Austin frowned. “Obayol? What the hell is that? I thought you said you were his secretary?”

“The mayor’s secretary is one of my duties in addition to many others as his obayol.” She saw his frustrated retort forming and headed it off. “It is a fairly obscure term even here, more a practice of the east from which Mayor Collins originated. My father and I came to this town from the east many years ago and it was only natural that the two of them came to an arrangement regarding me.”

“He arranged for you to marry him?” asked Austin.

Antonia laughed, a beautiful and clear sound. “Oh no, the mayor already has a wife. I perform all other necessary duties.”

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you his mistress or an employee or what?”

“An obayol is a position of respect and honor. It is my duty and pleasure to serve the one I am bound to,” she said with the faintest trace of annoyance.

“Bound to?” asked Austin with growing unease. “Are you saying you are some sort of slave to this man?”

Antonia turned pale at his words and turned away. She walked further into the house and Austin followed. They entered a room that was obviously an office and a lean handsome man rose from behind an ancient and lovingly polished wooden desk.

“Captain Reynolds, may I introduce Mayor Tel Collins,” said Antonia with graciousness, her composure regained.

The mayor moved from around the desk and grasped the ranger’s hand firmly in both of his. “It is a great honor, sir to have you among us! A Texas Ranger, here in New Hope! No one would have ever imagined it.”

“Well,” explained Austin, “the Governor is concerned about the raiding along the northern border and would like to do what he can to help.”

Mayor Collins nodded with a large fixed smile, “Splendid, just splendid. The Governor! Met him myself several years ago after he put down the Coastal Rebellion. New Hope and the northern counties remained loyal and I bet he hasn’t forgotten it!”

Austin smiled back slightly. “The Governor, like the Rangers, never forgets a friend...or a foe.”

The mayor’s smile slipped just a bit. “Yes, I see. Well then, let us serve dinner. I’m confident you’ll find our roasted lamb as good as any you’ve had before.” He held his hand out indicating Austin should move into the adjacent room.

Austin entered the dining room and was surprised to see only three chairs at a small oval table. The room was originally designed to entertain a great number of people, but a larger dining table and chairs had been moved against a far wall. He noticed that the places at the table were only set for two. Austin moved to the seat proffered by his host who sat at the other place setting. Antonia sat between them at the vacant space as a short servant began filling glasses and serving food. Rich and savory aromas filled the room and Austin’s stomach growled loudly, but neither the mayor nor Antonia seemed to notice.

“So, how do you want to handle this situation?” began the mayor without preamble. “We’re currently between sheriffs, so you can go through me as far as representing the town in our dealings with the raiders.”

“Actually,” said Austin around a mouthful of food, “I’d like to address the town’s people directly, the sooner the better.”

Mayor Collins looked taken aback. “Why certainly, but you’re a busy man, that really isn’t necessary. If you let me know what you need from the town and its people, I’ll make sure it happens.”

The silence spread out awkwardly as Austin chewed another large mouthful of food and waited to swallow it and then take a drink of a delicious fruit wine before speaking. “No disrespect to you or your position, mayor, but whenever a ranger is called in it is customary to address the people. They need to hear from me what to expect. They need to know what the consequences are and they most definitely need to hear my plan and their parts in it.”

“Your plan?” asked the surprised mayor who turned to Antonia questioningly. She looked back impassive but shook her head in the negative ever so slightly. “What is your plan Captain Reynolds?”

Austin wiped his mouth with a napkin, “Don’t have one yet, but don’t worry, something will come to me. I’d like to address the town as soon as possible since the raiders will be here in a week. How does tomorrow night sound?”

Mayor Collins looked completely flustered and he turned to Antonia who answered for him. “Tomorrow evening should not be a problem, Captain Reynolds. Do you require everyone, or simply the men?”

Austin had finished his first plate and signaled the servant to fill it again. “Every man, woman, child, and infant that is currently residing in this town regardless of their status, rights, or abilities needs to be there. I mean everyone. Old people, criminals, even those tending the flocks. I won’t talk that long, the herds should be okay for an hour or so.”

The mayor seemed to have lost his ability to speak and just looked at Austin with a mixture of shock and resentment. Antonia continued to carry his side of the conversation. “Certainly, Captain Reynolds. Is there anything else you require in the performance of your duties?”

The ranger smiled. “Yes, is that pie I see over there?”

***

Austin rode Ginger around the perimeter of New Hope the next day. The land was flat as a table and it was difficult to determine where the wild plains ended and the town began. Perfect territory for fast horsemen, especially if they knew how to work together. Austin guessed the Red Horde did. This was going to be tough, he Austin.

After leaving the mayor’s house the previous evening, he’d spent more time in the bar listening and talking to tipsy locals. It turned out that New Hope conducted most of its trade at the annual Fall Harvest Festival which was a month away. Traders and merchants from as far as Norman Free City and Nuevo Roswell came each year to buy and sell. The festival had been a disaster the year before due to the Red Horde’s devastation of the town’s people and goods. They could recover from one bad year...but not two. The Red Horde was due in a week at the full moon.

Austin shaded his eyes and saw the flocks spread out around the town in all directions. He also saw a dark figure ahead standing motionless in the hot sun. Austin thought about pulling out his binoculars to see who it was, but decided that wasn’t necessary. He knew who was waiting for him and rode forward at a canter.

“Beautiful sunny day, wouldn’t you say, ranger?” asked Reverend Timmons.

“What the hell you doing out here? You’ll get sun stroke in that black getup.”

Timmons smiled up at Austin and followed him with his sightless eyes. “The sun feels nice on my old bones and is a gift from God.”

“Yeah, I bet it makes you as rank as an old wet dog. You ever take that thing off and bathe?” asked Austin with only half curiosity.

“When the Lord thinks I need a bath, He sends rain.”

Austin shook his head. “Good God Almighty.”

“Exactly,” said the Reverend nodding solemnly as if that answered everything. “You know they didn’t want to send for you. They don’t know what’s getting ready to happen, but I do.”

Austin shifted in his saddle and stretched his back, “What are you talking about, old man?”

“The town, the mayor, none of them. They thought...damnation, they still think these hell hounds can be reasoned with like normal people.”

Austin stared at him for a long moment. “But you don’t.”

“Nope,” said Timmons and letting go of his staff pointed at his two empty eye sockets with both index fingers and then caught the staff again neatly before it could fall.

Austin began to roll a cigarette. “So, what do you think is getting ready to happen here?”

“Death and destruction. The Lord’s furious anger and retribution, not just for these raiders, but for the evil men among us. Those wolves in sheep’s clothing are an abomination and will be exposed.”

“We’ll see,” Austin lit his cigarette, “by the way, what’s an obayol?”

Timmons chuckled. “She’s gotten to you has she? In love with her I bet.”

Austin choked and coughed. “What? You’ve lost your wits, drink water and get out of the sun, old man.”

“It’s true,” he said in earnestness. “I’ve seen it, you just don’t know it yet.”

“You don’t see shit.”

“I see more than you think,” answered Timmons seriously, “more than you maybe.”

Growing bored Austin flicked his cigarette away. “As riveting as this conversation has been there padre, I got to finish my tour of the town.” He gave Ginger a gentle kick and rode past Timmons.

Austin rode for nearly half a minute and his thoughts had turned to other matters before he heard the old man yell out from behind him. He turned his head to see the crazy old man.

“Watch your back, ranger. You have few friends here and many that would turn on you if it suited them.”

“And are you one of my friends here?” jested Austin yelling back over his shoulder.

“Hardly,” snorted the reverend, “but I’m on your side. I’ll be there when you need me...and you will need me. I’ve seen it.”

Austin stopped Ginger to turn and watch the old man make his slow painful way back towards the crossroad.

The ranger sensed he was in danger, which wasn’t surprising.

The trick was to know from where it would come.

***

The tension that night in Elder’s Saloon was palpable, but there was also a strong sense of curiosity and excitement. Most of the town had seen the ranger at some point and a few had even spoken to him. The room was filled with a subdued hum of discussion as the men passed jugs of liquor and beer around.

Mayor Collins and Antonia entered the front of the large room and seeing Austin leaning against a far wall, marched straight over to him cutting a swath through the uncertain farmers and herders.

Tel Collins was clearly nervous, but trying to hide it. “Captain Reynolds, it would be best if you dealt with the people through me. No need to frighten or confuse anyone. These are simple folk and I understand them.”

Austin looked around the room at the sturdy men, the plain and tired women with resignation in their eyes, the ruddy children and adolescents who went forward with each day only because they didn’t know how painful and dire the future would be. He looked back at Tel and Antonia in their rich cloths and refined ways, the contrast was marked.

“I suspect I understand them far better than you,” said Austin. He turned abruptly and walked towards the elevated bar. He stepped on a chair and then up onto the worn and cracked surface, his head missing the ceiling by a few inches. The room instantly became silent and Austin noticed for the first time Reverend Timmons sitting in what was certainly the nicest chair in the building in one corner with a steamy beverage of some sort on a table beside him. Timmons nodded at him in greeting and Austin almost cursed out loud.

The ranger stood for a moment letting the tension build. He fully understood that part of his power and authority derived from presentation and drama. He would need these people to fear and be in awe of him in the coming days in order to willingly go die.

“Good evening, people of New Hope,” began Austin. A number of murmured replies greeted him in return. “My name is Captain Austin Reynolds of the Texas Rangers and I am here on the behalf of the Governor of New Texas. You have asked for his help in dealing with raiders from the north and as loyal citizens of New Texas he could not ignore your plight.” Austin paused and saw that everyone was hanging on his words and even holding their collective breaths.

“I am here to help,” said the ranger with the warmest smile he could muster. The moment hung in the air and then like a wave the tension spilled out of the air and the room was filled with cheering and clapping. People smiled at him openly and warmly. Austin held his hands up and signaled for quiet. With reluctance the room became still again.

Austin turned with an open hand to an apprehensive Mayor Collins. “Your able major here is still the leader of this town and my role is limited to dealing with this threat. He and I will work hand in hand, but...” here Austin turned back to survey the room with sternness, “...my authority in this area will be absolute and unquestioned.” Austin laid his hand casually on the butt of his pistol for emphasis.

Now he had to get into the hard part. He knew what to expect because it was so often this way. “Contrary to what you might think, I am not here to bargain for you with these criminals. I am here to help you destroy them. I am here to help you fight.”

The roar from the crowd was instantaneous. Men jumped up and started talking and waving, children looked on uncertainly not sure what was happening. Austin stood impassive and let the worst of the reaction play out before continuing on.

Austin raised his voice over the din, “I know how you feel. You do not believe it is possible to fight because you are afraid of the consequences. That is the main part of their power. They are men just like you and bleed and die the same as you. If you do as I say, we will defeat them.”

A large man in dusty homespun stood from the left side of the room. “But, Sir, you don’t know these animals. They tortured and killed the sheriff and he was tough. Look what they did to the reverend.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Houst,” said Timmons loudly, “they can’t do anything to me the Lord doesn’t allow. We need to listen to the ranger and not those in our midst who would steal our courage. The Lords’ Word says, ‘I did not give you a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power’. Trust in the Lord...and the servant He has sent to deliver us.”

“Be that as it may,” said a loud strong voice from the rear and Austin recognized the blacksmith, “they have horses and move fast. We have no weapons to resist them with or ways to hold them off. And no disrespect, Ranger, but you’re just one man.”

“Why not treaty with them, like we’ve done before?” yelled out a voice from the rear.

Another from closer up, “We try to fight and they might kill us all. Maybe take our children, burn the town, leave nothing.”

“All of this is the reverend’s fault, he talked us into sending for the ranger in the first place,” said a scared woman’s voice.

The mayor looked at Austin pointedly and then started to speak, but Austin put his fingers in his mouth and gave out a loud clear whistle that cut through the noise instantly. The room returned to some semblance of order.

This is going to be harder than I’d imagined, thought Austin. I’m going to have to shame them into this.

The ranger shook his head and chuckled, “I’ve been doing this job for a long time. I’ve helped many a town with many a problem, same as yours. Hell worse than yours. I come in, show them how to fight and then go on my way when they don’t need me anymore.” Austin paused and surveyed the room sternly. “Of all those towns, New Hope has got to be the most pathetic of the lot.”

The crowd was stunned and a low disapproving growl began to grow. Austin jumped off the bar and walked towards the front row of seated men and women. “You let them kill your sheriff and watched them torture him to death and the only one with the guts to even say boo is an old pastor? Is there anyone in this room that doesn’t feel ashamed over that? Is there anyone who thinks back and doesn’t regret not at least trying to do something?”

“Yes,” wailed a shrill voice, “but what could we do? We’re not fighters and these men are animals, vicious. They would have killed and tortured us too!”

“Maybe,” nodded Austin, “but not likely, not if you stuck together and certainly not in the future if you do what I say. There isn’t much you can do about the past, but there is a hell of a lot you can do about the future. Do you really want your sons and daughters to be dealing with this same problem after you’re gone? Wouldn’t you rather they are strong and able to fend off men like this?”

“We would,” said another, “but what about now?”

“It starts now,” answered the ranger, “it starts with overcoming your fear. I know it’s hard, but you have to trust me. You have to be willing to do what I ask and fight. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do for you and I’ll leave you with sadness and a prayer for your crippled cowardly souls.”

“But my paw could die,” said a small boy right in front of Austin who seemed shocked he had spoken out loud.

“Indeed,” smiled Austin laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder gently. “I won’t lie, many of you could die, but many of them will die too, I promise you that.”

Eyes shifted from Austin to his rear and he felt movement. “So what it comes down to...,” said Antonia’s musical voice, “is do we fight and risk death or do we continue to try to deal with the Red Horde as we have in the past? That is our decision and one which will define the very future of our existence. If we—”

Timmons interrupted her, “Do not be afraid. This is the choice; this is the time to have faith. Do we want our descendants to live in bondage as slaves to a heathen race? Do we want them to look back in future generations on us as the pitiful cowardly ancestors who didn’t have the guts to even try?”

The room was silent and still. Men and women looked at each other. Several met their neighbors eyes and nodded ever so slightly to each other.

“So what do you say, friends?” asked Austin. “Can you fight or are you slaves already in spirit? Can you overcome your fear?”

There was no talk or vote, but Austin saw the change in the people’s look and the straightness of their backs. Some even looked pleasantly surprised, as if something new and interesting had been shown to them. Fear was still there, but not as supreme as before. They would trust him...at least for the time being.

“Okay then,” said the mayor, “it appears we’ll try it your way. So, how do we begin, what now?”

“There’s a valley three days ride south of here. It contains a lake of clear water and lush grass with defensible hills all around,” explained Austin.

“Devon’s Valley,” said the blacksmith. “We sometimes drive the herds there when the droughts get bad.”

Austin nodded. “Tomorrow morning all the woman, the sick or infirm, children under twelve, and men over fifty will take all the livestock and herds to Devon’s Valley. They will drive far to the south around Amarillo before turning back northeast so the Horde doesn’t happen to pick up their trail when they come in. They will stay there until they get word it’s safe to return.”

He saw concern and confusion on their faces, even some additional fear.

“These are horsemen we’re dealing with,” explained Austin, “we can’t defend the flocks and herds. We need to drive them away so these raiders can’t take them. Also, won’t you feel better about fighting knowing your loved ones are safe and out of harm’s way?”

Most nodded at his logic and several looked relieved. “Everyone else needs to be in front of the mayor’s house at dawn tomorrow. You need to mentally prepare yourself for the most grueling and difficult thing you’ve probably ever done.”

The major looked concerned and spoke for them all, “Are you going to teach them how to fight?”

“No,” answered Austin, “not yet. I’m going to teach you all to dig.”

***

The next morning was complete and utter chaos. Sometime in the night Austin gave up trying to sleep over the ruckus and went out on the old sheriff’s front porch to smoke a cigarette as the sun rose. So much for starting at dawn, he thought unsurprised.

Fathers said tearful farewells to wives and children. Everyone carried a bundle of some sort and the town’s few horses, mules, and donkeys were hitched to small carts or wagons filled with provisions. Austin also saw the mayor’s wife for the first time. She was carried carefully out of the mayor’s house and lifted into a small litter strapped to the top of a loaded wagon. Either the frail and thin lady was sleeping through all of the activity around her or severely ill, Austin suspected the later.

One of the town’s matriarchs, who had either been selected as the caravan’s leader or assumed the role, finally gave the word to set out with another final round of farewells. It took nearly twenty minutes for the long line to clear the crossroads. In the distance Austin could see young boys and girls along with their trusty dogs gathering the flocks and herds into a long dusty line headed south.

Austin finally stood up and walked slowly down the street to the mayor’s house. The men watched him and then reluctantly fell into step behind him. As he was nearing the blacksmith’s shop, Austin remembered something else they would need and took a hard right towards the thick and strong man standing there gazing at him.

Austin stuck out his hand. “We haven’t met yet, I’m Austin Reynolds.”

The man slowly stuck his own hand out and grasped Austin’s in a near crushing grip. “Edgar Rodrigo.”

“I’m going to need a few things from you,” said Austin.

“Other than digging and dying?” asked Edgar.

“Yes, I’ll need every digging tool and bucket you have. I’ll also need you to make as many pike-heads as you can in the next three days.”

“Pike-heads?” asked the smith.

“Yeah, like spear-heads except the points are smaller since the shaft of the lance is much longer,” explained Austin.

“I know what a pike is,” said the smith, “just not sure why you need them.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said the ranger as he turned back towards the mayor’s house and continued his advance with the men gamely following along behind. At the front of the house Austin saw the mayor, his giant goon, and Antonia waiting for them. Seeing the beautiful woman still here annoyed him, but he decided not to make an issue of it. Besides, she seemed to have a calming effect on the entire town.

Austin grabbed a shovel out of the hands of a slack-jawed man nearby. He walked up to the goon who held his large stick trying to look menacing. The ranger took the stick easily out of his hands and tossed it aside, thrusting the shovel into his arms without a word. The big man took it and stepped back sheepishly. The mayor looked disgusted.

Tel Collins started to speak to Austin but the ranger moved past him to the top of the stairs before looking back on the men gathered below him in the rising sun. Men he would have to fight and die with. Despite everything, he felt akin to these men because of their decision to at least try.

Nearly thirty years before, Austin had answered the call and gone off to fight the war against the Chihuahua Barony far to the south. His father had tried to dissuade him, but the call of adventure was too strong for a young man. Austin had his own horse, so he was assigned to the 1st Texas Cavalry Regiment. His naïve ideas of glorious warfare were quickly and painfully shattered on those hot forgotten sands.

The enemy had mostly been reluctant peasants, but their generals were smart. The Mexicans had dug deep trenches and thrown the excavated dirt up in earthen walls right behind the trench. They then piled the top of the earthen walls with heavy rocks or logs. Not only did any attacker have to overcome the four or five foot deep trench, but then the six foot high wall with defenders raining down rocks, arrows, or spears. Austin’s cavalry had charged again and again against those walls, initially with confidence and distain for the Mexicans, but after several attempts their spirits were broken. Those simple peasants had massacred them with little loss to themselves. Austin had thought about those damned earthen ramparts numerous times over the years and knew their secret.

“Men,” boomed Austin’s voice over the apprehensive gathering, “the enemies we face are horsemen from the north. I’m sure they are ruthless, fearless, and terrifying beyond all measure, but horsemen nevertheless. And as an old cavalryman myself, I can tell you horses really do not like to break their legs no matter how strongly their rider urges them to do so.”

Several of the men chuckled, dispelling some of the tension in the air. “This land is flat, perfect for horses. What we have to do is put up obstacles to the horsemen so we don’t have to defend everywhere. We don’t have the numbers for that.” Austin cast his arm in a wide arc around the town. “We will dig trenches and mounds that the horsemen will avoid so that we can funnel them into areas that we’re defending. We’ll even the odds.”

“So you’re not teaching us to fight?” asked a gap toothed man in a wide hat.

“Not now, not yet,” answered Austin. “Believe me, the work you are about to do is going to be rough, but your lives depend on doing it quickly and doing it well. Fighting will be much easier with those ditches and walls up.”

A younger man stepped up, “Are you saying we’re going to dig a trench around the whole town? That’s got to be miles!”

“No,” answered the ranger, “only the very inner part of the town. Only the buildings themselves and what gardens are within a close radius, everything else will have to be abandoned.” There was some grumbling and concerned looks among the men, but Austin knew it would get no easier. “Break up into four groups and each group take a quarter of the perimeter based on the crossroads as a dividing line. I’ll come along and lay out the exact trench line. Let’s get moving, we don’t have much time.”

There was silence except for the regular clanking of the blacksmith’s hammer on metal in the distance. Austin strode off towards the edge of the town and after several silent moments the men began picking up shovels, picks, and buckets.

***

It took three grueling days to complete the trench and embankments around the town’s outer edge. A trench with an inside earthen wall encircled the town which was now split at four points by the two roads running parallel to each other. The tops of the walls were fixed with sharpened wooden stakes every foot or so. Infantry might be able to storm the earth mounds, thought Austin, but even undefended; horses weren’t coming by that route. Austin felt a little bit better about their chances.

The town’s men clearly didn’t share his optimism. They stood before him at the mayor’s house as they had four days before, but now they were tired, dirty, and angry. It was of no matter, anger might even be useful.

“How many of you men have bows and arrows?” Austin asked. He knew better than to ask if anyone had a gun. The men looked at him quizzically and then around at each other. It was no real surprise, bows were a weapon of the east. “How many of you can use a sling?”

Almost every man raised his hand. A few even made some braggart statements about their skill and accuracy.

Austin nodded. “Alright, that’s good. I’m going to need to know which of you can fire stones accurately at the fastest rate possible. We only need to worry about hitting a man or horse at twenty to thirty yards, no more.”

“That’s pretty close,” said one ruddy teenager. “The Horde would ride us down in that distance before we could get off much more than one shot.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” said the ranger. “They won’t be riding down anyone. Now all you slingers, go get your straps, gather a good pile of stones and meet back here in fifteen minutes. Everyone else, go to the smith’s and get a pike.”

The men began to straggle off, a little lighter in their steps. This sounded like fun to them, especially after days of backbreaking labor. Austin meanwhile went behind the mayor’s house and brought out a wooden board he’d previously painted a red bull’s eye upon. He saw the mayor and Antonia peeking out a window, but Austin ignored them. He’d thought about insisting on the mayor participating in the digging but knew that if there was a confrontation between them it would shatter the thin illusion of cooperation.

Austin dragged the board out and propped it against the well in the center of the crossroads. Reverend Timmons was sitting in the shade on the steps of a nearby shop.

“Going to slay Goliath with a sling stone I see,” said Timmons with a nod of admiration.

“A stone from a sling is no joke you crazy old man,” said Austin annoyed. “At even long range you can kill a man or horse faster and surer than with nearly any other weapon.”

Timmons held his hands up with the palms out towards Austin. “Oh I know ranger. I killed many a rabbit myself, and even a wolf or two on occasion, in my youth.”

“Well, just our bad luck you’re blind as a damn bat,” said Austin. “I let you go to this party you might break a window instead of striking a heathen. Besides, as a pastor, you should probably steer clear of such things. As a matter of fact, now that we’re on the subject, why the hell didn’t you go south with the women, children, and other old folk like I told you to...old man.”

Timmons regarded Austin for a moment and then stood holding up his hand. He folded down one finger. “First, I told you I’m on your side, but I don’t take orders from you.”

Timmons folded down another finger. “Second, my role in this is not to fight with my hands, but with the power and might of the Lord’s fury.”

Timmons folded down a third finger. “Third, I could still take your fool head off with a stone even blind as a bat.”

Timmons folded his thumb in and held his hand out to Austin, the only finger still sticking up was the middle one pointed markedly at the ranger.

Austin laughed in surprise and after a moment the reverend’s stern face cracked into a wide grin of his own. The men began to straggle back around Austin and Timmons and grinned themselves despite having no idea what was so funny. The ranger lit a cigarette and smoked with easy drags while he waited for the rest of the men to arrive with slings, buckets of stones, and pikes.

“All right, all my slingers line up there at thirty yards from the target,” said Austin. “You with the pikes keep score.”

It took nearly two hours to identify the twenty best slingers, two of which happened to be Dallas and Jim who first greeted him when he had ridden into town. It wasn’t all about accuracy, but also speed and the competition was surprisingly intense. You could say what you want about these herders and farmers, thought Austin, but they had used slings since youth to kill small game and drive away larger animals. They also appeared to revel in the competition after days of bitter and difficult labor.

Austin had the men prepare several more targets like the first and arrange them around the well. “This is the kill zone,” explained the ranger. “Right here is where we will defeat these raiders. Slingers split up into four groups of five each and pick a leader. Each of you collect a bucket of stones and get on top of those buildings.” Austin indicated the four two-story buildings each at one corner of the crossroads. “Until I tell you different, you all practice hitting those targets from the roofs as accurately and quickly as you can. When the stones are out, go collect them back up and do it again, understand?” The twenty men nodded to him and some smiled, this would be fun they thought and easier than digging. They might change their minds mused Austin when they couldn’t move their shoulders the next morning.

Without the slingers Austin had a little over a hundred men left, all standing expectantly and looking uncomfortable with their long pikes. “Pikemen follow me.” Austin led them away from the well and to a larger patch of flat ground. Once they were in the open and away from the slingers’ target practice he turned to the gathered men and grabbed one of the pikes.

“This is a terrible weapon to fight with...if you are alone,” said Austin. “All an enemy has to do is dodge one way or the other past the point and once they’re inside of your shaft you’re screwed. But, when you have a bunch of these together, especially in confined quarters where you can’t be outflanked, massed pikes are nearly unstoppable. You’re job is going to be very simple,” explained the ranger sensing the palpable air of anticipation. “Stand together and don’t run. That’s it and that’s all.” The looks he received from the men weren’t encouraging.

“Alright then, first, this is how you hold the pike, waist high with the point up towards a mounted horseman with two-thirds of the shaft in front of you and one-third behind you,” demonstrated Austin. “Everyone line up in four groups. Let me see you do it.” Austin went down the line and corrected the men, their most common mistake being not crouching, but standing totally upright and thus with a poor center of balance.

Austin next had the men form into groups of two files each, their pikes all facing towards him. “Okay, now front row, crouch low, but keep your pikes pointed up towards my head.” They slowly followed his instructions. “Good, now the second row, stand behind them, but a little back with your pike points between the two in front of you. The job of the front row is to strike anything within reach, to be aggressive. The job of the second row is to only worry about anything that gets past the first row of points, to be defensive. Front row, if someone gets inside your pike, do not panic and break formation, trust that the second row will take care of them. Men, we will have to learn to work together and trust one another.”

He stared at them trying to take their measure but realized that was a waste of time. They were what they were and all he had to work with anyway.

Austin drilled them slowly at first. They practiced getting into formation quickly, then moving together, then handling mock assailants. He even taught them how to form a square in case things went really bad. The men practiced over and over again with only short breaks until the sun was low in the western sky and the men drenched with sweat. When Austin called an end to the drill and practice, the men responded with audible and uniform groans of relief. They collected their stones for the next day and returned the pikes to the smith who had taken his place among the pikemen. Austin walked towards the smith’s shop allowing time for the other men to depart.

Austin could easily see that the muscular quiet man was a natural leader who the other men respected. He could also see that Edgar had no idea he possessed this quality. That would have to change.

The ranger rolled a cigarette as he watched the smith stack pikes carefully, counting them off. “You did a good job on those pikes, especially in such a short time,” said Austin.

Edgar grunted. “Wasn’t hard, pike points just need to be hard and pointy, everything else is about securing it to the shaft, couple of the men did most of that.”

“How hard was it to get them to help you?” asked Austin.

The smith looked over at the ranger. “Wasn’t hard at all, they just came over and started helping me. Why?”

Austin lit his smoke carefully with a match and then waved it out. “Because that ain’t normal. Men don’t normally volunteer for shit, you know that. Why you think they did it?”

Edgar shrugged. “Don’t know. Bored maybe, does it matter?”

“Not really, it only illustrates a point I’m about to make,” answered Austin.

“Thank god,” the smith grunted, “there is a point.”

“Yes, the point is that these men respect you. They trust you. They will follow you.”

Edgar shook his head. “That’s your job ranger. I’m just the smith. They’ll follow you just fine.”

“Maybe,” admitted Austin. “This time, since I’m here. But, what about the next time when you don’t have you own private ranger to show you how to find your guts and livers? What about then?”

The smith stopped his stacking and looked at Austin with surprise. “You mean to say this little battle you’re planning is only the beginning? That you’re going to get the Red Horde all riled up and pissed and then ride away? Leave us to deal with them from here on out?”

“Yep,” smiled the ranger, “that is exactly what I intend to do. I’m not gonna live here, despite the obvious charms, and it’s unlikely we’ll whip these banshees completely. This is going to take years, maybe even generations.”

“Then maybe we should have left you out of it and tried to reason with them,” said the smith angrily. “These folks may be nothing to you, but they’re my neighbors, my friends. They aren’t warriors, they’re farmers and herders and ordinary folk.”

Austin was suddenly sad. “Everyone is a warrior if they have to be...else they’re dead. What do you think is going to happen to those women and children and old codgers at Devon’s Valley if we fail here? How long till the Horde finds them?”

“Then why the hell did you send them away”? asked the smith aghast.

“To help you all focus. You can’t fight as men looking over your shoulder every five minutes,” answered Austin. “This is a fight to the death, for all of us. We’re either victorious in a few days from now, or we’re all buzzard food.”

The smith sat down. “But even if we win, they’ll be back, stronger and ready.”

“Yes they will,” said Austin softly, “but you’ll all be ready too. Fighting is hardest the first time. It’ll be easier from now on. You’ll raise your sons and daughters to be hard and strong, not the sheep most of them are now. You’ll live in fear for awhile, but the fear will go away and then others will live in fear of you. The Red Horde or others like them will still raid and pillage, but they’ll steer clear of those hard cases at New Hope. Who knows, you may even go after them.”

Edgar shook his head. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Unfortunately, I’m not,” said Austin. “I’ve seen this story a hundred times. People either find their backbones or they commit themselves and their descendants to slavery and shame. That is the point New Hope is at right now.” Austin pointed his finger at the ground while moving closer to the smith.

“So why are you telling me all of this? Tell the town.”

Austin shook his head. “They’re not ready for the whole truth, it would be too much. It’s almost unbearable for them to accept that they might have to fight this one time. They have no idea what that means and that’s for the best. If they knew what was coming, they’d run for their lives now.”

The smith picked up a hammer, but not in a menacing sort of way. He began working it back and forth in his hands as if it gave him comfort. “So again, why are you telling me all of this? You need a friend or something? No one to talk to at the bar? I can understand that, you seem to have kind of an asshole impression about you. You could work on that you know?”

The ranger smiled. He could see why men liked and trusted Edgar Rodrigo. “I know what I am...and what I’m not, which is one of you. I’ll teach you how to fight and then go on my way. This town will need a leader. Someone they trust and respect.”

“That’s the mayor’s job,” said Edgar slapping the head of the hammer into his palm with enough force to crush a skull.

The ranger looked at Edgar for a moment before turning away and staring at the rapidly fading sunset. “If the mayor organized an assault on the Red Horde’s camp this very might, would you go with him?”

“What? That would be dumb.”

“Yes, but would you do it?” asked Austin insistently.

The smith lifted his hands into the air, “Hell, I don’t know, depends on who else was going.”

“What if it was just you and him?”

Edgar laughed. “I’d stop him and tie him up. I’d think he had lost his mind.”

Austin grunted. “Right. But, I’d bet that if you were to do the exact same thing you would at least have a dozen men go with you without too much convincing. More if you worked at it.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning,” answered the ranger slowly, “that you are a leader. A man worthy of respect and trust. You are the leader this town needs in times of crisis and the days of danger that are ahead.”

The smith turned away and began stacking pikes again. “I’m not the mayor, that’s his job.”

Austin moved up close behind him. “That’s the scared side of you talking, smith. These people will need you. Will you let them down by hiding behind another man’s title?”

The smith turned slowly his face white, the hammer raised in his hand. “How dare you...”

“With that, I’ll bid you goodnight,” said the ranger moving out into the street. “Think about what I’ve said and what you’re willing to let this town endure or not endure.”

The smith stood glaring, murder in his face, the hammer still raised as he watched the ranger walk off into the darkness, whistling.

***

New Hope’s men were less enthused the next morning. The slingers had difficulty moving their arms and the pikemen massaged their aching backs. They fell into their assigned units slowly with lots of groans and curses.

Austin sent the slingers away to practice and took the pikemen. He taught them how to stretch out and then began putting them through drills, harder and faster than before. It was not long before men began to quit.

Austin ignored them until he had about ten such men, laggards who feigned injury or simply lay down. Once the first had given up, others followed fast and furious. He knew it wasn’t simply the heat and the fatigue. It was fear and futility which plagued their minds. The ranger stopped the training and gathered everyone around the ten men who had stopped without permission.

“Let it be known,” cried out the ranger, “in years to come when they speak of the names of those who fought here, let them also remember those who did not do their part...especially the families of these men for generations to come. Let their shame never be forgotten.”

Austin had them spellbound, he knew he was a remarkable presenter. The ten men looked at him with a mixture of shame, horror, and fury. He let the moment hang in the air, “...but let us pretend this never happened. A little joke here amongst comrades-in-arms, never to be spoken of again to anyone. Let us know that the man to our left and to our right will never let us down while we still live.” The atmosphere was pregnant with anticipation and even the wind stilled.

“Yes,” said the smith from Austin’s rear. “Jerry, Hector, you other girls, stop goofing around and get back over here with the rest of us before we take it personal.”

Edgar’s strong voice broke the men’s paralysis and they walked over and pulled their comrades to their feet and back into formation, thrusting pikes in their willing hands, eager to be rid of their shame.

Austin smiled inwardly. “Master Rodrigo, please continue drilling the pikemen while I check on those lazy slingers.” The smith nodded resigned to his role.

The ranger strode towards the crossroads, but he had no intention of interrupting the target practice which he could tell was proceeding with vigor now that the men had worked out their soreness. Instead he walked up the front steps of the mayor’s house, now unguarded by the huge goon who was one of the pikemen. Antonia must have again been watching through the window, she opened the door as he approached. She was more remarkably beautiful than he remembered and this annoyed him for an unknown reason.

“I see the training proceeds,” she smiled and bowed slightly. “You appear to have a way with the men.”

“Why are you here?” asked the ranger angry. “You should be in Devon’s Valley.”

Antonia’s fine lips tightened. “I have a responsibility here as does the mayor.”

Austin grunted. “I can’t fathom what that responsibility could be, you don’t support us or encourage us. If you’re not going to fight, you need to go so you don’t cause the men to lose heart.”

“Yet,” replied Antonia tersely, “you allow the reverend to stay and he also has no part in the fighting.”

The ranger was caught slightly off guard. “He would say he had another role to play in all of this.”

“As do we,” replied Antonia. “You see, we understand that this will not be one glorious battle, but the beginning of a painful and costly war. You will kick the hornet’s nest and leave. We are here to pick up the pieces and bind together that which you scatter.”

Austin stared hard at her. He wanted to argue, but she was right. He hated her at that moment for her honesty and insight.

“Was there anything else?” she asked.

“Actually you can play a part in this,” said the ranger suddenly.

Antonia was all courtesy again. “I am at your disposal Captain Reynolds.”

“My plan requires a bit of well...how to say it...bait. I’ll need the mayor to draw the Red Horde into the kill zone while we prepare the trap,” explained the ranger visualizing the scene in his mind.

Antonia shook her head. “No ranger. The mayor is far too valuable for such a dangerous mission. I said I was at your disposal.”

Austin glared at her his fists tightening at this infuriating woman. “So be it,” he finally grated, “these raiders will likely not be able to resist the temptation of utterly ruining such a lovely rose as you.”

The ranger said these words with bitterness, hoping to scare her, but as he turned away from her, he thought he saw the briefest of vulnerability in her eyes and possibly...sadness.

***

They kept watches constantly. In the past, the raiders had come the third day after the full moon before the harvest festival, but Austin did not want to be taken by surprise. He figured he could only count on one more day of preparation and knew he had to make it count.

Austin had all the men run through a complete rehearsal several times, faster and faster. They moved in groups and as individuals. Pikemen learned how to move forward to replace wounded and how to ignore hurt friends in order to focus on killing the enemy. He drilled them hard until noon and then called them together.

“We are ready,” said the ranger. “You will be afraid, but that is normal and right. Realize that once we spring our trap, these raiders will not stand a chance and will know fear themselves. All we must do is stand together...and know that I will stand with you.”

He knew they needed a little more. They needed magic, they needed to believe. Austin turned to the wooden slinger targets arranged around the well. He could only see the fronts of two of the targets, but it would do for his purpose. The ranger saw the targets and let his mind become clear and empty. He sensed the eyes upon him, but felt like they were a thousand miles away. In one smooth motion he drew his revolver and placed three incredibly tight shots in each of the two bull’s eyes and returned the smoking revolver to his holster. It had been like slow motion to him, but he knew what these men had seen was to them supernatural.

When he turned back to these simple folks they moved back away from him as one. They had been afraid of him when he arrived, but over the last week had lost their trepidation. Maybe the legend of these rangers wasn’t all it was cracked up to be they told themselves over beer. Maybe these guns were like anything else. Maybe they didn’t even work. Maybe this ranger is just another man like any other. These thoughts were now obliterated in all their minds. They had seen something only the old tales spoke of in whispers. They had heard the thunder and seen the lightning. Hell, they could even smell the death smoke as it still drifted on the gentle breeze. Who were these barbarian riders compared to this giant of a man in their midst?

Austin saw and understood and felt a little sad. He wasn’t like them, but it was comforting to pretend for a few days. They would not see him as mortal again. So be it, he told himself. It’s all part of the role. “We will kill these animals who dare to come against us. They will not stand a chance. We will be victorious...if you believe.”

It started with a nod followed by another and then a word of affirmation. The mood became contagious and spread. They wanted to believe, had to believe and Austin had helped them. Otherwise they would run for their lives in the night.

On a mischievous impulse Austin yelled out, “Drinks on me!”

The men roared out in approval jogging towards the bar. Mister Elder would not be happy thought Austin and chuckled to himself.

***

They could see the cloud of dust rising to the north hours before the riders arrived. Men with sweaty palms avoided eye contact with each other as they milled about aimlessly, waiting for the confrontation they were not ready for in their hearts.

Austin’s heart on the other hand soared. He would not say that he craved battle and bloodshed, but he appreciated the simplicity of life when it boiled down to kill or be killed. In such situations all of his life’s hopes, fears, disappointments, and loss shrunk to miniscule points of insignificance. The ranger cleaned his guns with cheerful serenity to the concern of those around him.

He checked the horizon and figured the riders were perhaps a half hour away. Austin directed the men to drink water, rest, and void their bowels and bladders. In battle, especially when wounded, the body had other things to worry about and tended to judge bowel and bladder control relatively low on the list of priorities. He then calmly directed the men to their hiding places and reminded them not to move until he gave the signal.

Once the men were in their assigned places, he went to get Antonia and saw she was waiting for him. She looked more relaxed than any of the men and Austin understood she had the heart of a lion, neither seeking death nor fearing it. The ranger hesitated in his steps realizing this woman was playing a dangerous part. There was a good chance she could get hurt or even killed.

“Not too late to back out you know,” said Austin feinting nonchalance, “plenty of others to play this part.”

Antonia’s smile was stunning. “It is my part to play and none here can do it better.”

Austin grunted. “I have no doubt of that. If you can get these dogs to just roll over and let you scratch their bellies it will save us all a lot of trouble.”

She laughed. “I will do my best, but I suspect these dogs have run wild too long to accept any master without force.”

“Yes,” answered Austin, “now remember what I said and what to do if things go badly.”

“I do and I will,” she said. “I have no interest in either dying or spending the rest of my days as a sla...” Antonia stopped in midsentence and frowned at Austin. “...as a concubine of the Red Horde. How about you, ranger? Do you know your part?”

“I most certainly do,” answered Austin his hand caressing the worn handle of his revolver.

He held his hand out to her and after a moment’s hesitation she descended the steps of the mayor’s house and placed her hand in his. Austin looked up and saw the mayor standing in the open doorway, his face serious and hard. The ranger turned away and led Antonia to her place in front of the well before making one more visit to each of the men’s locations.

After confirming they were all ready, or at least as ready as fear would allow, he climbed up to one of the slingers high vantage points to watch the enemy’s approach. They were much closer now and he could distinguish individual riders and horses. He counted about thirty horsemen along with about the same number of re-mounts. These were serious riders he could tell. Likely born and raised in the saddle hunting and raiding from youth and used to danger, hunger, and victory. He looked back at his men shaking and uncertain. They would have to do, he decided.

The barbarians were nearly naked, painted in red and white as were their small sturdy horses. All carried numerous short javelins and multiple horrific scars were clearly visible even from such a distance. Austin felt tightness in his stomach and a slight weakening in his knees and he welcomed it. Fear was normal and part of the process. His father had told him the day he stopped being afraid was the day he needed to hang up his badge because death was certainly around the next corner. Austin clenched his fists and breathed in and out slowly making his heart rate slow and turning his trepidation into focused anger.

He recognized the leader immediately from barroom tales. Stormbringer was larger and more muscular than any of the other wiry riders. He rode on a large horse with a haughtiness that implied he was the lord of all he saw or soon would be. The raiders slowed at the outer ramparts and then stopped to examine the trenches and earthen walls.

Austin signaled to Antonia and she walked out in front of the well at the crossroads. There was a long straight open path along the north road straight from her to the fierce riders. Stormbringer’s head jerked up immediately and saw her. They stared at each other motionless for many tense seconds. The leader finally made a signal and gave orders to his men. Five of the riders stayed at the edge of the town while the remainder rode forward at a gallop.

“Damn,” hissed Austin. He needed them all to come into the trap. The riders bore down on Antonia like a wild wave. She stood there unmoved and beautiful, attracting their complete attention. There was only one way to do this, but it was now going to be touch and go.

The ranger waited until the last of the galloping riders passed a predetermined marker on the ground and then pulled up his rifle sighting on one of the five at the edge of the town. The signal to spring the trap was supposed to be a rifle shot, one he’d hope to use to kill the leader first, but that was not to be now. He aimed down his rifle and relaxed his breathing. It would be a hard shot, three hundred yards at least. Austin picked a stationary target and squeezed the trigger slowly and steadily.

The rifle jumped in his hands with a loud report and the target at the edge of the town fell from his horse. Austin chambered another round and looked down to see the four groups of pikemen emerge from hiding in formation and block the roads, pinning the riders in the kill zone. He also saw Antonia jump down onto a wooden platform in the well out of sight as previously instructed.

“Fire damn you!” screamed Austin at the stunned slingers. They looked at him and then down at the whirling riders who were beginning to throw javelins at the pikemen. The slingers fitted stones into their slings and after a few shots started firing with rhythm. The riders in the center began taking heavy casualties. Riders fell from their horses and were then trampled by panicked steeds. They tried to charge the pike formations, but the long pikes either jabbed out at them or the horses, driving them back with grievous injuries. Some of the horde attempted to ride around the formations, but all the side paths and exits had been blocked. They were trapped.

Austin turned back to the riders on the edge who were now galloping towards the unprotected rear of the northern pike formation. He aimed at the lead rider and shot him down. One of the pikemen in this threatened formation turned and saw the approaching riders and turned to face them, urging others in the formation to do the same.

“No, you fools!” screamed Austin. “Keep your pikes pointed towards the center,” but they either couldn’t hear him or chose not to listen. Some of them ran, others turned to face the new menace leaving their backs unprotected to the more formidable threat. The riders in the center sensed the change and focused their attacks on this vulnerable position. Austin fired his rifle as fast as he could into the crowded horsemen, not caring if he hit rider or mount. When the weapon was empty, he didn’t bother trying to reload, but dropped it and ran to the stairway in the back. Taking the steps five at a time, he ran around to the beleaguered pikemen and drawing his pistol began shooting the raiders at close range.

The sight of this apparition with deadly thunder unnerved the riders and their horses that shied away from the unusual noise. Even so the riders in the middle were about to break through the pikemen and would be free any moment. His pistol now empty, Austin holstered it and picked up a fallen pike. He ran directly towards Stormbringer.

The big man saw him coming and grinned, raising his arm to throw a javelin. Austin was faster, he lowered the pike point and drove it deep into the horse’s breast. The animal rose up on hind legs with a scream and then fell back pinning Stormbringer to the ground. Austin rushed forward, leaping over the struggling horse to pounce on the leader. He drew his pistol and whipped the man across the face several times until movement stopped.

The ranger looked up and saw that the pike formations had broken up in disarray, but not in retreat and fear. They were rushing about in order to capture or finish off dismounted riders. Their horses were killed, wounded, or no longer inclined to be ridden.

Austin sat on the slowly dying horse and reloaded his pistol out of habit. Stormbringer moaned and opened his eyes, but Austin ignored him for now. All of the raiders were now either dead or prisoners and the men seemed too stunned to even celebrate. The ranger as always was surprised at how fast it was all over.

Movement to his front caught the ranger’s eyes. He looked towards the well and saw Antonia’s beautiful head emerge, but with a wicked face behind it holding a knife to her throat, his other hand wrapped forcefully in her long hair. He smiled confidently at Austin.

“I have your witch,” yelled the painted man. “Let us parley.”

Austin stood and walked slowly towards him with his pistol hanging loosely in his hand. The rider tightened his grip on Antonia and a thin line of blood began running down her neck from the knife.

“Parley!” cried out Stormbringer with surprising force behind Austin. “I call for parley. You dirt men have earned it, now let’s parley.”

“Yes,” cried the mayor coming down the steps from his house, “we will parley. You have sanctuary until we reach an agreement. Now let her go!”

Austin looked at the mayor in shock. He turned back to the man holding Antonia. The raider had relaxed his grip on Antonia with the mayor’s words.

Austin raised his arm swiftly and shot him in the forehead. The surprised man fell back dragging the knife edge along the beautiful woman’s cheek as he dropped leaving a thin red line.

“No parley,” Austin said simply.

The mayor looked stunned and stammered incoherently.

Stormbringer’s eyes shone fiercely before he screamed at Austin in frustration.

The ranger strode over to him and stomped on the man’s face as hard as he could with his boot heel.

Antonia climbed calmly out of the well holding the sleeve of her dress to her cheek.

Turning on the mayor Austin pointed his still smoking pistol at the pale mayor. “No bloody parley you shithead!”

The mayor shrank back and Austin turned and walked away to finish the job.

***

They tied up the prisoners and put them in the cellar of the mayor’s house to be executed at dawn. The dead horses were butchered and cooked as part of a giant celebratory feast. The remaining horses were a magnificent prize for this small town. Dead Red Horde bodies were piled in a great heap and burned in the night while exuberant drunk survivors danced and sang.

The casualties in the town had been relatively light. Five men were dead, three had serious wounds that might result in death or amputation, one lost an eye, and a dozen others had minor wounds which they carried now with great pride.

Austin was in the mayor’s house at his invite. Tel had apologized profusely to the ranger for his interference and offered a drink of conciliation. Austin wasn’t interested in the drink, but he did want an opportunity to see how Antonia was faring.

The wound on her cheek was superficial. Any scar would be light and not detract from her beauty and likely only accent it. The mayor’s giant goon was back at his side. Austin nodded his head to the man in respect, he had fought well and killed at least three of the enemy himself. The man nodded back and then turned away with a look of...what, guilt? Austin wondered if the man felt conflicted somehow in supporting Austin over his master. It was of no matter; he would get over it with time and be a legend in this town. In a year from now the stories would tell of how he slew fifty.

“Captain Reynolds,” said Tel, “I understand your position, and will certainly defer to your judgment as a representative of the governor, but are you sure we want to throw away a chance at parley so quickly? We have never put the Red Horde in such a position before. We might secure a treaty with them that could bring peace here for lasting generations.”

Austin chuckled and shook his head. “They would say what you wanted to hear to get away and then return in massive numbers to catch you by surprise and burn you to the ground.”

“But they could still do that!” insisted the mayor.

“They could,” admitted the ranger, “but without their leader and more hesitant, maybe even fearful. Also, a treaty would steal your town’s courage at exactly the time it has discovered it. The hope of peace is a temptation you cannot afford. You will likely have to fight again, but you now know how.”

The mayor said nothing for a moment and then motioned to Antonia who began preparing drinks at a sideboard. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “Let us toast our great victory Captain Reynolds.” Tel took a small glass of deep red liquid from Antonia and handed the other to Austin.

The ranger took the glass and turned to Antonia, but she turned away quickly before he could catch her eye. The mayor raised his glass. “To you, Captain Reynolds, the Texas Rangers, and the New Texas Republic.”

“To those who have fallen in defense of their homes and family,” answered the ranger solemnly.

“Yes,” said the mayor and clinked his glass to Austin’s. He drank slowly and Austin followed suit.

Austin only took a few sips before he knew something was wrong. His head began to spin and sound came from far away.

He dropped the glass and began to draw his pistol but the big goon grabbed him, pinning his arms to his sides with great force. Austin was held up and faced the mayor whose serene face was now filled with fury and malice.

“This is my town you, piss ant,” panted the mayor. “We will write the governor and tell him how you died gallantly in battle. Good-bye, Captain Reynolds.” Tel picked up a short heavy club from behind a chair and struck Austin on the forehead.

The ranger descended into darkness, his last thought was to wonder what would happen to Ginger.

***

Someone was shaking Austin. He instinctively reached out to grab the person, but his hands were bound close to his body. He opened his eyes slowly and with difficulty, it felt like weights were on his head. The first thing he saw was Antonia leaning over him and he instantly reacted by trying to reach out and choke her, but he couldn’t move.

“Save your strength, ranger,” said Antonia. “You’re going to need it.”

Austin bared his teeth at the woman and he noticed her hair was pulled back in a tight braid and she was wearing tough-looking britches and warm dark clothes. There was a large strangely shaped pack nearby. “I think I finally understand what an obayol is,” growled Austin.

“As usual you know little and understand even less,” answered Antonia. “There is no time, so you must listen carefully.”

The ranger started to speak, but she put her hand over his mouth and looked around furtively. Austin noticed they were in the mayor’s cellar where they had placed the Red Horde prisoners. The prisoners were nowhere in sight.

She turned back to him nervous. “The mayor has set the prisoners free after they concluded a treaty. You are to go with the Red Horde, likely to be burned alive at their camp in celebration. Tel is dealing with some issues right now regarding a distraction I’ve created, but he will miss me soon enough.”

“What are you talking about woman?” Austin’s head felt fuzzy.

“We don’t have time to discuss things. If I cut you loose, will you refrain from killing me...at least until I can get you out of here?”

The ranger nodded, his lips tight. “I will control myself.”

Antonia cut his bonds with a knife and helped him to his feet. She put the oblong pack on her back and handed him his pistol belt. “Tel will be very angry over this, your pistol was going to be the centerpiece in his display case.”

“Where’s my horse and rifle?” asked Austin.

Antonia began leading him carefully up the ancient stone stairwell. “Edgar snuck the horse and your gear out of town past the trenches. He’s awaiting us there.”

Austin wanted to ask more questions, but he could hear loud voices and yelling. Now that freedom was a possibility, he did not relish falling into the hands of the Red Horde.

A clear and unmistakable voice pierced the night, “...the prophet Samuel said, ‘Although you were once small in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel and he sent you on a mission saying, go and completely destroy those wicked people the Amalekites; make war on them until you have wiped them out. Why did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?”

Austin looked out the cellar opening and saw a crowd in the street, Reverend Timmons facing down the mayor and the leader of the Red Horde. Tel looked angry, but Stormbringer was laughing and clearly drunk.

“What in the hell is this?” asked Austin.

“Our diversion,” whispered Antonia. “Now, let’s move, quiet and fast.”

“Old fool’s going to get himself killed,” said Austin already moving off into the night.

Antonia grabbed his hand. I suppose that would please him very much...now shut the hell up!” Austin did and she led him surefooted south into the darkness.

They walked swiftly, jogging sometimes when the moon came out from behind a cloud allowing them to see more clearly. After nearly a half hour, the spiked earthen wall materialized in their path. They climbed carefully over the hill and down the other side through the trench and back onto flat ground again. Austin knew it was silly, but he felt relief to be out of the town. Danger still stalked them, he could fell it.

Antonia stopped and looked around. She cocked her head and listened and after a few moments made an owl call. Almost immediately a similar call answered far to their left. She took off at a run in that direction pulling Austin behind her. The ranger drew the pistol out of its holster and held it ready.

Ginger must have smelled him because she nickered affectionately far before Austin could see the horse. She was just an animal, but hearing his horse lifted a weight from his heart and he smiled in spite of himself. Ginger’s tan head appeared out of the darkness and she stuck her nose right in Austin’s face. He petted head and saw Edgar standing nearby. Austin was suddenly furious.

“What the hell happened?” Austin asked Edgar. “After all of this, how can you people let these jackals free?”

Edgar started to answer, but Antonia jumped in. “The people are accustomed to obedience and Tel is their leader until we have another. Edgar wanted to resist, but I convinced him otherwise.”

“Why?” asked Austin.

She strapped her pack to the back of Ginger’s saddle. “Because Tel’s plan was already in place and if he had sensed Edgar’s resistance he would have eliminated him making Edgar useless to us.”

“I’m so very glad I didn’t let you down,” said Edgar with dripping sarcasm.

Austin with a start thought of his rifle and scrambled to check the scabbard under the stirrup. The rifle was there secured. “Thank God, “said Austin with genuine relief.

“I went up to the roof and hid it from them,” said Edgar.

“I owe you my thanks for that,” replied Austin with feeling. “And for your help here.”

Antonia swung up behind the saddle gracefully and looked down at Austin expectantly.

“What in the name of Texas do you think you’re doing?” asked Austin. “I’m guessing your plan is for me to run and let the Red Horde chase after me, ridding your town again of this plague.”

“It is,” answered Antonia, “but Tel will know of my treason and will kill me. I’m dead unless I come with you. No one knows of Edgar’s part yet, he’s safe, but they will come after us in the morning once they sober up and learn of our escape. We have to go now.”

The ranger hesitated for a second. “Oh hell!” he said and climbed up into the saddle in front of the woman. Edgar was handing something to Austin and only then did he realize the smith had been wearing the ranger’s hat.

“You might need this,” said Edgar.

Austin took the hat and clasped hands warmly with the smith. “I will be back,” said Austin and Edgar nodded stepping back.

The ranger turned Ginger south and began riding towards the dark dead silhouettes of Amarillo.

***

Austin initially headed towards the ancient city only to keep his bearings, but Antonia insisted they actually go into the city. She said in the open plains the raiders would have the advantage whereas in the confined ruins, their superior numbers and speed would be negated. “Besides, they’re superstitious and will be scared of ghosts.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Austin seriously.

She laughed. “No such thing, which is ironic because my disbelief in spirits and ghosts is why they think I’m a witch. I know the ruins of this old city well.”

Austin wanted to resist her plan but couldn’t think of a good reason to do so and remained silent, shuddering at the thought of riding into that old tomb.

Antonio directed them through long dead and deserted streets. Austin soon lost his sense of direction and felt uncertain. Antonia and Ginger both by contrast seemed relaxed and relieved. The ranger gritted his teeth and pulled his hat down tighter.

They proceeded slowly, the long dead streets were paved in dust and weeds, but numerous holes and mounds made Austin cautious of breaking one of Ginger’s legs, so they dismounted and led her further on foot.

The heart of the old city filled Austin with awe. He had never been this deep into one of the ancient ruins. What manner of man built these immense structures and for what purpose when plenty of land to build upon lay ready and unused? Where they gods as the stories said or just crazy? Austin saw movement to his left and drew his pistol in one fluid movement, but realized it was simply a coyote chasing after prey.

Antonia pointed to a dark building to their right. “We’ll settle in there for the night,” but she kept walking down the street.

Austin started to ask why they were continuing on further, but realized with surprise her plan. The Red Horde would follow their tracks. They would put the horse someplace safe and then wait for the riders in ambush. Austin saw she was watching him expectantly and smiled when she saw he had gotten it.

“You are a very smart woman,” said the ranger in genuine admiration.

She laughed in pleasure. “I know! It’s one of many remarkable qualities I possess.” Her voice was teasing and not arrogant.

Austin was serious as a thought crossed his mind. “I would have killed you for what you did to me.”

“I know that,” she answered softly, “but I saved your life. Not just by the escape, but by drugging you. Tel’s methods are blunter, more final. I wanted you alive.”

Austin stopped the horse. “And why exactly is that? What is this game we’ve been playing?”

The woman’s jaw clinched and she hesitated before pulling the horse forward again. “You asked if I was a slave once. That question infuriated me and I couldn’t figure out why. I realized it made me so angry because it was true. I was sold by my father to Tel and have been cared for and mostly treated well, but a slave nevertheless.” Tears tracks appeared on her face outlined by moonlight. “I wasn’t born in bondage and I don’t intent to die that way.”

She turned to Austin and smiled with tears still running down her face. “I used you, ranger. To get free. I didn’t care a lick for the town or those pitiful people. Aren’t I something?”

Austin yearned to hold her, to comfort her, but didn’t know how. It had been so long since he was close to anyone. He patted Ginger instead and said, “No more than anyone else, your motives bother you, but nothing you’ve done has harmed anyone.”

She turned forward again. “That remains to be seen,” she replied simply. They walked into an enclosed space with hard stone surfaces all around and covered with an intact roof. There was a depression in the grassy ground filled with clear water which ran down in a multitude of tiny rivets from up above.

“Your horse will be safe and content here,” said Antonia, “we’ll pull that piece of metal across the entrance. It will keep her here until morning, but not trap her permanently should we never return for her.”

Austin nodded in appreciation. He marveled at her calm and willingness to face potential disaster without fear. The ranger pulled the saddle and bridle off of the horse. He collected his bedroll, saddlebags, rifle and ammo, and filled his canteen. Antonia took her pack. Austin patted and nuzzled Ginger and then pinned the content horse in the makeshift stable.

They walked quietly back the way they had come. At one point Antonia reached out and took Austin’s hand. His initial reaction was to jerk away, but he held fast, his heart racing much faster than it had in the previous battle. He still distrusted this woman, but he also wanted to trust her, was drawn to her in a strange way. Maybe she was a witch after all.

She led him confidently up crumbling and alien stairs. After several twists and turns in the dark confined spaces, she led them into a larger room. It was open to the street below and pale moonlight spilled onto the hard dusty floor. Austin walked over and looked down on the street. The fields of fire would be superb. They might actually stand a real chance, he thought.

Austin pulled out his rifle and practiced sighting it along the path the Red Horde would come from. Antonia was doing something strange around her pack in the dim light. She had something in her hands which looked familiar, but Austin couldn’t seem to place the image. After a moment, it snapped into place. She was stringing a sturdy compact horn bow. Antonia brought the beautiful weapon over beside Austin and laid out a dozen straight arrows with metal arrowheads.

“You know how to use that?” Austin asked with real curiosity.

She pulled the string back testing the draw. “When I was a girl in the east, we hunted with bows all the time. A few years ago, one of our herders went after a stray sheep and went way too far north. He finally made his way back with the sheep...and this bow and quiver filled with arrows. He had found the dead body of the plains folk, not Red Horde, but one of the others.”

She notched and arrow and pulled it back gazing down on the street. “No one in the town had any knowledge or interest in the bow and I was able to obtain it and practice when I could. They had no idea how priceless this weapon was. How many years it took to cure the wood and bone over fire, how much care and effort went into making these arrows. They had no idea, but I did.” She caressed the wood and with the bow in her hand Austin thought she looked like a fierce warrior, not entirely of this world.

He reached out and felt the wood and her hand where his touch lingered. She looked back at him openly without pulling away. On a sudden impulse, he handed her his rifle. “Hold this for a second.”

The look of horror on her face was immediate. “I could never...a true gun...like from the olden days!”

Austin pushed it into her hands. “It was made in Cooper in the days of my grandfather, it is not haunted...unlike this tomb of a city.”

She took the rifle reverently after setting the bow and arrow aside. Antonia touched the metal carefully and even placed her face against the cold surface. Austin watched for a moment before laying out his bedroll beside her. Now that they were not moving, the night’s chill was noticeable. He looked at her pack for something similar, but didn’t see any blankets or rolls.

Antonia saw his eyes. “Wasn’t real high on the priority list when I was packing.” She set the rifle beside her bow and took off her boots before climbing into his bedroll and then opened the top flap for him. “Come on in, I won’t bite. Besides, we’ll both freeze otherwise and can’t afford a fire.”

The ranger hesitated. She said it like lying down in a bed with her was nothing, a matter of no consequence. She did not move, staring at him patiently as if she could read his thoughts.

“Take off your boots, ranger,” she said playfully.

Austin did as he was told in addition to taking off his gun belt and hat. He climbed carefully into the warmth of her willing arms and they comforted each other in the dead city of the ancients.

***

Both of them woke the next morning hungry and tired, but neither spoke of these discomforts. They were warm and filled with the nearness of each other. Aloneness had been such a constant companion and expectation to that the love of another was shocking to both of them. They were awkward and uncertain even as they caught themselves staring and smiling at the other. Austin felt especially ridiculous and was oddly unconcerned by this.

The sun was rising in brilliant glory and the ranger knew it wouldn’t be long before the northern riders were on their trail. He cleaned and checked his guns. Antonia sat close, leaning against him. Neither spoke, simply taking comfort in the closeness of the other.

Antonia heard them first. Austin thought she was mistaken but she was sure. After a few moments, the ranger also heard the gentle thud of horses. It was low and approaching. Both prepared their weapons, then the thuds became less and went away all together.

“They’ve reached the edge of the city and now ride slowly,” said Antonia. “They have found our trail.”

Austin stared silently down the old street for what seemed like hours before the unmistakable Stormbringer rode his horse carefully around the corner at the end of the long street. He wore a blanket over his shoulders and carried javelins in one hand while the other held the horse’s reins. Five other riders followed behind them, all attired like their leader, covered in paint, cruelty, and old wounds.

Austin touched Antonia lightly. “I’ll take the one in front, you take the one in the rear. Wait for me to fire the first shot, then shoot as fast as you can. Understand?”

She nodded back and incredibly winked at him before turning to watch the enemy approach.

The raiders walked slowly gazing at the ground, masters at gathering information from the earth. Austin could see that several of the riders’ wounds were new, surely from the previous day’s battle. Stormbringer’s face was stern and twisted with concentration as they moved into the trap.

Austin slowly raised his rifle and aimed at the big leader in the front, but at the last second, as the ranger was squeezing the trigger, the barbarian looked up and saw Austin. He turned away as the bullet tore into his shoulder instead of his chest. A feathered shaft appeared in the neck of the last rider. Austin chambered another round as the riders milled about below them.

They both fired several more times until there was no movement below except a few riderless horses and some dying men. Austin counted the dead bodies. Only five. He counted again, still only five. Stormbringer was missing.

“Shit,” he said turning to Antonia. “You stay here and watch the stairs, I’ll be back.” She started to protest, but he silenced her with one look. He set the rifle aside, drew his revolver and stepped into the dark passageway.

He knew the man was wounded and losing blood, he could just wait until the raider died on his own and track him. The idea was tempting, but Austin was afraid the rider would continue to track their trail to Ginger and once mounted again might outrun them. He needed to find Stormbringer now.

The raider was certainly cunning and clever. Austin moved around each corner carefully, expecting to see the big man at each landing he descended, but soon he was at the street and saw nothing. The ranger whirled in all directions. Bodies were sprawled out, but he did not see the leader. He ran to where Stormbringer and his mount had fallen and saw a pool of blood. There was a light blood trail leading away from the street towards the building they had sprung the ambush from, but the trail did not lead to the stairs, instead it went up the side of the building.

Austin looked up in time to see Strombringer lift himself over the ledge far above into the room where Antonia waited.

“Watch out!” yelled Austin, but he heard her scream and a cruel laugh before the words were completely out of his mouth. He raced back up the stairs as fast as he could. He heard struggling and hard blows. Austin charged into the room with his pistol stretched out before him.

Stormbringer stood near the window with a near unconscious Antonia in his grip, a knife to her throat. Austin had a sense of déjà vu remembering her at the well the day before. Stormbringer grinned at him moving his head around behind the woman’s.

“You gonna shoot me like you shoot my man?” the raider asked with a smile.

“Let’s work something out,” said Austin.

“Parley?” asked Stormbringer, “I’m dying ranger, no parley.”

Austin moved slowly closer, his pistol steady and true looking for an opening. Antonia’s eyes fluttered and locked on Austin’s. “Okay, what then?”

Stormbringer kept moving his head around, preventing the ranger from getting a clear shot. “I’m ready to go to the land of my ancestors. They will greet me with open arms and much celebration. But I will not go alone. I will take this witch with me to keep me company at night.”

“No!” screamed Austin as he rushed forward firing, but the big man clinched the knife tightly in his hand and drew it deliberately and strongly across her soft throat. Blood spurted out of her neck and she slumped from Stormbringer’s dying grip.

Austin dropped his smoking pistol and gathered Antonia in his arms cradling her head. She looked up at him trying to speak, but no words emerged. Much too fast the bleeding slowed to a trickle and her eyes started to fade.

Tears stood in the ranger’s eyes and he pulled the woman close to him. He whispered in her ear, “You’re free, your own woman, no one’s slave.” Her eyes regained a glimmer of consciousness and looked at him. A slight smile appeared on her face before she slipped away for good.

The ranger sat in the dead city holding his love as the world ended again.

***

The town now looked odd somehow. Austin was entering New Hope by almost the exact same route, but it was different than before and so was he.

He rode Ginger forward slowly into the deserted street. Six ponies each carrying a severed Red Horde head followed along behind by a lead rope. He had buried Antonia in the dead city that morning. It somehow seemed fitting and wasn’t right to bring her back to the place of her bondage. Austin worked a rawhide rope in his hands as he rode through the hot dusty town.

Loud words came from the saloon where all the men must be gathered. A runner had surely gone to Devon’s Valley following the victory, but the rest of the town and their herds wouldn’t be back for several days.

“...I saved us all,” Austin heard the unmistakable voice of Tel.

“We saved us,” said someone who might be Edgar, “along with the ranger and no thanks to you!”

“How dare you speak to me like that!” replied the mayor.

“And what about the reverend?” asked someone else. “Those bastards killed him for no reason other than to speak to them the Lord’s Word.”

“Reverend Timmons’ passing is a tragedy, but he dug his grave years ago and hasn’t been sane since his wife died, you all know that,” cried out Tel pleading.

Austin had heard enough. He rode Ginger right up the stairs of the saloon, dropping the lead rope of the ponies behind him. The ranger had to duck his head to get in under the doorway and when he raised it back up again saw shocked and silent faces. Austin stared at them all in disdain and hatred.

He swung his leg over to dismount, but saw Tel signal his big goon who rushed forward at the ranger. Austin let go of the saddle letting himself fall on his back onto the floor drawing his pistol as he went down. The big man was nearly on top of him when Austin shot him in the face, blood and gore exploding all over the ranger. He slowly pushed what was left of the dead man off of him and stood up.

The ranger strode deliberately over to the now cowering mayor and backhanded him across the face with his heavy revolver. Tel fell to the floor in a heap. Austin holstered his bloody pistol and retrieved the rope on Ginger he had worked into a noose. Austin tossed the noose over a rafter near the bar and then placed the noose around the mayor’s neck.

“Now ranger—“ said someone in the crowd.

Austin whirled on them with finger pointing. “The next man who speaks a word is dead.”

He turned back and grabbed the end of the rope and walked over to tie it securely to Ginger’s saddle horn, taking up all the slack. Then he backed the horse up towards the door.

The mayor seemed to come awake and began frantically pulling at the rope around his neck furtively. He was yanked to his feet and then with another backwards step of the horse into the air. Tel stared at them with wide terrified eyes that threatened to pop out of his skull. His feet kicked frantically in the air and he made muffled sounds. Austin rolled and lit a cigarette.

After several long minutes Tel stopped struggling and simply hung limp, his hands at his side. Austin deliberately finished his cigarette before leading Ginger forward to drop the mayor onto the plank wooden floor in a meaty dead pile. He untied the end of the rope from the saddle horn and tossed it over on top of the mayor’s body.

“You,” Austin pointed at a random man, “take my horse and feed, water, and rub her down. You,” he pointed to another, “take those other horses out there and do the same, stake the heads at the north road trenches.” The man looked confused, but Austin went on, “the rest of you get these pieces of filth,” he indicated the mayor and his goon, “out into the desert. Strip them naked so the scavengers can have them. Anyone tries to give them a burial will regret it.” The men stared at him silently without moving before Edgar went over to the mayor and removed the rope from around his neck breaking everyone’s paralysis. The others soon followed.

All the men were eager to get away from the ranger, and nearly out of the saloon when Austin saw Mister Elder. “You! Bring me beer and lots of it, and then begone.”

The barkeep hurried down into the cold cellar and brought up four earthen jugs, nearly dropping several in his haste. He set them down in front of the ranger and practically ran out the front swinging doors.

The ranger popped the cork from a jug and drank in the cool quiet stillness, alone with his thoughts.

***

“Sure you don’t want to stay?” asked Edgar.

Austin finished strapping his gear down on Ginger. He turned to the smith with a wry smile. “You don’t mean that. The harvest festival is in a few weeks and the people of this town can’t wait for me to be gone and get back to some sense of normality.”

Edgar nodded. “True enough I guess.” The town had made the smith its new mayor and he appeared to be taking his leadership role seriously. He reached out to shake hands with the ranger. “Thanks for everything, if we have any more trouble with the Red Horde, we’ll send for you.”

“No you won’t,” said Austin swinging up into the saddle. “You know what to do now. Don’t send for help, help yourselves.”

Edgar simply nodded, “Yeah...”

Austin tipped his hat at the smith and rode Ginger south out of town leading one of Stormbringer’s horses as a remount. The town’s people stopped what they were doing to stare at him silently, but Austin ignored them. He wanted nothing more than to be away from these people. He began galloping out of town past the herds of sheep, goats, and gawking shepherds.

“Being a lawman’s no kinda life,” his father had said and he was right. But Austin Reynolds knew no other.

He rode dead south straight into the heart of the lifeless old city, no longer afraid of its ghosts.

The End

Find many more Ryan King stories on his Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Ryan-King/e/B0070D7BFW

The Protectors

by

Ryan King

I was born in the Dust Year, exactly twenty years after the Great Plague, when my mother was born. This December I’ll be sixteen and able to Take the Chit if I want. Not that we’re that bad off since Mother knows how to sew, but plenty of girls have.

“Get back to work, Teal,” hissed Mother under her breath, not even daring to look up at me. Reaper, the Protector assigned to watch us leaned against a nearby wall, his long whip curled around his massive tattooed neck.

Plunging my hands back down into the rich earth, I pulled out weeds carefully avoiding the tender shoots of carrots. I could feel the other women and girls around me. We communicated in subtle ways. Miriam who supposedly was once a math teacher, whatever that is, moved casually as if to tend the melons, but we all discretely spied her shadow. It was almost lined up with the first corn stalk. When that happened we would get a break for lunch. Most of the women would go to other assigned tasks, but Mother and I would return home to work on clothes for our fellow Newton residents or possibly a new order from the Shriekers.

I stole a glance at the Protector. The Shriekers were once a road gang back when there were such things. You could still see the rusting relicts of their motorcycles in front of the courthouse if you liked. It wasn’t simply the fact that gasoline was as scarce as to be nearly mythical, but except for the small roads and tracks around town, it would be suicidal to travel at any speed on the old highways. Those long wide roads were covered in thick layers of kudzu that was nearly a foot deep and to ride a bike on them would be impossible. The motorcycles were worthless for anything more than a monument to the Shriekers’, now our Protectors, earlier days.

“Alright,” said Reaper staring at one of the few functioning watches strapped to his beefy arm, “that’s it for Morning Shift, my little doves. Take your breaks and then report for Afternoon Shift.”

We all stood as one and moved to the fenced-in garden’s one exit, all of us funneled into a single line and consciously avoiding Reaper’s gaze. Even so he slapped us all lightly on the butt with his whip as we departed, the closest thing to affection this man is probably capable of, I imagine. Cringing as he slaps Mother’s rear, I prepared to walk through myself. Reaper’s arm reached out to block my way. Instinctively, I stood there still and silent, so like a rabbit under a circling hawk, hardly daring to even draw breath.

“Look at me, little dove,” he grumbled.

Reluctantly I raised my eyes up to his oversized shaved head. Cruel eyes and a wicked smile greeted me. He licked his lips.

“You’re about ripe there, my little tomato,” he said. “Come see me first if you decide to Take a Chit. I treat all my girls good, you’ll see.” As if to prove it to me he reached out and caressed one of my small breasts lightly showing me his gentleness.

I felt Mother tense in front of me, but I dared not look at her. Technically, it was against the Code for a Protector to touch a girl in such a way if she hadn’t taken the Chit, but who was there to complain to?

I nodded and forced a weak smile.

He removed his hand from the front of my course shirt and slapped my ass with his coiled up whip. “Get along then, my little cherry tomato.”

Forcing myself not to run, I walked out of the garden and Mother fell in beside me. I could tell she wanted to talk about what just happened, but what was there to say?

It didn’t take us long to walk home. Newton was once a much larger town, but after the Great Plague and the Black Years, every home and building outside of a quarter mile circle was burned to the ground. The reasoning of burning the dead bodies and their numerous scavengers while making it easier to defend the town against road gangs, had certainly made sense at the time. Now we understood it also made it easier for The Shriekers to control the dwindled and traumatized population.

We recognized faces as everyone returned to their homes or the Dormitory after Morning Shift. Few people spoke although it was allowed. We limited our interactions to brief nods or light waves of our hands. Several pretty girls strolled more casually with no regard for time as they did not have to work outside of the Shrieker House. They wore a round chit of wood around their neck by a cord. On the wood was a symbol corresponding to the Shrieker they were “mated” with. Several of the women wore chits upon which the original symbol had obviously been scratched out and changed, evidence that they had been traded for something or someone.

Mother crossed to the other side of the street as she always did when we approached her own mother’s old bridal shop. The actual dresses were all gone. Lace and veils had been taken to cover broken windows, satin long ago gone to bind wounds or sores. Peering through shattered windows you could see dusty floors littered with naked female manikins, many of them defaced by paint or knife.

I still liked to gaze in there and see the faded pictures on walls. The women seemed too clean and healthy and happy in their unearthly white dresses. Nothing was truly white anymore, not even the clouds. I imagine that if I could glimpse an angel, it would closely resemble one of these women. Grandpa assured me that it was not uncommon for women to dress this way for something called a wedding, but I had learned to disregard much of what the old man said. It wasn’t that I doubted its truth, the information simply wasn’t useful.

“My mother taught me to sew,” Mother said suddenly.

I was so startled I almost stopped walking. It was unusual for her to talk about anything that was not absolutely necessary. “You told me once,” I finally respond.

Mother’s eyes were distant. “She was already sick by then. Grandmother and my brother all died from the Plague, but she had something else.”

“The Small Pox?” I ask with a shudder.

Mother shook her head. “No, it was another disease. Doesn’t matter. She knew she only had a limited amount of time left and wanted to teach me what she could.”

“Had the Shriekers come yet?” I was always eager for information of those days.

“Not yet,” she said, “although we were under near constant attack by other road gangs and lunatics. Even what was left of the army came through once and took all we had. We were still struggling to find our way. I think most people at the time were surprised they were still alive and figured it was only a matter of time before they weren’t. There were still so many bodies and rats and wild dogs, you dared not go into a strange house or building even if there might be food hidden away.”

“Was this after everyone had to eat other people?” I asked without thinking.

She looked at me sharply. “You know it was. This was after the Year of Despair. Let’s not talk about that,” she said and picked up her pace.

I knew the conversation was over and was angry at myself. I had killed the spell by asking something that she didn’t want to remember or talk about. There were so many unknowns to the past and these frequently corresponded with times that gave Mother pain.

The blackened ruins of old houses were now before us. Mother had been fortunate. Her house was just inside the protective circle designated by the Shriekers. Everything outside was blackened and burned heaps and the area was now referred to as the Borderland. When I was younger I used to sneak out late at night and walk among the old ruins. I imagined what these neighborhoods had been like before with families and children living in them. Their ghosts were so clear to me I could almost see them. In a manner I recognized as odd, their haunting filled me more with wonder than fear. These apparitions were more comforting that the real monsters that walked among us.

Seeing our little house, I glanced at Mother with a silent question and she nodded. I ran around the back of the house to the small workshop where I knew I’d find Grandpa. Before he had been something called a mechanic and the Shriekers allowed him to stay and work in his shop. Grandpa had the ability to identify or fix any Artifacts the scavengers brought back from their excursions.

I knocked lightly before pushing the little screen door open. Grandpa sat at the short table in his wheelchair, spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He looked up at me from behind an odd tangle of metal and wires. At the sight of me he pushed back from the table. I basked in his obvious warm affection, so out of place in my world.

The stumps of what were left of his legs always make me sad and angry at the same time. Still a powerfully build man, Grandpa could pull himself around without the chair if needed, but recognized its practical benefit.

I briefly thought of what he would have looked like standing on his own legs and pushed the notion aside. With those legs, the Shriekers wouldn’t have let him live. All the men had been killed after the Rebellion. They had only spared the very young, the old, or the crippled. It was grandfather’s luck or curse that Clay had shattered his legs before then as an example to Newton of what happened to those who opposed him. Although Doc Huck had splinted the legs, gangrene had set in and then the legs had to come off.

“Hey, Teal,” he says looking up at me with a sad smile. His arms unconsciously opened wide and then settled back into his lap embarrassed.

The Old Ones had a thing for hugging and touching each other. It was strange and also Forbidden. Many had been beaten for forgetting.

“Hi,” I respond with a grin of my own. “What are you working on?”

“An alternator,” he answered picking up one of the pieces.

I stare at him quizzically.

“Something that powers the lights and the music and movies at the Shrieker House,” he explained. “This is hooked to a crank or a stationary bike and when turned makes electricity.”

My eyes widened as I walked closer to touch the Artifact. We had seen the electric lights and heard the music, but it was still mystical and my grandfather was as close to a magician as the True Old Ones from Before.

Grandpa watched me closely and nodded knowingly. It seemed like he could always read my mind. “There’s nothing mysterious about it, Teal. This is science, nothing more.”

“Science?” I asked. He had talked of this before, but I still didn’t understand.

Grandpa’s brow furrowed. “Electricity is the flow of electrons through a conductor. Those electrons heat up a light filament or power a radio. Very simple, actually.”

He frequently spoke this way. All of the Old Ones did. Many called them the Sad Ones because whenever they talked about Before, it brought longing. I had heard about pitsa and music and a group of musicians called “you too”, and roller coasters, but these things were as mythical and mysterious as electricity.

“Never mind,” he said with a sigh. “How was the gardening?”

The memory of Reaper squeezing my breast leapt to mind unbidden. I crossed my arms protectively over my chest.

“What happened?” he asked repositioning his chair to face me.

I didn’t want to tell him, but knew it would be futile to resist his inquires. He would stalk me like a cat until I told him. Grandpa said secrets between family were dangerous tumors. I wished he could convince Mother of that.

“One of the Protectors offered for me to Take the Chit from him,” I finally said. “I’ll be old enough soon.”

Grandpa’s jaw tightened and then slowly relaxed. “You don’t have to worry about that. We do fine.”

“But a lot of girls do it,” I said.

His eyes closed briefly before opening again, “Yes. They need the extra food or protection or because they’re scared. It’s horrible.”

“Horrible?” I asked in surprise. “Wasn’t the Chit one of the benefits of the Treaty with the Protectors? After the Rebellion? So that what happened to Mother doesn’t happen anymore?”

Grandpa didn’t answer for a long time. “That was a dangerous time, but in some ways these are worse.”

“How can they be worse?” I asked. “Road gangs taking women by force. Isn’t the Chit better? No one goes with a Protector against their will anymore.”

Smiling at me with sad eyes, Grandpa shook his head. “That decision is an illusion. At least when a woman is raped she knows she is a victim. That it was against her will. The Chit takes that away, makes a woman believe it was her choice to become a piece of meat traded and gnawed on by dogs. It rips away their self respect.” He looked down at the stumps of his legs as if to illustrate a point.

I knew we were alone, but I glanced around nervously anyway. Such talk could get us both whipped, or worse. I decided to change the subject. “I better go help Mother. Can I bring you some lunch?”

“No,” he smiled weakly picking up the Artifact and a tool. “Not hungry. You run along, dear.”

I turned away feeling guilty. My questions had saddened him. It was so hard to have any conversation with an Old One that didn’t depress them. I had learned to navigate most any interaction as I did the booby traps around the outskirts of town, but sometimes the Sad Ones rushed into their comforting despair.

***

Mother and I worked the rest of the afternoon in the sewing room on her weekly quota after sharing a potato and a few leeks for lunch. The quota left little room for relaxation, though neither of us complained. We knew we were better off than most. Making and repairing the clothing was always difficult even with adequate materials; however, what the scavengers returned with lately was nothing more than old moldy curtains or rotting automobile seat covers. Even that would run out soon. Mother had told our Block Foreman that we would need to build looms and learn how to produce cloth and thread soon. That particular Old One was a coward though - too afraid to bring this information to the Protectors’ attention.

We didn’t talk much, mother never one for conversation. I could tell the steady familiar tasks comforted her. After a few hours she told me to take a break and then go to my Afternoon Shift.

“I don’t need a break,” I said. “I can keep working a little while longer.”

Her sad eyes regarded me kindly. “Everyone needs breaks and rest. Especially young girls.” She reached out and touched my hand surprising me. Looking at her own offending hand she pulled it back as if embarrassed. “Go on now, Teal. I’ll be able to finish up before dinner.”

Not really needing an afternoon break, I left walking slowly, careful to make sure none of the Protectors saw me. They would resent my casual nature. On the other hand, it is also dangerous to report for duty early. Things like that made them suspicious and drew attention. I had learned from a young age to be as unobserved as possible.

The work schedule had me tending the goats on the south edge of town. This was an easy chore and my favorite duty. Much better than looking after the chickens, sheep, or cows. It also allowed me to pet the herding dogs and steal a few drinks of goat milk. Sometimes I could even fill one of the old plastic bottles with milk to take home if no one was watching too closely. No such luck today, Jonesy protected us. He was only a few years older than me and not one of the original Shriekers, only a Prospect, although he was one of the few who had advanced to the ranks of Protector. It was not that the young Protector was any more diligent in his guarding than others, quite the contrary, but he seemed to have a special interest in me lately. Maybe he wanted me to Take the Chit from him too, I think. I have a wild urge to tell him about Reaper’s offer. Maybe I could get the two fighting over me. With any luck they would kill each other. I pushed the useless thought aside and walked into the field.

“You’re a little early today,” said Jonesy with a smirking grin that only showed a single gap. “You must have missed me.”

Realizing I have arrived early despite my care, I looked away, the best response I knew. Making my way towards the milling herd of goats in the field, several of the dogs barked in greeting. They were a hodgepodge group of canines who took their duties seriously and had shown they were willing to die to protect their charge. Just last year Becky, one of my favorites, had died after fighting off a huge bobcat.

Rodney, the large Doberman, ran up to me and I ruffled his head before grabbing two pails. It is my responsibility, along with several other girls, to milk the goats and then lock them away in their pens for the night. Someone else would let them out to graze the next morning. The dogs would find their own way as they always did.

Three other girls were there too. No one spoke. We simply divided the herd evenly as if by telepathy. That was one of grandfather’s strange words, one I particularly like. Maybe that is how we are learning to communicate, I think. Sending and receiving messages without conscious awareness, like the flocks of birds that all turn in unison.

Simeon, the old dam was giving me trouble. It’s hard to milk the old goat as she was rubbing affectionately against me and trying to lick my face. I often found it odd that it is okay to get physical affection from an animal, but not humans. The Protectors would say that touch makes people love and love is Forbidden. It was love that killed all of Newton’s men they tell us.

“Hurry up girls,” yelled Jonesy.

I peeked in his direction and saw that he was leaning back against a tree. No need to rush. I have time to finish milking and walk the full pails to the hand cart. Finishing the last two goats in my section, I trudged over and loaded the pails in beside the others and we covered them with old pieces of plastic sheeting to keep out the flies.

Jonesy flicked his whip more for emphasis than effect, and I grabbed one of the front handles of the cart. Sarah, a girl who lived in the Dormitory took the handle to my right. The remaining two girls would put the goats in their pen and then fall in behind us. We begin pulling the cart into town and Jonesy stayed with us, probably believing his greater responsibility lay in making sure we didn’t sneak a drink of any of the goat milk.

“May we sing?” asked Sarah. Singing is normally frowned upon unless it is part of working.

Jonesy considered for a long moment and then nodded. “Okay. Just knock it off when I say.”

We began to pull and after a minute Sarah launched into a song we all knew well, with a beautiful voice. I joined her doing my best to provide harmony.

There was a Golden Age,

Many a long year ago,

All our life a stage,

And the nights a ‘lectric glow.

Our hearts were full to burst,

And we knew no loss or fear,

But then the earth was cursed,

And our lot was dirty tears.

The Plague took our life,

And destroyed all we’d built,

Men took up the knife,

And fought ‘til blood was spilt.

Long the dark dark years,

Where hunger stalked its own,

When death was always near,

And we reaped as we’d sown.

But life is sweet and good,

And we are the lucky few,

Those left when all have stood,

And the old has turned to new.

Jonesy noticed other workers coming our way down the road. He turns to tell us to “shut up”, but before he could get the words out Sarah’s voice rose in a loud clear anthem,

For we are alive, alive,

And he is alive, alive,

And she is alive, alive,

I am alive, alive!

“Hush,” hissed Jonesy slapping his whip across the back of the cart. “You damn girls don’t say ‘boo’ until you get the chance to sing and then it’s damn near enough to bring down what roofs are left.”

I glanced over at Sarah and I catch the barest hint of a smile. Impressed at her daring I nodded at her. It was a minor thing to do something we know the Protectors do not want, and gained little if anything, but it was a small victory. My heart felt fuller somehow.

And it proved that we were capable of resisting, should we choose to do so. However pathetically.

And of course that we were indeed alive.

***

The night was our only time of real freedom. The Shriekers used to check on us. Before the Treaty they even broke into homes at night. Now they left us alone. We could hear the loud music and garish laughter in the distance if we listened. We consciously ignored it. None of us would ever laugh that way and wouldn’t even want to. It was too overdone, almost a dare for something terrible to happen. We didn’t need any dares for that.

Dinner was the typical large kudzu salad topped with goat cheese and whatever nuts, berries, and home pressed oils we were able to find or make. It was the one meal where everyone typically got to eat until they were full. The Protectors sneered at kudzu salad, but it was sweet and Grandpa said was filled with nutrients. It also helped the little ones to sleep at night if their bellies were nicely satiated.

Most of the dark room is filled with teenagers, small children and women, more than a hundred in all. The Chit Girls were serving duty at the Shrieker House, so we watched after the children of their unions. It was men that were noticeably absent. Those present were either old or maimed like Grandpa, allowed to live as an example. It made me wonder again about who my father was and if it really was Clay as some had whispered. Either that, or he was killed by the Shriekers like all the other men after the Rebellion. Most of me doubted this. Still, sometimes I couldn’t help it. I dreamt that he was a good man. True and wise and strong. Like Grandpa, but younger and not so sad.

There were some adolescent boys around. When girls came Of Age they could Take the Chit. Boys had no choice, they were taken into the Shriekers as Prospects. Most ended up working for them doing minor tasks. Some even made it to the level of Protectors eventually like Jonsey. A few were never seen again once they entered the Shrieker House.

Broily stood and we all fall quiet. It had been less than a year since the old man’s right hand was chopped off by Clay. Broily had dared to write letters and arrange for them to be smuggled out of town by the few traders traveling through Newton heading east. Grandpa said Broily was a fool to have written the letters at all. Everyone knew the Knights of the Watch were a myth, and even if they weren’t, they would be unlikely to help the people of Newton.

“Tonight I will talk about Before,” Broily said dramatically as if this wasn’t what he talked about every night at Remembering Time.

Unlike the other kids, I didn’t groan. The stories from Before were fascinating to me. Although it was always difficult to believe most of what the Sad Ones said about those times.

Broily glared out over the dim tightly packed room and it became still. The old man commanded respect because he was one of the few left who could read and write, although I’m pretty sure Grandpa can even if he won’t admit it. The Sad Ones would have us believe that there was a time when nearly everyone could read. We know that can’t be true.

“At the End,” said Broily, “we didn’t know it was the End. This was before the plagues and the famine and the chaos. We had food to eat whenever we wanted and walked around without fear of someone whipping or killing us. It was an age of wonder. It was also an illusion.”

Many of the Sad Ones nodded. All of them had withdrawn into themselves I saw.

“Back then it was all about making money. Money is something you accumulate so you can buy other things you want,” Broily explained.

“But you said you had all the food you wanted,” said Ginny, a little girl in pigtails seated near Broily’s feet.

He frowned. “We did at that, but it was the money that allowed us to get the food. The point is we were able to get more than we needed, more food, more of anything. It was unbearable for us to consider we couldn’t instantly have whatever it was we wanted. But it wasn’t just us, it was everything. Money was the ends, not the means. This is what caused the Great Plague.”

Some of the Sad Ones coughed reflexively at the memory.

“We had seasonal sicknesses every year, pandemics. Little plagues if you will. They would sweep the globe and set off a panic for a few months before some big pharmaceutical company miraculously produced the perfect immunization or cure. The cure always worked, and it was always expensive. A little plague would vanish from the earth and we would have a reprieve until the next winter.”

“Because they were making the plagues,” yelled out Little Eaton who had probably heard the story a dozen times already.

Broily shook his head. “We didn’t know that then. It wasn’t until the Great Plague that governments were able to prove this crime. By the time they shut everything down, it was too late.” The old man remained silent for a moment, his jaw tight. “They called it T-path. Some scientists think it was a synthesis of Spanish Influenza and measles. Like Spanish Flu it took the strongest and left the young, old, and weak alone, something about using the body’s immune system against itself. ‘A work of art’ one scientist described it on television before they knew the cure didn’t work. I think they were even proud of T-path. Those brilliant minds in those laboratories were drunk on the power of creating and taking lives. There was no one to stop or even watch them, just as long as the profit margin remained in the black. Competition was growing fierce among the pharmas, sometimes we had two or three little plagues a year. We’d buy the cure they produced in their laboratories and go on back to our oblivious lives.”

“But the cure didn’t work on T-path,” I whispered surprising myself.

“They waited too long,” continued Broily not hearing me. “I’m sure there was some sort of marketing formula for the best time to release the cure for highest profits. Typically it was at the point of maximum worldwide press coverage to optimize the publicity of the cure. Usually that meant several million dead, but T-path was different. By the time the cure was introduced, the original contagion had mutated, the cure didn’t work. The irony is that those who caught the original T-path, and received the immunization, had immunity to the T-path 4, Red T-path, and Cromel’s mutations. The problem was that the T-path mutations inherited the originally designed T-path long gestation period. This was in order to spread the contagion to as many people as possible before that person became obviously sick, and thus increase exposure and subsequent profits.”

“Lot of good it did them,” grunted Grandpa beside me.

“The governments and the corporations tried to step in, but all they really wanted to do was quarantine the sick so those folks would die without infecting their privileged selves. If you tested positive for any form of T-path, they locked you up in camps. Everyone who was immune, of course, still tested positive so we were herded into the camps with the rest. Little food or water, no medical care. Desperate men and women with a ticking death sentence. All the fear and depravity of mankind burst forth eventually in the world and for those of us with immunity all we could do was hide...and endure. Once enough folks died we were able to break out of the camps and return to our homes. But it had all changed.”

I glanced at mother. She stared at the ceiling vacantly as her hands knit. I wonder if she was remembering or seeking to distract herself.

He indicated those in the room, “All of us here are descended from someone who received the cure and either escaped from those horrific camps or hid away somewhere.”

“And now we’re immune,” said little Ginny cheerfully hugging a soft lump of dirty cloth that might once have resembled an animal.

“Yes,” answered the old man. “I’m sure T-path and all its mutations are still out there somewhere. Maybe dormant, sleeping for now. It never infected animals, of course, that wouldn’t have been very profitable, so maybe without human hosts it is truly gone. For all we know it’s still ravaging other parts of the world.”

“Tell us about the years after,” cried another of the little ones. “How the Dark Times and how the Shriekers came, and the war they fought so they could protect us.”

Broily gazed around the room, meeting the sad eyes of his fellow survivors from that time. “Not tonight, little ones, it is getting late.”

I wondered how terrible those days must have been. We heard at least one version of the Story of the Great Plague every week during the Remembering, but they never talked about the Dark Times. It must have been truly horrible.

“Tell us about the Knights of the Watch,” said Lucas, a small sandy-headed boy who many thought was one of Reaper’s children. If so, the little boy was unexpectedly sweet, not inheriting any of his father’s tendencies.

The adults in the room groaned in unison. They knew that this was a stalling technique to keep from going to bed, but Broily was obsessed with the Knights and unlike everyone except the little children he actually believed they existed somewhere. To me, the idea of men risking their lives to help others they didn’t even know, was as far-fetched as the flying steel birds the Sad Ones speak about, more so even.

Broily settled back down with his face more relaxed. I noticed there was even a childish twinkle and delight in his eyes. “In the early days it was the worst. No one knew what was going to happen. People kept expecting the government or some powerful corporation to come rolling in to save them, but those organizations were long gone. Whole cities simply vanished into great spasms of violent rapine and murder. Desperate animals and men fought over the corpses. Mothers ate the infants that only months before they had lovingly suckled. Fires blotted the sky so that some thought the sun had vanished forever. It was all gone. Those that were left wished for death.”

I noticed Mother had stopped her frantic knitting and was listening. With a flash of intuition I realize that Broily wasn’t the only one who wanted to believe. The image of an eye, painted onto a wall came to mind. The Shriekers obliterated any symbol of the imaginary Knights of the Watch, so these eyes rarely lasted long, but they still appeared on occasion. Maybe others wanted to believe as well.

“Out of that despair of death and ruin, men of strength and valor emerged,” Broily proclaimed triumphantly. “They banded together to protect and defend what they could. These men did not abandon their charge and they fought off the attacks of the marauders, the mobs, the road gangs, and the rogue soldiers. The Knights watched over these small pockets where people could survive like humans. Eventually these small pockets began to communicate with each other and became—“

“Broily,” cried out Crazy Reuben, “have you ever actually seen one of these Knights of the Watch? Better yet, have you ever even talked to someone who’s seen them?” I noticed without surprise that in addition to his normal erratic behavior Reuben was also drunk. Most likely from the peach wine or schnapps he made for the Shriekers.

Startled, Broily opened his mouth and then shut it again before finally answering. “Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.”

Reuben snorted. “Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means,” explained Broily with exaggerated patience, “that there is more evidence that they do exist than that they do not. And if they are out there, they could—“

“They could what?” asked Reuben. “Come help us? Start a fight with the Shriekers? Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that? Next time they’ll chop off you damn tongue, or maybe even your head instead of just the hand you write...excuse me, wrote with.”

Broily turned pale and then red.

“That’s enough for tonight,” said Mother loudly, startling me. “Good night everyone, we have a long day of work tomorrow and let us all thank the Protectors for what we have. That is the purpose of the Remembering and why we are allowed to meet like this. Let us not abuse their generosity.”

There were several murmurs, but the crowd in the room began to move and break into bits and pieces as everyone made their way either back to a home or the Dormitory.

I was embarrassed for Mother though I couldn’t say why. She walked beside me as I pushed Grandpa’s wheelchair. He looked up at Mother and I tensed for what would likely be one of his rare reprimands.

Instead he reached out and took Mother’s hand. “Well done, Margaret.”

She looked down at him and actually smiled. They gripped each other’s hand firmly before releasing and glancing around furtively to make sure no one had seen them show affection.

There was so much I didn’t understand. There was so much they would not tell me.

***

The next morning I discovered Victor. I might not have found him except for the sound of rain on that cloudless day. Looking at a fresh eye painted on a wall in mud, I almost didn’t place the sound at first.

Mother didn’t have gardening that morning, so I walked alone. I stopped at the sound of rain striking a surface. The sound ceased, but then started again. It was like water droplets hitting a roof. A nice sound. A soothing sound. Totally out of place here.

In the shadows under the ruins of an old burned out house I saw movement. A faint shifting of light that seemed to correspond to the noise. Approaching carefully I peered into the shadows.

The movement and rain noise ceased immediately. I thought I heard a faint whimper. Someone was down there.

“It’s okay,” I said as soothingly as I could. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

I heard fast breathing. It might be one of the rejected Shrieker Girls. They were sometimes Cast Off and then had nowhere to go.

“Come on out please, it must be cold down there.”

“Cold,” said a deep voice.

My eyes widened and I fought the urge to run. It was a male voice and it didn’t sound old or boyish. It was strong...yet something wasn’t right about it.

“Well, it will be warmer up here in the sunlight,” I said, being sure to stay back out of reach.

“No hurt, Victor,” the voice said. “Safe here.”

“Is that your name?” I asked. “Victor?”

A large head and face tentatively materialized out of the shadows. Childlike eyes looked at me fearfully from underneath long dirty hair. “I Victor. No hurt?”

“I won’t hurt you,” I said. “Can you please come out of there?”

The eyes left mine and darted to the left and right. He mumbled to himself, shook his head, and began to retreat.

“I bet you’re hungry,” I said. “We’ve got some food.”

The big head reappeared with a bright gleam in his eyes. Saliva actually began to run down one corner of his face.

I held out a hand. “Come on now. It’s okay. You can’t stay under that old house.”

He hesitated before reaching out with a gigantic hand attached to a huge muscled forearm.

I was tempted to retreat from him. Instead I held myself steady and allowed him to enfold my hand in his. I’m fearful he will pull me down with him or crush my hand, but he held it gently as he climbed out of the darkness.

I had already gotten a sense of his largeness, now I realized he is gigantic. Reaper is the biggest man anyone had ever seen and Victor was easily six inches taller. His filthy rags barely covered scared rippling muscles. He stepped out carefully on bare calloused feet. In his other hand he held tightly to a long dark wooden tube nearly five feet long with a cord tied around each end for easy carrying. As he moved the rain sound starts again.

“The rain noise,” I said in wonder.

Victor grinned shyly. “My rainmaker.”

“Can I see it?” I held out my other hand.

He jerked his hand from mine and pulled back with the tube held protectively in his arms. Tears formed in his eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said holding my hands out to him. “I’m not going to take it from you.”

Victor stared at me suspiciously for nearly a minute before dropping his eyes. “Food?”

My whole goal had been to get him out from under the ruined house. Now I began to wonder what I was going to do with him. The Protectors would kill any grown man they saw, especially one so huge and strong. They wouldn’t stop to find out that he was as crippled in his mind as Grandpa is in the legs.

“Come on,” I said leading him towards our house. Victor hesitated, then followed. It wasn’t far but I looked around the whole way afraid someone would see us. Fortunately, we didn’t encounter any other residents. It helped that we were on the very edge of the Borderland.

“This way,” I said taking him around to the back. Something told me I needed to get Grandpa’s help before bringing Mother into this. Both are cautious, but Mother is especially so. “Wait here,” I told Victor after placing him behind the corner of the workshop. I knocked and then entered.

Grandpa looked up from his work table in surprise. “Teal, aren’t you supposed to be at Morning Shift?”

“I need your help,” I said.

He took off his spectacles and laid them carefully on the table. “What is it?”

I didn’t answer, instead I go back out the door and then coaxed a downcast Victor into the workshop. He had to lower his head to get under the doorway.

“Oh, Dear Lord,” said Grandpa slowly his eyes wide.

“I found him under one of the Dead Houses. He’s cold and hungry. I don’t really think he’s all there in the head.”

Victor had started to moan and rock back and forth avoiding both our intent gazes. Soon he was tilting his long tube up and down.

“I’ll be,” said Grandpa, “a rainmaker.”

The big man peered at Grandpa in surprise and nodded vigorously. “Rainmaker. Victor’s.”

“Your name’s Victor? Where did you come from?” asked Grandpa.

Victor looked away, his head dropping down even further like some of the cowed dogs I have seen.

“It’s like he’s expecting to get beaten,” I said.

“He probably is,” Grandpa answered. “Kindness is not something that’s easy to find anymore. I’m guessing he’s just wandering around, finding food and shelter where he can. It’s a wonder he’s even been able to survive.”

I was starting to get an idea. “Can we—“

Mother walked in and froze. Her eyes flared wide going from Grandpa and me to Victor. She pulled a small slender knife from inside a sleeve. I had no idea she even carried a knife. Another in a long list of things I don’t know about my mother I think. She was slowly turning to face the big man.

I stepped between them. “Mother, it’s okay. This is Victor. I found him. He’s just cold and hungry, can we help him?”

“Where’re you from?” she asked Victor suspiciously while edging around me towards Victor.

“Victor,” he said. “Hungry.”

“You’ll have bigger things to worry about if the Shriekers find you,” she said. “Matter of fact so will we. Better turn him in.”

“No!” I cried. “He’s not a danger to them. Could be a help. Look how big and strong he is, he’d be good in the fields.”

“Teal,” Mother said slowly. “We can’t hide him, we have to tell the Shriekers.”

“But they’ll just kill him,” I cried.

“I’ll go talk to them,” said Grandpa. “I’ll speak with Clay. He’ll listen to me, I think.”

“Father,” pleaded mother. “You don’t have to do that. We can just give him some food and send him away from the town if we don’t want to turn him in.

“Winter is coming on,” I said. “He’ll freeze or starve.”

Mother put her knife away. “Looks like he’s managed to survive a few winters. He’ll be okay. He’s not a lost sheep or stray dog.”

I started to protest, but Grandpa held up a hand. “Let’s not decide this right now. If we sneak him out we’ll have to wait for nightfall anyway. Teal, you need to get to Morning Shift or there will definitely be trouble.”

For the first time mother looked afraid. She rushed out of the shed and then returned several minutes later. She pushed a pair of good thick mittens she’d made into my hands. “Give these to Reaper when you show up. Tell him I was feeling poorly and you had to help me. I don’t think he’ll report you.”

“Especially if he thinks I might Take the Chit from him,” I said.

“Don’t do that,” said Grandpa sternly. “I know what you’re thinking and it’s extremely dangerous. Do not give that man any indication you’re thinking about going with him. If he feels led on it could be bad for all of us.”

I tucked the gloves into my belt. “You’ll feed and hide Victor? Not send him away or turn him in?”

Mother started to answer but Grandpa jumped in. “No promises, but we don’t have to decide now. You’ll get your say in this, now go.”

I hesitated, looking at Victor, but then took off at a run.

“You coddle her far too much,” I heard Mother say as I rushed through the gate.

Mother was wrong about that. Though it turned out she wasn’t wrong about Reaper. He took mother’s bribe and didn’t report me.

***

I felt nervous pushing Grandpa up to the Shrieker House. Mother offered to go instead of me, but Grandpa said I should go since I had found Victor. Mother didn’t protest too vigorously and seemed relieved.

Of course I had seen Clay before, everyone had, but we would be actually meeting with the man. He was the original founder of the Shriekers and had brought them to Newton after the End. He had lived through the Dark Times and beaten down the town in the Rebellion. He had also taken Grandpa’s legs.

“You think Victor will be okay with Mother?”

“For the hundredth time, yes. It’s not like she’s going to cook him and eat him, “snapped Grandpa. “Your big new pet will be just fine. Better than us probably.”

Grandpa’s irritation frightened me. He was always patient and kind. I realized that he was nervous as well, and for the first time I feared that I might have put my family in grave danger. It was never good to draw attention to yourself.

I pushed the wheelchair down the center of the old road. Boarded and burned out storefronts lined up on either side. Most people used the sidewalks, but the buckled and wore pavement was far too broken for the wheelchair. The town seemed to hold its breath and I felt hundreds of eyes upon us.

The Shrieker House was to the front just off from the ancient courthouse. The old motorcycle relics rose up out of the dirt and weeds. The Chit Girls daily went out and cleaned the metal Artifacts and polished the chrome, but even so, they were slowly rusting away.

Skull was at the front of the Shrieker House and I inwardly groaned. He always kept his face painted in the image of a skull. No one knew where he was able to obtain the paint, but the color didn’t seem to matter. Today it was a hot pink.

“What you want, No Legs?” he asked once we have drawn up close. He flicked the tip of a whip around on the ground before him.

“I’d like to talk to Clay, please,” Grandpa said. “It’s a matter of some importance.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” answered Skull.

Grandpa shook his head, “It’s really only something I can talk with—“

His words are cut off by the crack of the whip across the side of Grandpa’s head. I felt the wind of the whip breeze by my hand before I even knew what had happened. Skull stood there smirking with the whip end dancing at his feet again.

“You were saying?” Skull asked.

Slowly Grandpa unwraped his fists from his armrests. Although a light trickled of blood was running down his head, Grandpa didn’t reach up to touch the wound. “This is a matter for the Protector Father. The Code of the Treaty clearly says—“

I could see Skull was tensing up for another strike and I screamed out without thinking. “No! Stop it!”

Skull’s focus changed and the whip end flips over Grandpa’s head to strike my face, but I see it in time and duck. When I look up Skull is no longer smiling. He is angry.

“What the hell is all this commotion?” demanded a tall lean man with blue eyes and closely cropped blond hair.

Skull turned in surprise. “Nothing to bother you with, boss. Just a couple of trouble-makers.”

“I need to talk to you,” Grandpa said. “In private, please. You know I wouldn’t come to you if it wasn’t important.”

Clay looked at Grandpa and then pointedly at the man’s missing legs. “I suspect you wouldn’t. Alright then, come on in.” He walked back inside waving us to follow him.

Grandpa hesitated a few seconds and then lifted himself out of the chair dropping to the ground. “Bring the chair up please, Teal.” He used his powerful arms to lever himself up the front steps of the house passed a glowering Skull.

I followed, dragging the chair to the top and then opening it again so Grandpa could climb back up. Quickly pushing the wheelchair away from Skull’s menacing look, I looked around. Inside was a large room filled with rotting couches and old rugs. The walls were covered in crude and amateurish graffiti and drawings. Several women wearing chits were cleaning the room and preparing food in an adjacent area.

“In here,” yelled Clay from down the hall. “Step into my office.”

I pushed Grandpa into a wood-paneled room with an imposing dark mahogany desk. The office was a counterpoint to the room we just passed through. Light from a large window behind the desk drifted down onto clean and neat surfaces. I noticed Grandpa staring at a framed document on the wall with what looked like signatures at the bottom. There was even a tall bookshelf to the right filled with impressive looking volumes. I stared in wonder.

“They’re just paper with words on them,” said Clay catching my interest. “Nothing magical about them.”

“Then why do you keep them?” I asked impulsively.

“Teal,” hissed Grandpa warningly.

Clay grunted and walked around the desk to stand before me. One hand rested on the hilt of the large knife at his belt while the other touched a lock of my dark hair. “Teal,” he said. “You must be Margaret’s daughter.”

I forced myself not to pull away. “Yes, sir.”

“And who is your father supposed to be?” he asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” I answered. “Most people think you are.”

Clay shrugged. “Could be. Your age is about right and those were such confusing times.”

“A stranger appeared this morning,” Grandpa said suddenly.

Clay’s hand dropped from my hair and his smile vanished. He focused on Grandpa. “What?”

“A simpleton,” Grandpa explained. “Big and dumb and pathetic. Hardly worth fooling with, but he might be a help to everyone in the fields. He looks pretty strong.”

“When did you find him?” Clay leaned menacingly over Grandpa.

“Just today,” I said. “We can take him into our family. With the extra work rations from what he can do, we should be okay. It will also help with the winter harvest.”

“I see,” Clay said staring out the bay window. “You want to keep him. Do you just feel sorry for him or do you already have some sort of sad crush?”

Confused, I wasn’t sure how to answer. Truthfully, I didn’t know why it was so important for me to help Victor.

“He can help,” insisted Grandpa. “And he’s no threat to anyone.”

“Everyone can be a threat to anyone,” answered Clay spinning to face them.

“Not Victor,” I insisted.

“Victor?” hissed Clay. “So this stranger has a name. What’s his story?”

“Hard to say,” said Grandpa wiping the blood that had run down into his collar. “He doesn’t seem to have the ability to speak coherently and it appears he’s been treated badly. Obviously hasn’t eaten in awhile.”

“How’d he get through the barriers and booby-traps?” Clay asked.

“If you’re careful you can safely make your way,” I defended without thinking. “And many of the booby-traps are malfunctioning or long ago sprung.”

“And how would you possibly know that?” Clay shifted his icy eyes onto me.

My mind nearly seized up, but then I latch onto last summer. “One of the goats wandered off and I went into the Borderland to get him.” It was at least part of the truth.

Clay continued to stare at me skeptically.

“He can stay with us,” Grandpa said. “We’ll look after him...with your permission, of course.”

“We don’t have the luxury of charity. If he’s not worth the effort, he goes. And you,” Clay pointed at Grandpa, “are responsible for everything this Victor does or doesn’t do. It’s on your head however this works out, do you understand?”

Grandpa’s face hardened. “I do.”

“Okay then,” Clay clapped his hands together cheerfully. “Have our newest village idiot report to the Block Foreman for the north field tomorrow for Morning Shift. We’ll see if he works out.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Clay looked me up and down. “My pleasure. Besides, now you owe me. And I always collect.”

My skin crawled, but I forced myself to nod.

“Now, if that’s everything, I suggest you make your way home unless you want to get caught up in our nightly circus. It’s always entertaining, but you might find yourself in the center ring.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew I wanted out of Shrieker House. I pulled Grandpa back out of the room and we both nodded respectfully at the man who had already turned his attention to other work.

Skull stood at the front door waiting for us. His whip was replaced by a long wooden baton.

“Skull,” hollered Clay from behind us. “Get in here.”

The pink painted man scowled and hit the side of the wheelchair savagely with his baton as he strode past.

“Keep walking,” Grandpa said as he hopped out of his seat to make his way down the stairs. I dragged the chair down and set it up quickly. Grandpa agilely climbed back in and I pushed him towards home, the old man’s powerful arms helping on the wheels.

I stole one glance back to see if Skull was watching us.

Instead, it was Clay standing on the porch staring in our direction.

***

I ran into Skull the next week, literally. He strolled around the corner of the Newell’s old drug store as I was headed home from milking. The wind had turned cold and my head was tucked down inside the edge of my coat so I ran right into the Protector.

“Watch where the hell you’re going,” he grumbled and kept moving.

Fear gripped me only after he had moved away. I hadn’t had time to be afraid, only gotten a brief glimpse of Skull, but it was enough to see the combination of white and green face paint. Even though the colors were laid on thickly, it couldn’t totally hide the purple and yellow bruises on his face. I hurried home with my heart beating fast.

We settled back into our routine. Mother found Victor some clothes and made him a pair of moccasins from old rabbit skins. I helped her bathe him and cut his hair that first night. The multitude of scars and burns on his body angered me.

Mother didn’t seem surprised. “It’s a cruel world. I can’t figure out how he’s still alive at all.”

“He may not be all there in the head,” I said, “but even animals find a way to survive. He’s obviously strong and good at hiding.”

She grunted but looked skeptical. It was the same grunt she gave whenever she watched Victor eat. His appetite was in direct proportion to his ponderous size and his consumption of kudzu had already forced us to forage further afield. Normally we fought to keep the vine from overwhelming us, even with all the goats, but Victor’s eating was reversing the trend. Neighbors who rarely visited made of point of stopping by to see him shovel bowl after bowl of salad into his mouth before smiling and burping loudly.

Victor turned out to have the strength of a young bull and was happy to work till he nearly dropped from exhaustion. He cheerfully endured the Protectors’ ridicule, immune to most of the insults and taunts. The appearance of an adult man under the age of fifty who wasn’t a Shrieker caused a great deal of combined apprehension and excitement among the Protected.

Through it all, Victor was quiet and childlike and quickly assumed the role of pet among the town of Newton. He occupied a strange position slightly above the children, but beneath everyone else.

Victor’s rainmaker also made an impression on the community. Whenever he was scared, confused, or nervous, the big man would tilt the long cylinder first one way and then the other. At the Remembering, Victor entertained the children with the magical sound of falling water.

Broily wanted to send the giant east with another entreaty for the Knights. The old man had painfully composed another note with his left hand and presented his idea after they had all gathered one night.

“You better not let the Shriekers know you can still write,” said Grandpa. “They’ll take your other hand for sure, or your head.”

“And,” quipped a drunken Reuben, “there are no Knights of the Watch waiting to come help us. Get that into your goddamn head, you stupid fool.”

“You don’t know that,” said Broily, but he dropped his eyes.

“Besides,” added Grandpa, “Victor wouldn’t know east from a frog. He’d as likely use your letter to wipe his butt as deliver it where you want...wherever that is.”

“And he’s part of us now,” I cried. “We can’t just send him away. He’s earning his keep.”

There were some murmurs at my entering the conversation of the Old Ones, but most seemed to agree with me. The idea died and everyone eventually adapted to the presence of the big man and incorporated him into the fabric of our lives. Everyone that is except Mother.

She continued to watch and even try to question him.

“Mother, please leave him alone,” I pleaded. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting him?”

“Something isn’t right,” Mother said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She just shook her head and went back to her knitting. In the days ahead I would catch her watching him distrustfully when she believed no one was looking. Until the day Victor saved me.

Mother and I were in the garden and our shift was nearly over. Victor had taken to meeting us and accompanying us home for lunch before he would return to the north field. We were filing through the gate one at a time, carefully scrutinized by Reaper. Even before it happened, I sensed something was wrong. He wasn’t groping any of the women or looking down their shirts.

“Not you,” he said to me. Mother had just passed through and she paused to stare at me with fear in her eyes. “Step over there,” he said indicating a secluded part of the garden while he continued to funnel the rest of the women and girls out of the garden.

I looked at Mother imploringly but moved over to the corner of the garden under a peach tree long since picked clean for the year. I waited nervously as Reaper closed the gate and then walked over to me with a wicked grin.

“You’re quite the topic of conversation among the Shriekers, my little plum,” he said. “Bidding is high for you. You should be flattered.”

“I thought a girl could pick who she Took the Chit from,” I stammered.

Reaper chuckled. “That’s true, but once they do they can be traded or bought, you know that. Some girls we all get a taste of before they’re worn out. You won’t hear any complaints from them though. They’re taken care of.”

The big man moved uncomfortably close to me.

“I don’t believe I’ll Take the Chit,” I said with more courage than I feel.

He frowned. “Think you’re too good for us, that it?”

“No,” I stammered backing away from him until my back rested against the wooden fence. “It’s just that my family does okay and I don’t need to. We manage.”

“What if you didn’t manage? Wouldn’t take much for your mother to lose her side job and without his mechanical shop your grandfather is just a waste of food. Life could get very hard for you. You need to plan for the future.” He slipped his hand inside the front of my shirt.

I tried to pull away. “I’m not sixteen yet.”

Reaper licked his lips, foul breath pushing down upon me. “I’m just going to test the wares, that’s all. Let the boys know what the merchandize is worth. You wouldn’t begrudge anyone that.”

Before I could say anything, he nearly lifted me off the ground with his hand in my crotch. His big fingers were there probing, thrusting, hurting. “Stop!” I cried out. “You’re hurting me.”

“Shut up,” he said burying his head in the opening of my shirt licking my neck.

I cried out again and struggled, but it was like pushing against a tree.

“Let her go,” said Mother from behind Reaper.

He grunted in surprise and released me. Turning he saw the small woman there with a slender knife in her hand. Fast as a cat, he punched out catching her flush in the face with his massive fist. Blood spurted from her nose and mouth as she crumbled to the ground.

Reaper stopped to spit disdainfully on Mother’s writhing form before turning back to me.

“No hurt, Teal,” said a childish voice from inside the garden. “Miss Margaret hurt?”

“Get out of here, softhead,” said Reaper, “or I’ll put a beating on you too.”

Victor ignored the Protector and helped Mother off the ground.

The Shrieker appeared genuinely angry now and he let go of me. He swung his arm and his fist connected fully with the side of Victor’s face. The big man’s head rocked back, but he didn’t fall, only looked back at Reaper in slight surprise.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

Reaper backhanded me absentmindedly and then turned back just in time to see Victor rushing upon him.

The giant wrapped his arms around Reaper and squeezed him tightly. “Nohurtteal. Nohurtteal. Nohurtteal,” he kept saying over and over as the two men struggle and feel to the ground.

Reaper thrashed and bit at Victor until the big man let him go. The Shrieker climbed to his feet red in the face and gasping. Picking up his whip with trembling fingers, Reaper started hitting Victor again and again with all his might.

Victor squealed and tried to crawl away, but Reaper followed, striking Victor across the back, legs, arms, and head again and again until blood showed through torn clothing.

I rushed towards the two, but felt Mother’s arms around me, holding me back. “No dear, stay out of it, or he’ll kill you.”

“But he’s going to kill Victor!”

At that moment the wooden handle of the whip broke in half. Reaper stood over Victor’s prostrate body heaving great gasps of air. His large head slowly rotated towards us before baring his teeth and screaming savagely. Fists clinched he stepped forward straddling the man’s body and gripped the hair on the back of Victor’s head. With one hand he tugged the head back to expose Victor’s neck while pulling out the large curved knife at his belt.

“No!” I cried struggling in mother’s arms. “Don’t kill him!”

Reaper ignored me, but Victor’s eyes meet mine. Incredibly they look calm, even aware. He smiled at me affectionately.

“I’ll Take the Chit from you,” I scream.

The Protector freezes and tilted his head in my direction like a dog listening for a particular sound.

“No,” hissed Mother.

I ignore her. “If you spare him, I’ll Take the Chit from you when I’m Of Age.”

He glared at me angrily before looking me up and down. I can almost feel him devouring me and my skin crawled. Finally, he put the knife back in its sheath and stepped away from Victor.

“Pick him up and get him out of here,” he rasped and noticed the other women and girls at the entrance. “Not one word of this to anyone or I’ll peel the skin off your faces. Now get!”

We fled. It was difficult carrying Victor, but he was able to support most of his own weight. I could feel Reaper’s eyes upon me until we are down the street and out of sight.

I heard a strange sound from Mother and turned to see something terrible.

Tears were running down her face and that frightened me worse than anything that had happened so far.

Victor cried all the way back to our house, but once there seemed to calm himself. Mother and I stripped the bloody rags from his body and clean his wounds, most of which were on his immense back. He stoically endured what is certainly painful, mumbling incoherently to himself.

Once we had done all we could for him, I tried to get the big man to rest. Instead he took his rainmaker and sat cross-legged in front of the open fireplace. He tilted the cylinder to one side and then the other. The soothing sounds of rain filled the house while Victor stared intently into the flames.

***

I had never seen Grandpa like he was. To call him angry failed to adequately explain his state of mind. His deep fear for Mother and me, mixed with fury over what had happened, all combined to form a strange cocktail of intense brooding that set our home on edge.

Instead of being more afraid, though, I felt a sense of clarity. I truly realized for the first time that we were not the Protected and the Shriekers were not our Protectors. It was a situation that couldn’t continue, I knew. We had to do something.

“The Protected are close to one hundred fifty, right?” I asked Grandpa the following week in his workshop.

“More or less,” he answered working on a giant stereo speaker. “About twenty-five of what you would call Sad Ones and the rest women or young.”

My face turned hot. I didn’t know that Grandpa knew we call them that. “What about the Protectors?”

He stared at me sternly for almost a minute and I felt certain he could read my thoughts. Seeming to make up his mind he nodded. “Thirty-one. But only fifteen are actual Shriekers. The rest are Prospects, boys taken to serve them once they Came Of Age. Only two of those have been promoted to Protectors.”

“Why so few Shriekers?”

“There used to be much more,” he answered. “Most were killed in the Rebellion along with all our men.”

Understanding dawned. “We almost beat them, didn’t we?”

Grandpa glanced around nervously. “That was a long time ago.”

I hesitated before finding my resolve. “We have to do something.”

“No we don’t,” he picked up a screwdriver and tightened a clamp.

Knowing what I needed to do, I still despised myself for doing it. I sighed and turned to the window knowing I couldn’t say the words while facing him. “In two months I will walk up to the Shrieker House and take Reaper’s Chit.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Grandpa said behind me. It sounded as if he had thrown one of his precious tools on the table.

“Yes I do,” I said. “If I don’t go, they’ll kill you and Mother, but first they’ll make an example of us to everyone. Take away what little dignity they’ve allowed us to have.”

“What do you know about dignity?” Grandpa’s voice had a hint of anger.

I ignored the question. “Once I Take the Chit, Reaper will use me and degrade me. He’ll do it in front of the other Reapers and invite them to use and degrade me themselves. When he’s tired of me he’ll trade or sell me to another Shrieker like a goat.”

“Stop it.”

“Somewhere along the line I’ll likely get pregnant,” I continued. “Who will know or care who the father is? This great grandchild of yours will grow up in squalor and fear and bondage.”

“I said stop it, Teal.”

“And not too long after these things have happened, I will lose hope. I won’t be able to live that way. One morning they will find me hanging from a beam or sitting in my own blood after I’ve cut my wrists.”

“Enough!” he yelled at me.

“This is my future,” I turned to look at him now. “Unless someone does something. Unless you do something to stop it.”

With one of his powerful arms he swept the tools and speaker parts off the work table and onto the floor. His face looked at me with anger and shame. “Get out.”

I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I wanted to rush into his arms and beg for his forgiveness. Wanted things to be like they were before.

Instead I turned and walked out the door.

***

Grandpa didn’t stay angry at me for long, but I could tell things weren’t okay with us. A persistent awkwardness hung over our heads. I still wanted to apologize for what I had said, but something told me that would be wrong. That it would be weak and possibly even doom us all.

As if we weren’t already doomed.

Mother also seemed on edge. I suspected that she and Grandpa talked about what I said, but she never brought it up with me. This wasn’t surprising given my mother didn’t speak about much of anything unless there was a good reason.

Indomitable and sweet Victor continued on as if nothing had happened. His wounds healed and he never even missed a day in the fields, although I’m sure he must have been in terrible pain after the beating he took.

Grandpa has started meeting with the Old Ones in the evenings after the Remembering. At first it was just one person at a time, but it soon grew to small groups, and now all the Old Ones. The rest of us are curious, but other than Mother and I, most just chalk it up to more unexplained strangeness of these human Artifacts from another age.

One night the first small flurries of snow fell and everyone who was Of Age was told to return to the Meeting Hall after putting the little ones to bed. I helped Mother place Victor on the pallet in front of the fire to sleep and then walked back with her. She seemed as if she wanted to protest my involvement, but then just shrugged.

“She’s not Of Age,” Grandpa said as soon as he saw me enter.

“What does that even mean?” I asked. “It’s just something from the Treaty. Made up.”

“Let her stay,” said Mother with a finality that told me there would be no further discussion on this topic.

Grandpa must have known it too because he simply grumbled under his breath and turned away.

The large meeting room soon filled with nearly a hundred Protected. Almost all of them were women and all are nervous. This had never been done as far as anyone knew and many keep looking over their shoulders and out windows racked with guilt and fear.

“We should get started,” said Doc Huck looking at Grandpa.

My grandfather nodded and appeared to gather his courage before speaking. “Many of you remember the Rebellion over a decade ago. Few of you remember the times before and only a handful lived in the days of the Great Plague.”

I found myself leaning forward in anticipation. I knew every story by heart, but this was new.

“The Shriekers weren’t the first road gang to attack Newton in those dark days, but they took the most. We were nearly burned out twice and most of the town starved in the Famine Year. Those that were left fought each other for every kernel of corn or rotting dog corpse. None of us were in any shape to fight off the attacks. So we made a deal with the devil, but things were so bad we didn’t care. The Shriekers helped us for a time when we were getting raids near every week. It was a good arrangement at first. We gave them a little food and shelter and they helped us fight. And for a while it worked. We focused on growing food and they watched our backs while we did it.”

Mother’s hand was under her sleeve and I suspected she was unconsciously touching her hidden knife.

“The fighting was bad at first, but gangs eventually learned to pass by Newton. Wasn’t long after that we were scavenging outside the town and planting whole fields of our own food again. People began to cooperate. Soon, the madness settled and we weren’t getting attacked at all. Then the Shriekers started taking from us. A little at first, such that it wasn’t worth protesting, but it grew over time. It was inevitable I guess, in their nature. Soon they were stealing our food and women. Groups of them breaking into houses at night and doing their worst. Anyone who did protest was gunned down, back when we had guns. Something had to be done.”

“The Rebellion,” said a girl to my right.

“Their word, not ours,” answered Broily.

Grandpa smiled sadly. “I’m pretty sure we surprised them. Didn’t enter their heads that we would dare go after them. They expected us to obey and endure, no matter what they did to us. Terror was their only weapon and one they used with practiced precision.”

I looked at Mother and wondered what she was remembering. How many times did they break into our house? How many cruel men raped and abused her? At what point did Grandpa protest too much and lose his legs for it?

“We damn near had them beat,” continued Grandpa, “but winter was coming on and we knew if we were to survive we needed to prepare. By then most of the Shriekers were dead and many of our men were too. Both sides were at the end of their endurance and we were destroying the town as we fought. That’s why we don’t have running water or sewage anymore, but everything was breaking down and we knew it could no longer be replaced.”

“So you made a treaty with the Shriekers,” said Sarah. Even her conversational voice is beautiful, I realized in the stillness.

Grandpa nodded. “We got almost everything we wanted. They agreed to not mistreat the women, children, old, or infirm. They agreed to never take a woman by force again. They would be our Protectors and we the Protected and we would provide for them as long as they helped defend us and abided by the Treaty.”

“But they didn’t abide by it?” asked a small voice from the other side of the room.

“Oh, they abided by it,” said Grandpa. “It’s only recently that they’ve started really taking advantage and abusing us again.”

“Then what went wrong?” I ask louder than I intended.

He looked at me before answering. “Clay outsmarted us. He had all of his men and all of our men sign the treaty in our own blood. I saw it hanging in Clay’s office the other day, my signature is there on it. After the signatures he had his men seize all of us. We protested, but he said there was nothing in the Treaty about not killing the men of Newton. They tied us all up, slit our throats, and laid the corpses out on the ground for the town to see.”

“But they didn’t kill you,” said Reuben and for once he didn’t sound drunk.

Grandpa was looking down at his legs. “They decided I was part of the infirm indicated in the Treaty. They dragged me out of my chair and hung me up by my hands in the center of the courthouse where we’d all signed. Made me watch as they murdered my friends and neighbors. Then they cut me down and made me crawl through their blood while they pissed and spat on me.”

The room was eerily silent and I noticed everyone was staring at my grandfather intently, even Mother.

“Ironically, they intended their act as an example. To terrorize us of course, but they warned us never to speak of that day. And we didn’t, there was no point.”

“Is there a point now? In speaking of it?” asked Miriam.

Grandpa paused so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He finally took a deep breath and glanced around. “We surprised them before and I think we could do it again. They don’t expect us to do anything.”

“But there’s no men left,” said our neighbor Candice. “They’ll kill us all if we do anything.”

“They can’t kill us all,” answered Broily. “We provide their food, their clothes, their shelter. Without us they have to go back on the road and none of them want that. Not anymore.”

“But we need everyone in on this,” added Doc Huck. “All it takes is one person saying something to a Protector and we’re in trouble. Although they can’t kill all of us, they’d certainly kill some of us as an example. We’ve got to be together on this.”

“How are we supposed to fight those men?” asked Candice. “They’ll just kill us and then where will our children be?”

“We fight them by fighting them,” said Reuben and I was surprised to see a fierceness in his old bloodshot eyes.

“They’ll never expect us to rise against them,” said Grandpa. “We’ll have surprise and numbers on our side. Most of the ammo for the guns is gone, so we’ll make weapons in hiding to use.”

This wasn’t technically true. I’d seen the Shrieker Bird’s Eye kill a small black bear with a rifle last year. The animal had been hanging around the edge of the goat herd and we were sure the animal would eventually drag one off despite the dogs. I remembered how the sound of the weapon had frightened me and everyone else. That was the first and only time I’d seen a gun. I hadn’t been paying attention the last few minutes and realized that most of the objections had been talked down or reasoned with.

“So is there a plan or something?” asked Sarah.

Grandpa nodded. “We’re still working on that, but I’ve got some ideas. We’ll talk more in the days ahead. The important part of tonight was getting everyone’s mind right for what is to come.”

“We’ve stayed long enough,” said Broily. “Don’t want any of the Shriekers to get suspicious. Remember folks, don’t talk about this outside this room and for God’s sake don’t talk to any of your sons or brothers who are working for the Shriekers. We don’t know if they can be trusted.”

“But we’re going to save them, right?” asked Beatrice, Jonesy’s mother.

Grandpa, Reuben, Doc Huck, and Broily turned to each other. Rueben speaks to her kindly. “If we can. They’re part of us, we’ll try to bring them back in the fold.”

I thought of Jonesy and some of the other Newton boys working for the Shriekers. I was certain some of them would fight against us. They had become drunk on power and didn’t consider themselves part of us anymore.

“That’s enough for tonight,” said Grandpa. “May God bless us and help us.”

Some grumbled as they depart but several others say “amen.” I peered around at the people and knew I should be excited about what had happened tonight. This was what I wanted. What I set in motion.

Instead I felt scared, a sense of foreboding weighed me down like the kudzu slowly covering the world outside.

***

As we made weapons we hid them in the Dead Houses in the Borderland. Clubs and spears were our most common instruments, but there was also an occasional flail or rusty knife.

Everyone was edgy. We’d meet each other’s eyes and then glance away as if afraid the Protectors could read our thoughts. There were more late night meetings after the Remembering, but they served more to strengthen our resolve than to actually strategize.

Reaper has been watching me with hungry eyes, and it was somehow more frightening that he no long pawed at me. It was as if he already considered me a possession, one he was making plans for, one for whom he was waiting to take ownership.

“You keep that big idiot away from here,” he said when Victor came around to greet us. “Next time he won’t be so lucky.”

Victor seemed genuinely content. He ate voraciously. Grinned moronically at the children and played with his rainmaker. At night his loud snores from the pallet in front of the fire testified to his sound relaxation.

Mother just shook her head. “This is probably as good as he’s ever had it. Regular food, a warm bed to sleep in, and a roof over his head.”

“He’s also not alone anymore,” said Grandpa. “Being alone is a terrible feeling. I can’t imagine how scared someone like him must have been out there alone.”

“But even so he survived,” said Mother. “That just strikes me as miraculous.”

“How old do you think he is?” I asked.

“Older than you think,” said Grandpa. “I’d say he’s at least forty.”

“That means he’s an Old One.” I was completely surprised.

Grandpa nodded. “He was certainly alive from Before, probably a teenager when the Great Plague came. It’s difficult to see him as that old because of the way he is, but he’s been around.”

“I wonder what happened to his family?” I always contemplate awful things for others without thinking much about what might happen to me, or those close to me.

“Same as everyone else’s,” answered Mother harshly. “They either died in the plagues or were killed afterward by road gangs or rogue soldiers. Maybe they starved. Doesn’t matter.”

“I wish he could talk more,” I said. “There’s so much we don’t know about him.”

“And probably never will,” answered Grandpa. “The important thing is he’s strong as an ox and works hard. Doesn’t cause any trouble either.”

I saw my mother’s grimace and knew what she was thinking about. “That wasn’t his fault,” I said. “Reaper was likely going to do something terrible if Victor hadn’t stepped in to help.”

“He might also have just groped at you and let you go,” she said.

“Then why did you pull out that knife of yours?” I asked.

Grandpa was shocked. Mother moved away without answering. She went into her room, closing the door behind her.

“She pulled a knife on a Shrieker?”

I nodded. “That’s why he punched her in the face. If Victor hadn’t distracted Reaper, he’d have killed her for daring to do such a thing.”

Grandpa leaned forward to poke absently at the fire before speaking. “Things are starting to come apart. I think even the Shriekers know that. We can’t go on like this much longer.”

“When?” I asked this nearly every night.

“Soon,” he said. “We’ll know when the time is right. We’re almost ready.”

“What are we going to do? How are we going to fight them?”

Grandpa smiled at me and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about that yet. We’ve got a plan. Just a few more pieces to get into place. Best get on to bed, Teal.”

I wanted to talk more. To figure out what was about to happen, but I knew Grandpa would not be moved. He just poked about in the fire with far off eyes.

I got up to go to my room, hoping I could sleep. Maybe I would. It helped that Victor had finally stopped snoring.

***

A week later I walked into Grandpa’s shop to find tools, parts, and wires spread out all over every available surface. Almost compulsively tidy, Grandpa became agitated whenever things weren’t in their proper place. True to form, I could see his nervous frustration. There were also several books on his desk.

“I knew you could read,” I said.

“Never said I couldn’t,” he responded without looking at me.

I walked over to examine them. Running my finger down the page of the smallest of the books I saw what looked like rows and rows of numbers.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“An almanac,” he answered. “It tells me that tonight should be cold and a full moon. With any luck it will be a clear sky, maybe we’ll get a good wind too.”

My hand jerked back from the book and I froze for a moment. “How can a book tell you that? Is it magic?”

“I’ve told you before, Teal. There’s no such thing as magic. It’s just a book that you can use to predict future weather based on past data. It’s not looking into the future, only making a calculated prediction from sound scientific measurements.”

Steering clear of the smaller book, I touched pages of the three larger ones, all are open to sections showing lines intersecting with numbers and symbols.

“Wiring schematics,” Grandpa said. “They tell me how to wire up the speaker to do what I want it to do.”

Down on the floor there were buckets filled with broken glass and sharp gravel. I was trying to take in everything, figure out what I can. “What about this stuff? This is not electronics.”

Grandpa frowned and turned away. “No. That is what I hope will give us an edge tonight.”

“Tonight?” I asked as a heaviness settled into my stomach. “What will the gravel and glass do?”

He pointed to the inside of the large open speaker. “Inside there will be the normal speaker parts, but also explosives and a radio controlled detonator. The gravel and glass will be packed around it all to serve as projectiles that should at least wound anyone nearby when it goes off.”

There was so much of what he was saying that didn’t make sense to me, but one part was clear. “But what about the Chit Girls? They’ll be in there too.”

That frequent sadness pulled at Grandpa’s expression. “We’re going to try to warn them, but we’re not sure which can be trusted. A few are with us, but they’ve warned us to be wary of the rest.”

“But they’re part of us. They’re not with the Shriekers.”

“That’s true, but some of those women are so beat down that they would never think of crossing their masters. That’s one of the crimes of the Chit and the abuse it brings. It tends to take away your free will while making you grateful for the degradation.”

“It doesn’t seem right.”

“Nothing about this situation is right. We have to make hard choices here and consider the greater good. If we’re going to succeed we can’t take any chances that someone might tip the Shriekers off.”

I picked up a handful of glass and squeezed it lightly in my hand. As I opened my hand again I saw a thin line of blood on my palm. There was no pain yet, just that small red slash. I told myself that hopefully, there would be no pain for any innocent harmed by Grandpa’s speaker. I was probably lying to myself. The broken glass with my blood on it trickled back into the pail.

“I need you to go to Reuben’s for me. Tell him it will be tonight and to send everything he has.”

“Everything of what?”

“He’ll know. Now go, Teal, and be careful.”

I already knew to be careful, still I heeded his words anew. Staying within the shelter of buildings as much as possible I watched carefully for Protectors before walking quickly to the next building and repeating the process. All the while my heart felt like it was beating too fast and I debated for perhaps the hundredth time if I have done right by setting all this into motion.

Reuben’s house was easy to find. Like our home it had a small shed in the back, but this one had wood piled up around the outside along with baskets of rotting and half frozen peaches. The heavy smell of fermentation made me wrinkle my nose.

I knocked on the outer door lightly and then entered. Reuben was tending a fire under a large enclosed copper bowl. He wore a thick leather apron and dirty gloves.

“Teal,” Reuben was not surprised. “On an errand from your grandfather I suspect.”

He also wasn’t drunk. “Yes. Grandpa said tonight is the night and to send everything you got.”

Reuben nodded and turned back to his work.

“All of what? What are you sending and to where?”

“Peach hard liquor, best in town,” Reuben answered grinning. “Wine goes further, but the hard stuff is stronger. We want the Shriekers to have as little of their senses as possible when the time comes.”

I thought of that handful of bloody glass. “Why not just poison them?”

Now Reuben is surprised and possibly there was a slight bit of respect. “A good idea. We talked about it, but none of us knows enough about poisons.”

“Lots of things are poisonous,” I said. “Surely we could put something in.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be tasteless. No one knows of any poison that can be added that won’t alter the taste. And for all their lack of sophistication, the Shriekers like their alcohol to taste a certain way. I earned myself enough whippings to learn that.”

I had not been in here before. Various tubes and containers were tucked everywhere. A clear liquid dripped into a large ceramic jug next to others of its like. The fumes were starting to make me dizzy.

“Was there something else?” he cocked his head. “You want to try a little bit?”

“No,” I retreated towards the door.

“Suit yourself,” his back was already to me as he kept working.

Closing the shed door I pulled my coat up around my neck to keep out the bitter wind. Making my way to my Afternoon Shift in the goat field I tried not to think about what would happen to us if we were found out.

Or failed.

***

The Old Ones and most of those Of Age were noticeably absent from the Remembering that night, all except Broily who had to play his part.

“I want to go with you,” I’d told Grandpa.

“We need to keep up appearances as much as possible,” he answered. “Every house has to have someone there to put the little ones to bed and settled down. We don’t want them worrying. You’ve got Victor to take care of.”

“But after he’s asleep, can I come join you?”

Grunting he nodded his head reluctantly. “Yes. We’re gathering at your grandmother’s old bridal shop. Come when you can.”

“You won’t start without me will you?”

“No, it will likely be late,” he answered sternly. “You seem in a damn hurry to get yourself killed.”

I shook my head. “I’m responsible for all this. At least in part. I should be there, no matter how it turns out.”

His eyes softened. “You’re not responsible. I know you think that, but we would have had to do something eventually. You just helped me see the truth. No matter how things turn out tonight, this is not your doing or your fault.”

“You sound as if you expect us to fail.”

“No, this is a good plan. The best one we could come up with, but it hinges on women and girls being willing to fight the Shriekers. They think they can, but until the actual moment, who knows? Very few of us here have ever dared defy them or even remember how to fight. There’s a lot of ingrained submission in this town. Success will depend on whether we can overcome that habit or not.”

I thought of Mother with her knife and knew she would fight. I hoped she didn’t do it alone and determined that at least she would have me by her side.

“It’s dark and we have to go now,” Grandpa said. “After the Remembering, and once Victor is bedded down, you make your way to the shop.”

Now I was sitting in the Meeting Hall and listening to Broily drone on. Normally fascinated by his tales, I couldn’t concentrate tonight. Most of the room seemed pensive and out of sorts. Small children cried or squealed and older siblings reacted sternly, worry on their faces.

“The cities were the worst,” said Broily softly. “Once the government had broken down, not even food subsidies arrived. Millions of people crammed into sprawling urban areas with not enough food and water, even after most had died off. Transportation had ceased so nothing arrived and it was impossible to leave. Groups of desperate men and women banded together and preyed on each other.”

“And everyone had to eat bodies,” said little Samantha. “That’s nasty.”

“That mostly came later,” answered Broily, “although I’m sure some did terrible things to survive. Fires raged in the cities day and night. The fumes and smoke killed many and drove more away from shelter and into areas where they were easy prey for the gangs.”

“Road gangs?” asked Bobby a young teenager.

“These were just gangs. The road gangs had motorcycles and were already around before the End. When the world started to fall apart, they roamed the highways killing and robbing those trapped in long lines of cars. They had nowhere to go and, unlike the cars, the motorcycles could make their way through the packed lines of stationary vehicles.”

“Is that what the Shriekers did?” asked Jenny, a little redhead.

“I imagine it was,” said Broily, “but we don’t know much about them before they came here.”

“And now they protect us,” said Jenny cheerfully. “My momma says that without the Protectors we’d all be dead. We pray for them every night.”

“That’s very good,” said Broily with the tired Sad One smile. “We should all pray for each other this night and for our town. Now I think that’s enough for tonight. Off to bed, little ones.”

“What about the Knights of the Watch?” asked Samantha in the stalling tactic that never failed.

“Not tonight,” the old man said surprising us all. “Now everyone go off to bed, your mothers will be along soon, there’re doing important work tonight.”

The children and older siblings quietly made their way out of the Meeting Hall and back to the Dormitory or their homes. Victor walked silently beside me and I am grateful for his presence. We both look up at the clear sky and the stars that seemed to go on forever.

“What wrong, Teal?” Victor asked suddenly.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I answered surprised at his intuitiveness.

“Where Miss Margaret? Where Grandpa?”

“They’re busy doing something for the Protectors,” I answered. “They’ll be home soon, now let’s get inside out of the cold.”

I stirred up the fire and put on another log. On second thought, I added another just in case we were gone longer than I expected. Laying out Victor’s pallet I looked at him expectantly, and he dutifully takes off his boots and lies down in front of the fire cradling his rainmaker in his arms. After draping a blanket over his huge shoulders I sat in Grandpa’s chair.

“You stay with me?” asked Victor.

“I’ll be right here,” I lie. “Just go to sleep.”

I waited until I heard his loud snores before arising. Starting to walk out the door I stopped and stared at Victor for a few minutes, wondering what would happen to him if we didn’t return. On impulse I walked over and gently kissed him on the forehead and brushed the hair out of his face. He smiled sleepily and rolled over.

Putting on my coat, I walked out the door of our home into the expectant darkness.

***

At first I thought they were all gone, but then I see the slight movement in the back of the bridal shop. I had forgotten how large the interior was and the fact that there are storerooms in the back. Nearly eighty people were crammed together, makeshift spears, clubs, and axes in shaking hands or leaning against walls.

Grandpa and Mother were the closest to the front. He was in his wheelchair and she stood behind him. Both were looking out the shattered front windows at the Shrieker House across the courthouse lawn. He had a blanket in his lap against the cold, but I could tell there was something bulky under the blanket.

“When?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Grandpa said. “We want them to be as tipsy as possible. The music gets louder as they get drunker. We have many hours to go yet. Just relax.”

I paced for a while and talked to the other girls, but everyone is too nervous for conversation. Finally, I went and sat down near Grandpa and Mother, leaning back against the side of his wheelchair and burrowing under the edge of the blanket in his lap.

I dreamt I was in the goat field and it was a beautiful day. The goats and dogs were all around me and I’m the only human in sight. Worriedly I searched the perimeter for the Protectors or other girls, but I am alone and it’s getting dark. A familiar sound made me squint through the dim light. A faint growl. Soon all the dogs have taken up the warning. I looked for the threat, but see none and notice the dogs have surrounded me and the goats. They are growling at us. A dog leapt on a baby goat and tore its throat out and I yelled for him stop. The goats are in a panic now bleating and screaming in fear and pain as the dogs attacked from all directions. Suddenly it is quiet and all the goats are dead. I am surrounded by a ring of hungry dogs with glowing eyes. Turning, I looked for a way out as they stalk forward. I screamed as the dogs leapt and bore me to the ground.

Someone was shaking my shoulder. Awaking with a start I realized the music was much louder. There was also activity in the shop. Small groups of women were leaving together carrying their makeshift weapons.

“It’s time,” said Mother her hand resting on my shoulder. Her hand moved from my shoulder to my cheek and she smiled so tenderly at me. Then she was gone.

“Where’s Mother going?” I asked.

“The women have selected your mother to be in charge of the east section of the perimeter,” Grandpa explained. “That’s right behind the Shrieker House and the route they might try to escape.”

“Where’s my sector?”

“You’ll stay with me.”

“But I want to fight too,” I protested and searched around for a weapon.

“Oh, we’ll fight, but you’re going to help me first.”

“Help with what?”

Instead of answering he pulled the blanket off his lap. I noticed he is wearing the thick leather caps over his stumps that he used whenever the wheelchair was impractical. I also saw a strange contraption in his lap. He picked up a heavy round circular metal object that is somehow familiar.

“An alternator, only smaller,” he said. “You’ll remember I said it creates electricity and that’s what we need to set it off.”

I didn’t have to ask what was going to be set off. A chill ran down my back, but I took the proffered object from his hands. Two wires ran from the alternator to the back of a small plastic device with an antenna sticking up that fit in Grandpa’s hand.

“When I say, you stick that under one arm and turn the hand crank on the end like your life depends on it.”

We stared out at the Shrieker House silently for long pregnant minutes. “I guess that’s long enough,” Grandpa sighed. “Start cranking, Teal.”

It was awkward and difficult. The crank didn’t want to turn and I almost dropped the alternator, but once it got going it was easier to crank. Soon I could feel the wheel inside the metal casing spinning with a hiss.

Grandpa held up the device in his hand and closed his eyes. I could see his lips moving. He opened them again. “No one likes a coward,” he said and pressed the side of the plastic device. A light brightens the face of it and a small bell noise sounded. Grandpa let go of the device and laid it in his lap.

For nearly a second nothing happened. Then we see the inside of the Shrieker House grow brighter before the front windows blow outwards spewing fire and glass. A deep roar soon followed along with a rumble in the ground.

“That’s it,” said Grandpa. “No turning back now.” He pulled thick leather gloves on his hands and hopped down out of the wheelchair. He moved over to a corner of the shop and hands me a heavy cudgel.

“What about you?”

Grandpa shook his head. “I need my hands free. Besides, once I get a hold of ‘em, I won’t need anything else. Come on, follow me.”

As we exited the front of the bridal shop, I hear screams from inside the Shrieker House. Smoke and flames billow up from the top of the house and incredibly the loud music is still playing on the remaining speakers.

A Chit Girl stumbled down the front steps bleeding and on fire. She falls into the front lawn and thrashes. A dazed Shrieker named Talon followed after her dragging a bleeding left leg. I could see our women standing around with their weapons in their hands, uncertain what to do.

Grandpa raced forward on his fists and stumps and I have to run to keep up with him. He slammed right into Talon and dragged the stunned Shrieker to the ground. Once there he held the man in place by locking his arm against his body and uses one of his powerful hands to choke the man.

The Shrieker’s eyes were wide and he looked up at me like he can’t tell what’s going on. Then he begins thrashing and nearly escaped Grandpa’s grasp. Without thinking of what I was doing, I stepped forward and swung my cudgel down on top of the man’s chest with all my strength. His struggles ceased immediately.

The women were now moving forward attacking the dazed Shriekers in groups. More screams of pain and surprise could be heard from the rear of the house. The sounds of the music mixed with that of the fire and screams in a dizzying chaotic mixture so like a dream.

Jonesy was there in front of me. He had Sarah by the hair and is punching her repeatedly in the face. Running forward I swung my heavy club as hard as I could at his lower back. He dropped to the ground and then rolled over to look at me in amazement.

Sarah was gasping and bleeding and I stand over both of them uncertain what to do next.

“Kill him,” Sarah gasped.

“No,” Jonesy held his hands up towards me.

“Do it,” she said. “He’ll kill you if you let him go.”

Jonsey leaned up and started to speak again.

I swung the cudgel from the hip and caught him in the side of the head. I felt a wet dull thump as if I’ve struck a melon. Jonesy fell back to the ground, his head broken open and his jawbone protruding grotesquely through the stretched skin of his cheek. I remembered that he wasn’t that much older than I was and that we had sat together during the Remembering when I was younger.

Before I was aware of it, I was vomiting on the frost covered ground. I heaved for several seconds after my stomach was empty and then sank to my knees.

Sarah, her face already swollen, lifted me up. “Come on, we have to go help.”

I looked around and it appeared to me the women didn’t need any help. They were standing attentively, ready to attack any who emerged from the house. Just as I am starting to believe we were actually going to be able to do it, to win, I heard a horrifying sound.

A gunshot.

The pop was distinctly different from any other and I remembered it well from the time they killed the black bear. The gunshot was followed by another and then another. Soon a cascade of pops echoed from the rear of the Shrieker House.

Through the smoke I could see women running our way from the east. I spotted Jonesy’s mother fleeing the sound before she falls to the ground, blood soaking her shoulder. She tried to rise again, but Skull stepped out of the darkness and shot her in the back of the head with a pistol. He smiled maniacally through his orange face paint.

There were gunshots from all sides of the house and women were running frantically away. I looked for Mother, but couldn’t see her.

“Run,” shouted Grandpa suddenly beside me. “Take your mother and Victor and leave town. Do it now.”

“We can’t leave you,” I said, but he was already gone, charging towards Skull who was preoccupied with reloading his ancient revolver.

The Shrieker didn’t see Grandpa until he is almost upon him. Skull’s eyes shoot wide and he dropped precious cartridges onto the ground in his haste. Skull kicked at Grandpa who caught his foot and twisted the man to the ground. I saw Skull point the pistol in Grandpa’s face and pull the trigger.

The weapon made a small click sound.

Skull screamed in rage and then in pain as Grandpa smashed his large gloved fist into the smaller man’s groin. The two struggle and roll on the ground. Skull kept trying to point his pistol at my grandfather and pull the trigger. Soon Grandpa was astride Skull choking him. The Shrieker raised his pistol again and pulled the trigger.

With a blast Grandpa fell back off of Skull, blood pouring from his head. The Shrieker rolled away from Grandpa and climbed slowly to his feet.

“No,” I whispered. Part of me wanted to run to help my grandfather and another part wanted to flee with the result that I was frozen. I saw Clay striding towards me out of the billowing smoke, a pistol in each hand. He glared at me with pure hatred.

My paralysis was suddenly broken, I turned to run away, ashamed at abandoning Grandpa, but also relieved to be leaving this place of death and horror. I ran as fast as I could around the corner and slammed into something immovable. Falling back on my rear, I saw Reaper towering over me.

Before I could get up, he placed one giant boot on my chest and presses down. I swung the cudgel weakly in his direction, but he caught it and yanked the weapon from my hand. I looked into his face and see no mercy or humanity.

He swing the cudgel one handed at the side of my head which seemed to explode with fire and pain.

My mind closed down to sounds of screaming and music.

***

When I awoke I notice we are all crowded together into the Dormitory. The cots and makeshift dressers have all been rudely pushed against one wall. I felt dizzy and my mouth was dry.

“Don’t try to move,” Mother whispered from beside me. “It will only draw attention.”

I slowly turned my head and saw Grandpa lying beside her, his head in a heavy bandage.

“I saw him get shot in the head.”

“It didn’t penetrate his skull,” she explained. “The bullet traveled around his head tearing loose his scalp. I need to sew it back on.”

“Getting shot in the skull by Skull but the bullet doesn’t go through the skull,” I laughed hysterically at my own humor.

“Shut up!” Mother hissed at me.

Looking around I saw other huddled groups of friends and neighbors and many of the children we’d put to bed safely the previous night. Lanterns posted at regular intervals cast menacing shadows around the room. Five dead Shriekers were laid out on the stage at the end of the Dormitory and many more dead women were piled unceremoniously below them. The smell of blood and burnt flesh was thick in the air.

Clay sat in a chair on the stage while several other Shriekers stood around him looking down at us hatefully. A dozen or so of the Prospects were posted along the walls. All seem to be waiting for something.

A door bangs open and in strode two Shriekers leading a group of children. I could see Victor was with them looking confused and frightened. He cradled his rainmaker in his arms and was forced to sit against the far wall near the stage. Two Prospects closed the doors and stand guard.

I tried to catch Victor’s eyes, to reassure him, but he was too far away in the dim and crowded Dormitory.

The last two Shriekers walked up on stage. All nine of the remaining Protectors stood around Clay who sat looking at his feet while tapping a pistol against his leg.

He stood suddenly kicking the chair violently behind him. “Who is responsible for this?”

No one answered.

Clay nodded as if he didn’t expect an answer. “We’ve lived in peace by the Treaty for nearly a decade and now you go and do this?” He pointed at the pile of bodies at his feet.

Unbidden, my eyes looked where he indicated. I think if I had tried I could recognize each body. Instead I closed my eyes and felt a single tear roll down my cheek.

“We’ve lived in harmony and peace,” Clay continued. “I have been merciful and kind. Given you your freedoms. Protected you from harm. Someone is responsible, I refuse to believe that you all did this on your own. Again I ask who is responsible?”

People were starting to look around them. Several eyes lingered on Broily and Grandpa. Even a few stare hard at mother.

“Give me the one responsible,” said Clay. “This violation, this rebellion, cannot be tolerated. I do not want to punish you all, only the rabble rouser. The one who stirred up mistrust in your hearts. This person has led you astray. Give them to me. Who is responsible?”

A child started to cry. Then another. As if contagious, nearly all the small children were soon wailing loudly.

The sound clearly made Clay angry. “The Old Bible says that the children shall suffer the sins of their parents. I don’t want that and I know you don’t, but if you force me I’ll take it out on the little ones. Someone here has to answer for what happened. Someone has to pay in blood, that is the way to make things right again.”

Who is responsible, I wonder. Someone had put them in this position and gotten a lot of good people killed. Most would blame Grandpa, but that’s not who’s responsible.

“Okay then,” said Clay. “Bring me a baby. Any of them will do.”

I stood suddenly and nearly fainted. Steadying myself I looked at the stage and said as calmly as I could. “I’m responsible.”

“Sit down,” Mother was pulling at my hand.

“Bullshit,” said Clay. “You’re just a little girl.”

A wave of euphoria washed through me and I chuckled. “Yet we still almost beat you. A bunch of women and girls. Maybe we should switch places and you can let us protect you.”

The room was deathly still. “Come on up here then,” said Clay with a dangerous grin showing too much teeth.

“No,” moaned Grandpa trying to rise. “It was me. It was me.”

None could hear him but Mother and I. Yanking free of her grasp I made my way forward carefully trying not to step on anyone, pausing occasionally as a wave of dizziness washed over me. Soon I was standing at the base of the stage. Clay was in front of me and the pile of bodies was to my right. I heard the sound of murmuring behind me.

“Well, come on up here,” Clay waved at me with his pistol.

I measured the stage mentally and knew it was too high for me to climb in my current state. Turning to the left to walk up the stairs, I felt a searing agony in my head as my feet leave the ground. Screaming in pain, I’m deposited in a heap at Clay’s feet by Reaper who has just lifted me up by my hair.

“Go ahead and take the load off,” Clay said pulling the chair he had kicked to the rear forward. “You must be very tired what with all the conniving you’ve been up to.”

I do feel tired and just want to go to sleep. Sinking down into the chair I looked out at the room. Meeting Mother’s and Grandpa’s eyes I felt a deep love I had never felt before. Wishing I could hug them now, I smiled and wiped the tears from my eyes.

“Oh, tears won’t do you any good now,” Clay said. “It’s way too late for...what the hell is going on?”

There was a commotion to my right and I looked over to see Victor climbing up the stairs towards us, his rainmaker out before him like a protective talisman.

“No hurt, Teal,” he said.

“Someone get that simpleton off the stage,” Clay ordered.

Reaper turned and strode purposefully towards the big man.

“No hurt, Teal,” Victor repeated.

“We’re going to hurt you in a minute,” Reaper shoved Victor.

The big man doesn’t move.

Reaper pushed harder and I heard a cascade sound. Looking over I see small stones pouring out the open end of Victor’s cylinder and onto the stage.

Oh no. They’ve broken his rainmaker, I think. “It’s okay Victor,” I said. “Just go sit down, please.”

Reaper grasped the large knife at his belt in his fist and yanked it out. “I told you I’d kill you if you crossed me again.”

What happened next seemed to be in slow motion to me. Victor was holding one hand out under the broken rainmaker as if trying to catch the last few stones. Miraculously a long thin metal object falls into his hand. He pulled the rest of the cylinder off and tossed it aside.

In Victor’s hands was a long sharp two-handed sword. On the pommel was the unmistakable symbol of an eye. The sword flashed forward in a blur.

Reaper shifted slowly back towards Clay and the arm that previously held the knife was now missing from the elbow down. Before he could take another step, Victor raised the sword to shoulder level and with a powerful swing took Reaper’s head off.

The room was still and nearly silent.

Victor drove the bloody sword into Hellspawn’s chest before yanking it free and moving forward to jab the tip of his sword into Thor’s eye.

There was screaming from the Protected and the Shriekers appeared confused about whether they should attack this bloody apparition before them or flee.

Victor continued forward. He kicked Skull savagely in the groin and then drives the tip of his sword into the prostrate man’s chest before turning to take the top of Bird’s Eye head off. He followed this up by slamming the hilt of his sword savagely down on Stormchaser’s skull.

Clay grabbed me by the front of my shirt and stuck the barrel of his pistol against the side of my head. “Stop or I’ll shoot her.”

The big man slashes downward cutting off Irish’s leg before spinning and slicing open Firebrand’s abdomen.

“I’ll do it!” screamed Clay.

Victor tripped Cowboy as the Shrieker tried to flee and then drives his sword through the man’s lover back.

“I swear to God,” shouted Clay, “if you don’t stop right now, I’ll—“

The pistol fell away from me and Clay collapsed on the floor. I looked down to see his headless body, his head having rolled off the stage and onto the pile of Protected corpses.

Victor was past me and continuing in his carnage. I reached down and pried Clay’s pistol out of his hand and stood. Mother was there suddenly holding me up. She reached down and secured Reaper’s big knife.

“Don’t let any of them escape,” Mother screamed out over the crowd. The mass of women seemed to come to life slowly and then with growing intensity. Some of the Prospects had fled out the doors, but newly armed Protected were now chasing them.

Victor killed Spike, a Prospect who had climbed up on stage, before turning to address the room in a voice as loud and strong as Broily’s. “Show no mercy. The Prospects are not part of you. They are Shriekers and must die. Do it now.”

I turned to stare at the big man. “Victor? Is that really you?”

“It is, Teal,” he answered in a clear and intelligent voice.

“How is this possible,” Mother asked.

Victor smiled and brought the pommel of his sword up to his face. The eye on the hilt shown out clearly through the thin film of blood covering it.

“We got your letters.”

***

Mother and I cleaned Grandpa’s wound with some of Reuben’s leftover peach alcohol recovered from the Shrieker House. We then carefully stitched his scalp back on. He sat stoically through it all, his hands clinching the arms of his wheelchair tightly.

My grandfather had somehow become the de facto leader of Newton. There wasn’t an election or even a discussion, people just started bringing their problems to him, and they did what he said. He told everyone to keep doing their Shift Work and to prepare for winter. Grandpa also directed us to repair the burned out Borderland around town by reloading the old booby-traps and digging out the debris from the stake pits.

We buried the Shriekers in the big communal garden knowing they would make good fertilizer. The Protected we placed lovingly in the New Cemetery, the services, quick and simple. Snow was in the air and there was too much else to do.

Victor helped. People at first looked to him for guidance and answers, but he just shrugged and said, “It’s not my town,” or “I’m not staying here much longer,” or “You need to learn to figure things out yourselves.”

It was strange to have such freedom all of the sudden. I’m sure most of the women acted as I did, going about our routines out of habit, expecting the lash or a slap whenever we did anything wrong. We got rid of the Protectors, but their ghosts were still with us.

Perhaps they would always be with us.

Victor still slept in our house on the pallet in front of the fire although now he engaged us in conversations and stories of his travels. Grandpa eagerly soaked up information and many nights Broily is here too, writing furiously on moldy paper with his left hand.

“I’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Victor announced abruptly one morning.

Mother, Grandpa, and I looked at each other in concern. “You can’t leave,” I finally said.

“I can and I will,” he answered around a mouthful of kudzu salad.

“But we need you,” I said.

“My family needs me more.”

Mother was surprised. “Your family?”

Victor chuckled. “Margaret, I know you think I’m a vicious killer, not to be trusted, but I have a wife, two little girls, and a son waiting for me back east. I promised them I’d try to be home for Christmas.”

“Christmas,” I whispered reverently. We had of course heard the wonderful and fanciful stories of this mythical holiday, but never experienced it. The Shrieker’s had forbidden celebrations. “Can we have Christmas?” I asked Grandpa.

He nodded slowly. “I don’t see why not. Be good for us, I reckon.”

“You sure you don’t want to wait until spring?” asked Mother. “They’ll be snow soon and it sounds like a long way.”

“I appreciate the offer,” said Victor, “but I’ve already stayed here too long. Tomorrow morning I’ll take my leave, got a few preparations to make today.”

Grandpa nodded. “I can help you with that.”

Victor grunted and kept eating.

I went about the day noticing things as if for the first time. Of course life seemed different without the Shriekers, but I guess I had imagined that Victor would be our new Protector. I can see how open the Borderland is. Anyone could walk into Newton if they wanted. The pits, booby-traps, and barriers were good, but we needed something more. Otherwise it would only be a matter of time before some other road gang or pillagers came through.

We needed what Broily had called in one of his stories a militia. It would be years before the young boys were men, but I realized we women could fight too. We had already. We would have to if we wanted to protect what was ours.

Like the dogs, I thought, watching them patrol the edge of the goat herd. We needed to patrol our perimeter. Even the Shriekers had gotten lazy and complacent, I realized. They weren’t really protecting us at all.

We can do it, I decided. Newton didn’t need any outside help. We had everything we needed. Mother would help. So would Sarah and the other girls.

Newton still gathered each night after dinner for the Remembering, but the nature of the stories was starting to change. Others talked besides just Broily and now some of the stories are remembrances of the Shriekers and the things they had done. It still surprised us sometimes that they were gone.

“Polishing and cleaning their old motorcycles was somehow the worst,” said Juliette, now without her Chit. “Most of what we had to do was to serve them or satisfy some urge, but taking care of the worthless bikes seemed like rubbing our faces in their complete control of us. I also think in some ways they missed those old days when there were able to ride on the roads.”

“They’d even make the Prospects spend time sitting on the bikes,” added Tammy. “As if they could experience riding that way and become like the Shriekers.”

Victor stood suddenly and the giant stared out over us. The room became respectfully silent.

“You may have heard that I will be leaving tomorrow,” he said.

Although this wasn’t news to most people, a murmur of dismay spread through the crowded room.

“I’d like to tell you the story of the Knights of the Watch. Of simply the Watch as we call it and how it all began. Maybe it will help you.”

Nearly everyone looked at Broily at the mention of the Knights. Some surely feel guilty for doubting the old man. All are grateful for his sacrifice which made their freedom possible.

“At the End,” said Victor, “we didn’t understand what was happening. Didn’t know it was the end of everything. We were so accustomed to others solving our problems that we sat back and watched things get worse. The police and military and government simply melted away or took from us. We waited almost too late to act.”

Victor glanced around the room and grimaced. “It may be hard to believe, but back then we didn’t know all our neighbors, sometimes not even those directly around us. I was a senior in high school then, preparing to go to college on a football scholarship. My family got the early T-path vaccine, my father was a doctor you see. They died anyway. I never found out why.

“By then there was no one to call for help. I nursed them at home as long as I could once the hospitals closed down and then buried them together in our backyard. I hid in our house, eating what food we had while listening to the sirens and watching the smoke from the fires. I tried listening to the radio, but it got too frightening. Wasn’t long before the electricity shut off anyway.”

Victor shifted nervously and I realized the telling of this story was painful for him. He was a Sad One as well.

“Armed men came to my door,” Victor continued. “I didn’t answer and they went away, but they came back. Again and again. I watched them through the windows for days on end and came to realize a curious thing. They weren’t taking from anyone or harming people. I even saw them fight off a group of wild teenagers at the end of our street. Besides, I had to go out anyway by then, I was running out of food. You might not believe it, but back then I used to eat a lot.”

People in the room chuckled. Victor’s appetite had taken on legendary status. I imagine that in the years to come when stories were told of him at the Remembering they would tell of how he ate whole goats at a single sitting and grazed among the kudzu vines like a cow.

“I near got myself killed when I finally opened my front door,” continued Victor. “Likely scared them to death as big as I am. They weren’t expecting me and I thought they were going to shoot, but Mister Egles told them to stand down.

“’Where you come from, son?’ he asked and I told him this was my house and that my parents were dead.

“’I’ve seen him around,’ said another man with him. ‘Good football player from what I hear.’

“’Big as he is, damn well should be,’ answered Egles. ‘You okay, son?’

“I didn’t know how to answer,” said Victor. “Of course I wasn’t okay but the fact that someone asked me that and really cared changed everything. They took me in with them and I helped patrol our neighborhood. We linked up with other groups nearby and before long we were cooperating and trading and helping each other. Our community had a water tower nearby that we shut off before it could drain. Another might have a grocery or a drug store or a home supply store. We helped each other and survived.”

Victor shook his head. “You have to understand that Before, the Neighborhood Watch was almost a joke. Men and women who called the police when they saw something suspicious or that they didn’t like. When things turned bad at the End, the Watch fought and died and bled for those neighborhoods. They drove back the marauders. We set up barricades and took in refugees. We organized sanitation and planting and before long we weren’t just a group of people hiding out and surviving. We had formed a community of people looking out for each other.”

Victor looked at Broily. “Word soon spread. Men came to join us and other communities asked us to help them. Some didn’t think we should risk our lives for those we didn’t know, but Mister Egles felt different. He sent us out to help other communities. Sometimes we were able to help. Sometimes those Men of the Watch never returned.”

The big man looked around at us beseechingly. “Do you understand? There is nothing special about the Watch. We’re just normal people like you who decided to stand together and fight. That is the message and the gift that I bring. It is up to you to accept it. Realize that the Watch will never accept your call for aid again. It is now up to you to help others when they call on you for help.”

“But how can we help others?” asked a small voice. “We’re just women and old men. Can we even help ourselves?”

“Don’t be mistaken,” said Victor, “we’re called Men of the Watch, but there are women amongst our number. Women can fight too, as well as men when needed. You’ve shown that. You are able. It is just a matter of choice.”

“But we don’t even know how to fight,” said one of the Old Ones.

“You learn to fight by fighting,” Victor answered. “It’s as simple as that. You will defend what is yours or you will not. With any luck you won’t all be raped and massacred. Maybe the next group that comes along will decide to put you and your children back in bondage. Either way, it’s up to you. I sincerely wish you the very best.”

Abruptly, Victor strode out of the Meeting Room and everyone was left looking at each other in shock. The silence stretched out uncomfortably as people gazed around at each other.

“Sounds like we have some work to do,” said Mother loudly in the silence.

Grandpa grasped her hand in his and nodded. “Indeed we do.”

***

I got up early the next morning, but Victor was already gone. I tried not to cry, but I did anyway. The big man might have been my friend or not, I was never sure, but I was glad I found him under that house.

Simple and sweet Victor who was our salvation.

His pallet was folded up neatly in front of the fire with his rainmaker resting on top. I picked up the long cylinder and tilted it first one way and then the other listening to the soothing sounds of rain. Finding the seam along one end, I carefully unscrew the cylinder cap, careful not to let any of the small smooth stones fall out. I feel inside carefully. No sword. Of course not.

Yet he had left me a gift, and I imagine what that act might mean. That he was my friend? That he was grateful for me taking care of him, even though he didn’t need that help? That I reminded him of one of his daughters? That under different circumstances he could have been my father?

Wiping the tears away, I picked up the rainmaker and the blankets to put them away and notice something on the bricks near the fireplace. It is a symbol drawn in burned wood ash. I recognize it and smile.

Victor had drawn an eye. His message is clear to me.

It is our turn to watch and protect.

We were now the Protectors.

THE END

Find many more Ryan King stories on his Amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/Ryan-King/e/B0070D7BFW

Reaper’s Run

by

David VanDyke

Introduction

Speculations on the Eden Plague by B. B. Larson – Online Excerpt

Greatness tries to change the world for the better. Small-mindedness resists, reacts – and ordinary people get caught in the gears. Usually they are ground up and spit out, but sometimes, once in a while, they win through to produce a fundamental alteration of everything we know.

The long-awaited apocalypse arrived not with a bang but with a slow-motion, grinding crash. It began with irrational fear in the minds of men, a self-fulfilling prophecy of overreaction that brought the world to the stuttering brink of annihilation.

It started with a man named Aaronovsky, a secret Jew that kept his Talmud and his Torah behind a false panel in his miserable little apartment on a bleak biological warfare research base in the middle of Siberia. This one man had the courage to respond to anonymous messages that showed up on his computer and keep the conversation hidden from his Soviet masters.

Whoever was on the other end provided information on how to build a prototype virus that might save humanity: from illness, from death – perhaps even from itself. It was an amazing feat of genetic engineering, decades ahead of its time. Unbeknownst to him, this information, this communication, was of extraterrestrial origin – but that is another story.

For long years he used the knowledge, and the laboratory, to create what eventually came to be known as the Eden Plague. That he did it right under his supervisors’ noses was a testimony to his courage and determination. Unfortunately, he did not have time to complete his work. The virus he had made, though amazing, was imperfect.

No one living knows exactly what happened, but in 1989, politics intervened: the Soviet Union fell apart, and its technologies were stolen, its scientists and research trafficked to brutal regimes with oil money, and the almost-miracle disappeared into a black hole.

That is, until it surfaced in the form of some samples of tissue, a whole human head, and a canister of a virus, in an abandoned biological facility buried in the Iraqi desert. There it had waited until someone, probably local salvagers, found it.

From there its path wended murky, but eventually it fell into the hands of an ambitious CIA man, a spymaster in the classic mold – an old-moneyed New England dabbler named Jervis A. Jenkins III. He believed in putting wealth and power to use, and in this experimental biotechnology he saw a source of both.

Keeping the secret even from his own superiors, he created a small, closed corporation to investigate the germ that showed the potential to heal and to extend life. If harnessed, it would be of immeasurable value. Who wouldn’t give everything they owned to conquer cancer, AIDS, even old age itself?

But the so-called Eden Plague had a flaw – at least, from Jenkins’ point of view. Not only did it heal the body, but the brain, and perhaps the mind, as well. Test subjects changed for the better; their morality tended to improve as a so-called “virtue effect” took hold. Were the virus to be distributed, crime, drug addiction, selfishness and misuse of power would drop precipitously. For those like Jenkins, this was a drawback they could not stomach. If corruption were stamped out, so would be his unchecked exercise of power over his fellow man.

Additionally, because the agent of change was a communicable disease, it could not be controlled. Easily transferred from person to person, in its present form it was useless for Jenkins' selfish purposes. The virus had to be modified – “perfected” – to get rid of this virtue effect, and also its easy transmissibility. Only when it could be controlled, withheld for the elite who could pay, and held out like a carrot to the hoi polloi, would it be publicized.

Then the world would beat a path to his doorstep, cash in hand.

The elder Jenkins’ major mistake? Bringing in his son and namesake to manage the corporation. When Jervis A. Jenkins IV botched his attempt to recruit Air Force combat lifesaver Daniel Markis into the program, he set off a chain of events culminating in the Eden Plague spreading throughout the world.

But just like Jenkins, the national power structures, especially the people at the top, were not ready to allow such a revolution in their societies.

The U.S. tried to burn the virus out with nuclear weapons on its own soil, as did the Russians and the Chinese. Especially within these three superpowers, Eden Plague carriers, or “Sickos” as they were labeled, were hunted down, rounded up, locked away – or worse.

Chapter One

Aboard Royal Princes Cruise Line’s Royal Neptune

Sergeant Jill “Reaper” Repeth, U.S. Marine Corps, started the day as she always did: with a protein shake and one hundred pull-ups on a tension bar she had brought aboard and set up in the doorway of her room’s balcony. Facing out to sea looking over the railing, her head and shoulders rose and fell, eyes on the horizon. Her lungs expanded, pumping the fresh sea air in and out.

It is great to be alive, she told herself, one of a series of mantras of encouragement. Twenty-five and still alive. Every day above ground is a good day. Every day I am not being shot at is a good day. She believed these things more today than on some other days.

Jill Repeth was a One Percenter. Most Marines didn’t know about them, because most Marines weren’t female. Only a small fraction of the Corps was composed of women, because unlike the other services, the Marines didn’t bend its physical standards very much to admit them. Measure up or leave, they said.

But the One Percent was an unofficial secret club of female Marines that strove to outperform the men – that could, would and did beat them at their own game. Marathoners, triathletes, gymnasts, distance swimmers, biathletes. Thus One Percent, because perhaps one in a hundred already fit Marine women could do it – could perform at this Olympic level of physical prowess.

The cruise line had given her a private room on a middle-high deck, something she would have struggled to afford if she hadn’t been selected through their “Wounded Warriors” promotion that provided free cruises to the nation’s war-damaged service members. Jill was glad of that privacy as she finished the hundred, hardly more winded at the end than at the start. Taking that as a good sign, she knocked out another fifty before stopping.

That was more than she’d ever done before at a stretch. Perhaps it was because she had an advantage over the average Marine, male or female: she weighed at least twenty pounds lighter than normal.

Missing everything below both knees put less strain on the cardiovascular system. Absent lower legs didn’t need blood and oxygen.

Stay positive, stay focused.

Ever since the mortar shell that took her feet and shins, that’s what she told herself.

Dropping gently to the deck onto her buttocks, she maneuvered with wiry muscled arms and leg stumps over to her prostheses. Sitting on the floor, she strapped them on, fiddling and adjusting for a longer span than usual. She finally got them to some semblance of stability, and wobbled to her artificial feet.

Jill stared down at the legs and the metal-and-plastic structures. They didn’t feel right. Her good mood evaporated. Some days the damn things just didn’t sit well on her, and it looked like this would be one. She wasn’t even going to turn on the microprocessor control and servos that helped her walk and run with a semblance of normalcy. She still hoped she could work up to a marathon again. Maybe with those bladerunner things.

Jill sat down on the bed and took the prostheses off, rubbing at the end of the stumps. They always itched a bit, but today they positively screamed to be scratched. She did so, vigorously, and then looked more closely at them. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that the stumps had lengthened slightly.

Maybe they were just swollen.

She shrugged to herself. Rather than fight with the artificial legs, she phoned for a wheelchair pick-up. She’d come back after breakfast and fiddle with the things. She was starving.

An hour later, after bolting down everything she could shove into her face at the buffet, she returned to her room, bewildered. The ship had gone crazy, in a good way. People claiming to be cured of cancer. A blind man seeing. A paraplegic standing up and walking. People talking about the Second Coming of Christ, seeing the Virgin Mary on their walls and their pizzas, gossiping about miracles and the aliens landing.

Well, nobody had disappeared off the ship, so at least that ruled out the Rapture. Other people spoke of a viral video some had seen before the ship’s internet went down, where a man named Daniel Markis claimed to have released a curative disease that everyone could have.

Jill stared down at her stumps again and wondered.

***

Two days later, Jill peered out over the balcony rail. The object of her gaze was the U.S. Navy frigate Ingraham, keeping station to windward at about two nautical miles distance. Beyond, hull up on the horizon perhaps twelve miles off floated a Landing Platform/Dock amphibious assault ship, probably the USS Somerset. It was this ship that held her frustrated attention.

She lowered herself down from her hold on the railing; she had been perched there with her hands taking all her weight. Settling into the comfortable deck chair, she picked up her small five-power optical binoculars. Jill cursed herself for not bringing her eighteen-power electronic monsters, but she hated to carry a month’s pay around on a Caribbean cruise.

The LPD leaped into view, the angled, radar-deflecting planes of its superstructure identifying it as one of the most modern ships of the U.S. Navy. She was familiar with the type, having served a Fleet Marine Force tour on her sister ship, the USS Arlington.

Twelve miles away. Just sitting there for the last forty-eight hours.

Food aboard the cruise ship had dwindled, and was now rationed; Jill had recognized the impending problem as soon as the vessel had been detained. She had taken pains to smuggle everything that would keep back to her cabin and stash it in anticipation of making a break, but her stock would run out shortly, and there was no sign of them being allowed to land or disembark.

The announcements aboard ship had said they were quarantined because of a “dangerous disease.” That dangerous disease had apparently cured cancer, blindness, even old age among those aboard, and had started to regrow her legs. Between the official word and the Daniel Markis video, she decided she believed the latter.

Hunger became her constant companion. She didn’t know why for sure. Her caloric intake had exploded; for a triathlete like her, that was a sign something was seriously out of whack. The appetite must have something to do with the miracle disease.

She looked down at the strange pink skin down there, contrasting with the tan that ended just below her knees. The nubs couldn’t bear her weight without excruciating pain, and they wouldn’t fit her prosthetics anymore, so she had used the wheelchair service a lot. Reaching down to scratch the itchy growth, she pushed aside thoughts of why it had happened, or even how, and concentrated on what she had to do.

Night began to fall over the Atlantic. Making her final preparations, she wrote a letter to her parents in Los Angeles, leaving it addressed on the table for the steward to find. She ate as much as she could hold, and put the rest into the waterproof bag, along with her combat utility uniform, her wallet and identification, and the jury-rigged prostheses. She had ripped the expensive electronic guts out of them and she now had something that she could use, if barely. Padded with pillow stuffing and cut-up blankets, they strapped onto her stumps and allowed her to stand, even walk gingerly, as long as she could take the pain, and look somewhat normal in her uniform.

A bottle of ibuprofen went in as well, and a few other odds and ends. Then she sealed it up and put it in her rucksack. Wet suit on next, a stylish blue and green never intended for clandestine work, but it was all she had. Then the scuba gear she had brought to use – she thought – for recreation; her combat knife; and a rucksack strapped in reverse to sit over her belly. Lastly the swim fins, reconfigured to fit her regenerating stumps.

Levering herself up to the rail, she looked out between the slats at the two ships, now visible mainly by their navigation lights. Earlier she had seen hovercraft embarking and disembarking out of the combat well at the back of the LPD. Now she could see a strobe and running lights from a helo landing on the flight deck at the rear, one of a continuous droning above and around the ships. She had seen Hornet and Lightning naval fighters high overhead earlier in the day, so there was a supercarrier out there somewhere too, running combat air patrol.

She took several deep breaths, wondering if she was making the biggest mistake of her life. Hell, there’s an old Corps saying, she thought. “The worst plan executed quickly and violently is better than the best plan no executed at all.”

Far better to do something than to do nothing.

Facemask and regulator on, she hoisted herself up to the railing, looked at the water thirty feet below, and launched over the rail like a gymnast. Balling up, she wrapped herself around the rucksack, holding her hands to her face to shield the delicate apparatus from the impact. The sea struck her like a cold wet fist, and she fought to stay out of sight below the surface, fought to get the mouthpiece settled and clear it of water. For a moment she just floated beneath the waves, recovering her breath.

Then she began the long swim.

She navigated by lights from the ships. At first she steered by the brilliant glare of the bright cruise ship behind her, easy enough to see through the water above her head. All she had to do was keep going directly away. A half hour later, when she couldn’t see it any more, she cautiously broke the surface to get her bearings and adjust.

Her stomach already complained; she rolled over on her back and pulled a plastic coffee can out of a rucksack pocket, gulping down the cold spaghetti and meatballs packed inside, shoving it into her mouth with her fingers. It was the best she could come up with for eating on the trip; she hoped she had enough food to last. A half-liter of water followed.

The surface swim seemed interminable; even with the fins, she estimated it would take four to six hours to reach the LPD. The critical variable was the hunger, the thing she'd had to learn to live with and manage for the last two days. How often would she have to stop, how much would she have to eat – would her food and water run out? She laughed to herself at the idea of being thirsty in the ocean.

Eating every thirty minutes, she burned calories at a prodigious rate.

The answer came after three hours. Ingraham was far to her rear; she had bypassed it by a good mile, having no desire to be spotted and caught. It appeared that no one had even considered the possibility that someone would swim away from their floating prison, particularly not in the direction of their captors. But now she’d eaten the last of the food outside the waterproof bag. It looked like about an hour to the LPD. She wished she could ditch the scuba tank, but she might need it when she reached the ship.

A half hour later her gut demanded food again, and she didn’t have anything accessible to give it. If she opened the waterproof bag, she would flood everything inside with seawater – the food and her uniform in particular. She clamped down on the discomfort, bringing the discipline of a lifetime of triathlon training into play.

Pain is just weakness leaving the body. No pain, no gain – no pain, no brain. Pain is a feeling, and Marines don’t get issued feelings.

Two hundred yards from the stern of the LPD, the starving wolverine in her belly cramped her up completely, curling her into a fetal ball. She ground her teeth, pushing through the pain. She put her head under water and screamed. She pounded her thigh, trying to distract her nervous system.

Looming above her, the ship showed nothing except for its navigation lights. Uncramping just enough to propel herself to the stern, she hoped that someone didn’t pick that moment to look out into the dark water and see her in the moonlight. She forced her legs to push her closer, finally rounding the corner.

The well ramp had closed.

She groaned, fighting the cramps and starvation. Pulling out a water bottle, she drank, hoping the fluid would ease the sensations. She cursed herself for not thinking of putting something with nutrition in the containers – protein shake, orange juice, anything.

Milk would have been ideal. I’m such an idiot.

Lesson learned, if she lived to remember it.

The cramping eased for a moment. Looking around she found a steel rung inset into the stern. More rungs led up the side, and she measured the climb with her eyes. Fifty feet, maybe. No way would she make it, especially not with the gear. She closed her eyes for a moment, hanging on grimly. Ketosis soured her breath as her body scoured her bloodstream for something to metabolize.

Only one choice. She had to get to the food inside the waterproof bag.

Levering herself painfully up on the first rung, she sat on it and wrapped her left arm into the one above. Clinging on crudely, she forced her right hand’s cold knotted muscles to open the rucksack strapped to her belly, then the bag inside. She grabbed the first food packet she encountered. Greedily she stuffed crackers into her face. A feeling of relief and well-being spread like a drug; she could almost follow the sugars through her veins as they reached outward from her insides, quieting her screaming tissues.

A rumble went through the ship, a vibration felt rather than heard. Grinding and clanking sounds startled her, originating from somewhere very near. She hastily sealed up the waterproof bag and slipped back into the water, just in time.

Light blazed above where she had just rested, and she slipped the scuba regulator back in her mouth, breathing tank air. The great dark slab of the well ramp laid itself rapidly down onto the surface of the water nearby, forming a smooth transition for hovercraft inside to leave the ship.

A moment later an enormous dark shape swept by just feet from her, an LCAC hovercraft shoving her downward with tremendous force, spinning her like the undertow at a riptide beach. As quickly as it had come, it was gone, off into the Atlantic night, and the ramp began to rise again.

This was her only chance. Her legs pumped, driving the fins against the sea with all of her strength, aiming for the joint at the base of the ramp, from the side. There was no time to worry about being spotted; she had to get out of the water and on board.

She rolled over the enormous hinge and into the wet well. There was only three feet of water inside, and as soon as the ramp closed it would drain. She swam sidestroke in the shallow water, pushing herself up against the side rail, and then wormed her way forward. She was still hidden by the seawater, the dimness and the looming machines, but soon she might have nowhere to hide.

It’s good to be good, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky. She got lucky.

The only person in sight was a sailor sneaking a smoke, facing into the corner opposite her across the vast open space. Parked vehicles hid her exit from the water, and the noise of the starting pumps covered any sound she made as she dragged herself up the access ramp. She climbed onto a ladder – nautical terminology for any stairway aboard ship – and upward into one of the compartments tucked up along the walls. Once out of sight, she just breathed for a few minutes, resting after her ordeal.

Dry and safe enough, she ate her fill, stripped off the wet suit, and changed into her uniform. On a ship this size, one more Marine would be almost anonymous. The trick would be when to make herself known, and to whom.

This was as far as her planning had carried her.

Her MOS, Military Operational Specialty – until she lost the legs – was 5816-3RT, Military Police Special Reaction Team member, similar to civilian SWAT. The problem with such a small specialty was that her circle of contacts was limited. 3RT people tended to keep to themselves. She hoped to either find someone on this ship’s 3RT she knew, or just depend on the tight-knit community to shelter her in the face of her unlawful actions. Still, there were some violations that could be ignored by the loyalties and traditions of the service; she hoped that unofficially rejoining a deployed unit would qualify.

She slipped the prostheses on last, grimacing as she strapped them tight. Another four pain pills and a gulp of water, and she was on her feet. She stowed her gear behind a stack of firefighting equipment and hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.

Down into the enormous ship she tottered, holding onto railings and moving slowly. Sweat broke out on her brow, and she fended off two concerned inquiries with explanations of recovering from food poisoning. She didn’t like the way the people looked at her; she had chosen that illness as an explanation precisely because it was neither unusual nor contagious.

These people seemed on edge. She realized the crew must have been told the same lies about a deadly disease aboard the cruise ship, and they were jittery. Maybe going to the 3RT wasn’t the best choice. She suddenly realized whom she might be able to trust – by law, custom and regulation.

Five minutes later she was leaning against the chaplain’s door. She hoped he would be a calm, sensible sort that could keep his mouth shut. If she were lucky, she would get a Catholic priest. Priests had reputations for keeping confidences, and closing ranks. For this, she needed someone unshakeable.

The door opened to show a pleasant, pink, thirtyish face attached to a short, chubby body with dirty blonde, collar-length hair. She stared at the Navy Lieutenant’s bars on the right lapel of the woman’s combat cammies, and the cross on the left, disoriented by preconceptions. Her name tag read “Forman.”

“May I help you?” Lieutenant Forman’s accent exuded culture: New England – Boston perhaps, or Maine. It reminded Jill strongly of Katherine Hepburn, before the quaver, or maybe a Kennedy.

“Yes, ma’am. Permission to enter?”

“Of course, Sergeant.” The chaplain stepped back, then closed the hatch behind Repeth as she gingerly tottered in. “Please, sit. Are you ill?”

Jill sat. “No, my prostheses are giving me a bit of trouble.” She reached down to thump on her boots, bringing forth a decidedly artificial sound.

“Ah. Well, here we are. Coffee? Tea? Soda, or some juice?” She gestured at a compact coffee maker that sat upon an equally tiny refrigerator. “Privileges of the ministry.”

“Juice would be great, and if you happen to have anything to eat…I missed chow.”

Forman slid a tin of shortbread cookies off a shelf near her feet, opening it and setting it on the desk within reach, then pulled out a cold can of orange juice for Jill, a coffee cup for herself.

“You have the look of someone with a lot on her mind.”

Jill stuffed two cookies into her mouth, drank the juice in one pull. She gazed at Forman from under lowered eyebrows. “You don’t know the tenth of it. But before I go on…how confidential is this conversation?”

“As confidential as you want it to be.”

“And what if I told you I had done something unlawful? Would you stick to that?”

Forman sat back, blowing on her hot coffee, contemplating. “Are we talking capital crimes here?” She smiled, obviously only half joking.

Jill stared, intent. “I don’t think so. Mostly just Article 92.”

“Failure to obey a lawful order. I can tell you then with ironclad certainty that my lips are sealed.” She took a drink of her coffee, made a face. “It’s this ship’s water. I ran out of bottled a while back.”

Repeth took a deep breath. “All right. I choose to trust you.” A pause. “I am not assigned to this ship.”

Forman’s eyebrows flew up in surprise, and she sat forward, putting her chin on her fist. “Really? That’s a new one, not that my military career is particularly long or distinguished. Do tell.” Her eyes sparked with the cheeky joy of shared secrets.

Jill shook her head angrily. “Ma’am…six hours ago I was looking at this LPD from the railing of that cruise ship you have under quarantine. I just swam twelve miles, I’m hungry, and I’m not in the mood for girl talk. And there is no disease aboard that ship. At least, nothing…nothing bad.”

Forman opened her hand to drum her fingers on her own cheek, staring into Jill’s eyes, as if seeking truth. “Dear me. Dear me. Sergeant, I never thought to say this, but I am at a loss. What do you want me to do?”

“Ma’am...I haven’t a clue. But I’m exhausted. I need food and rest, and I’m holding my head up by sheer willpower. Is there somewhere…”

“On a ship? We both know that every space is spoken for. You might be able to join the crew as a transfer in and get away with it for a few days…”

“Just let me eat and sleep, then I’ll be able to think straight. Please?”

Forman pondered for a moment. “Take my cabin.” She gestured to a door in the back of the tiny office. “No one will disturb you. I can sleep in my chair if need be. I’ll go get some food to go from the mess.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Jill stumbled to the cabin’s bunk, falling asleep as her head hit the pillow.

The wolverine in her guts woke her up. Faint light from the open office door illuminated food cartons next to the bunk. She wolfed down their contents – sandwiches, fruit, potato chips, milk – then rolled over and went back to sleep.

A long black time later, a giant club struck the ship like a gong, throwing Jill out of her bunk and onto the deck. She yelped as the impact twisted her wrist, then again as she put her weight on the prostheses. She gave up and went back to one hand and two knees, crawling along the heaving deck to the doorway.

Chaplain Forman sat on the deck as well, holding her head. She would have a nasty shiner soon, above her right eye. The two women stared at each other, and then Forman clawed her way to her seat behind the desk as the PA came to life.

“Now hear this, now hear this. General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands General Quarters. Condition Zebra.” They felt the ship get under weigh, the sound of the screws churning at flank speed, maximum revolutions.

“I have to go to my station in the infirmary. You stay here!” Forman pointed severely at Repeth with an emphasizing finger.

An hour of sweat later the chaplain returned, teeth clenched. “The scuttlebutt is your cruise ship just exploded. Lost with all souls. One of the corpsmen said they saw streaks of light from the sky, then it just vanished in a fireball. Someone should be court-martialed. The Ingraham was a lot closer than we were, and has been gravely damaged. Their wounded are being medevacked to us. I have to get right back.”

“You know what this means, don’t you, ma’am?”

“It means the U.S. government just murdered three thousand innocent people because they thought they were sick. They must have been extremely frightened to do something like that. Though perhaps they have a right to be. Terrorists just detonated two nuclear weapons on U.S. soil: one in Los Angeles, another in West Virginia.”

Sergeant Repeth gaped in shock. “Nukes? Los Angeles? What the hell is going on? Just what…” She trailed off, stunned.

“Something rotten in the state of Denmark, methinks. I have to go.”

Jill just raised a shaky palm as Forman left, not looking. She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes, damning her leaking tear ducts. Los Angeles. Her whole family was in Los Angeles, her parents and her little brother and uncles and cousins...

She waited as long as she could, until the ship secured from General Quarters and the watertight doors and hatches were allowed open and the ship slowed; they must have gotten word they were not under attack after all. She wondered why the two naval ships had not been told to move away before they sank the cruise ship.

Her first concern was more information. She also needed more food, and to move the illicit gear she'd stashed back in the compartment. Angrily she shook her head, throwing the tears off, wiping her eyes with her sleeves. She stood up, gritting her teeth against the pain, and strode out into the passageway.

The ship blurred busy around her, sailors and Marines scurrying about with extreme sense of purpose. The amphibious well filled with people checking landing craft and gear, loading armored vehicles aboard the huge hovercraft, chaining them down to hardpoints on the decks. She saw live ammunition being hoisted into the tanks and personnel carriers.

The commotion hid her, just one uniform among hundreds, hurrying about a task. She climbed the ladder to the compartment where she'd hid her gear, using mostly her upper body strength, and then struggled back down with the rucksack, everything stuffed inside it.

“Hey, let me give you a hand.” He was smiling, handsome, cheerful and dark. She saw Staff Sergeant’s stripes, and “Gaona” printed on his name tag.

“No, I got it.” She grimly struggled on.

“Come on, Sergeant. You know, chivalry isn’t really dead.”

“With all due respect, Staff Sergeant, you can stow that shit where the sun don’t shine. I pull my weight.” At that moment, the jury-rigged prosthesis on her left leg failed her, twisting sideways under the pressure of walking down the ladder steps. She would have fallen had he not caught her, setting her gently on the deck, along with her rucksack.

He looked at her lower leg, then her face, then back again. “You should be screaming about now, so I’m going to guess that’s not your real leg. I mean, that’s…” Confusion showed on his visage.

She bit back her embarrassment to growl, “It’s a prosthesis. I need to re-secure it. Just help me get out of everyone’s way.”

Accepting his support, she hobbled a few yards on one leg to a spot against the bulkhead. Once there she pulled up her trouser cuffs and began redoing the bindings. “Thanks, Staff Sergeant. But you don’t have to do any more. I’m good.”

Pursing his lips he nodded, then shrugged as he pointedly read her name tag. “Okay, Sergeant Repeth. I’ll see you around.” His tone was playful.

She watched him walk away. Just as good-looking from this angle, and he knows it. Oh, Jill, give it a rest; not the time for the libido to act up. Funny, she’d been feeling friskier the last few days. Maybe it was from the…the whatever-it-was that was fixing her legs.

Boot and straps again secure, she stood back up and hefted the rucksack down the passageway toward the chaplain’s berth. After dropping that off, she made her way to the nearest mess. The galley crew was in full swing, and she loaded up on everything she could, demolished the whole tray, then did it again. She didn’t think she could get away with a third; one of the mess ratings had looked at her strangely the second time through. Fortified, she stumped down the passageways to the other enlisted mess and went through the line there too.

This time she could eat slowly enough to listen to the scuttlebutt. She chose a spot close to a group of sailors in uniforms somewhat crisper than average. She thought they were part of the CIC, the Combat Information Center, nerve center for operations aboard. Maybe they would know what was going on.

“The Old Man said it was a kinetic strike.”

“Kinetic strike of what?”

“Inert reentry vehicles. Like nukes but just made of metal.”

“No way that could have blasted that cruise ship like it did.”

“Dude, those things come in at fifteen thousand miles an hour. Mach 20. I ran the energy on my computer – it’s way enough. Like manmade meteors. I’m surprised it didn’t take Ingy with it.”

“It almost did, from what I hear. Two dozen dead and fifty wounded.”

“Somebody screwed up bad. They should have had her move away.”

“If they wanted it gone, why didn’t they just have us do it? With a missile or the guns or something?”

“Dunno, man, dunno. Maybe all them civilians on board. Glad I didn’t have to push that button.”

“Oh, yeah. That would suck. So where we going now?”

The sailors all stared at the questioner, a young junior enlisted rating, but no one spoke. Security prohibited talking about operational details, such as their destination, outside of secure spaces.

“Sorry.”

“That’s what I always tell them you are.”

“What?”

“You’re sorry.” The sailors laughed.

Jill finished her third tray and sidled away before they noticed her eavesdropping. Replete at last, she went back and got a to-go carton for later.

When she slipped into Chaplain Forman’s office she found the older woman staring at her shipnet computer screen. “Come here,” the lieutenant said. She pointed at an open email.

“All hands, pass this message. Sergeant Repeth report immediately to the Personnel Support Detachment.”

“Someone must have noticed you weren’t on the manifest.”

Jill growled. “Gaona.”

Forman looked a question.

“Just a nice guy that tried to help. Probably tried to look me up at Personnel and found out I wasn’t in the system. Now they’re trying to find me. There goes my anonymity. F– umm, freaking do-gooders. Sorry, ma’am.”

“I’ve heard salty language before, Sergeant. I’m sure Jesus did too.”

“Yeah, lots of people talking about Jesus on that cruise ship. Didn’t do them any good…ma’am, I need to get off this ship. I need to get to somewhere that I can plausibly rejoin from – I can say I missed reboarding – that I got drunk and got left behind in the Bahamas or something. Do you know where we’re headed?”

“Yes, and I think I know how to get you off the ship. We’re going to Norfolk to transfer the injured ashore on to Bethesda. That’s how you’ll go – as combat wounded.”

Jill looked at her doubtfully. “That seems pretty iffy. I don’t have any fresh wounds.”

“You’ll have a concussion. Disorientation, you can’t think straight. It will be the perfect cover. And I’ll attend the wounded. Nothing more natural. I’ll make sure you get left alone. Then, at Bethesda, you’ll disappear in the shuffle.”

“Ma’am…that sounds like it will work. Can I say, you’re the most…unusual chaplain I’ve ever run across?”

“Why, are most of them you have met cowards?”

“No, just more sticklers for the rules, I guess.”

“I never much liked rules. I didn’t like my father’s rules,” – she pronounced it ‘fahtha,’ the New England Brahmin coming out strongly through clenched teeth – “so I married a Navy man. After a while I found I didn’t like my husband’s rules much either – or his skirt-chasing – though I did keep his name after the divorce. Better than ‘Jenkins,’ and a bit less conspicuous. But then I found God, or perhaps God found me, and I decided to go to seminary, to be a chaplain. I still didn’t much like rules, so I made sure the only ones I respected were really His, not the ones that mankind had tacked on to the religion.”

“That…that makes a whole lot of sense, ma’am.”

“I’m glad you approve,” she said drily. “If we’re going to be co-conspirators, you might as well call me Christine.”

Sergeant Repeth squirmed. “Ah…I’m not really comfortable with that, ma’am.”

Forman’s tone turned ironic. “God forbid I trespass on the sanctity of Marine Corps sensibilities. Suit yourself. Just remember, I’m not a line officer, I’m a Navy chaplain. You’re permitted.”

“All right…Christine. Thank you.”

“You can thank me when you’re ashore and gone.”

“Ma’am…Christine, can you see if you can check on my family? They are in L.A…I’d like to know if they’re…how they are.”

The chaplain looked at Sergeant Repeth and swallowed a lump. “Sure, Jill. Just as soon as I can.”

Repeth sat back, some of the knot of worry finally unraveling. Like any good Marine, she hated being without a plan. Now she had one, or at least, half a one. After she got back to where she belonged…her mind shied away from the future. Some part of it knew she wouldn’t like it when it arrived.

The next morning Forman dropped a sack on Jill’s bunk, waking her up. “Sit up. We need to give you a good wrap and disguise.” She opened the bag, pulling out gauze, bandages and a soft neck brace. Soon, Repeth was swaddled in enough of the material to hide her identity, save the last part across her eyes.

“Did you find anything out about my family?”

“Jill, I’m sorry. Communications are swamped. There are half a million people dead in LA, and the authorities there are way behind the power curve. Here, eat this. It might be a while before I can feed you again.” The chaplain handed her a carton full of scrambled eggs, sausages and biscuits. While Jill was eating, Forman dumped the Marine’s rucksack and started making two piles. “You can’t get caught with anything incriminating. That means the scuba gear and anything with your name on it except your neck wallet. Shove that down your panties and tell anyone that asks you lost it in the attack, until you get clear. Where were you stationed, anyway?”

“Quantico.”

“Good, that’s just down the road from Bethesda. I assume that if you make it home you have uniforms and other gear?”

“Of course.”

“Very well. Let’s go, get those prostheses on.” The chaplain started to help, then stopped as she looked at the exposed stumps. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was new skin. Right there at the tan line. That’s very strange.”

Repeth licked her lips. “Uh…I didn’t tell you everything, because…because I’m not sure I even believe it myself.” She cleared her throat. “I think it is new skin. New skin and more, new everything. I think my legs are, uh, regrowing themselves.”

Christine sat down suddenly, reaching out a hand to gently touch the baby-pink nub. “That’s…that’s amazing. Miraculous.”

“Yes. I think it’s why they killed all those people. There were things like this happening all over the cruise ship. Blind people that could see. People with terminal cancer cured overnight. A paraplegic got up out of his wheelchair. And this. I guess regrowing – regeneration – takes a bit longer, but I think in a few months I’ll have new feet.” The younger woman’s eyes were pleading, begging the chaplain to let her have a chance at being a whole Marine and a whole person again.

“And that’s what they are trying to cover up. But why? You aren’t some kind of monster.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a secret worth killing for. It’s going to take smarter people than me to figure that out. I just know that I don’t want to be locked up in some lab.”

“You won’t be if I can help it. We stick to the plan. This doesn’t change anything. In fact I’m more sure now than I was before. Something big and rotten is going on, and I’m going to find out what. And fight it. My family is wealthy, and has contacts. Maybe it’s time to use them.” The chaplain looked very determined.

They heard an announcement over the PA, calling for the patients to be prepped for medical air transportation to Bethesda National Military Medical Center. Hurriedly strapping Repeth’s prosthetics on, they walked carefully through the passageways to the auxiliary infirmary that had been set up in one of the cleared cargo holds. Ratings stepped out of the way as they saw the chaplain and the walking wounded Marine. The two slipped in among the hustle and bustle of the doctors, nurses and corpsmen, and got Jill horizontal on a cot as quickly as possible.

Forman fended off several helpful medical professionals, insisting this one was fine, just combat stress and a lingering concussion. When asked for her name, she said, “Jane Doe. No ID, no dog tags, no memory. Bethesda can take her fingerprints and DNA and look her up in the system.”

Everyone was too busy prepping the patients to pursue it further.

Several six-man teams of Marines carried patients to the cargo lifts, then up to the flight deck to be loaded onto MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotors. Lieutenant Forman sweated and watched as they worked their way toward her and Sergeant Repeth, finally surrounding the cot and reaching for the lift points.

One man stopped short. “Hey, this is Sergeant Repeth, the one they were looking for.”

Forman saw the man’s name tag read “Gaona.” Thanks, Murphy. Mind racing, she whipped him with her raised voice. “That’s right, Staff Sergeant. She’s concussed, she’s suffering from combat stress, and she’s in no condition to be bothered with you like last time. Now take charge of your detail and put your hands on that cot and lift, damn you, one, two, three, lift, and march your asses up to that aircraft or by God I will have your stripes – and you too, Corporal, don’t think I won’t, you men ought to be ashamed of yourselves, I should file charges for sexual harassment, for abuse under cover of authority. I thought Marines had more discipline than to be sniffing around a wounded female like horny butt-monkeys looking to hump everything in sight – h’ut, two, t’ree, fower, keep your eyes front you stinking pus-poxed son of a guttersnipe streetwalker or I swear I will have you locked up at attention in front of the Sergeant Major and he won’t be anywhere near as nice as I am…”

She hardly took a breath as she vented her bile in a running monologue, channeling her drill instructors and her abusive ex-husband and her lacrosse coach and that DI in Full Metal Jacket, calculated to stun and overwhelm the men until they loaded Repeth aboard the humming Osprey VTOL transport. Forman followed Jill onto the aircraft, where her blazing eyes dared anyone to interfere with her patient.

***

The transport team was sweating and only too happy to get away from the most cross-grained and viper-tongued minister of the Lord they had ever encountered.

“What the hell was that all about?” muttered one Marine once they were out of earshot.

“Must be a lesbian thing,” said another nervously.

Staff Sergeant Gaona coughed, then spoke in a stentorian voice. “Belay that, Edwards. This is the new Corps. Embrace the rainbow.”

After a distinct pause, all six of them burst into gasping, raucous, relieved laughter. When they could breathe again, they headed down to pick up another patient. The corporal said, “Remember, Staff Sergeant, that Chaplain’ll be coming back eventually.”

“Oh, shit. And she knows my name.”

***

On the Osprey, Forman strapped Jill in – Navy chaplains afloat were trained in as many medical-assistance tasks as possible – and shook with relief when the aircraft finally lifted. She bowed her head and said a heartfelt prayer of thanks, certain now that Jill would get away. She resolved to have a little talk with one Staff Sergeant Gaona when she returned to the ship.

Bending down, she spoke directly into Jill’s ear. “Take this,” she said, handing her a folded piece of paper. “Memorize it if you can, then get rid of it. It’s an anonymous email drop I set up when I was going through my divorce, so I could communicate with my lawyer without my husband snooping. If you avoid any distinctive keywords, you should be able to contact me through it without the NSA picking it up. Only use it if you have to.”

Jill nodded, opening it up to commit it to memory. When they landed, she handed it back to Christine with a confident nod.

Chapter Two

National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland.

Inside the female head – what the Army would call a latrine – Jill pulled her eight-point cap from her cargo pocket and her neck wallet from her panties. Looping the packet of ID, money and cards back over her head, she then shrugged on the utility tunic she’d swiped from a wounded fellow Marine’s ruck. “Raznowski” read the name tag, with a corporal’s insignia. A little big, but it would have to do.

That was probably the worst thing about this whole exercise – to steal, even if she thought it necessary. She consoled herself with the belief that it should be reported lost or damaged in transit and replaced by the Corps.

After strapping her prostheses up tight again, she stepped out of the stall and washed her face and hands, checking her appearance. Good enough for a cursory glance, and one more Marine in a military hospital was likely to go unnoticed. Sliding out into the hallway, she turned and walked quickly for the stairs.

Eight floors later she wobbled to the bottom on her false legs. She’d done the last four flights parallel-bars style, with her hands on the rails, pausing as others walked by, nodding and smiling and hoping they did not inquire too closely.

After tightening the bindings up again, Jill opened the door to the lobby. It bustled with people, with the smells of the coffee kiosk in the corner and fresh bread from the sub sandwich franchise along the wall. It was all she could do to ignore her increasing hunger and not get in the line for a foot-long, but there was no telling how soon they might start looking for her. After an internal struggle, she simply walked out.

The first and most important order of business was to get lost, so she stumped carefully over to a waiting base shuttle bus and got on, not caring where it went. There had to be something to eat somewhere.

The bus made several stops on the base, then drove out the gate. She could see Humvees with M2 .50 calibers mounted, guarding the entrances, and long lines of vehicles waiting to get in. Fortunately, they did not seem to be checking the outgoing vehicles – yet. Though martial law and a state of national emergency had been declared just days ago, the national capital region was still sorting itself out.

Traffic felt light outside the installation, even in the middle of a weekday, and there seemed to be a cop or an MP vehicle parked at every intersection. Jill wondered what they thought they were securing against – more “terrorism,” presumably.

Given that she had witnessed the deliberate murder of three thousand people on the cruise ship, she wondered about the nukes in West Virginia and Los Angeles, and the lengths people in her own government would go to control secrets.

Thinking of LA brought another wave of grief and fear for her family. She’d grown up on some tough streets, been part of a gang until she’d joined the Corps. With her mixed-Latina looks, she’d never quite fit anywhere – until the Marines taught her what it meant to be a warrior, and serve something greater than herself.

Though there were at least fifteen million people in the greater Los Angeles area, and perhaps only – only! – half a million casualties from the nuclear detonation, she couldn’t shake the terror that almost everyone she loved in this world might be dead.

Maybe they’re all right. She kept telling herself that.

Jill resolved to try to call them as soon as possible, then discarded the notion. From what she’d heard, on the television in the ward and the radio on the bus, anyone showing “unusual medical symptoms” was being detained and quarantined. A call to her family might lead back to her or, more importantly, throw suspicion onto them. As a military police member, she knew the security mentality well; anyone associated with a suspect was automatically under suspicion.

No, she’d not make that call. Better to have them believe she’d died on the cruise ship. Maybe Gaona’s inquiry and the records associated with it would get buried under an avalanche of more important things for the overstretched military to do.

The bus she rode pulled up with a squeal of air brakes and she looked up from her musings to see a Metro station. Getting off, she settled her cap on her head and looked around, searching for any sign of something to eat.

A burger place beckoned at the end of the block, but her stumps were already screaming inside her badly fitted prostheses. She looked longingly toward the fast food, then thought about the long ride home to Quantico. Her healing body wanted food every hour, needed it really – with this thing that was going on inside her.

“Can I help you, Corporal?” a voice at her elbow asked. Jill turned to see a tall, staggeringly handsome Army captain, in neat utility uniform with a holstered sidearm. He glanced at her chest, but she was used to that in uniform – that’s where her military name tag resided. His read “Muzik.”

It certainly isn’t my huge rack, she chuckled to herself, not with a triathlete’s low body fat. She saluted sharply, and he returned it automatically, raising his eyebrows expectantly. God, he’s gorgeous.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. Have to take a chance here. She reached down to thump on her artificial right leg, then the left. “Just got released and haven’t totally got the hang of them yet.”

His brow furrowed with sympathy. “That sucks. IED?”

“Mortar round. Iraq.”

“I thought we were pretty much out of there?”

“I’m an MP, and we’re still helping with their police. ‘Troop withdrawal’ doesn’t include trainers. Those poor local schmucks get it from all sides. Glad to be home.” The truth came much more easily than any lies, and Jill found herself glad to talk with someone.

“So…again, can I help you?” The sun returned to his face.

“Sir, I hate to be coddled, but what I really need right now is food, and the end of the block looks a long damn ways away.” She pointed at the burger place.

Captain Muzik laughed. “Well, Corporal Raznowski, I can’t leave my post, but we got MREs in the Humvee.” He gestured at a nearby armored utility vehicle with double whip antennas and a 40mm grenade launcher in a cupola, manned by a nervous-looking private.

Jill smiled with relief. “Deal. Mind if I sit down in it while I eat?”

“Of course. You make it?”

“I made it fifty yards to cover crawling with my feet blown off. I reckon I can make it ten on these pins.” She stepped over to the Humvee and pulled one back door open, resting her butt on the seat without swinging her legs in. Soon she chowed down on twelve hundred calories of Uncle Sam’s finest field food – Meals, Ready to Eat, also known as Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. She found they really weren’t that bad when the body believed it was starving.

“So Captain,” Jill asked between bites, “tell me the latest.” That seemed a safe enough question.

“Hmm well, nobody really knows anything. The two nukes got everyone spooked and there’s a lot of people getting detained. It’s a good time to be in uniform; at least we’re more or less above suspicion.” Muzik peered at her from under his cap with a mock-severe expression. “You’re not a Sicko, are you?”

“A what?”

“You know. Infected. Someone with the Plague.”

“Oh, is that what they’re calling the bastards now?” Jill tried to convey the right sense of black humor. “Do I look sick? You wanna see my stumps?”

“No, that’s okay. To tell you the truth, I don’t know I could even tell if someone was. Hear a lotta rumors about what it is, like…like folks turning into hippie peaceniks or pod people. Doesn’t sound like any Marine I ever knew.”

“Right.” Jill casually plucked another MRE out of the box on the Humvee floor and slid it into her cargo pocket, the door hiding her motion from Muzik. It won’t be long before this hunger will be a symptom they’re looking for, she thought. Best not to be too obvious. “Well sir, thanks very much but I gotta be going.” Standing up, she saluted once more.

Captain Muzik returned the courtesy, saying, “Good luck, Corporal.”

“Cap’n,” the 40mm gunner abruptly broke in from above, “something’s up.”

Muzik and Repeth turned to look in the direction the private pointed. Around a corner two blocks away came a procession of hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, yelling something and waving signs with anti-government, anti-martial-law slogans. Some pumped fists, and some carried sticks with no signs attached. More kept coming toward them, and some outliers, mostly young men, jumped on cars or kicked over garbage cans.

All the uniforms nearby, whether military or cops, nervously checked their weapons, and moved instinctively out of the mob’s path. “Everyone keep calm,” Captain Muzik called to his troops in a ringing voice. “As long as they are peaceful, do not fire.”

“They don’t look peaceful, sir,” Repeth said as several youths smashed a parked car’s windshield.

“I’m not going to shoot people for a little property damage, Corporal,” Muzik said in a cold voice. “You’d better get inside the Humvee. Lock the doors.”

It stuck in her craw to have to be protected, but she knew he was right. With her legs the way they were, and no weapon, there wasn’t much she could do. She wasn’t sure she could shoot civilians anyway, unless they were trying to kill someone.

They’re just scared, she told herself. Like me.

“Get on the radio,” Muzik said to her when she had climbed in. “The CEOI is right there with callsigns and frequencies. Tell Battalion what’s happening and we need riot control squads.”

“Roger,” Repeth responded flatly, reaching for the radio handset.

“What?” Captain Muzik shot her an annoyed glance.

“Yes, sir, I got it.” But what’s got him? she wondered.

Repeth saw Muzik shut the armored door and move to the other side of the vehicle, putting it between himself and the mob that had overturned a pick-up truck and now chanted rhythmically, “Kill-the-cops. Kill-the-cops.”

Uh-oh. She tried to reach the next higher headquarters on the frequency listed, but all she could hear was chaos on the nets. She got a brief response, she thought, before someone else stepped on her transmission.

She popped the door on the safer side open enough to yell, “I can’t reach anyone, and it sounds like there are riots breaking out all over. Battalion is swamped.”

“Crap,” Muzik responded, then said louder, “Dammit!” The mob had turned toward them. He drew his sidearm. “Lock the vehicle!”

Repeth immediately did so, checking all the doors and looking up at the private standing in the 40mm cupola. “Better unbuckle, kid. You don’t want to be lashed into position if they roll this vehicle.”

“Hell with that,” he muttered, sweat streaming down his bone-white face. “Hell with that!” he repeated, and without orders, opened fire with his grenade launcher.

“Shit!” Repeth yelled as the weapon’s loud stuttering filled the compartment. “Cease fire, cease fire,” she ordered, hammering with her fist on the man’s leg. He paid no attention, but continued to rake the mob with 40mm grenades.

The first shells did not detonate. Launcher grenades require approximately thirty meters of flight before arming, and the soldier was firing at people closer than that. The heavy cylinders slammed into people, breaking bones and knocking them down, but none exploded.

At first.

Then one lucky shot missed hitting anything or anyone, striking the street sixty meters away, right in the center of the crowd. To Repeth’s surprise, it burst into a cloud of white mist, and the rioters nearby coughed and covered their mouths and noses, eyes and sinuses streaming.

Tear gas. Thank God. I thought he was firing explosive rounds. Other grenades popped, and soon the entire area filled with acrid fumes. Her eyes stung, and she grabbed a protective mask on the seat next to her, putting it on in well under the requisite nine seconds.

It did not matter that the shots were not lethal. Like a living being with one angry mind, the mob gave an inarticulate scream and turned from rioting to killing rage.

Men surrounded the Humvee, and climbed up to beat the struggling, screaming soldier on his perch behind the grenade launcher. Blood spattered into the interior. Repeth could see sticks, rocks and even a machete chopping, chopping.

Grabbing the gunner’s assault rifle racked below, she aimed and fired upward, shooting for arms and legs, trying to drive the mob off the soldier before they killed him. Only when his severed head fell into the interior did she stop. They couldn’t get past his harnessed body to reach her, and the three or four she shot deterred the others for a moment.

Instead she felt the Humvee rocking as the mob sought to overturn it, but the squat, heavy vehicle resisted their efforts at first. If they got coordinated and all on one side, though, they would succeed.

Shots rang out from the direction of the metro station where Muzik and his troops had fallen back, but she heard none of the full automatic that would indicate anyone had blown it like the gunner. From what she could see, the cops and soldiers had taken cover, only firing if the mob threatened them directly. She felt a brief flash of pride at their discipline, amazed that only one young troop had lost his head.

That had been enough, though. The Humvee now bounced like a low-rider on hydraulics, and she knew that if it went over, they would drag her out and butcher her. She would be forced to shoot to kill to try to save her own life, and the thought nauseated her.

That’s odd: killing those trying to kill me never bothered me before.

Then Repeth had no more time to think as she scrambled into the driver’s seat and punched the starter. Given options among death, shooting to kill, or driving, she chose the last. Putting the truck into four-wheel-drive, she goosed the diesel engine, lurching a foot or two forward. Then she did it again, trying to give the mob a chance to back off.

Instead, this seemed to increase their rage. A miasma of blood and death and cordite rode the air, and faces and fists plastered themselves against the bulletproof windshield. Hate-filled screaming washed over her, causing terror to shoot through her different from any fear she had felt in war.

There seemed to be no choice. She floored it.

Bodies crunched and cries turned from rage to fright as she powered across a carpet of human flesh. It lasted only a moment, then she was clear of the press, trying to avoid running down any more civilians.

She saw a uniformed cop being dragged from her shattered vehicle and changed her mind, deliberately slamming the two rioters aside by opening the driver’s side door as she drove into them. “Get in!” she screamed hoarsely at the policewoman through the mask, then cursed as she forgot she had locked the other doors tight against the mob. “Crawl across me!”

The cop did just that, throwing herself in and clawing across Repeth’s lap with reckless abandon. As soon as she could, the Marine clamped the door shut and floored it again, racing between burning vehicles and groups of rioters.

“Holy shit, is that someone’s head?” the woman squeaked, looking down at the floorboards where the thing had fallen.

“Yes, and that’s what these people will do to us if we don’t get out of here,” Repeth replied.

“Turn right at this next intersection. There’s a fire station…there.”

Repeth turned, powering across the corner lawn to pull up next to the front door of the firehouse. Off the main drag there seemed fewer people, though smoke and a sense of impending doom filled the air. The door opened and two burly firemen with axes and helmets stepped warily out.

Repeth pulled off the mask. “Go on, I have to get back to my unit,” she lied, and the cop nodded.

“Thanks, Miss. You saved my life,” she replied.

“Just one cop to another, officer.”

The woman hopped out and was quickly whisked into the safety of the station. Repeth roared away, then pulled over on a side street. Taking a deep breath, she ran her hands through her hair and rubbed her eyes, feeling the residual sting of the tear gas. What the hell am I going to do? The world is going mad, and this is just going to cause them to clamp down more. If they know I’m a “Sicko”…what will they do?

Trying to think, she glanced around and noticed the head again, and realized she had to get rid of the body. She wasn’t ready to give up her transportation yet, even if she would probably have to abandon it eventually. A Marine with a false nametag alone driving an Army Humvee was uncertain enough without adding a corpse.

Struggling with the harness, she eventually pulled the headless body down from the cupola and inside, placing it and the head into the seat directly behind her. Looking around, she saw a boy of about ten in dirty jeans and not much else watching her from his perch on a tree limb. Solemnly, he waved.

Repeth waved back as she drove off, wondering what he thought of what she was doing. She tried to think where she could dump a body.

The urge was strong in her to go back and find Captain Muzik, to return his man’s corpse and his vehicle. It tore at her sense of honor to be running off, leaving the officer in the lurch, but to do so would be to rejoin a system that had become her enemy. At best, she would be cast loose on her own again with legs that hardly worked and no transportation. At worst…no, she did not want to be locked up.

Checking the fuel gauge, she saw that it showed full, so she decided to just drive, for now. Using the GPS mounted on the dash, she programmed it for Los Angeles and hit GO.

It’ll be a miracle if I get that far, she thought with a dark laugh, then began giggling almost uncontrollably as she started to come down from the stress high. At that moment, driving a stolen Humvee with a decapitated body in the back seat toward a nuked city three thousand miles away seemed hysterically funny.

Noticing a sign, she detoured toward the Potomac and found an access road leading down between high earthen walls. In a wooded declivity, she quickly rolled the body out, consoling herself with the fact that she did not murder the kid – it was his own panic and the mob’s reaction that did it.

Her rationalization didn’t help much.

The GPS took her west on I-66. Checkpoints stopped civilians but waved her Humvee on through without a second glance. Eventually she reached I-81 south, running through the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Its beauty wavered surreal in her eyes, with light traffic except for military convoys of five to fifty vehicles. Stopping only for take-out food, she drove steadily for several hours. Somewhere around Wytheville, where I-77 crossed, she ran low on fuel and pulled over at a truck stop.

After using the restroom and buying two much-needed burger meals to go, she climbed back into the driver’s seat and ate while she thought about her options.

Use her credit card for a fill-up – if it was not blocked – and she could make it another 300 miles or so. Otherwise, ditch the vehicle and start hitchhiking, perhaps on semi trucks. Truckers were usually a patriotic lot, and would probably have no problem with giving a servicewoman a lift.

Unless they thought she was running.

They wouldn’t even have to think she was a Sicko. One of them might report her as a potential AWOL, running from her duty. Life had turned crazy enough right now that such things must be happening.

A few always ran when the shit hit the fan.

She decided to try to fill up.

Repeth’s heart pounded as she swiped the card in the reader. “Come on, come on,” she chanted as it processed, and then the words came: Dispense Fuel. She gasped with relief, grabbing the hose and jamming it into the tank, then realized how stupid she’d been as she looked toward the rear of the vehicle. A row of six five-gallon cans sat strapped to the back, resting on the bumper.

Nothing for it now, she thought, then checked the canisters. Each can was full, so she went back to filling the tank, looking around nervously. No one seemed to be paying her any attention, so she took another risk and walked over to the ATM on the wall and took out as much cash as it would let her, four hundred dollars. She wondered what paper money would be worth in the coming months.

Back on the road, she drove with one hand and ate with the other. Night threatened to fall, and quickly, as the Appalachians loomed to the west. Fumbling, she eventually found the lights, but just after crossing the Tennessee border, the Humvee began to make ugly noises underneath.

It didn’t sound like the engine, but Repeth was no mechanic, so she slowed down and pulled in to the next truck stop.

Like most such places, it had a repair shop, and after taking a look, the good ol’ boy there with the nametag that said “Willet” shook his head and his attached NASCAR cap. “Ma’am, you done messed up the transmission. It ’pears you been drivin’ locked in four wheel drive for I dunno how long on a paved road. Ain't made for that.”

“Crap. Can you fix it?” she asked.

“Two, mebbe three days to get the parts, with things as they are now. I could call Bristol to the National Guard there. They could come tow ya. Mebbe you could beg another Hummer off them in trade.” The man spat a stream of tobacco juice off to the side, managing to look sympathetic doing it.

“Yeah, give me the number and I’ll do that. Will it go a little farther?”

“Five or ten mile, prob’ly. After that…” He shrugged.

“Thanks, ah, Willet. That a first name or last name?”

Willet laughed. “You ain’t fum aroun’ heah, is you? That’s mah first name. Last name of Hunt. Pleased ta meetcha.”

“Get me that number, Willet?”

“Yes ma’am.” He rustled around in the office for a moment, found an actual paper phone book under a pile of actual newspapers, and scribbled down a number. “Here ya go.”

“Thanks, Willet. You’re a true gentleman.”

He spat again. “Aw, shucks, ma’am,” he said, and winked. “You in Tennessee now. We’s all gentlemen till we get riled.”

Repeth tipped her hat to him, leaving the mechanic rubbing his greasy hands with an equally greasy rag and chuckling. She hopped into the Humvee and tossed the phone number onto the seat next to her, and then drove around the back side of the massive truck plaza and parked as far from the garage as she could. By the time the vehicle was found, she hoped to be long gone.

Slinging the dead soldier’s assault rifle, she emptied his rucksack and stuffed it full of ammo and MREs. She wished she had a pistol, but the only one she had seen had been on Captain Muzik’s hip. Looking at the blood-splashed interior of the Humvee, another wave of guilt washed over her. Desertion, theft, desecration, mishandling of firearms and ammo, misappropriation of government property…the list went on and on in her mind. Now she was about to abandon a deadly weapon – the grenade launcher – and several hundred rounds of ammo.

Picking up the slip with the phone number, she sighed. Can’t let some civilian get ahold of this stuff, she thought, and trudged back to the well-lit central building to buy a new prepaid phone. A quick call to the National Guard number to report the abandoned Humvee eased her mind. Then she went looking for a ride.

With no idea how to do this, Jill looked around and spotted a scantily clad woman looking an old thirty and smoking in the half-darkness near a line of idling semis. “Hey,” she said to the working girl.

“Looking for a date, honey?” the woman asked, cocking her hip.

“No, I’m not…I mean, I like men. No, I just would like to talk to you a minute.”

“Time is money, honey.” She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Jill pulled an ATM-fresh twenty out of her wallet and passed it to the woman. “Look, I need a ride on a truck going south, but I’ve never hitchhiked before. Just tell me the system.”

The woman ground out her cigarette on the pavement and made the money disappear. “Okay, honey, it’s simple.” She pointed. “Over there is mostly northbound, over there is mostly southbound. If they’re idling with the curtains shut or the lights in the cab are off, don’t bug them. If the curtains are open or they’re sittin’ in the driver’s seat, they’re fair game. Just knock on the door and talk to ’em.”

Jill nodded. “How do I make sure they don’t think…I mean, that I’m not going to…”

“Pay your way in trade?” She laughed tiredly. “Don’t worry about that, honey. Dressed like that, with a gun, nobody will think you’re working. Why don’t you just wait until a convoy comes through? Or over there,” she pointed, “there’s some Army guys in a truck.”

“Um, no.” Jill stepped deeper into the shadows.

“Ah…” The woman held out a pack of cigarettes, then lit one when Jill declined. “AWOL, huh?”

“I’m not deserting, if that’s what you think,” Jill retorted angrily. “My family was in LA and they won’t tell me anything. I just want to find out what happened.”

“Yeah. You and a million other people. So I guess you don’t know anything either.”

“Not really. I was on a ship until a couple of days ago.” Suddenly Jill realized she was talking too much, out of loneliness or fear perhaps. “Hey, thanks, I gotta go. Take care.”

“Yeah, honey. You too."

The third trucker Jill talked to agreed to give her a lift, eyeing her uniform and weapon. She offered him a twenty. He sniffed and took it, saying, “Get in.” Big, bearded, burly, about forty-five, and he smelled of cigarettes and, strangely, lemons.

Inside the roomy cab she settled into the big passenger seat with her feet stretched out. She massaged her upper legs, then as the rig got moving she lifted her trousers at the bottom to scratch where the stumps met the prostheses.

“Woah,” the trucker said in surprise. “How come you didn’t get out when you lost your legs?”

“The Corps is my home,” she answered. “And what’s the point of getting out, trying to find another job? We take care of our own.”

“You don’t look like you’re bein’ taken care of, darlin’.”

“Sometimes you gotta take care of yourself.” Jill turned away from him and rummaged in her ruck for an MRE to eat. Afterward she stared out the window at the night rushing by. Eventually her eyes closed and she slept.

***

If she hadn’t been so exhausted, and lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the rolling wheels, she’d never have been caught unawares. It was only the feel of cold metal against her cheek that finally woke her.

Looking up, she saw the business end of her own assault rifle wavering in front of her face. Jerking, she backed up against the door, staring wide-eyed at the truck driver, whose name she did not even know, holding it one-handed with his finger on the trigger and the safety off. His other hand loosened his belt.

Glancing around, she realized he’d pulled the truck over on a side road in the middle of nowhere. No lights but the moon and stars were visible, and the trees closed in as if conspiring to hide the commission of sins.

“Now darlin’, let’s just do this nice and easy. I’ll have me my fun and then you kin go, and nobody gets hurt.”

Jill was about to threaten to report him when she realized that was about the stupidest thing she could do. The whole country was falling apart and a man who would rape might also murder.

“Hey, you could have just asked nicely,” she said with a show of equanimity.

“Naw, you don’t understand. I like it rough. I’m gonna like it when you squeal. Just shrug them pants off, then turn around. Don’t even look at me. Better for both of us.” He smiled, showing oddly even teeth through his beard.

Her mind racing, Jill reached down and rapped her prostheses. “Hard to get my pants over these things. You’ll have to help.” She unbuckled her belt, then pulled the utility trousers down to her knees, extending her booted false feet toward him, past the assault rifle that still pointed at her.

“Oh, hell,” said the man disgustedly. “Forgot all about those.” He looked confused for a moment, then mumbled, “I guess no cripple ain’t gonna give me too much trouble.” Leaning the rifle against the driver-side door, well away from her, he reached for her legs.

Instead of cooperating, she popped the door lock on her side and tumbled out of the truck cab, landing in a wet ditch. Her athleticism saved her this time, and she rolled on her hands and arms, and then scrambled crawling into the woods.

The trucker hollered with rage, and then jumped out of the cab with the rifle in his hand, but she snaked on her elbows and bare knees down a draw, then rolled upright behind a tree. While he blundered around looking for her, she yanked the trousers back up, buckled the belt, and then worked her way away from him as quietly as she could.

Cursing inside, Jill realized she had now lost her weapon – a Marine’s cardinal sin. She should have looped the sling around her wrist and leaned on it as she slept. What’s more, the bastard had her ruck full of supplies. She racked her brains trying to remember if she left anything that could identify her, but did not believe so. At least she still had her neck wallet, an MRE in her cargo pocket, and her prepaid phone.

After a couple of minutes blundering in the woods, the man gave up. Probably smart enough to realize he can’t leave his truck unattended, in case I circle back around and turn the tables. That was very tempting, but she swallowed her anger and desire for vengeance and stayed put, watching from a distance until he drove away. Then she found a dry spot in the cool Tennessee night, and dozed until morning.

Chapter Three

Sounds of an engine nearby woke her up. Warily she looked around, spotting an old pickup truck pulled into a turnout nearby. Two big men with shotguns got out as the engine shut off, and a large muttish hound jumped out of the bed and made a beeline for her.

Crap. She hid behind the tree and hissed at the dog to go away. Instead, it bounded and capered around her.

“Hey, you, come on outta there.” At least, that’s what she thought it sounded like, as thick as the man’s mountain accent was.

Hands visible, Jill eased from behind the tree and looked at the two men. Both held their shotguns negligently, not pointing them at her. One looked to be about twenty, and the other, the one who had spoken she thought, about forty. The elder stood tall and wide, perhaps six four and two fifty. The younger looked only slightly smaller.

“Howdy, Miss. Kin we he’p you somehow?”

“Ah, yeah,” she replied. “I was…” Jill ground to a halt, suddenly aware of acute hunger. Even without hard physical activity, the thing within her demanded to be fed as it slowly rebuilt her legs.

She started again, after sitting down and pulling out her MRE, the only thing she had. “My name’s Jill, and I was riding in a truck. With a trucker, I mean, hitchhiking. I fell asleep and when I woke up, he had pulled off here and had a gun on me. He was going to rape me, but I got away.”

The dog nosed her interestedly as she tore open the thick food-packet plastic. “Sorry, gentlemen, I’m really hungry. And thirsty, too. Any chance you have some water?”

“Got beer,” said the younger one, and went to fish in a battered cooler in the truck bed. Walking over, he handed it to her as he pushed the dog away. “Go on, Klutz. Go on now.”

“Thanks.” She popped the top and guzzled. Despite the liquid’s warm temperature, she said, “Best beer I ever tasted.”

“First one o’ the day allas is,” he replied. “I’m Jimmy, by the way. This here’s my pa, Big Jim.” He squatted and held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, gentlemen. Looks like you’re not much smaller than your dad, though.” Jill shook his hand backward, then shoveled beef stew into her mouth with the long-handled spoon provided.

“Yes ma’am.” Despite his outrageous accent, rough clothing and appearance, the young man had a nice smile, and his teeth looked healthy. “What?” he asked.

“Guess I expected you to have a dip in,” she mumbled as she dug for gravy.

“Naw. That stuff’ll kill ya.” Jimmy grinned at his father, then stood up. “Well, we was gonna go do a bit of duckin’, and we’re already late. Wanna come along?”

“Jimmy,” the older man said in a warning tone.

“Oh, come on, pa. We cain’t just leave her here.”

“Oughter take her to the sheriff. She gotta report that rat bastard.”

The younger Jim stared for a moment at the older in disbelief.

“I didn’t say we would let him see us. Just drop her at the corner and she can walk to the station.”

“Now wait a minute, gentlemen,” Jill said. “The way things are in this country right now, I’m sure your sheriff has a lot more important things to do than talk to me. I can’t even give him a license number off the truck. No harm, no foul.”

Now both men stared at her, then glanced at each other. “Uh-huh,” said Big Jim slowly. “Well, I guess you kin come along with us if’n you like. You ever been duckin’?”

Jill shook her head.

“Well, we’ll show you how it’s done.”

***

Jill sat in the shotgun seat of the pickup truck on the way back from the duck hunt. Seven birds, along with Jimmy and Klutz the mutt, rode in the bed. The dog flapped his long tongue alongside her head right by her open window, enjoying the breeze through the trees.

Up into the hills they wended their way, down old paved roads that turned to gravel and then dirt. For some odd reason, these two – well, three with Klutz – had taken to her like the proverbial ducks to water. Sure, she was used to dealing with men like brothers in the Corps, suppressing her femininity in favor of the warrior culture, but this was something more. In just a day of sitting in a blind and shooting at birds, it appeared she’d been adopted.

They didn’t ask too many questions, and they’d given her a few knowing looks, which she studiously ignored. They’d fed her from their cooler, simple fare but wonderful. “Ma’s a great cook,” Jimmy had said, and his bragging justified itself. She ate fried chicken wrapped up in brown paper, cold potatoes and butter, cole slaw and corn bread and pecan pie, and sipped from a bottle of what they called “corn squeezins.”

White lightning. Moonshine. Maybe that explained their reticence to talk to the sheriff.

Normally not much of a drinker, she imbibed because alcohol also yielded calories. She noticed she had lost another pound or two in the last couple of days. Looking at her hands was like staring at sticks with skin on them. Perhaps that explained these hill folks’ sympathy – they probably thought she was starving and on the run.

Ironically, they were not wrong. Her reasons were just not what they must think.

Eventually they pulled up in front of what Jill would have termed a cabin, given its setting. On closer inspection she had to call it a house, because there was nothing recreational about it. A dull yellow clapboard thing with a corrugated metal roof, it seemed almost a part of the landscape.

Tucked into the hollow between two hills, a functioning farm surrounded it. Garden plots alternated with fruit and nut trees, a henhouse, rabbit hutches, and a barn. A bit farther back looked like several acres of corn. To her amateur eye it seemed prosperous, at least in food, though probably not in cash. Another old pickup truck was parked off to the side.

Once they had stopped, Jill could see a boy of perhaps twelve sitting in a chair on the oversized front porch. He waved with a strange motion of his hand, as if something impeded him. Klutz jumped from the back to charge up the steps and press his head into the kid’s lap, and he petted the dog clumsily.

From the front door stepped a tired-looking woman similar in age to Big Jim, and a pretty young one of perhaps sixteen in a homemade flowered dress. The former held a pitcher full of lemonade; the latter, a stack of beat-up multicolored plastic cups. Both set their burdens on a rough wooden table that occupied one side of the wide frontage and pulled chairs back to sit around it.

“Got seven!” Jimmy called enthusiastically as he picked up the birds in both hands. “We kin have a couple tonight. Got a guest, Ma,” he continued, waving in Jill’s direction. “She eats like Cousin Bee-Bob and looks like to blow away in a stiff breeze, so maybe we should make three or four. Ain’t gonna keep that long in this hot weather anyway.”

Jill didn’t find it all that warm, perhaps eighty-five. On the other hand, she didn’t see any electric or phone wires leading to the house. Perhaps they had no refrigeration beyond the water from the creek she could see running down the hillside behind the farm.

“You come on up here, honey,” the older woman called. “I’m Sarah McConley, this here’s my daughter Jane. The boy over there’s Owen, but he’s one o’ God’s simple children.” She took Jill’s hands in both of hers, her eyes kind. “Oh my, you do look like you could use some fattenin’ up. We’re common folk, but the good Lord has blessed us with food and kindness. You set y’self down now.”

Jill had little choice in the matter, as Sarah kept hold of her hands until she sat. “I’m Jill,” she replied as she was gently maneuvered into position. “Jill Repeth.”

Sarah blinked quizzically. “What’s that name there on your shirt?”

Color drained from Jill’s face as she realized how she’d tipped her hand, but she really did not want to lie to these people. “Something bad happened…I had to get away, so I borrowed this. I’m not…” She ground to a halt. I’m not what? A criminal? A deserter? Face it, Jill, that’s exactly what you are.

She started again. “I haven’t hurt anyone, but I did run away.” She unbuttoned the tunic, balling it up and stuffing it into a cargo pocket, for some reason not wanting to wear that lie anymore.

Sarah pressed her lips together in thoughtful disapproval, but didn’t pursue the matter further. “Jane, you keep Miss Jill here company while I start a-working on dinner.” She went inside.

Jane smiled broadly and poured lemonade out in five tall, well-worn plastic cups, setting two aside and handing one to Jill. “I just love having company. Hardly anybody comes up here.”

Jill tasted the lemonade, then drank half of it down. Cool but not cold, it confirmed her conjecture about the lack of refrigeration. Nevertheless, it tasted wonderful. “Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Everyone’s been so nice.”

“It’s the Lord’s kindness, that’s all. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, the Good Book says.” Klutz’s tail thumped on the porch as if in agreement.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Jill responded, unsure how to take these folks. The banjo line from Deliverance played in the back of her head, and something in her wondered if anyone could really live this simply. Had she encountered the same family in her own LA neighborhood, she would have thought they must be cultists of some sort, but here, in these hills…it all seemed to fit.

“Do you go to school?” Jill asked.

“O’ course I do. We ain’t billies, you know. Ma and Pa both graduated from high school, and they say maybe I can go to the junior college down in Morristown, if’n I can get a scholarship and state aid. They got a program for vocational nursing. I already take care of Owen, mostly, so it can’t be all that hard. O’ course, with everything like it is…”

Jill turned in her seat to look more closely at Owen, and realized that his chair had wheels on it. Not exactly a traditional wheelchair, rather, it looked like something home-made from bicycle parts, but sturdy nonetheless.

Owen made a sound something like a grunt or moan, and looked at her with a smile on his face. She got the distinct feeling there was more inside him than he could express. “Hello, Owen,” she said, and was rewarded with a clumsy wave and another inarticulate but cheerful sound.

“He wants to come on over. Will it bother you?” Jane asked.

“Of course not,” Jill replied. “But could I trouble you for a little something to eat? I seem to get hungry a lot lately,” she said, watching closely for Jane’s reaction.

“Here you go, Miss Jill,” Sarah called as she backed out the door holding a large bowl in each hand. “Figgered you’d want something before the ducks got done, which will be a couple of hours.”

Cheese and butter and bread filled one bowl, and freshly washed peaches the other. After she wheeled Owen over to the table, Jane plucked one of the yellow-orange orbs and sliced it all the way around the middle with a little paring knife, handing half to Jill. Cutting hers small, she fed Owen and herself alternately, a piece at a time. He chewed open-mouthed and laughed, clapping his hands together.

When Jill bit into her peach half she thought she’d found heaven on Earth, and devoured it and another whole one right away. Then she started on the bread and butter and cheese.

“My, you are a hungry thing.” Jane’s voice held no criticism, only the kind of innocent wonder Jill hadn’t experienced since her childhood. She smiled, embarrassed, but that didn’t slow her feasting down. Her body screamed for calories, protein, and fats, and hummed with pleasure as her stomach filled.

The men had disappeared into the barn, where Jill caught glimpses of them tending to animals. She thought she could see cows, barn cats, and it looked like a pig and some piglets occupied an enclosure to the side, well downwind.

“Jane, get us some t’maters and squash, will you?”

“Yes, Ma,” Jane replied. Turning to Jill, she asked, “Watch Owen, will you? Just make sure he don’t get ahold of nothing sharp, and only give him a small bit at a time. He can choke if’n it’s too big.” Without waiting for a reply, Jane hurried off to one of the garden plots to pick tomatoes and yellow squash, putting them in her flipped-up skirt.

Jill looked at Owen, and Owen looked back at Jill. His eyes danced, and he grinned. Someone’s trapped in there, she said to herself. She wondered what it was exactly that afflicted him. Was it a cognitive disability, or only physical, like Stephen Hawking?

“So Owen, can you understand what I’m saying?”

The boy squealed, pawing in the direction of the food.

Jill took a piece of cheese, but Owen shook his head. “Peach?”

Squeal.

She cut one of them up, keeping the little paring knife well out of reach, and began to feed him. She knew so little about people like this…how much was delayed development due to lack of a special-needs program? And how much was intrinsic, brain or body betrayal?

Her musing was cut short by Jane’s return. The girl sat down with bowls of washed vegetables to begin cutting them up for cooking, producing another small knife. Soon they were chatting like sisters. For a time, Jill forgot that she was on the run, forgot that her family might all be dead, forgot that her second family, the Corps, would consider her every action since contracting the disease aboard the cruise ship to be unlawful, even treasonous.

By the time dinner was ready the sun was going down behind the hills, though not behind the true horizon. It made for a long sunset, pleasant breezes, and enough light to sit outside on the porch and talk. The table overflowed with food, but everyone seemed determined to eat all they could.

“So you two are farmers?” Jill asked the men at one point. “Or do you have some other jobs?”

“Oh, we do a little of this and a little of that,” Big Jim replied, his face studiously neutral.

“I do some construction now and again for cash,” Jimmy volunteered, “but with a place like this, well…something always needs doing.”

Jill grunted, picking up the jar of “corn squeezins” from which the men had fortified their lemonade, and looked at Jimmy across its open top. He smiled back at her as if sharing a secret, but it seemed a very open secret to her. Then she caught Sarah’s glare and realized that perhaps not everyone was in agreement about the stuff. She put the jar back down and shrugged apologetically.

“You know what’s funny?” Jill asked without meeting anyone’s eyes. “I’m a cop. I’m a military police sergeant. I should be chasing down people like me…people like me. Whatever that means. I never thought anyone had an excuse to run from their own government, but…”

The men chuckled, and even Sarah and Jane looked amused. Big Jim spoke. “Girl, you in Tennessee. Ain’t nobody knows more about resistin’ the gubmint than us. In the War of Succession we saw county against county and town against town – families divided, brother against brother. We had two gubmints to resist, and we made the most of it. Virginia had the biggest battles, but Tennessee had the bitterest. So don’t you worry none; we ain’t much on bowin’ to no gubmint, not when it comes to right an’ wrong.”

The adults – lumping Jane in that category – nodded, and Jill suddenly realized they were trying to reassure her, to tell her something: that they wouldn’t turn her in, and perhaps, that they understood.

“Jane girl, go get the radio, would you please?” Big Jim said. He turned to Jill, “We been listenin’ to the goin’s-on from the Knoxville station. Terrible, terrible things, some of it. Riots all across the country. Martial law. Feds confiscatin’ people’s guns just when they need ’em most. Troops ever’where. We always knew it would happen, didn’t we, dear?”

Sarah nodded, fingers plucking at her needlework. “Just got to hold out ‘til the Lord returns and sets things to right.”

“Now Ma,” Jimmy protested, “this ain’t no Armageddon. Lots of places went through worse than this.”

“Either way,” Big Jim intervened, “we’ll do the same. Keep an eye on our own and our neighbors.” He cocked his head at Jill and furrowed his brow. “You reckon to stay here a spell, or move on soon, Miss Jill?”

Jill opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Staying hadn’t even entered her thoughts. How could these people afford to take care of her, and how would she repay them in turn? “I’ll stay for now, if you please,” she found herself responding with relief. “As long as you’ll have me, until I have to move on. I’ll try to earn my keep.”

“That you will, girl,” Big Jim said contentedly, sucking on his briar pipe.

Jane returned with a radio, setting it on the table and then cranking a handle on it a dozen times. “Survival set. Charges its own batteries.” She switched it on. “Only gets the one station though.”

…And that was Brenda Lee with “I’m Sorry” on your country oldies station. Now we bring you a public service reminder that if you see something, say something! Tell a police officer, tell your local, state or federal officials. What should you tell them about? Anyone who has had a miracle recovery, or who seems to be hungry all the time, might be infected. Anyone who seems furtive, or has a sudden change in behavior, or who pulls their children out of school. Anyone who speaks against the government, or protests against it, should be reported. Anyone who your neighbors are calling a “Sicko,” must be reported. If you don’t know who else to contact, call the Centers for Disease Control at 1-800-336-132.

Now a word from one of our sponsors:

The voice changed from the announcer to a smooth, deep-voiced narrator with a cultured Southern drawl very different from the McConleys’.

Are you sick and tired of the same two political parties running your lives? Watching them pointing fingers at each other in the same old useless ways, fiddling while Rome burns? Letting terrorists use nuclear weapons against the USA? Don’t you wish you could do something about it? Well, you can. Take a look at what the Unionist Party of North America has to offer, at www.unionistparty.usa.

Who are we? We’re a grass-roots organization composed of former Democrats and Republicans, Libertarians and Tea Party members, and independents of every stripe. What do we want to do? With a new spirit of unification, and the triumphant will to move together in lockstep to solve this country’s problems, we can and we will set things right. Join us today. We’re the Unionists. Put us in office, and we’ll make this country great again.

Then the station returned to playing old country songs. Big Jim reached over to turn it down, staring at Jill contemplatively as he puffed on his pipe.

A chill went through her. He knows, or at least suspects. Just stay calm, Jill. These people took you in. They’re not going to suddenly turn around and give you up. Besides, they don’t even have a phone. And there is no fear in this family, only love. If they were twisted, they couldn’t hide it.

She hoped. Everyone seemed to be watching her as the daylight and the conversation faded.

Eventually Sarah went inside and artificial light soon shone from inside the house, harsh white glare from a gas lantern. Jane stood up to clear the table and Jill started to get up to assist when Jimmy put a hand on her arm. “Mebbe you can just watch Owen while we do this, Miss Jill.” He picked up dishes and followed the others inside, leaving Big Jim staring at her.

“Don’t worry, girl,” Big Jim rumbled as his eyes gleamed in the night. “We ain’t gonna turn you in. You ain’t mean no harm to us, and we ain’t mean no harm to you.” He took his pipe out of his mouth, fragrant smoke swirling from it toward her nose. Owen sneezed and moaned, waving his hand. “Oh, pardon,” he said, and changed seats to send the smoke away from them. “I imagine you kin use a firearm, ma’am? Other than a shotgun, I mean?” He’d let her take a few shots at ducks, but she’d missed every one.

“I grew up in East L.A., sir. I joined a gang when I was thirteen, and enlisted in the Corps when I turned seventeen. Spent two years deployed to the desert, fighting off insurgents and training foreign police. What do you think?” She smiled to take the sting out of her words.

“Nuff said. I hope it don’t come to that, but with things goin’ the way they is, nuc’lar weapons and all, people bein’ rounded up an’ quarantined…”

“Sir…Big Jim, aren’t you worried about the disease?”

He puffed on his pipe a moment. “They got the internet in Jane’s school, you know. She saw that Daniel Markis fella on the tee-vee, tellin’ about the miracle germ. For a couple days, afore the gubmint took over the news stations, she heard all kinda stories, about people gettin’ cured. The cancer, the black lung that got all my cousins over in Cold Creek, heart attacks goin’ away, even my uncle Clyde that allas was a little teched in the head, they said he was talkin’ like a normal person. Clyde got taken away, and my cousins took to the hills. If the disease is so bad…I think roundin’ folks up is worse.”

Jill’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she couldn’t swallow. Impulsively she took a gulp of the white lightning straight from the jar, coughing a little. Once the spasms passed, she straightened, looking Big Jim in the eye. “I want to show you something.”

Big Jim held up his hand. “Mebbe you want to show everyone.”

“You’re in charge here…”

“Yeah I am, but we’re a family. Smart man don’t leave his family out, less’n he has to.” He grinned. “Not if he wants a peaceful home.”

Jill cocked her head and picked up her lemonade, looking at Big Jim over the rim of the cup. “Well, I may not be family, but I know how to follow orders.” She put on his accent for a moment. “A smart sergeant don’t buck the system less’n she has to.”

“Amen. Why don’t we go inside?” Big Jim stood up. “Here we go, Owen, goin’ inside for family time.” He wheeled the chair and the boy into the doorway, clattering over the threshold. Klutz dodged ahead, bumping into the doorframe on the way.

Jill followed, entering the home for the first time. As expected, the room was rustic and unpretentious, but in the light of the lantern hanging from an overhead beam, it blazed richly with homey decorations. Needlework Bible verses competed with pastoral scenes done in oils, exquisitely carved animals, some painted and some not, and lots of other artistic crafts. Photographs, many old, in black and white and sepia, hung on the walls.

“This is amazing,” she said, looking closely at the nearest wall. “Who did these?”

“The womenfolk did the sewin’. Pa paints, I carve,” Jimmy explained. “Got to have somethin’ to do, don’t you think?”

“What do you do for fun, anyway?” Jill asked. “No television, no computer, no internet, no phone…I see you have some books, and some boardgames.”

Jimmy shrugged. “We get by. None o’ those things was around a hunnerd years ago, even fifty years ago some places in these parts. People got by.”

Big Jim wheeled Owen into a place obviously his, next to the unlit hearth. Klutz padded over to sit at his feet. The boy craned his head around, looking at everything as if checking to see it was all in place. “Unnh!” he said emphatically, making a motion toward one part of the wall.

“That’s right, Owen. I moved the pictures.” Sarah walked over, and then switched two small photographs into each other’s location. “He knows, you see. He remembers everything, and can tell when something’s out of place. If I really want to change something, it’s some time before he takes to it.”

“Autism, sounds like,” Jill remarked.

“Yes, that’s what the doctor said, but it don’t matter what you call it. It’s just Owen.” The older woman walked to a bookshelf and took down a large leather-bound Bible, handing it reverently to Big Jim.

“Thank you, darlin’,” he said, then leafed through it as if looking for some particular passage. “We allas read a bit of the Good Book after dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

Even if I did, I sure wouldn’t be complaining to these good people, Jill thought.

“Janie, could you please read for me? My eyes are a bit tired today.” Big Jim handed the Bible over to his daughter. “Right there, where the bookmark is.”

Jane smiled, and in a clear sweet voice, read, “The Good Samaritan.” Then she proceeded to relate the parable of a man set upon by bandits.

Left to die, a priest, and then a high-status Levite, passed him by and did not help, Finally a Samaritan, of despicable ethnicity and heretical faith to the Hebrews of the time, was the only one to render assistance. In fact, he paid for the man’s care and promised to return to check on him.

“You know,” Big Jim said in a casual tone, “we’s the Samaritans here. Ap’lachian folk. Get laughed at on the tee-vee, less’n they like our bluegrass pickin’.”

The rest of the family nodded, and Sarah said, “Amen.”

Jill couldn’t fail to get the message. Unless their whole lifestyle was a lie, they had truly accepted her into their family, in a way that usually happens only when the very foundations of society get shaken. She found tears of relief in her eyes.

“Thank you,” she replied. “I have something to show you, though. You’ve been so good to me…I want to be honest with you. It might…well, if they ever come for me, I want you to know the truth about these people. These ‘Sickos,’ as they are calling them.”

Reaching down, she rolled up her utility trousers, exposing first her boots, then the prosthetics that filled them. Eventually she worked them all the way up to her knees, exposing the skin of her stumps, showing pink at the extremities. Then she began unstrapping the left one.

The McConley family murmured sympathetically as they saw, and Jimmy let out a hoot of surprise. “If that don’t beat all. I never woulda knowed if you didn’t show us. You walk around all right.”

“As long as I don’t have to go far, I can stand it. But the fact that I lost my feet isn’t really the interesting part.” Jill finished unstrapping the left artificial foot, and set it aside. Lifting her leg with her hands, she flexed her knee, the stump waving up and down. “Perhaps I should have done this in the daytime, with better light. You’d be able to see that the bottom inch here is pinker than the rest, like new baby skin. I lost my legs over a year ago, and nothing like that happened, until now.”

She took a deep breath and went on, finding them staring at her in fascination. “I was on a cruise ship a few days ago. One morning we woke up and there were miracle cures all over the ship. I heard rumors of some video that said it was a germ that did it. Then the Navy showed up and quarantined us. Food began to run low, and people were eating more. That’s what the disease did, I guess. I know I got hungry a lot. I decided I didn’t want to wait, so I swam to a Navy ship nearby and sneaked aboard. I blended in to the crew, contacted a chaplain, and she got me off with the wounded.”

“What wounded?” Jimmy asked.

“After I left the cruise ship, they blew it up. Killed everyone aboard. Damaged another warship doing it.”

The family gasped. “This is worse than I’d thought,” Big Jim rumbled.

“It’s Armageddon coming for sure,” Sarah declared.

“Now honey, we don’t know that,” Big Jim cautioned. “But it sure ’nuff looks like bad times. Miss Jill, we can see you’re not some crazy person. Whatever it is, it ain’t a bad thing, far as we kin tell. Mebbe the gubmint will figger it out, and things’ll calm down. Best we just be careful, keep you out of sight, and wait. Stay out of the way.”

“Thank you,” Jill said yet again.

“Don’t thank me yet, girl,” Big Jim replied with a smile. “Like I said, you’ll earn your keep. As much as you eat, you’ll have to.”

“You’ll never meet anyone that works as hard as I do,” Jill declared. “I’m no invalid, and maybe…” She gave voice to her greatest hope: “Maybe I’ll actually grow my feet back.”

“Wouldn’t that be a marvel,” Jane exclaimed, throwing her arms around the other woman.

Jill replied, “Yes, it would. And now, folks, I’ve had a really long day. Does anyone mind if I get some sleep?”

Murmurs of assent came from all, and Jane showed Jill to a room with two beds. “We’ll have to double up, though. That there bed’s Owen’s, and we cain’t disturb his routine, so you can sleep with me, head to foot, like we did when we was little. You mind?”

“Oh, Jane, you can put me in the barn and I won’t mind.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Jane replied seriously, rearranging the bedclothes and retrieving a pillow from the closet. “Here you go. Sleep well. We’ll try not to disturb you when we come in later.”

Jill climbed into the bed and slept, not waking until the morning sun peeked over the hills.

Chapter Four

Days passed into weeks in a pleasant haze for Jill. She watched Owen a lot, freeing the rest to work the farm. They moved her into the barn loft, after she proved to them that she could handle the ladder just fine. Their excuse was to give her privacy and not crowd their two-bedroom house too much, but it also occurred to her that if someone showed up unexpectedly, she might at least have a chance to keep out of sight.

She explored the hills behind the land as best she could, taking short painful trips upward with Klutz romping along, eventually to find a hollow with a cave-like overhang that might hide her if she needed to run. There was also a small obvious basement beneath the barn, and a genuine working root cellar beneath the house.

Sometimes the two men would spend the day away in one of the pickup trucks, with no explanation. Usually the bed would be full of corn, heavy five-gallon buckets, and other things when they left, empty when they returned. Jill guessed they were servicing their still, and were smart enough to keep it well away from the farm.

In three weeks her stumps had lengthened to the location of her former ankles. She wondered if they would just keep growing longer: if the disease that they now called the “Eden Plague” would know when to quit, or start making ankle joints.

Jane had brought the disease’s name back from the church the McConleys attended, whispered in the usual gossip that nothing could stamp out. She also told Jill about some people whose old folks had suddenly passed on, and of new “cousins” that showed up unexpectedly. A deputy that attended, a relative of the number of interknit families in the region, had quietly warned people to keep quiet and not rock the boat.

The radio lied but the gossip told of things getting worse instead of better, especially in the cities; of neighbors turning each other in, of quarantines with no cure and no one returning, of men who came in the middle of the night and took people away. Some said more nuclear weapons had been used, by terrorists or the Russians or Chinese, or even by the U.S. against its own citizens.

Jill had no trouble believing it.

One day a pickup truck full of young men in uniform shirts drove up, wearing black armbands with some kind of spiky red symbol on them – perhaps a trident. Jill climbed the ladder to her loft, hand over hand, to watch through the board cracks. They talked to Jimmy for a moment, then Big Jim came out onto the porch and they talked some more. Finally the group drove off, looking unhappy.

Once they were gone, Jill hurried over, her heavily modified prosthetics hurting more than ever. “What was that?” she asked.

Jimmy replied, “Unionist party. Wanted us to come to some meetin’ they’re havin’. I told them I’d think about it.” He glanced at his father, who nodded in approval.

“You’re kidding, right?” Jill almost exploded. “These are the people that are the most anti-Eden-Plague. They’re fascists. They’ll take away all your rights, and you’re thinking about joining them?”

“Simmer down there, girl,” Big Jim said, an edge to his voice. “That’s exactly why Jimmy’s gonna go see what they have to say. Keep an eye on what’s goin’ on. If’n we spit in their faces right off, who do you think they’ll come after next?”

Jill took a deep breath. “I understand what you’re saying, but…” she trailed off. “We can’t let them win.”

“We’ll do what we can, girl, but I ain’t gonna get my family killed by bein’ no martyrs.” He pointed a finger at Jill, and she realized he’d never been stern with her, never been anything but kind…until now. “You become part o’ this family, and you told me you knew when to take orders. So as the head o’ this family and as your boss both, you need to fall in line. You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ aroun’ here that we didn’t done teach you, so you gotta trust us on how to handle this. Amen?”

Jill lowered her eyes. “Amen, boss.”

“Good.” He stared at her for a moment more, then glanced at Jimmy, and then his wife and daughter. Sarah gave a slow nod, so he went on, “Come on out to the barn, girl. We got somethin’ to show you.”

Jill looked at the women’s faces, seeing no fear, only determination. Wondering what this was about, she walked gingerly after the two men as they led her to the barn. “I already know about the cellar,” she said with a hint of defiance in her voice.

“Do you now?” grunted Big Jim. Ignoring her and the visible cellar door of heavy planks set in the floor, the two men stepped over to get behind an old broken-down tractor that sat in a corner. From the side, they lifted and it tipped with surprising ease, holding it precariously balanced on two of its rusted wheels.

Jimmy reached down to pull up a trap door while Big Jim held the tractor in place. Jill walked over and examined the setup in wonderment, realizing that the antique was gutted of its heavy parts, and was thus much lighter than it looked, needing not more than a couple of hundred pounds of dead lift to get it up on its side. One healthy person could probably do it, in fact.

Looking below, she saw a dark opening and a ladder. “Come on down,” Jimmy said with a grin, and went in before her. “Don’t worry, this here lever will lift the tractor up if it gets closed. Got gears and ever’thing.”

Jill followed, and soon found herself on a dirt floor in another, separate stone-walled basement. Jimmy reached for a flashlight and turned it on. The space was small, but boasted a triple bunk bed, and what looked like food and water for a few days. Other supplies – a lantern, fuel, books, linens – rested on shelves along one wall. A tiny plastic portable toilet sat in a corner.

“This place has been here since the days of the War,” Jimmy said.

“War?”

“Civil War, you’d say.”

Jill gaped. “That’s…”

“More’n a century and a half, I know.” Jimmy turned to look Jill in the face, shining the flashlight against the floor. It gave him a devilish look, even more so when he grinned. “We McConleys is Abolitionists from way back. This here’s a gen-u-wine piece of the Underground Railroad. ’Course, the supplies and furniture’s newer.”

“My God…”

“When all that stuff happened, and you showed up, well, we figgered we might have to revive some of the old ways. We ain’t had nobody to stow yet, but if’n things keep gettin’ worse, mebbe we’ll be hidin’ Eden people. So now you know about this place, and you kin hop in here if’n you have to.”

Impulsively she threw her arms around Jimmy, who reciprocated after a moment. “Thank you, Jimmy. You’re…you and your family…”

“Mm. I’ll have to take you here more often, I think,” he chuckled in her ear.

Jill pulled her head back to look at him. What the hell. She kissed him gently. “Yeah, maybe,” she breathed.

“All right you two, break it up,” Big Jim called from up above, laughter in his voice. “Any courtin’s gonna be done up here in the light o’ day.”

They broke their clinch with embarrassment, then climbed back up the ladder and watched as Big Jim closed up the hide. Jimmy and Jill swept dust and hay back to remove their traces while the older man walked out of the barn ahead of them, leaving them alone.

“Listen, Jimmy,” Jill began. “I like you, but that was just something I did on impulse. I don’t know how you do things around here, so I just want to speak plainly: I’m not sure what it was, all right?”

Jimmy smiled gently. “It’s all right, Miss Jill. I’m twenty-two. I kissed a few girls in my time. Even done a couple other things with ’em I don’t never tell my ma about. You ain’t gotta worry about no shotgun weddin’.” He stepped toward her, stopping within easy arm’s length. “On the other hand, I do like you. If’n you stay, well…reckon I ain’t against it.”

“Okay, Jimmy. That’s fair.” Jill nervously pushed her lengthening hair behind her ears. “You’re a real gentleman, you know that?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m from Tennessee. We’re –”

“– all gentlemen till we get riled, right?” They laughed together, and walked out of the barn toward the lunch waiting on the porch.

***

A week later Jill’s nervous idyll took another unexpected turn.

As Jimmy finished a plate of pork with cracklins, courtesy of one of the young hogs, he remarked, “I shore do have an appetite lately.”

Jill and Big Jim glanced sharply at the younger man, then at each other. Jill’s face whitened.

Big Jim leaned over to lift up the sleeve on his son’s t-shirt. “Scar’s fadin’,” he said.

Jimmy pulled the sleeve back and craned his head to look at the outside of his shoulder. “Well I’ll be doggoned. Why…” Then the color drained from his face as well. “I got it, don’t I?”

“Imagine so.” Big Jim pushed his own plate away and began to pack his pipe.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” Jill exclaimed, heartfelt.

“What did you do?” Sarah asked sharply.

“Simmer down, Sarah love,” Big Jim interjected. “They just been courtin’ a bit, the way young folk do.”

“That’s what the radio said – the disease is passed by close contact,” sister Jane remarked. “So Jimmy,” her eyes lit with a sibling’s joy in another’s discomfiture, “you been smoochin’?”

“Just that once, and it was all my fault,” Jill broke in, glaring at Jane. “My fault,” she repeated. “We haven’t done anything like that since.”

Sarah took a breath and seemed about to explode when Big Jim spoke. “What’s done is done. We knew a day like this had to come sometime, though I’d hoped to delay it a fair bit.”

“What do you mean it had to come?” Sarah asked, unable to contain herself. “She should have been more careful!”

“I mean,” Big Jim said heavily, “that eventually we’d have to give it to Owen, don’t you think?”

That stopped Sarah in her tracks. She turned to look at her youngest son as his eyes roamed here and there, and she breathed, “Oh dear Jesus I pray, you’re right, James. It could fix him. He could be normal!”

Big Jim lit his pipe and puffed. “Cain’t do it now. Not with things the way they are. It’s one thing for Jimmy’s scar to go away, but if Owen got cured and someone saw him…they’d round us all up.”

“Then we go on as before. We just be careful,” Jimmy declared. “I’ll taper off going to the meetings. I’ll tell ’em I gotta work the farm. We just got to buy enough time…” He abruptly stopped, as if he’d said too much.

Jill looked from Jimmy to Big Jim and back. The elder was imperturbable as usual, but Jimmy seemed embarrassed. “What?” she asked.

“Well, I figgered once your feet got better, you’d be moving along, goin’ to Los Angeles to find your family.” Jimmy eyed his empty plate, and reached for another slice of bread and butter, not meeting Jill’s eyes.

“I…I hadn’t thought that far. I suppose you’re right, that’s what I should do. I’ll go, just as soon as I can.” Stupid, Jill, she scolded herself. Every day you’re here, you put these people in danger. Now you’ve infected one of them, and that can’t be undone. At least with you gone they can blend back in to their own society, or run for the deep-woods mountains like their cousins.

***

UNIONISTS TAKE POWER IN STUNNING MASS PARTY DEFECTIONS read the headline on the newspaper Big Jim dropped on the porch table. “Found that in a trash can when I went into town,” he rumbled.

Jane snatched it up, skimming the headlines and then summarizing, “It says elected officials are changing parties all over in the middle of their terms.” Jill noticed the girl’s accent and dialect faded as she read. Perhaps this was her school persona coming out.

She went on, “It says the new party has gained a bare majority in the House and Senate, and if the President doesn’t switch too, he’ll still be voted out next election. Says the whole country is turning against the infected people.” Jane glanced at her brother and Jill. “It also says that the same thing is starting to happen in Canada and Mexico. There’s a column here where the writer believes there might even be some kind of co-governmental arrangement.”

“Mexico and Canada’d be damn fools to join the U.S. in anything like that,” Jimmy declared. “They have their own ways of doing things.”

“Might be good for Mexico,” Big Jim said. “Might clean up some o’ that corruption.”

“Yes, like the Nazis made the trains run on time,” Jill muttered darkly.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, girl. I’m jus’ sayin’, there’s a little good in most bad, and the other way ’round too. This country is too big and there’s too many ornery people for the crazies to take over for long.”

“Long enough, James,” Sarah said. “You always see the bright side of things; that’s why I married you. This time…things are really getting worse. Them Hastings boys have taken to wearin’ that Unionist uniform all the time, runnin’ around and scarin’ people, makin’ them give ‘political contributions.’ I heard they burnt out some poor black folks on the other side of Shandy that wouldn’t pay.”

“Like to see ’em try that here,” Jimmy growled.

“Rather they didn’t, son,” Big Jim disagreed. “Rather if trouble jes’ passed us by.”

“But Pa, we need to do something!”

Big Jim nodded. “And we will, son, but not with violence, unless we got no choice. No, the best thing we can do is stay out the way, help who we can, keep our eyes open and our mouths shut. That goes for everyone. When Jill gets her feet back, when she’s able to get up and run for the hills, then mebbe we can take a few risks. Y’hear?” He stabbed his pipe stem at Jimmy. “You want this fine young lady to get taken away?”

“No, Pa,” Jimmy said miserably, suddenly looking twelve instead of twenty-two under his father’s stare.

“How are your legs now, Jill?” Jane asked, changing the subject.

Jill had showed her just last night, but she answered, thankful for the diversion. “It looks almost like I have baby feet, and I can’t put my weight on them at all. It’s a good thing that I have this,” she went on, slapping her palms on the wheels of the chair they had built for her. “I figure another two weeks and I may be able to walk, three or four and I may be almost normal.” And then I’ll go, she heard the unspoken subtext.

Klutz stood up and pointed with his nose, his ears cocked, then barked once.

“Pa?” Jimmy stood up, looking out toward the valley below. “Someone comin’ up the road.” Now that he pointed it out, they could all see a plume of dust as a vehicle made its way up the gravel-dirt track that led up to their farm.

“Jill, get in the special hide. Jimmy, run her over there and toss her things in after her. Everybody keep your guns handy. Jane, run and get a coupl’a jars o’ corn squeezins out of the larder, put ’em on the table there, and then go get a whole case from the cellar and put it in the kitchen. Sarah, see what kinda grub you can rustle up quick. Hop to now.” Big Jim stood up, reaching for his shotgun he kept leaning in the corner on the porch.

“Don’t see why I’m getting’ food for some fool flatlanders comin’ up uninvited,” Sarah muttered as she went inside.

“Come on, Jill,” Jimmy said as he wheeled her down the ramp and off the porch, racing for the barn. She held on tight, and assisted as much as she could when he lifted the tractor and helped her down the ladder. A moment later her duffel bag and bedding tumbled down into the hole as Jimmy made sure nothing incriminating remained in the loft. Then the tractor came down, sealing her in, and Jill sat down quietly in the dark.

For the first time since the trucker tried to rape her she felt afraid. She imagined some runaway slave of so long ago doing the same, longing for freedom, relying on the kindness of strangers, fearing a return to hell on Earth. Why couldn’t people let each other have the gift of the Eden Plague, its healing and its promise, if they chose to?

Jill knew the answer already. She’d seen it in the Corps, and in the gangs before that. Power itself, to those who had it, was more important than anything else, or anyone. It didn’t matter whether the wielder was a slave owner, a pigheaded officer or a politician. As soon as they got power, and felt afraid of losing it, then they would abuse it, and to hell with the people that got hurt.

She saw now that the Eden Plague would take away their power by taking away an enormous source of dependency. If no one needed medical care, and everyone had their head screwed on straight, how could they be made to fear? How could they be manipulated? Of course the ones on top right now would resist, by whipping up that fear before it was too late, to drive out the infection, even kill those who had it.

But what could she do here? Obviously she would have to leave. Somehow she had to help fight this thing, this situation. Like she wished people had fought the Nazis when they took over, or the Bolsheviks, or McCarthy, or…she ran out of examples. But where could she go? She’d only read a few obviously censored newspapers, and listened to one radio station, for the last several months. No internet, nobody to talk to except the McConleys. Once she got out, she’d have to find somewhere in the world that Eden Plague people were accepted as normal. Then…then she’d find a new gang, or a new Corps, to join.

Thinking about that drove a dagger through her heart. The Marine Corps was her family…except for the Repeths back in Los Angeles, if they even lived. Except for the McConleys, too. It seemed she was doomed to keep losing her families, and the tears began again.

Some warrior you are, Jill, sitting here sobbing like a little girl. She felt so helpless, with useless feet. It would have almost been better to live with the prosthetics for the rest of her life; to have never gotten the Eden Plague. Then, as during all tough times, she reminded herself that this would be over with soon, and she would come back stronger, faster, better, like she always did.

Someday soon.

***

Jimmy took one last look around the loft and barn before sprinting back to the house to rejoin his family. He saw that Jane had her Ruger .22 across her lap, hidden a bit by the porch rail. Two quart jars of white lightning sat on the dinner table, along with a plate of yesterday’s persimmon cookies and a big bowl of apples.

Pa had his Remington under his arm, standing on the porch steps, and he could see Ma had her Smith and Wesson .38 long barrel visibly tucked into her waistband. For a God-fearing woman she was a dead shot with that thing, he knew. Jimmy retrieved his pride and joy, a .308 Browning lever-action rifle, from inside the front door. With a magazine that held ten of the heavy rounds, he knew he could knock down an equal number of targets in quick succession.

Around the last bend came a truck, and not a mere pickup; he saw a flatbed two-ton fitted with slatted sides, a dozen men packed into it. All of them wore the deep-blue Unionist shirts with black armbands, those points-down red tridents emblazoned upon them. As soon as the truck stopped in a cloud of dust, the men jumped out, one of them with chevrons yelling orders as if they were all in the Army. He took three men with him and headed for the barn without asking permission. Klutz ran over to them, capering and barking with delight to have visitors.

Jimmy could see they carried a variety of weapons comparable to his family’s – shotguns, rifles, handguns. He recognized several from the meetings he had attended, especially their leader, who hopped out of the passenger seat. That one wore the double bars of a captain, though the last time he saw the man he had been a sergeant recently discharged from the National Guard. Guess he gave hisself a promotion, he chuckled to himself.

“Harry Whitcomb,” Jimmy said as the man walked forward hitching up his pants. “How you doin’ ol’ son?” He tucked his rifle in under his arm, but knew he could have it up and aimed in a flash.

Harry’s belly fell down over his waist despite being no more than thirty, and two .45 automatics depended from his gun belt, one on each side. He hooked his thumbs just inside the holsters with his palms resting on the closed flaps in implied threat.

“Don’t how-you-doin’ me, Jimmy. This here ain’t a social call.”

“I kin see that, Mister Whitcomb,” called Big Jim from the porch step. “What cause you got bringin’ all these armed fellers onto my land? Might wonder whether you’d done forgotten ’bout the arrangement me an’ yer pa have.”

“Now settle down, Big Jim. This here’s just precautionary, you might say.”

“P’cautionary about what?” Big Jim reached over a casual left hand to pick up a quart jar. Popping the top, he took a sip and smiled. “Drink?”

Harry licked his lips and shook his head. “We got orders to search the place.”

Big Jim shrugged and put the jar back down on the table. “Yer loss.”

“Whose orders?” Jimmy demanded, his temperature rising at the highhanded treatment of his father. Pa had called Harry “Mister” and the man had come back with “Big Jim,” as if Pa warn’t twelve years older and a respected man in these parts.

“Unionist party orders. We gotta check every place for Sickos and traitors hidin’ out.”

“Well, son,” Big Jim said with a frown – no more “Mister” – “your men kin check the farm all they want, long as they don’t mess with nothin’. Then you kin come inside and check the house. Then, since there ain’t nobody here that don’t belong, once you do that you can all have a nice drink and some cookies and be on your way.”

“I’ll check in my own way and in my own time, thank you,” Harry blustered.

A moment later he found himself frozen, staring at the wrong end of Big Jim’s 12-gauge from a range of about six inches. Jimmy had never seen his pa move that fast. He raised his own rifle, jacking a round into the chamber with an audible clack, and aimed at the nearest of the bully-boys. Beside him, he sensed Jane and Sarah doing the same.

“You best tell your friends to keep them hands away from them firearms if’n you don’t want your brains spattered all over that truck o’ yours, Captain Whitcomb.” The way Pa said it made the word a sneer. “And ever’ one’ a us kin pick the eye out of a fly at fifty yards. I’ll bet you dollars to damnation ever’ one’ a y’all is down with a bullet in him before any o’ my family is even winged.” Stone-cold menace dripped from Pa’s every word, and a shiver ran down Jimmy’s spine.

“Stand down, boys, stand down,” Harry said, his voice squeaking. Those who held long guns made sure to point them at the ground; those with handguns holstered them, some with dropped jaws and nervous hands. Whitcomb himself showed a stain on his crotch that spread slowly down his trouser leg.

Big Jim continued, “Now each one’ a you boys is gonna walk over and put them weapons down in the truck bed, then go over there by the pear tree where I kin see y’all. And you,” he called loudly, “with the three men in the barn. The first shot and your boss is dead, y’hear? Come on outta there and nobody’s gonna get hurt.”

“Do it!” screamed Harry over his shoulder. His face ran with sweat.

Reluctantly the sergeant and the three men walked from the barn toward the house, to drop off their guns at the truck and stand over with the disarmed mob. Klutz, apparently sensing the tension, ran over to stand at Big Jim’s side.

“Jimmy, get Harry’s pistols,” Big Jim ordered, so the younger man plucked them from the holsters, carefully staying out of his father’s line of fire or background. “Toss ’em in the truck bed there.”

Once Jimmy had done that, Big Jim tucked the shotgun back under his arm, barrel pointed half-down. Then he put his left arm around the shaking Harry Whitcomb and walked him gently over to sit down at the porch table. He then slid the jar of hundred-proof over to the man and ordered, “Drink. You look like you could use a jolt.”

Harry reached for the jar with both hands and took a gulp, then another, his eyes never leaving Big Jim’s. “Thanks,” he rasped, moving as little as possible, like a mouse under the gaze of a snake.

“Now you see? No need for trouble here. We’re all friends, all local folks. We know how to work things out without comin’ onto one another’s land and scarin’ each other’s family. Why, I reckon your ma’d be plumb frightened out of her wits if a dozen boys come up on her little place with guns, don’t you think?” Big Jim’s eyes bored into Harry’s until shame joined fear on his face. “I don’t care what kinda p’litical party y’all are with now, that don’t do away with common courtesy, now does it?”

Harry shook his head miserably, looking more like a bashful little boy all the time.

“Take another drink there, Harry. Now, I ain’t gonna hold this against ya. I ain’t even gonna tell your pa or, heaven forefend, your ma, ‘zackly how you jes’ acted. We’re jes’ gonna all have a nice drink and some cookies and forget this ever happened, ain’t we?” Big Jim patted Harry’s shoulder like he was his own son. Jimmy kept his eyes and rifle on the mob, but he couldn’t help a grin stealing onto his face.

“All right, Mister McConley. I ’pologize for comin’ up here like I did.” He took a deep breath and seemed to regain some composure. “But I still would like to take a quick look inside – just so’s I can rightly say I did it, you understand.”

“O’ course, Harry, o’ course you can. Tell your boys to come on over and have a swig and a cookie while you and I take a look inside.” Big Jim guided Harry up out of his chair, his large calloused hand never leaving the man’s shoulder, and on into the little farmhouse. “Look here; there’s Owen. You seen Owen before, ain’t ya? See, if’n them Sickos was around, if’n we’d got that disease, Owen’d be all different now, don’t ya think?”

“Sure, Mister McConley, you got the right of it.” Harry stared at Owen, who grunted and waved a twisted hand.

“Go ahead, Harry. Take a look in all the rooms, even the closets. You want a gander in the root cellar?”

“No sir, no, won’t be no need for that, Mister McConley,” Harry hastened to assure Big Jim. “Just had to truthfully say we checked, you understand.”

“O’ course, Harry. Oh, look at that.” Big Jim prodded a wooden box packed with straw. “There’s a case full’ a corn squeezins. I bet if you spread that around a bit, your boys’d forget all about this little…” Big Jim seemed to search for a word, “this little misstep on your part, as your mama’s cousin the sheriff might say.”

“Oh, yes sir,” Harry said eagerly, picking up the heavy box. It clinked as he hefted it, and the man unconsciously licked his lips.

“Jes’ don’t forget to bring one jar home for your folks,” Big Jim added as he followed Harry back out onto the front porch again.

By now the first two jars had almost been emptied, and every man had a couple of cookies or an apple, or both, in his hands, bashfully munching away under the stern gaze of the McConley matriarch. One of the men was actually trying to start a conversation with Jane, who seemed to be struggling not to smile. When Harry showed them the box full of moonshine, they gave a cheer, and the mood changed in a moment from uncertain to festive.

“All right you boys, git on up in that flatbed there and head back on down the mountain,” Big Jim said with an expansive smile, but never letting go of his shotgun. “Our poor ol’ hearts had jes’ about enough excitement for one day.”

The group turned as one for their vehicle, some mumbling thanks and goodbyes. Jane winked at the one she’d talked to, and he blushed. Everyone else waved as they drove out of sight, forcing good cheer onto their faces all the way.

Then they all collapsed into chairs. Sarah laid her pistol down on the table and clutched her knees. Jimmy whooped, and then put the rifle safety on, leaning the weapon against the rail. Big Jim set his shotgun back in the corner where it usually stood. Jane unloaded her .22 with practiced fingers, hardly bothering to look at the mechanism, a cold expression on her face that belied her flirting a moment before.

Owen gave an inarticulate cry from inside, and Klutz wuffed. Jane hastened to roll the boy out onto the porch, which seemed to content him.

“Sarah darlin’, I believe I’d like a drink. We got another jar somewheres?”

“Yes, James, we do.” Not even a hint of her usual disapproval colored her voice this time, and when she brought back the jar, she poured a healthy slug into a water glass and drank it down herself. “For medicinal purposes,” she explained, deadpan.

Big Jim wisely said nothing as he took a gulp, then passed the container to Jimmy.

“Oh, Lord. Jill!” Jimmy cried suddenly, jumping to his feet.

“Settle down now, son. Another few minutes in the hide won’t matter. Let’s make sure they don’t talk themselves into tearin’ back up here to have another go at us. I don’t think they will, but shame kin do funny things to a man, once he’s not under the gun anymore.”

Jimmy sat back down, but fidgeted ceaselessly for long minutes. Finally Big Jim said, “Son, you go take the old pickup down to the end of the drive,” – that was more than three miles, ten minutes at normal speed – “and take a look, make sure they really left. If’n ya see hide nor hair of ’em, you hightail it back. Bail out if’n ya have to, leave the truck. Ain’t nobody gonna catch you on our own land. I’ll see to Jill.”

“Yes, Pa,” he responded eagerly. Probably just giving me something to do, he thought, but he didn’t care, and he grabbed his rifle and the ignition key off the hook inside the door and ran for the pickup truck.

By the time he got back, Jill and Big Jim and Jane and Owen were sitting on the porch. “No sign of ’em,” Jimmy called as he hopped out.

“Let’s hope they learnt their lesson,” Big Jim rumbled.

“For now,” Sarah said, bringing out another pitcher of lemonade. “Evil’s got them boys, and no amount of shamin’s gonna make it stick.”

“Aw, Ma, they ain’t so bad,” Jimmy protested.

“Not by theirselfs they ain’t, but they’s like a pack of big stupid dogs. They will tear apart whatever their master Satan tells them to, and don’t you forget it, James Aaron McConley Junior.” Sarah shook a wooden spoon at her son for emphasis. “It don’t take much for the Devil to lead the weak-minded and unbelieving into the ways of Hades, and I ain’t talkin’ about a bit o’ fornicatin’. I’m talkin’ about beatin’ and rapin’ and killin’ and burnin’ folks out, you mark my words.”

“Ma!” Jimmy was appalled at his mother’s diatribe, which made it all the more powerful in his mind.

Big Jim spoke. “All right now, Sarah dear. That scare they had oughta hold ’em for a while, and I’ll go over tomorrow and talk to Tom Whitcomb. Give him a kindlier version o’ what happened, make sure it don’t happen again. Remind him if’n he wants his corn juice, me and mine got to be left alone.” He nodded to himself as he took out his pipe and pouch.

“I’m so sorry this happened, Mister McConley,” Jill said.

“Don’t you ‘Mister McConley’ me, girl. You’re family, just like my own.” He smiled at her and tears came into her eyes. “Wouldn’t anythin’ been different had you been here or not.”

“But I do have to go as soon as my feet are healed up. Being here puts you all in danger.”

Sarah put a hand on Jill’s arm. “You stay as long as you need to, and go when you must, Miss Jill.” Klutz’s tail agreed with her.

Chapter Five

Late summer turned to peaceful autumn on the McConley farm. The air breezed crisp as leaves reddened and yellowed, and the family lit a fire in the hearth for the first time that year. The ever-present knot inside Jill’s stomach finally loosened itself as she began to feel whole again.

Literally.

She stared at her feet every morning, watching them turn from buds to baby appendages to strange gnarled troll limbs, eventually to something that really belonged to her. Every day she gingerly tested them out, putting a bit of weight on them until the pain told her to stop.

One day she let go of all support and stood.

Victory! she crowed inside, but remained stoic on the surface. Standing wasn’t running, and no matter how many pull-up and sit-ups and careful push-ups with her shins braced on a padded railroad tie she did, she wouldn’t be whole until she could run.

Once her routine had consisted of thirty to fifty kilometers, three days a week, and ten just to keep limber on the off days, interspersed with lots of swimming and bicycling. She’d swum in the creek’s deep pool in the back, and it felt good to eel under the water with all four limbs moving freely, but it was still nothing like training, nothing like being really fit and at the top of her ability.

The first time she’d walked from the barn to the house the family had stared, then burst into raucous cheers. They’d hugged her and congratulated her, though Jane had started to cry, and Jimmy had looked a bit distressed.

They know this means I’ll leave soon.

Jill had gently kept the young man at arm’s length, for reasons both practical and intangible. She had no birth control pills anymore, and even if she had, who knew whether they would be effective with the Eden Plague dominating her body’s metabolism? Other methods might have worked, but it was just safer to simply put the whole thing on hold. She liked Jimmy and before the world went mad she probably would have been happy for a roll in the hay, but now, things had changed.

Before, she probably wouldn’t have thought much about the emotional consequences to such a short-term fling. Now, she thought of the heartache getting in deep and then running off would cause them all, and she just couldn’t do it. If everything worked out, and she came back, perhaps…

It wasn’t long before Jill could take short hikes, with boots laced tight to give the new feet support. Her muscles strengthened rapidly, far more quickly than she expected. It has to be the Eden Plague, she thought. Building muscle was a process of tearing and healing, and no matter how hard she trained, she healed overnight…as long as she got food.

One morning Jimmy invited himself along. He carried his rifle and a wanderer’s bag slung over his shoulder. “Got some things ta show you,” he said with a secretive grin. Jill found herself returning the expression, filled with the sheer joy of healthy physical movement. “Klutz, stay!” Jimmy ordered as they set out, leaving the dog standing forlornly on the porch.

Up the hill behind the house they went, then wended their way into what the locals called mountains. Having grown up near the southern tip of the Sierras and having seen the Afghan heights, Jill thought this branch of the Appalachians barely qualified, but they were rugged, thickly forested, and confusing to anyone who didn’t know them well.

After four or five miles he led her up a steep hillside to a forested ledge that concealed a deep dell with a stream and a pond. Pulling aside brambles, he showed her an opening in the hillside, then entered it. He pulled out a flashlight and handed her another, both modern long-lasting LED models.

Switching them on, they proceeded into the side of the mountain, up a twisting cave that after a hundred yards debouched into a cavern with a still, shallow pool. Inside, Jill saw a dozen large waterproof plastic bins and twice as many small closed barrels. “Supplies,” Jimmy said. “Enough to keep us goin’ for a while.”

‘How long have you had this here?” Jill asked curiously, lifting the lid on one of the bins. It was packed tight with cans of lantern fuel.

“Oh, the cave is an old McConley secret. Pa and I brung this stuff up here after the first nukes went off. Took us a couple a’ dozen trips, too. Only time I’d a wished we kept horses, or maybe mules. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Jill almost asked him why they’d never said anything about this place before, but stopped herself, because the answer was obvious to the practical-minded: there was nothing to be gained by her knowing, and what she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell if she was questioned.

“Come on.” Jimmy led her into one of several tunnels, all of which showed signs of having been worked – the floors smoothed, corners rounded, protrusions broken off to make for easier transit. The one into which they walked led upward, twisting and turning. At one place they had to wiggle through on their bellies.

“There’s more tunnels than I ever explored, and five or six exits that I know about,” he explained. “D’pendin’ on how hard we was pressed, we could live here for a while an’ come out later, or keep on goin’ up into the higher country. But you’ll like this.” After fifty yards of relatively flat easy tunnel, they emerged into another cavern, larger than the one below.

A stream ran through this one, into and out of a pool, exiting in a rush down a dark hole at the lower edge, but that wasn’t the most interesting aspect of the cave. Along one side sat what was obviously a moonshine still, though Jill had never actually seen one. Big kettles and copper tubing, propane tanks, tubs and buckets and jars. Boxes rested on shelves, along with all sorts of other implements and items whose function she could only vaguely guess at. A metal pipe ran up into the ceiling, for a chimney, she thought.

“I don’t imagine you carried all this up from below,” Jill remarked.

“Nope.” Jimmy walked across the floor, crunching gravel beneath his boots, and pulled back a heavy canvas curtain that covered an opening. On the other side she could see a short tunnel and sunlight through a screen of bushes. “There’s an old mining road that runs nearby, that we can get up with a truck if’n you know the way. If’n we just need to come up to work it, we walk. Don’t make but thirty or forty gallons a month. We’s careful, and we ain’t greedy, but it brings in some extra cash, and lubricates some dealins.”

“I reckon so,” Jill replied, looking around at the arrangement. “I never knew people could…” she ran out of words. “This seems like we just traveled back a century – bootleggers and revenuers, Prohibition. Now it’s just…quaint.”

“Guess so. On the other hand…” Jimmy pulled back another curtain along the rock wall, revealing another room. He waved Jill forward to look.

Inside she saw a small office, with bookshelves – and a computer. It was outdated, certainly, perhaps fifteen years old, but a cable and its power cord ran around the base of the wall and out the door, from there hidden by duct tape and dirt. Jill turned to Jimmy and punched him in the arm. “You’ve been holding out on me! You aren’t such a simple hick after all!”

“Never said I was. Pa says it’s always better to have people underestimate you. One way to do that is to adopt the dialect of the simpler folk around you.” While his accent had not diminished, his diction had abruptly improved.

Jill’s jaw dropped. “Wow. What else don’t I know about you?”

“A fair bit, but that’s as may be. The next question you’ll ask is ‘why.’ Pa wanted to keep our upbringing and lifestyle simple, oriented around our family and hard work. He wanted us to use machines, not have them use us. So he kept the high-tech stuff up here. We got an antenna that gives us access to the internet through cell networks, we got a water-powered wheel and generator, also a gas generator and a battery bank, and some solar cells in a hard-to-see spot up top. We got television too. Makes workin’ the still less of a chore.”

“I’m flabbergasted.” Jill waved her arms helplessly. “You just upended my world, Jimmy.”

He stepped closer, looking into her brown eyes. “Enough to give me a chance? Now that you know I’m not just a dumb hillbilly?”

“What? Oh…no. I never thought that.” Did I? She reached out to place her hands on his shoulders, but more to keep him there than to draw him closer. “Look, Jimmy, it’s just terrible timing. I’m going to go soon, to try to see if my family is…is still even alive. That means leaving. If I make it back here…then I promise I’ll give you a chance. Give us a chance. Okay?”

Jimmy nodded slowly, pain and frustration in his blue eyes. “Okay…but you said you ain’t even seen them since you joined the Corps. All you did is email. How come you suddenly can’t stand not to travel across the whole country? And if you get caught, you’ll end up in some cell somewhere and…what’s the point? Why not just stay here? We’re your family now!”

Even though she wanted to take Jimmy in her arms, Jill shoved herself away from him with a flick of her wrists. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have. It’s just something I have to do. Now I told you I’d come back when I could, and you’ll just have to be patient. If this Eden Plague thing is really like the rumors say, we’ll live hundreds of years and not get old, so we both have time. Time for things to change. Time for people to come to their senses, and get used to us Sickos. Time to figure out that we’re still the same people, just a little bit kinder, a little bit smarter, and a lot more durable. Now let’s please quit talking about it, all right?”

He sighed and turned away. “All right.”

Crestfallen was a weak word for how Jimmy looked, but Jill told herself that it had to be said, and it had to be done. Giving in now to the way she felt, or might have felt, would just complicate things, and she would never be sure that it wasn’t just fear and stress and the supercharging Eden Plague underpinning everything, rather than love.

“Come on, Jimmy. I’m not saying ‘no,’ just ‘wait’.”

“Ha. That’s how Ma says God answers prayers when you ain’t ready for what you want.”

Jill laughed gently. “Your mother is a wise woman, I think.” She turned toward the computer. “Can you turn this on? I’d love to see what was going on in the outside world.”

“No, sorry. It’s too dangerous. It piggybacks on a cell phone tower signal, or somesuch. We have to only use it from time to time, and not too much, or the phone company might think it’s worth their time to track us down. Next time we fire it up, though, you can.”

“All right.” Jill looked wistfully one more time at the old machine, then said, “Come on, let’s get back…unless you have more amazing revelations.”

“No, no Revelations, unless it’s the Apocalypse already.”

“Was that a joke?” Jill slapped Jimmy on the shoulder.

“A lame one. Here, let’s go outside and eat.” He led her through the curtain, down the short tunnel past more screening bushes and onto a wooded mountainside. Finding a spot in the sun on some rocks, he took off the satchel he carried and handed her a chicken salad sandwich.

Homemade mayonnaise and chopped pickles on fresh-baked bread made it the best meal she’d ever had, except for every other meal since arriving at the McConleys. Real hunger, not the pale imitation the average office worker experienced, was truly the most amazing flavor enhancer. She washed it down with spring water from her canteen.

Jimmy pointed to the left and downward after he’d finished his first sandwich. “See? There’s the mining road. The trick is to make the cutover hard to see. You have to actually go above and past it a hunnerd yards, turn around at a wide spot, and come back. Then you can see it easier, but we allas brush out the tracks and spread some fallen branches. Nobody found it yet. But on foot, we go that way.” Jimmy then gestured to the right along the grade, at a faint trail.

Jill nodded, peering archly at the satchel. “What else you got in there?”

“Got ’nother sandwich, some apples, a half-dozen oatmeal cookies. That oughta hold us until we get back for lunch.”

“Oughta.” Jill chuckled again, reaching for more food. Once they had finished everything, they set off down the mountainside.

Eventually the trail rejoined the one they had originally come up. Jill turned to orient herself and thought she could see where the hidden ledge and dell must be, but even so, she couldn’t pinpoint it.

“Right there,” Jimmy said, pointing it out as he came back to stand beside her.

His arm brushed hers and she shivered with suppressed pleasure in the cool autumn breeze. Not yet, she scolded herself yet again, and patted his shoulder absently. “Come on, let’s go,” Jill said. “There’s work to be done, and then I want to take a swim.”

“Sounds good. Race ya down!” Abruptly Jimmy took off down the slope, satchel flapping, rifle in one big hand. Jill followed, whooping, and trying to figure out how she could beat him. The only thing she could think of to do was stay close so as not to lose the track, and then try to sprint past him to the finish.

Several miles of heart-pounding trail running later they crested the final hill and the farm came in sight. Jimmy slowed in front of Jill and put an arm out to prevent her from running past, and then he pulled her aside under the trees. “Wait. Something’s not right.” He jacked a round into the chamber of his lever-action .308 and glided forward to a position overlooking the homestead.

From almost four hundred yards, their perfected Eden vision allowed them to easily see a truck and an SUV parked next to the family’s two pickup trucks. At least a dozen figures in black uniforms were spread out, looking around. They appeared different from the Unionists, with helmets, standardized weapons, and no armbands.

Searching, perhaps.

Jimmy surged forward, jogging down the path, rifle at the ready. “Wait,” Jill said urgently. “We have to make a plan.”

“We gotta get close enough to see what’s going on,” he replied, slowing to a fast walk. “If they’re just looking for moonshine or doing a routine search, we’ll wait it out.”

“And if not?”

Jimmy stopped to turn and look at Jill. “We do what we gotta do. You okay with that?”

Jill nodded. “Yes. We can’t let your family be taken away. But Jimmy…I’ve been thinking about this for a while. First, the Eden Plague will heal us if we don’t get hit too bad. I’m tactically trained. You’re not. You’re a fine shot but you don’t have the honed instincts for close combat, so you are going to take up the best position you can a hundred yards out. You know this area, so you pick a good spot. Then I go in.”

“And then?”

“I’ll sneak into the barn and get my weapons, or I’ll take one of them down and use his. You watch me the whole way in. If they spot me and I make this hand signal,” she pointed her finger and thumb like a child pretending to have a gun, “then you shoot, center mass low, and you keep shooting as long as you have targets. Don’t get fancy and try to go for head or weapon shots.”

Jimmy angrily replied, “At a hundred yards I can put one through an eye!”

Jill grabbed his arm and shook it. “Shooting human beings isn’t like plinking bottles, or even killing a deer. The first time your gut really knows that you just ended a human life, you’ll find it a whole hell of a lot harder to pull the trigger. So you try to think of them as targets, not people, and shoot center mass, low. They might have chest plates, and under stress you’ll tend to pull high, so it’s always better to put one into the dirt than to go over; at least it will scare the shit out of them. Got me?”

“I got you.” He jerked his arm resentfully away.

“Don’t go all testosterone on me, Jimmy. This is my job, and I’m damn good at it. Now you have to do yours like a pro. Be patient. Be cool, don’t panic, and when you shoot, shoot straight.”

“Okay!”

“Okay. Good luck.” Without further words, she turned to scurry forward, low through the light woods and brush that surrounded the farm. Up ahead she heard Klutz barking, an angry sound.

As she approached, she could see one man looking over the pigpen fence. He jerked back at something inside. If Jill knew the old sow, she’d lunged at him. She didn’t like strangers getting near her half-grown offspring.

Using the distraction, she crept forward with all her skill. She could now see the man’s uniform was jet black, with the American flag on both shoulders. His appearance seemed neat and military, unlike the local party thugs who had visited them before. Their trucks looked uniform as well, painted with unit numbers, a government crest of some sort, and the words “Security Service.”

She’d heard about this new paramilitary, formed by an expansion and reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security. How they could not see the irony of calling something that would inevitably be nicknamed SS was beyond her. Perhaps that just spoke to their fanaticism and ideological blindness. From what she could tell, the far left and the far right had both gone around the bend to the other side and met in the middle, and this was the result.

Four SS men stood near the trucks, between the barn and the house. Owen, Big Jim and Sarah sat on the front porch, two guards behind them. Another, apparently an officer by his dress and demeanor, seemed to be questioning them. Jane should be coming home from school soon, walking up the three miles from the main road where the bus picked her up. Jill hoped she spotted the men and would stay out of sight.

For now, she decided to watch and wait. Maybe, if they were lucky, the detachment would go away after asking their questions.

Or not. It didn’t take long for their methods to reveal themselves.

She watched the officer ostentatiously slip on a pair of black gloves, and then he struck. Not Big Jim, not Sarah even.

Owen.

He backhanded the boy across the face, flinging a spray of blood. Owen howled and held up ineffectual arms to cover his head. Big Jim surged out of his chair, only to be clubbed down by rifle butts. Sarah threw herself on her husband, and she was clubbed in turn, until the officer yelled for them to halt. Klutz sank his teeth into the officer’s leg, and one of the others reversed his assault rifle and shot the dog, who dropped onto the porch as if poleaxed.

So that’s the way it is, she thought, and clamped down on her sudden rage. I hope to hell Jimmy doesn’t start shooting. Unless they kill someone, they can always get the Plague and be healed. But I can’t just stand here. I have to acquire the tools I need, if we’re going to go up against ten to one odds.

Drawing her combat knife, the one she’d kept in her boot through all of her adventures, she did something she’d thought about, even tested. She ran the blade down her forearm, creating a shallow slash, and wiped the profuse bleeding all over the blade like spackle on a trowel.

She knew the arm would heal within moments, and now the weapon she might have to use on someone was coated with her fluids – filled with the Eden Plague. Everyone she stabbed would eventually heal, easing her conscience about the danger of killing – and would also produce more Plague carriers. In essence, it would force them to defect, or be interned as well, draining the resources of the fascists.

It was far better than killing them, really, no matter what her outrage told her.

With knife in hand, Jill eased forward in a combat crouch, freezing when the man turned toward her, moving when he turned away. It appeared as if he had been placed to watch this sector, but had made the cardinal error of getting out of sight of his fellows. There couldn’t be more than twenty SS here, not enough to really cover the whole perimeter.

When she got as close as she could, behind the last screen of bushes, she took a deep breath, waited until the man turned away, then rushed him silently.

As a cop, she’d never stabbed anyone before. All of her blade work had been theoretical, or defensive, aimed solely at disarming a knife-wielding attacker. She’d heard that a straight blade to the kidney was ideal to incapacitate. The pain and shock involved usually paralyzed the diaphragm for long enough to finish the man off, lethally or not.

At the last moment she realized that the man had a vest on beneath his shirt – a thin one, undoubtedly just enough to stop pistol rounds, but it would likely turn her blade. In a split second she changed tactics, bringing her hands together to grip the knife’s hilt with both. She lifted it and brought the pommel down on the back of the man’s neck, just to the right of the spine, beneath his helmet.

He staggered and fell, letting out a low grunt, and she leaped on him with both knees. Adrenaline surged through her and she swung double-handed at his neck and face, trying to knock him out. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.

It took her four blows, and he was bloody and breathing shallowly when she finished. Ugly and poorly done, she thought, and suppressed a wave of nausea. She’d killed before, with an assault rifle, fending off insurgent attacks on U.S. training and assistance forces, but it was never this close up and personal.

She found she really did not want him to die. He was a fellow American, misguided perhaps, but probably not evil. Just a grunt. So she did what she had intended before, and sliced him shallowly, on his forearm, twin to her own wounds. Hopefully that would transmit the Eden Plague.

Quickly she dragged the man inside the barn out of sight before running back out to retrieve his assault rifle. The odds just got a lot more even in Jill’s book. She made a big come in gesture toward where Jimmy should be, then went back to the fallen trooper and began to strip off his clothes.

By the time she had his black pants and tunic off, Jimmy slipped inside the barn. “I’m too big for those,” he whispered.

“Not for you. For me.” She pulled the trousers on over her own, bloused them in the boots with their strings, then donned the man’s armor vest and tunic. Everything was large, but by cinching up the belt she made it fit. Fortunately she had pinned her hair up for the hike so once she put the helmet and equipment harness on, she made a fair imitation of an SS trooper.

She hoped.

“Did you see what they did to Owen and Ma and Pa?” Jimmy asked, his voice anguished.

“Yes. So we take them down. That means keeping cool. We can give them all the Plague and they will heal up. Just keep that in mind.” Jill reached down to smear some dirt from the barn floor on her chin and face.

“Right.” He squeezed his Browning and looked around furtively, unsure.

Jill ordered, “Go up to the loft and toss me down the .45. Keep the shotgun up there with you. Take a sniper’s position back as far from the window as you can while still able to see your targets. Keep moving from position to position. That way they won’t be able to pinpoint you.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked in a hoarse whisper from the top of the ladder.

“Don’t whisper,” she said in a low tone. “It carries farther than a quiet voice. I’m going to walk out into the open and take down as many of them as I can, by surprise. As soon as I start shooting, you pick off any target you see, especially those behind me. Center mass low, remember? Right in the gut is the best thing, okay?”

“Okay.” He turned away and retrieved her weapons hidden in the loft, tossing the .45 and two full magazines down. She thrust the pistol into the back of her waistband and dropped the ammo into her left front pants pocket. Then she cleaned off her knife, slipped it back into its sheath and eased over to look out across the farm.

Jill would never even have considered what she was planning if she hadn’t known the Eden Plague would give her an edge. Even if they ended up in a draw, with everyone shot and wounded, she and Jimmy would recover rapidly, while the SS men wouldn’t. She performed a slow scan, fixing everyone’s position in her mind, and then called softly up, “Here I go.”

Stepping out the back of the barn, she popped open the ammo pouches on her captured harness, tucking the covers out of the way and making sure the magazines were loose and handy. A standard load of six thirty-rounders, plus the one in the weapon, gave her two hundred ten rounds. More than enough.

She held her captured assault rifle casually pointed down, but with her hands in position on the grips, and strolled around the corner of the barn. Helmet tipped down, she looked out from beneath its rim, opening her mind and eyes to the positions of her targets, just like on the tactical range.

Targets. That’s all they are.

“Hey, Smitty, you look shitty,” someone called in her direction. That was the signal; in a moment they would recognize that Jill was not Smitty. She brought her weapon up, flipping the selector lever to Fire with her thumb, and shot the speaker just below his visible chest plate.

Before he hit the ground, she took down two more standing near him, pop – pop. Working outward and moving rightward in a tactical crouch, she circled the trucks and shot the fourth man in the leg as he tried to take cover, then drilled him in the back as he fell.

With the four at the vehicles out of the way she turned toward the house, scurrying forward, rifle locked to her shoulder, eyes open looking over her sights. A bullet flicked at her heel. Jill barely noted heavy .308 shots sound from the barn; she had to trust Jimmy to keep them off her back.

In front of her on the porch, three standing targets and three prone friendlies occupied her arc of fire. The leftmost target aimed a rifle her direction and fired just as she did. Her shot took the man in the stomach, the high-velocity rifle bullet punching through his vest without difficulty.

His shot struck her in the center of her forehead.

Unlike the vests, the helmet she wore was made to stop assault rifle bullets up to 7.62mm, and so it saved Jill’s life. Her head snapped up with the impact and she fell onto her back, instinctively flattening and rolling, trying to regain some kind of firing position. Rounds from target two kicked dirt around her as she scrambled under one of the McConley pickup trucks, then recovered her feet on the other side. Bullets slammed into the sheet metal and smashed through the vehicle’s windows.

Using one of the vehicle’s side mirrors, she saw target two fall, his head exploding as one of Jimmy’s precision shots rang out. Whether he was showing off, or merely had forgotten her instructions, she had no time to wonder. She turned to scan behind her toward the woods, just in time to see Jane, in a flowered frock and tennis shoes, club an SS trooper down with a tree branch. He’d been aiming at Jill.

Jill waved her emphatically back. “Keep to cover, Jane!” she yelled, the need for secrecy long over. Jane nodded and slipped back into the bushes with her improvised weapon.

Checking the mirror again, she saw the SS officer drag Sarah to her feet and, using her as a shield, back into the house. Big Jim stirred on the floor as Owen sobbed in his wheelchair.

About half of the possible twenty troopers had been taken down, Jill believed. Now she had a hostage situation, but could not wait it out. The officer might have a radio or satphone and she couldn’t allow him to regroup his men.

Only one thing for it. She charged the house.

He couldn’t control Sarah and engage Jill effectively with a pistol. Her vest and helmet and the Eden Plague gave her an edge. As long as she didn’t get shot in the face, she should be able to take the man down.

Two handgun rounds struck her as she rushed through the death funnel of the doorway. One hit her vest like a punch to the chest, hardly noticed due to adrenaline and concentration. The other burned hot fire along her thigh, a nasty flesh wound.

Inside, the officer had his left arm encircling Sarah’s neck, while his right pointed his pistol at Jill. Most attackers would have ducked behind something and looked for a shot, hoping to get the hostage-taker to run himself out of ammo. With her advantages, though, she’d already decided on a different course.

Spiraling to her left and forward, she advanced quickly with her rifle sights fixed on the man’s exposed right shoulder. He fired one more time, and the shot took a piece of Jill’s right ear off.

Then she had him.

From two feet away, impossible to miss, Jill’s bullet shattered his exposed right shoulder joint. Shock and pain caused him to drop his pistol and Sarah both, and as soon as he was clear, she put another round into his stomach. Then she kicked him in the head, ensuring he was out.

Checking Sarah, she saw that the older woman was incoherent and concussed, with one pupil dilated huge, so Jill did what she had planned, if it ever came to this.

With her left hand, she smeared her fingertips into her thigh wound, coating them with ichor. Then she stuck one of them in Sarah’s mouth. Disgusting, perhaps, but if the rumors were true, her blood contained even more of the virus than her saliva, and one good kiss had passed it to Jimmy. This should infect the older woman, and perhaps save her life.

She did the same with the unconscious officer, then scuttled over to the front door. Big Jim looked at her from floor level, still stunned, but he had begun grimly crawling toward the entrance. Jill grabbed his collar and dragged him inside, then fed him a taste of her blood as well.

Next, she grabbed Klutz and dragged him inside. He still breathed, and she shoved a bloody hand between his teeth to coat his tongue. She had no idea if the Eden Plague worked on animals, but it seemed worth a try. Then she stood up and went back to work.

Scanning quickly outside, she spotted two troopers moving toward the barn, left and right, closing in on a flurry of gunfire inside it. Odds were that the remaining SS men would focus on the sniper that was picking them off one by one, and so now it appeared Jill was on the outside of the action, looking in.

Aiming carefully, she popped the one on the left, seeing him fall. Swinging right, she fired but missed her right-side target as he dove forward. A moment later he was out of sight behind the barn.

Using the reprieve, she grabbed Owen’s wheelchair and rolled the crying boy into the house. She saw that Big Jim seemed aware, if badly injured. She kicked the half-conscious SS officer in the side of the head again to make sure he wouldn’t cause any more trouble, and then relieved him of his belt that carried several leather cases, like a police officer would wear.

One case held handcuffs, with which she expertly cuffed the officer’s hands behind his back. Another held a walkie radio, which she slipped into a pocket. Then she extracted two magazines and retrieved the fallen man’s pistol from the floor, pressing the weapon and ammo into Big Jim’s hands.

“I have to go finish them off,” Jill said to her surrogate father.

Big Jim nodded, taking the weapon. “Go,” he grunted hoarsely. “Kill the bastards.”

Jill nodded, though she wasn’t going to follow his wishes; at least, not intentionally. The rumored virtue effect must be damping down her sense of outrage and desire for revenge. It didn’t matter: leaving them alive and infected would be vengeance enough. That would consign them to being abused by the very system to which they had sold themselves.

Swapping in a full magazine, she set her assault rifle for three-round bursts. Now that her enemies were fully warned and waiting, firepower mattered more than surprise. Nearly as effective as fully automatic, this setting was far more controllable and gave her an easy way to track her ammo expenditure. She only had to count to ten as she fired off each thirty-rounder by threes, then drop the empty and insert the full one.

A look out the door showed movement in the trees to the right and left of the barn, but no clear targets. Intermittent firing continued, sounding like half a dozen weapons, maximum. Because Jane was somewhere to her left, she went out the back door and rightward, counterclockwise along the edge of the farm, hoping to flank and roll up the enemy.

Hang in there, Jimmy. I’m coming. Jill sprinted up the rows of vegetables, quickly entering the tree line, then turned left, resuming her gun-up tactical advance. Her thigh burned like fire, but it appeared only slightly impaired and already the bleeding had stopped. She’d also avoided the worst of the shock she should be feeling: Eden Plague again.

She mentally thanked her instructors for making her one of the best; these men, though competent enough, fought hardly better than the half-trained insurgents in the sandbox.

As Jill approached the barn she spotted two targets. One fired his rifle into the wall of the barn near one of the small loft windows. It appeared he had no target, but was just providing harassing fire. The other faced her direction, a very young man, eyes searching, and he spotted her movement just an instant later than she saw him.

She revised her estimate upward slightly – at least they were keeping rear security – even as she lined up on his lower torso and fired a burst. Her bullets dropped him and his weapon stuttered skyward on full auto. Twigs and leaves dropped around her as a dozen rounds sliced through the foliage above Jill’s head.

The other SS man was a veteran, she guessed; at least he did what it took to survive, dropping forward to the ground, out of sight in the bushes. Jill fired several bursts into the scrub to the left and right of his position as she cautiously advanced. He would have been smarter to keep watch himself, she thought, and let the kid fire into the barn.

Jill swung wider to her right, away from the barn, instinctively believing her opponent would not scramble toward that building with his other enemy inside. With her weapon at the left oblique she tried to anticipate his position, circling, circling…

There. A flash of dark movement. She expended the rest of her magazine and dropped down on one knee to reload, then resumed her advance. In a moment a leg came into view, moving slowly, painfully. Jill quickly swept her weapon through three hundred sixty degrees, checking around her before rushing forward to see the wounded veteran, a man of perhaps thirty, pull a pistol from his thigh rig and try to point it in her direction.

Her cop instincts took over and she hissed, “Freeze!” When he failed to comply, she put a shot through his forearm, and the handgun jerked and fell into the dirt. He moaned and his head dropped back. It appeared he had been hit three or four times even before her last shot, and she mentally saluted him.

Tough bastard.

Rubbing the sticky blood around her healing thigh wound, she shoved some of it in the man’s mouth. In other circumstances she’d have bandaged him, tried to save him, but gunfire still stuttered from the barn and she had to come to Jimmy’s aid. This instinct was confirmed when the boom of a shotgun replaced the hard crack of the .308.

They must be getting close to him.

Reloading again, she hurried for the back of the barn, skirting the hog pen. A hole had been knocked in the heavy boards, and it appeared empty; mama pig must have gone berserk with the firing and smell of blood, and broken out with her yearlings.

One man stood in the back door of the barn, looking inward, and she shot him in the kidney. He dropped like a stone. Charging inside, she was just in time to witness a flurry of automatic fire from two men on the ground floor as another climbed the ladder.

Jill picked the man off the top of the rungs, then turned to blast the other two. She took down one before the other shot her in the chest, knocking her off her feet. Her assault rifle went flying. She felt like a mule had kicked her, her vision grayed, and she became unable to breathe. Lung shot, she thought as she lay on her side, and, this is shock for sure. Apparently there were limits to what the Eden Plague could do, and she’d just found them.

She lay still, watching the remaining trooper approach her with rifle aimed at her head. Her only chance at this point was to seem nonthreatening, too wounded to fight back. “Hello,” she croaked, trying to put some femininity into her voice. “How’s the security business?”

Maybe he won’t shoot a woman, or at least he’ll underestimate me. Come on, Jimmy, now would be a good time to use that shotgun.

The hoped-for blast didn’t come. The SS trooper kicked her in the belly, then in the head, breaking the helmet strap and sending it flying. Her hair came loose of its bobby pins, but it didn’t seem as if the man cared about her gender. He kicked her again, and this time, she blacked out.

***

So close, she thought as she came to. One, maybe two guys left. Opening her eyes, she saw she was still in the barn, with her wrists fastened painfully to one of the supporting posts. The baling wire that confined her also cut off her circulation, and both hands seemed completely numb. It felt like the .45 in the back of her belt had been taken away, but at least she could breathe now. The Plague had done its work.

Whoever had tied her up must have thought she was not going anywhere, lung-shot and concussed. He would be coming back for her and the rest for sure, with reinforcements.

She also felt as if she was starving. Fortunately she had put on some fat during her enforced inactivity, but she felt it draining away as her body scoured itself for available materials and calories.

That was a secondary issue, though, compared to survival.

Jill began working at the wire, moving her arms and body in an attempt to bend the metal. Unlike rope, steel would fatigue if she could work it back and forth, twist it enough times. It would be a long tough job, but she knew she could eventually do it.

If she had enough time. She wondered where the last man had gone.

Someone appeared in the doorway. Jill tried to focus on whoever it was, and then realized she must be concussed, because her vision blurred and it appeared she was looking at an angel.

Then the figure stepped closer and out of the sunlight. “Jane,” Jill said with relief. “Get this wire off me. What happened to the rest of the security men?”

“A healthy one drug a couple wounded men into the smaller truck and drove hell-for-leather on down the road.” Jane dropped to her knees and began to unwrap the steel wire. “Even if they have a radio, we should still have at least fifteen minutes before anyone can get here, thirty if they don’t.”

“Unless they have helicopters. We have to get everyone away, up to the caves.”

Jane looked at her in surprise. “You know about them?”

“Jimmy showed me today. Good thing, too. Come on, hurry up.” As soon as she was free, she laboriously climbed the ladder with her feet and elbows, already knowing what she would find. If Jimmy had been able, he would have been the one setting her free.

Jill’s faint hope she would find him alive but incapacitated was dashed when she saw the young man’s head shattered on the loft floor like a dropped melon. One of the hundreds of bullets that had been fired blindly into the upper room had taken him down. It was just bad luck, and she let loose with a stream of profanity worthy of a drunken sailor, to cover the anguish she felt at his loss.

“Jill!” Jane cried. “What…is it Jimmy?” She began to climb the ladder, but Jill pushed her back down.

“Yes, and you don’t want to see. He’s dead for sure.” Jill stepped off the ladder and hugged the girl. “Leave him there as a testament, to show these people the price they’re going to pay for what they’re doing. Besides,” she said, picking up her fallen assault rifle, “there’s no time to mourn. We have to go now.”

The two ran across the yard, past the lone truck. Dead and wounded men littered the area, and Jill felt sick with reaction and the killing, more so than she had after similar firefights with insurgents. “Go see to your family, Jane. I tried to infect them with the Eden Plague.”

As Jane ran to the house, Jill took out her knife and gashed her left index finger’s tip, then methodically dripped blood into every man’s mouth she thought had a prayer of living. Though several were conscious, none resisted, watching her like mice in fear of a snake. “If you’re lucky, the Plague will take hold and you will live,” she announced loudly, “but I wouldn’t go self-reporting as Sickos if I were you.” She could think of no better punishment.

Jill turned toward the house, to see the McConleys emerging from it. Big Jim and Sarah stood and walked without difficulty it seemed, and Owen…did too. His eyes and his expression seemed clearer, and full of wonder. His parents each tightly held a hand, and the smiles on their faces contrasted strangely with their current plight.

“He’s getting better already, praise the Lord,” Sarah called when she saw the realization come over Jill.

“That’s great, Sarah,” she replied, “but we have to go to the caves, now. Get some walking shoes on and we have to get going.”

“She’s right,” Big Jim rumbled. “Jane, watch Owen. We’ll go in two minutes, out the back door.”

He led them inside, where he grabbed an old canvas bag and began throwing items into it – fresh food, a blanket, clothing, shoes and sundries. Sarah did the same with a pillowcase, handing one to Jill. Soon they all were laden with as much as they could carry.

“Let’s go,” Big Jim said, seeming stronger by the minute.

“What about Jimmy?” Sarah asked sharply. “Where is he?”

Jill and Big Jim exchanged saddened glances. She knew the big man had already figured it out. “Jimmy’s gone, Sarah darlin’,” Big Jim said gently, wrapping his wife up in his arms. “Him and Miss Jill done the best they could, but now we got to go.”

Silent tears leaked from Sarah’s eyes, but she nodded and picked up her load. “All right. I’m ready.”

“Then let’s get goin’. We’ll eat as soon as we’re out of sight.”

This reminded Jill of the sharp pain in her belly as her need for food made itself felt. She picked up the pitcher of lemonade that stood by the sink and drank as much as she could hold, easing the problem somewhat. She passed it around.

Owen spoke, suddenly. “Klutz,” he said, pointing at the faithful canine lying on the rough wooden floor, then sinking to his knees to cradle the dog’s head. His four-footed friend ran his tongue over the boy’s hand one final time, then he went slack with a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” Jill said, her voice cracking. “I guess the Plague doesn’t work on animals.” Owen began to cry softly. “We have to go,” she said. “We don’t have time. Whoever comes here will take care of Klutz.”

Jane pulled Owen away, speaking softly in his ear, and then they left out the back.

“Can’t we take a pickup?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Jill answered before Big Jim could. “They’ll follow fresh tire tracks, and if they get a helicopter up here they may find it. Much better to go on foot.”

Into the tree line they hiked, retracing Jill’s route as she flanked the barn. She detoured to take a look at the two men she’d shot there, finding the younger one staring sightlessly at the tree branches above. The older one, the veteran, was not where she’d left him, and she lifted her assault rifle, looking around. Hopefully he’d run off, or been one of the ones that got away.

“Stop,” she heard a man’s voice from behind her say.

Damn. Slowly she crouched and laid the assault rifle and the stuffed pillowcase on the ground, and then held her hands out to her sides before she turned.

The man sat propped against a tree, with brush on either side of him. She’d walked right past him, for he’d chosen his spot well. He held a rifle trained on her, braced on his knee.

The man looked to be in bad shape, Plague or no Plague, but his grip on the weapon was steady. “What did you do to me?” he asked. “I should be dead.”

“Would you rather be?” she retorted. “I gave you the Plague to save your life. You’re a Sicko now. An Eden. We’re the same, you and me. I am…I was a Marine. You’re a combat veteran; I can tell. Do you like what your country has become?”

“I’m not a traitor,” he ground out.

“Then shoot me. What’s stopping you? And then when your buddies return, they’ll lock you away, because they won’t see you anymore. All they’ll see is a Sicko. Just like every time this ever happens – Japs, Jews, blacks, Bosnians, ragheads – dehumanize the enemy, then round him up and murder him. Well I’m still human, and so are you.”

His mouth worked, then he turned the weapon away from her. “You got a point. So what now?”

“Right now you can let us go and take your chances, or you can come with us.”

“Jill!” Sarah said from behind her, where she and the rest of the McConleys had been watching the tableau. “We can’t trust him. And he killed my boy.” She burst into tears, falling to her knees with her pillowcase sack.

“Miss Jill is right,” Big Jim said to her as he squatted down. “Everyone with the Plague is now on our side. We’re all runaways together. We lost Jimmy. Maybe this man can help fill his shoes.” The older man stood up and stepped forward, dropping his sack and shifting his shotgun to his left hand. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Clayton, sir. John Clayton.” He rolled painfully to his feet, supporting himself on the tree he had been resting against, and stuck out his hand. “And I’m powerful sorry for my part in this. I know it’s no excuse, but…well, when the shooting starts, you shoot back at the guy shooting at you.”

Big Jim wiped his hand on his trousers for a moment, then set his jaw. “I understand, John. I forgive you.” He glanced at Sarah. “Jimmy’s mother’s gonna have a mite harder time, though.”

“I want him with us. Someone go get him,” Sarah wailed.

“We’ll do what we can,” Jill broke in. “We really have to go. Clayton, can you walk?”

“Not very well yet.” Clayton looked around. “Are there any more of us alive and infected?”

“Yes, back by the truck there are two or three.”

“I have to help them.”

“Dammit, we don’t have time,” Jill said.

“Just tell me where to go. We’ll follow after you.”

Jill cursed again, but fully understood the man’s loyalty to his brothers in arms. Turning to Big Jim, she said, “Go ahead. Jimmy showed me the cave. I’ll stay here with these men and lead them in. And we’ll take care of Jimmy.”

Big Jim nodded to her. “Give me that sack. You gather all the guns and ammo you can and bring everything with you, hear?”

“Got it, boss.” Jill agreed, grimly satisfied now that everyone’s goals aligned. She watched for a moment as the McConleys started the hike up to the caves, then turned to Clayton. “Come on, John. You got any rations in that truck? You’re gonna get damn hungry soon.”

She helped him limp back toward the mess in the center of the farm, leaving him to talk to his men when she realized the one Jane had clobbered hadn’t been dosed with the Plague. Fortunately he was still out, so a quick cut and a few drops of blood solved that problem. She dragged him back over to dump him with the rest.

Five SS troopers had survived to become Edens, including Clayton. One she recognized as the man who had shot Klutz. “You,” she said, pointing with her assault rifle. “You see this dog you killed?”

“Yeah,” he replied, clutching his healing stomach. “Sorry.”

“You want to stay to be interned, or you want to come with us?”

His mouth worked, and finally he said, “I’ll come with you.”

“Then here’s your penance. You’re gonna pick up that dead dog and carry it all the way up to our hideout, and when we get there, you’re gonna bury him in a nice grave so that a twelve-year-old boy can grieve properly. You got me, soldier?” At that moment Jill felt as close to troop abuse as she’d ever gotten, and he must have seen it in her eyes, for he lowered his own and nodded, clearly ashamed. He got up and began wrestling the ninety-pound corpse up onto his shoulders.

“All right, men,” Clayton spoke up. “Like the lady said, you can stay and get locked up, or you can come with us, because I’m going with her.”

The other three looked around at each other, then as one stood up from their resting positions. “We’ll go,” one said. The others nodded.

“Good. Then grab all the weapons and ammo you can carry and bring them to the barn. There’s one more thing I have to do.” Jill left them to their salvaging, walking resolutely over to the barn.

Inside lay two dead cows, and the barn cats were already sniffing around at the smell of fresh meat. Jill opened the henhouse and let out all the chickens, then did the same with the rabbit hutches, taking no more than a minute. Then she began breaking open hay bales and scattering the straw.

Next Jill steeled herself, and then climbed the ladder. She forced herself to look at him one more time, with the flies gathering already around the sticky, blood-soaked boards. Blinking back tears, she picked up his beloved Browning, and the shotgun he died clutching, and then backed down the ladder.

On the ground, she grabbed a fuel can and opened it, waiting for her little squad. Once they arrived laden with weapons and ammo, she upended the gasoline onto the straw, tossing it into the pile, then took another and began to lay a line of flammable liquid out the back of the barn. “Get on ahead of me,” she instructed, and when they were all a hundred feet away, she asked for a lighter.

A moment later, fire streaked toward the barn, sending the barn cats running. A muffled whump and a puff of smoke signaled the structure’s ignition. “Viking funeral,” she whispered. “Best I could do. Goodbye, Jimmy. Hope you find that Heaven your ma talked about.”

Less than a minute later, flames had engulfed the old wooden structure. “Come on, men. Even discounting your former buddies, the smoke will draw people from miles around.” Jill turned toward the hills. “Follow me,” she said.

Chapter Six

Four weeks later

Jill hugged Owen first, looking into his bright inquisitive eyes. “Be good, little brother,” she said.

“You too, Miss Jill,” he responded shyly. “Thanks again for letting me out.” She knew what he meant; out of the prison of his body, and his brain’s broken biology.

Jill said her goodbyes to each in turn: dour Sarah, smiling more now as the age lines fled from her face; gentle giant Big Jim, looking more like his dead son Jimmy every day; Jane, seemingly the least affected by the Plague, though at seventeen she had little to rejuvenate.

“Clayton.” Jill shook hands with the man who, with four of his fellows, formed the nucleus of a resistance cell in this area. They struck from the high hills and hidden valleys, stealing supplies, damaging military equipment, and infecting everyone they could.

“Reaper.” He smiled, his eyes less haunted now that he had come to terms with what he’d done, and Sarah had explicitly forgiven him. In fact, he seemed to be doing his best to be the son she had lost. “We’re going to miss you.”

“Me too, but I can’t stay. I know it makes no sense up here,” she tapped her head, “but it makes sense in here.” She patted her heart. “I have to find out what happened to my family.”

“I know.” He squeezed her hand one final time and let it drop. “Good luck, and good hunting.”

“Not me,” she replied grimly. “I’ve killed enough for one lifetime. Anyway, I’m a cop at heart. I’m not cut out to be an insurgent. All I want to do is go back to being a cop, in an America that isn’t murdering its own people.”

“Too late, I think. We’ll have to fight the Unionists to bring the real USA back. When you’ve found out what you need to know…remember us, all right?”

“Yeah,” Jill replied. “I’ll do what I can, from wherever I’m at. And remember to get in touch with the contact I gave you. The person on the other end of that email is completely trustworthy. Helped me escape. Just remember what I said about avoiding keywords that the NSA might pick up on. They can’t read everyone’s email, so the trick is never to get flagged.”

Clayton nodded. “I got it. We got it. Now you have to get going, before these folks start bawling.” He looked a little teary himself.

Jill smiled one last time, hoisted her rucksack, and walked out of the cave into the Tennessee Appalachians. She consciously resisted the urge to look back, but sensed their loving eyes upon her until she was down the trail and out of sight.

Night fell as she walked, the sun lingering below the mountainous horizon, shedding a long twilight. After dark, the moon allowed her to see well enough, perfected Eden eyes picking out every root and rock. Eden ears heard every night cry, the hoot of owls, the piping of bats that normally only children could. Fully fuelled, her body felt like a smooth-running machine.

The trail she had planned took her through a series of lightly populated areas, many of them state parks – Cove Lake, Frozen Head, Obed, Cumberland Mountain – eventually debouching near Huntsville, Alabama, nearly two hundred miles on foot. As long as she had food, though, she should be able to make twenty to forty miles a day, assuming she didn’t run into any trouble.

A stolen GPS would keep her on track, and a faked Security Service ID card should get her through anything but a high-level database check. She had food, fluids, and camping gear, and the burner phone she had bought so long ago.

The one thing she didn’t have was a gun. With her cover as an SS trooper on vacation, she might have been able to get away with it, but she had decided it was more risk than it was worth. Her combat knife would have to do.

She’d learned one lesson at least during the long swim from the cruise ship. Now her ruck and her pockets were packed with high-nutrition items – protein powders, nutrient bars, MRE packets, home-jerked deer meat, smoked fish and duck. She sincerely hoped that she would never feel that gut-ripping hunger ever again.

As she hiked, Jill wondered about the rest of the world. Apparently whole nations had embraced the Eden Plague, or at least, didn’t have the security apparatus to keep it under control. The poorer they were, the more likely that it spread like wildfire, becoming accomplished fact. Now formerly corrupt and terrifying places like the Congo and Zimbabwe, Sudan and Colombia and Rwanda, nearly overnight had become functioning nations. Without the load of medical costs, and with the Eden Plague’s virtue effect dramatically reducing corruption and crime, the only problem many countries now faced was food supply.

However, the world had always produced enough food. In most cases it was transportation, distribution and economics that caused shortages, and those issues remained. The world was still a long way from perfect, but it seemed like it was getting better, despite the tremendous disruptions, and resistance from the fearful elites.

They’re afraid of change, Jill realized. Afraid that disruptions in the markets and healthy, long-lived populations would erode their traditional power bases. Like the Unionists, reactionaries throughout the world are exploiting fear to maintain power.

She camped that day in an out-of-the-way nook in the mountains, with no fire and no tent, just some brush to hide her. Insects seldom bothered her, and she wondered if that was a Plague effect as well. Even if she did get bitten, the bites healed so fast they were no trouble.

Traveling by night and sleeping by day gave her a lot of time for similar thoughts. An earbud and a radio no bigger than her thumb let her pick up a lot of information, though most of it was obviously censored. Even so, some things leaked through.

The USA, even under the Unionists, still claimed to be a republic. The Constitution might be getting trampled, but it was not yet completely gone. Courageous judges, statesmen, clergy and legal organizations fought rearguard actions, trying to limit the tide of lies and fear sweeping aside citizens’ rights.

They seemed to be losing.

In the past months, tensions with the Chinese had run high, and the paranoid North Koreans launched a missile at Japan. Though shot down by interceptor missiles, Tokyo immediately revealed that it was even now assembling one hundred atomic warheads from secretly prepared components, and would defend itself with nuclear weapons if necessary.

Shortly after, seven more nuclear detonations occurred on American soil. Though blamed on terrorists, speculation ran rampant that some enemy state had supplied the bombs – China, Russia, or North Korea being the usual suspects.

The Unionists pushed for more Federal police powers, and the rump Democratic-Republican coalition, now joined out of sheer political necessity, was happy to oblige. More surveillance, more arrests without charges, more curtailment of rights naturally followed.

By the time Jill got to Huntsville, the USA had become a police state. Less than one year from Infection Day, the world had convulsed and remade itself, and most Americans didn’t care. They were too busy trying to keep food on the table, money in the bank and themselves above suspicion to be courageous.

Most people were sheep.

Jill remembered a resistance training exercise she had participated in. She and the rest of her MP platoon had been run through a prisoner-of-war scenario for three days.

Despite briefings, despite education, and despite knowing full well it was only a training exercise, many if not most of the troops had found themselves complying with their “captors” instructions in all things, with little question or resistance. Videos shown afterward had been eye-opening and embarrassing, as Marines seemed to make statements denigrating the United States, their officers, and everything they had sworn to uphold, with just a bit of trickery, persuasion, and selective video editing.

Why? Afterward, she had deduced the answer, the same answer: most people followed authority figures, especially if backed up by force and even the veneer of legitimacy. Add fear and misplaced patriotism and the recipe was complete, and no one was more susceptible to this seductive stew than young military troops, trained to follow orders.

In fact, in the exercise, she’d seen junior personnel ignore the lawful orders of their own officers and NCOs in favor of the “captors’” instructions, completely ignoring the Code of Conduct that they should have internalized. How much more likely was it they would follow despicable orders that proceeded from those same officers, whose careers, whose lives, or even whose families were threatened?

Jill understood. If the Corps was your family, what do you do when your family betrays the very things it is supposed to uphold and defend? Without another family, some kind of support system, what could one poor Marine, or soldier or sailor or airman, do?

Now she realized that, although she loved the Corps, the Corps did not love her. God might love her, if He existed the way Chaplain Forman believed. Her family might love her, and her new family, the McConleys, certainly did. Beyond that…she just didn’t know.

She made it two hundred miles in five days without trouble, traveling from sundown to sunup and a bit more. Park rangers generally did not walk trails at night. At most they might drive around and check campgrounds and scare the bears away. They were easy to avoid.

But near Huntsville, her luck ran out.

Jill had planned to make her way west by hitchhiking, by bus, or even perhaps by “borrowing” a government vehicle if she thought she could get away with it. The corridor between I-20 and I-40 seemed ideal; smaller state highways that would be watched less, perhaps, but still with a heavy presence of truckers.

This time she resolved not to let anyone get the drop on her. This time she was ready.

As so often happens, it was just bad luck that tripped Jill up. She’d made it to Monte Sano State Park overlooking the Rocket City of Huntsville – home of both the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army’s Redstone Arsenal. As the sun came up over the Von Braun Astronomical Society’s observatory, a pickup truck with Alabama State markings came into view on the forested road.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been tired, been more alert, or if the park ranger had had her lights on, Jill would have had time to dash into the woods and hide, as she usually did. Then again, what was one more hiker in a state park?

Jill kept cool, nodding as the truck passed her going the other way. Her heart dropped and her adrenaline surged as it swung around to pull up next to her.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” called the middle-aged female ranger out her passenger window. “Can I ask what you’re doin’ here?”

Jill put on her best clueless smile. “Hiking?”

“The park is closed right now, ma’am. Been closed to the public for almost a month.” The woman stared at Jill with a strange mixture of suspicion and concern.

“All right. I’ll go back.” Jill made as if to turn around.

“Wait a minute, please,” the ranger called with a hint of authority in her voice. “Can I see some ID?”

“Sure,” Jill said with false cheerfulness, and dug out her fake SS card, handing it in the window across the passenger seat.

The park ranger looked it over front and back. Her face twisted sourly. “Would have thought you’d have heard the advisories, Ms. Clayton. Or did you think just because you people control the processing center, you have the run of the park? Closed means closed.”

Jill hid her confusion. Obviously something was going on of which she was unaware, and she found herself in the middle of it. In any case it appeared the woman did not like the SS, which was a plus in Jill’s book.

“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” Jill replied. “I promise I’ll head right back out the way I came in.” She held out her hand for the ID.

“And what way was that?” The ranger’s face sharpened suspiciously, holding onto the card.

Jill realized she’d made an error, and tried to cover it with as much truth as possible, which she knew was always the best way to lie. “I’ve been hiking and traveling on leave, and my GPS led me to your lovely park. I’m sorry I intruded.” She changed her tone from apologetic to matter-of-fact. “Now I’m going to go. I don’t like to throw my weight around, but I am a federal agent and I don’t have to put up with harassment from fellow officers. Feel free to file a report. Now please return my ID card.” She gave the ranger her best no-nonsense stare, the one she reserved for stupid suspects who couldn’t follow simple instructions, holding out her hand insistently.

Instead of returning it, the woman’s face soured even further and she barked a vulgar expletive. Then she put the truck in gear and roared off, leaving Jill standing by the side of the road without the fake ID.

Shit. She’s going to take the ID card straight to her office, maybe her superiors, and report me, and it won’t be long before they figure out it’s a fake, but my picture is real. Then they’ll match biometrics and might come up with who I am…

It had been a calculated risk putting her own picture on the fake ID but she had seen no way around it. The photo they had used was as low-resolution as they could make it without arousing suspicion, and maybe that would slow them down, but she had to assume they would come up with her identity eventually, and her status in the federal military databases would change to “Deserter.”

With little idea of the park’s layout – the GPS did not provide much detail on such installations – Jill just had to make a judgment call. She wanted to go west down the mountain, to lose herself in the city of Huntsville, and she saw no reason to change that goal, except that she would have to somehow get past the closed park to do it. Skirting it north or south would lengthen her travel time. Unfortunately she had only a hazy idea of where she was and what the terrain looked like between here and there, so she decided to head straight on through in minimum time. With her triathlete’s fitness and Eden strength and speed, she could cover a lot of ground in under an hour; probably a lot more than the park ranger would expect.

Tightening the backpack’s padded hip belt and shoulder straps, she began to run as fast as she could down the road the truck had taken. She kept her eyes open for signs or buildings, and at the first fork in the road she kept right, away from where the signs indicated the park was. Presumably the park ranger had taken that road and even now had begun the process of petty revenge upon the uppity SS agent she’d accosted.

If she only knew.

Two minutes and half a mile later, Jill passed a road and a sign marking an exclusive mountainside housing tract. A late-model high-end SUV turned out from the drive and accelerated away in front of her. Already sloping slightly downward, the grade steepened, and soon she ran as fast as she ever had in her entire life, on the smooth asphalt surface. Only the pack thudding on her back hindered her, and that not very much.

Two more cars passed her, and the second driver slowed to take a look in its rear-view mirror. Jill realized that she must seem rather odd, running flat out with a backpack full of gear. She had to get off the main road.

At the next curve she spotted an access road to the right and a water tower thirty yards back in the trees, so she slowed down and took it at a jog, making sure no cars were in sight when she did so. The driveway led to a chain-link fence, but also continued around the enclosure as a partly overgrown graveled track. Following it, she was happy to see it twisted and turned down the mountainside, perfect for her purposes.

A half mile later she came in sight of another stand of homes, and looking out from the hillside she could see Huntsville spread out before her. She was running out of rough country to hide in. Soon suburbia would be her jungle.

Finding a place among the bushes with cover in all directions, she dropped her pack and stripped out of her hiking boots, shorts and shirt. She put away the dusty ball cap that held her pony tail, and then donned tightish jeans, walking shoes and a clean t-shirt. A windbreaker and a large leather handbag completed the ensemble, and she shook her dark brown hair out, letting it cascade around her shoulders.

After putting a selection of essentials into her pockets and bag, and sliding her sheathed knife into the small of her back, she drank as much water and ate as much food as she could wolf down, then buried the backpack in a shallow hole.

Then Jill simply walked out of the woods and onto the sidewalk, past people beginning their days – driving away to work, starting sprinklers, sending their children to school. She looked like one of them now, perhaps a college student on her way to the bus stop, or an employee of someplace local enough to walk to.

Eventually she came in sight of a divided highway, and what she really needed: a bus stop. Once on the vehicle, she was able to pay the driver for a transfer ticket to the main station downtown, which shared space with a long-haul passenger line.

Looking around the local terminal, she could see a couple of SS guards, but they just seemed there to show their presence. On the other side of the busy yard, though, she watched as uniformed officers checked IDs and tickets as passengers boarded each long-haul bus.

They sure aren’t making it easy, she mused, and sat down on a bench to survey their routine. As a cop herself, she was naturally familiar with the theory and practice of securing a transportation hub, and so she figured she might be able to spot a hole to exploit.

She found it.

As usual, it resulted from the simplest of things: human boredom, complacency. The long-haul company’s uniforms were all similar, porters and maintenance workers and drivers, with only some minor differences. Everyone had photo badges clipped to their chests or on lanyards around their necks, but the busy maintainers generally had them tucked inside their shirts or into pockets so as not to get caught on things as they scurried around performing their duties.

These men and women fuelled and serviced the vehicles, cleaned them and dumped the sewage from their tiny restrooms, invisible and ubiquitous. The SS guards ignored them even as they slipped on and off the buses, doing their jobs.

Bingo.

Jill marked the “Authorized Personnel Only” door that many used. It probably accessed the break and locker area. While most of the workers going in and out wore the uniform, a few did not, and no one paid them any mind either. With at least a hundred employees on duty at the terminal, not counting the drivers, any thought of checking each busy person’s badge every time had long ago broken down.

Getting up, she went into the local terminal gift and sundries shop, buying a navy-blue lanyard. She put it around her neck and slipped its badgeless end clip inside her windbreaker.

Resolutely she strode across the wet October tarmac, skirting the line of buses, walking as if she belonged there. An SS guard glanced at her briefly, but his eyes lingered more on her tight jeans than her face. Straight toward the door she marched, timing her entrance to follow a uniformed employee in. The woman didn’t even glance behind her.

Still walking as if she knew where she was going, Jill quickly found the women’s locker room. Happily, it contained full facilities including showers, and there were a few empty lockers.

Slowly she began undressing, watching for her opportunity. It took almost fifteen tense minutes, hoping no one would notice her dawdling, before a woman roughly her size came in to change out of uniform. Luckily she did not shower, but threw on a sweat suit and left quickly.

Using an abandoned towel she found to hide what she was doing, Jill took out her knife and slipped it through the cheap padlock on the woman’s locker. A careful steady twisting popped it open, and in moments Jill pulled the stolen uniform coverall over her clothing. Her lanyard end, stuck into a zipped upper pocket, simulated possession of a badge, and her handbag she wrapped in the towel, and then jammed it under her arm. Hopefully no one would question the bundle.

It was the work of a moment to select a bus going west, with “Memphis” on its electronic display, and slip aboard, ignored by the ticket-checker and the SS guard nearby. Only a few passengers had boarded so far, so Jill stepped into the tiny restroom near the back and stripped off her coverall, rolling it up in the towel, leaving herself back in her street clothes.

Taking a seat far to the right rear, she stuffed the bundle far underneath and then ate a protein bar and drank some water from her big handbag. She slouched down against the window and closed her eyes. Most people didn’t bother the sleeping.

It was only when there came a commotion at the front of the bus that she began to worry. A middle-aged woman was holding a heated conversation with the bus driver. Looking down the long aisle, Jill could see the bus was now packed full, and in a flash she realized what must have happened.

While passengers were not assigned seats, the total number of tickets sold would not exceed the number of places. The woman was complaining that she had no place to sit.

Jill knew the next thing that would happen was a person-by-person check of tickets, possibly with the SS watching closely.

Trapped! Every nerve screamed to get off the bus and run, but she kept outwardly calm and casually stood up, slipping into the restroom again. If only no one noticed…

Though she hoped her ploy would work, inside the restroom she prepared to be taken, the way she had rehearsed many times. She’d already pre-concealed many useful items about her person, such as hobby knife blades sewn into her collar and other seams, and notched fine piano wire that would slice through wood or flesh inside her shoelaces. Now she took out a handful of tied-off condoms containing other things, and swallowed them. If they did not perform an X-ray, she should be able to recover them later. She also dumped her knife in the trash slot. Then she started eating and drinking everything she had left.

A knock on the door dropped her heart into her stomach, and as she finished the last of her food, she put on her best smile and waited, on the off chance they would go away. The knock came more insistently, then a curse and a rattling. Eventually the door opened to show a maintenance worker and an SS guard, with two more visible behind.

“Come with me, please,” the hard-faced man said, and Jill sighed and shrugged.

“Okay,” she said brightly in her ditziest voice.

He snapped handcuffs on her wrists in front, then used them to pull her along off the bus.

“Come on,” she whined, “I’m broke and trying to get to Memphis. It’s not a federal offense.”

The three SS officers took her into a holding area, one small bleak room of two, and fastened the cuffs to a lock in the middle of a bolted-down steel table. Then a woman wearing latex gloves searched her and took all the obvious things from off of her, but none of her well-concealed items. No body cavity search yet, but she was ready for it.

Then they left her there for an hour.

When they came back in, Jill knew she was done. The cat-cream smile on the hard face of the female SS captain, the smirks displayed by her muscular sergeants, and the nervous look the technician gave her as he took a blood sample gave it away. “Positive,” the man said after three awkward minutes.

“Take this Sicko to the processing center,” the captain snapped. “Standard protocol.”

One sergeant lifted a dart gun and shot Jill in the neck. She jerked with the pain, but did not resist. Her vision tunneled and she felt dizzy, and then someone threw a hood over her head. She blacked out.

Chapter Seven

Jill came to in stifling heat, which seemed strange for early November. The reason became instantly evident, as she felt people pressing up against her. She lifted her now-free hands to take off the hood, stuffing it into her jacket pocket. As a prisoner, almost anything they let her keep might prove useful.

Around her she saw at least sixty people crammed into the interior of what must be the back of a semi trailer. The dimensions fit, and she found herself next to the doors, in a corner. Everyone sat or lay against each other, and as far as she could tell there were no facilities, or even lamps. Cracks around the doors and what looked to be air holes punched in the ceiling provided the only light. The structure vibrated with the idling of a diesel engine.

Sweat poured down Jill’s face, the same as others around her. She was about to try to talk to the woman closest to her when their prison lurched into motion. Immediately some relief from the heat came as moving air filtered into the interior, and she breathed deeply. The trailer tipped as it descended a slope, the truck’s engine whining as the driver braked with its resistance. The prisoners flopped left and right as the vehicle rounded switchbacks. They appeared to be descending a mountainside.

Jill thought back to the words of the park ranger – something about the SS and a processing center in the park – and the irony struck her. She must have ended up back in Monte Sano State Park to start her journey – to where?

Carefully she reached down into her trousers and extracted the stretched condom containing the GPS from the only place she could have hidden it. Needs must when the Devil drives.

Sliding it into her windbreaker, she turned it on, but it could not lock onto its satellite signals, probably because of the metal roof. She turned it off and slipped it into an inside pocket.

Raising her head, she met the eyes of a lean, scarred-faced man of about forty-five, with a day’s growth of stubble. Jill smiled, but the one he returned had nothing of reassurance in it. She told herself not to worry; they were all Eden Plague carriers in here, and the virtue effect should limit or eliminate any serious problems among the prisoners.

At least she hoped so. Humans could overcome almost any taboo or conscience if pushed too far. She idly wondered whether she could ever resort to cannibalism if she was starving badly enough. It was a question no one was likely to be able to answer until they actually faced it.

And what made her so sure everyone here had the Plague? Perhaps they had tossed a few common felons or political prisoners in with them. After all, while Jews were the most well-known target of the Nazi holocaust, they also interned and killed or sterilized other “undesirables,” – communists, homosexuals, activist clergy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “gypsy” Roma, even single mothers who weren’t “Aryan.”

Jill suspected any number of grudges had been recently settled by turning in friends and neighbors for any available offense. Also, infecting and interning some of the hardcore prison population in the camps might seem like a viable solution to hard-pressed bureaucrats.

Or perhaps not bothering to infect them. She resisted glancing at the scar-faced man again. If he had the Plague, those marks would have been healed, and he’d look younger, unless he just recently got infected. Mentally she marked him as a wild card; someone that could help or hinder her plans…plans to escape.

***

Four hours later they were let out at a rest stop under the close eye of a busload of SS. The troops had blocked off the entrances so only the detainees could access the restrooms and drinking fountains. Long lines formed immediately, exacerbated by the unwillingness of a couple of frightened people to leave their toilet stalls. Nonsensical, perhaps, but Jill could feel the fear coming from her fellow prisoners like waves of heat.

Once she’d had her turn, she sidled over to the scarred man. Now she could see blue monotone tattoos up and down his arms and peeking from under his collar. Prison ink, using the oily color from ballpoint pens, laboriously hand-drawn with sewing needles.

He didn’t look at her, but he was certainly aware. “What?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

Interesting, that they let him keep those. “You don’t have the Plague,” she stated.

“Nope. Why would I want it?”

“Make you stronger, younger, heal faster.”

“Make me a pussy.” He took a deep drag.

“I’m infected,” Jill said casually, and then turned to him. Without telegraphing, she shot a straight right to his jaw. It hurt like hell; she thought she might have broken her hand. She’d certainly broken the first rule of street fighting: never hit your target’s head with your naked fist. It tended to do more damage to the hand than to the opponent.

In this case it put the thin man down, but not out. From his hands and knees he shook his head like a dog, then roared as he came to his feet, but Jill was already fifty feet away. She had turned and speed-walked as soon as she’d struck him, and the SS guards were already converging on the troublesome man with truncheons. As expected, they’d marked him as a felon and been ready.

Instead of fighting back, he covered up and curled into a ball, just protecting his head, belly and groin. After a short beating, they left him alone, as Jill thought they might. They had no mandate to respect their prisoners’ rights, so they just punished anyone who got out of line and then backed off.

Jill walked warily over to the bruised and battered man, now lying on his back with his knees up. She squatted down near his head, just out of easy reach. “I bet that hurt,” she said conversationally.

“What do you want?” he coughed.

Not, ‘Why did you do that?’ Definitely an experienced inmate.

“Do I seem like a pussy?” Jill asked, glancing around. A couple of the guards watched from a distance, and one licked his lips.

“Guess not,” he replied.

“You’re a hard case, probably a lifer,” Jill stated. “Somebody got sick of you causing trouble and transferred you to the Plague detainee system, right?”

“Guess so. So?”

“So I’m a cop. How’s that for funny?” She smiled without humor. “That means I know guys like you, inside and out. I also know law enforcement inside and out. You obviously know prisons inside and out. Together, we could get the hell out of this trap we’re in.”

He turned on his side and coughed again. Blood spat onto the concrete. “How’s that gonna work? I’m all messed up. Think they broke some ribs. Might have nicked a lung.”

Jill grinned. “Oh, I think we can fix that. What do they call you?”

He held up a forearm with a picture of a coiled snake. “They call me Python, ‘cause I’m long and skinny, but once I get ahold of you, you’re dead.”

“Excellent. You can call me Reaper, because I’ve sent so many sons of bitches like you to hell.” Melodramatic for sure, but she knew bravado backed up by violence was the only thing that impressed men like him.

“You don’t sound like any lady cop I ever knew.” Python rolled to his knees, and Jill stood up, offering him the hand she’d hit him with. It had stopped throbbing, and if she had to hit him again, she wanted to use a fresh one.

“Let me show you my ink,” she said as she helped him to his feet. She unzipped her windbreaker and bared her left shoulder, where the fouled anchor of the Marine Corps blazed in red and gold. “I’ve probably killed more people than you have.”

“Kill for your country and you’re a hero. Kill for yourself and you’re a criminal.” Python spat more blood and coughed, putting his palms on his knees.

“Just the way it is. Come on, thin man, let’s load up.” The guards blew whistles and herded the people back into the truck. She let him lean on her, but remained alert to treachery. By the informal felon’s code, as far as she understood it, he should have accepted her as someone to respect…or at least, he’d fake it for as long as it took to recover and stab her in the back.

Inside, she muscled them into her same corner, suppressing her feelings of guilt at shoving these sheep around. But she was a sheepdog, and always had been. Sometimes the herd needed some nips on their asses to keep them in line. She also felt it important to keep looking tough in her new partner’s eyes.

Once they sat down shoulder to shoulder, Jill turned to Python. “Now I’m going to do something you’re gonna like, but don’t let it go to your head. Either of them.”

“What?”

Jill put both hands behind the man’s grizzled neck and pressed his mouth to hers for the deepest kiss she could manage. After a moment of surprise, he responded, bringing his palms up to her breasts, but she broke the lip-lock and then grabbed his thumbs, pulling his hands away. “Like I said, chill out, big boy. Plenty of time for that later.”

I don’t like playing with a man’s urges, she thought, but right now, I’d stretch my principles quite a lot to get out of here.

“You’ll be feeling a lot better soon, because I just gave you the Plague,” Jill continued. “Unfortunately you’re also going to get hungry, but I can’t do much about that.” Talking about it reminded her of the gnawing pangs in her own belly. She wondered whether the SS would feed them or just let them waste away. From what she understood, the internment facilities were not death camps, but then again, that kind of thing could be covered up for quite a while.

“Guess I got no choice now.”

“Nope. Deal with it.” Jill sighed, blowing air out of her cheeks. “Let me tell you a story.” She noticed heads turning her way, watching, listening, so she raised her voice. “Let me tell everyone here a story, since we don’t have much to keep us entertained. I hope you remember it, and keep telling it, because in it, our government murdered three thousand innocent people, and maybe a lot more. It’s about a Marine in the military police, who was helping to train Iraqi security forces…”

***

Late the next day, threescore hungry, tired people found themselves herded through the gates of Internment Camp 240. Black-clad SS lined up with truncheons, and used them on several people who didn’t move fast enough.

Give people a little power, and they will use it, and not usually for good.

Jill stayed close to Python, but not too close, trying to give the guards nothing out of place to focus on. Right now they were alert and primed for trouble. The time to do something different, anything against the rules or to create an advantage was later, when they were lulled by the routine.

On the other hand, standard POW doctrine said the best time to escape was early on, before things got too organized, and when there might still be holes in their procedures. Somewhere, sometime she should be able to find a sweet spot, between the disruption of newness and the dullness of routine.

Surreptitiously checking her GPS confirmed what she already suspected from the harvested fields of cornstalks all around: the camp was in Iowa. More precisely, to the northwest of the town of Osceola, which was forty or fifty miles south of Des Moines. She could see several farmhouses, but no activity. Perhaps they had been evacuated.

It was a prime spot for a prison camp, with nothing but rough fields in all directions. A few wooded gullies offered the illusion of cover, but she had no doubt there was very little in the area the SS had not thoroughly reconnoitered. Once outside the double barbed-wire fence, where would the average escapee go?

They were herded into lines to be processed. First they passed through large communal restrooms with no walls between toilets. Under the watchful eyes of hard-faced female guards, they did their business. Jill considered putting the GPS back in its hiding place, but she did not know whether a body cavity search still awaited, and decided to abandon it. She set the little box down beside her toilet, one of the few places not easily visible, and left it there. Better that she not be caught and marked as knowing anything special.

She also made sure she retained what was in her bowels, hopefully until she had some privacy to retrieve the things inside.

In the next building they were checked once more, but still with no body cavity search. There seemed to be a lot of prisoners in the camp, and relatively few guards. Perhaps they didn’t have enough manpower – or at least, enough people willing to do this kind of work. Perhaps they relied on the Eden Plague virtue effect to minimize any trouble. Perhaps they thought the people were all sheep.

Jill tried to recall what she knew about the internment of Japanese civilians in World War Two. It was probably a closer analogy than Nazi concentration camps. Hopefully the point of this facility was not extermination…at least, not now. Things might change as the “Eden Problem” spread, and if the Unionist party ever took full power.

After processing, the men and women mingled again. They’re going to have a population explosion in about nine months if they aren’t careful. That thought led her down dark paths as she considered just how the SS was likely to prevent it. Forced sterilization, at least vasectomies for the men, seemed like the easiest method. She wondered if the Plague could reverse such a surgery.

At the last station, she received a shrink-wrapped package the size of a large pillow. It looked like it held bedding and a few sundries. She also received an electronic card with a number on it. “Don’t lose that, or you won’t eat,” the clerk said. “Next!”

Jill exited the building into the interior of the camp. “What now, boss?” Python asked as he walked up to her, hands thrust into jeans pockets in the cold breeze.

“Recon the camp. You go left, I’ll go right, along the fence line. Come back through the middle and meet right there.” Jill pointed with her chin at what looked like a chapel building, easy to spot for its plain spire.

Jill’s man nodded and turned to stroll the fence counterclockwise, and she did the same on the other side. She counted at least forty two-story barracks on this side of the camp, along with dining halls, muddy ball fields with bleachers, a laundry, a separate shower building, and a large supply store that sold basic necessities like soap and towels. All the buildings looked to be prefabs, hastily thrown up with no foundations, no drainage, and rudimentary sidewalks made of discarded wooden pallets. It would be hell when it rained.

Inside one near-empty barracks building she added up the bunks. More than one hundred double racks meant at least two hundred people per, eight thousand on this side of the camp. Room for sixteen thousand in this place alone, then, and a lot more could be crammed in if necessary.

Rounding a corner, she came upon two rough-looking young men. Their eyes widened on seeing her, and they moved to obstruct her way. Each had a two-by-two board about the length of a baseball bat, and prison ink on their arms.

Great. Convicts preying on Edens.

Quickly, Jill put her back to the wall beside her and glanced back the way she had come. Another man, older than the first two, blocked her retreat with a shiv in his hand.

“Don’t start no trouble now, missy,” one of the younger ones in front of her said. “We just want the packet. Give it to us and you can go.”

Letting them have it might have been the smart play, but everything Jill had ever heard about prisons said that backing down was a sure-fire way to look weak and be preyed upon. Even if this place hadn’t turned into a hellhole yet, she wasn’t about to let these bastards help it along the way.

Instead of talking, she dropped the package into the dirt and took three quick strides toward the older man. While most people are more afraid of a knife than a club, Jill knew that two men with sticks were far more dangerous than one with a short blade.

The man slashed at her with the knife and backed up instinctively, clearly not ready for her aggressive move. She avoided his swing easily and kicked at his knee, connecting solidly. He fell with a grunt of pain.

One down.

Jill immediately turned and ran toward the opposite building’s wall, knowing the two bat-men would be rushing her from behind. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw one helping the man with the knife, and the other following her with stick raised.

The older one must be the leader of their little bandit gang, and the younger one had given in to his instinct to please his boss. Bad move. Turning around, she put the wall on her right, her attacker between herself and the other two, so she could see them all. When he swung, right-handed baseball style as she expected, she jumped back, and his stick slammed into the building.

Instantly she reversed and kicked upward, aiming at his groin, but happy to come in a little high and drive the ball of her foot into his belly. He bent over with a whoosh of breath so she grabbed his medium-length hair, driving her knee into his face. Something broke, and he dropped senseless onto the ground.

Jill picked up the stick, hefting it as she walked toward the other two. “Who’s next?” she asked cheerfully.

The younger man started for her with his stick, but the older one grabbed his elbow. “No,” he said. “Let’s go.” The two men slunk off around the corner, leaving their compatriot to his fate.

Jill stood over the fallen man and thought for a moment, and then she worked a tiny hobby blade out of a seam in her jacket collar, the kind that fitted into a handle the size of a pencil. Using it, she stabbed her wrist over a vein and squatted to splash the resultant gush of blood into his half-open mouth. Then she picked up her package and left, her thumb sealing the cut for the minute or two it took to heal.

Jill waited for Python for fifteen minutes at the side of the chapel. When he arrived, she told him about her encounter. Then they compared notes on the camp. The only major difference in his side seemed to be that instead of a supply store it had an indoor auditorium seating at least a thousand.

“Looks like we find our own place,” Python rumbled. “Lots of people have staked their own spaces with hanging blankets and scrounged materials. I checked out eight or nine buildings. Some are full of families, and the men are not letting anyone that doesn’t live there inside. One had only women, with the same setup. One with a bunch of hard cases had no security at all, but I had to kick the shit out of two guys to get out.”

“It’s a new camp,” she said. “Not full yet. Wild West still. There is probably no prisoners’ administration, no central authority. Many of the people are Edens but until all the troublemakers are infected, it’s going to be a dangerous place.”

“Yeah. I saw three roving patrols of a dozen SS each, with riot armor, truncheons, beanbag air guns and radios. All the firearms are outside the fence. There’s also a command post inside the auditorium.”

Jill nodded. “Yeah. I saw ten or twelve troops around the supply store. I wonder what passes for currency here?”

“Camp scrip.” Python handed her a small piece of printed plastic. “Everyone gets a weekly allotment in cash. There’s some inside your packet. Also I saw normal money, and barter – cigarettes, candy. Like any jail. Inside is inside.”

“Yeah. So, any ideas on where is safe to crash?”

He shrugged. “Maybe someplace with couples?”

“Good idea. Let’s go look.”

They’d lost count of barracks buildings when they found what they were looking for: a half-full building with young people, mostly paired off. A few had babies, and there were a few groups of teenagers trying to look tough and uncaring. Mostly they seemed forlorn and lost. Jill and Python claimed an area for themselves.

One of the items Jill retrieved on her first toilet visit was a tiny multi-tool. Using its pliers, they partly dismantled four bunked beds and built a corner enclosure they could pull inward, creating some security when they slept. It also yielded some short, heavy lengths of steel pipe that could be concealed in waistbands and used as weapons.

“All right. I’m starving,” Python said. To Jill he looked sallow and unhealthy, and she realized he must be running on empty as his body healed the damage she’d inflicted on him.

“Yeah, me too.” They found the nearest cafeteria and used their cards to gain entrance.

Once inside they were allowed once through the serving line, the food dished out by sullen trusties under the watchful eyes of more SS guards. They exited with their trays from the service area into a communal dining room with more guards.

Jill and Python ate ravenously as they observed their fellow detainees. Almost everyone else consumed all they had immediately. Jill wondered how long before they would be allowed to eat again – a certain number of hours? Three times per day? A few people slipped fruit or other portable food into pockets, and the guards did not seem to care.

It interested Jill to classify those who saved food. One category included parents whose children did not eat everything. Uninfected hard cases seemed to do it often as well. She guessed their caloric needs were less than an Eden, and they would barter or hoard what they could. A third type of people simply looked thin, even malnourished. She wondered about those.

Once they had finished eating, they went back to their bunks in the barracks block. No one had disturbed their bedding, and they’d brought everything portable, such as soap and scrip, with them in their pockets.

A half hour of conversation with their new barracks mates gave them a lot of information about the routine of the camp. Meals could be had three times a day, once during each eight-hour period. Some ate late and then early, to feel full. Some spaced their meals out equally. Almost everyone seemed hungry all the time, and food was the most valuable commodity in the camp.

That explained the parents saving food for kids, or just for later, and the hard cases, for barter. Jill wondered again about those she dubbed “skinnies.” What was their story? Nobody in their barracks knew, or had even noticed.

***

A week later Jill and Python found out, by the simple expedient of following one of them. He skulked into a nondescript barracks building no different from any other, except for two things. It was one of the closest to the edge of the camp, less than fifty yards from the fence. It was also controlled by men and women with a certain look about them.

A military look. Jill could spot them a mile away, and they had it.

“I think we just found our escape committee,” she said, nudging her sidekick as they watched from well back.

“How can you tell?” Python seemed to be genuinely curious.

“How can you spot a con?”

He shrugged. “Just a look they got.”

“Right. I can spot military. It’s also close to the wire. And you see that guy carrying in a board? I bet we see another couple of boards, or maybe metal from bunks, brought inside in the next few minutes.”

They watched, and it was just as Jill had said. “I think they got a tunnel in there.”

Python snorted. “What do they need a tunnel for? There’s only two hundred guards on site at any one time, and ten thousand people. We could just grab pipes and beat down the wire if we could get people organized.”

“These people aren’t cons. Only one in fifty, one in a hundred is going to stick his neck out. A tunnel is low risk, high payoff.”

“So why the skinnies?”

Jill replied, “They’re giving up some of their food for the workers. Hard work means extra calories. Doubly so for those with the Plague.”

“They could have enough if they got more people to contribute.”

“But then more people would know about it. There have to be informers among us, probably some of the hard cases, paid off in cigarettes, extra food, scrip. Maybe drugs.”

“Yeah,” Python mused. “I’ve seen some meth around. Also a few phones.”

“Those won’t do us any good. Besides, they’ll all be bugged. It’s easy when there’s only one tower in line of sight.” Jill pointed off in the distance at a tall structure, perhaps five miles away, on a low hill. “So forget about that. We just need to get out.”

“So…we join this escape committee?”

Jill motioned Python back, and started walking around, not wanting anyone to notice their scrutiny. “What do you think we should do?”

His forehead wrinkled in thought. “If we muscle in, we’ll have to do something. Dig, or give up food, or something. Also, if they get caught, we do too. Some of the troublemakers already been put in solitary.” The confinement blockhouse stood outside the wire, an ugly windowless rectangle with steel doors. Those who spent time there came back cowed and starved.

“Yeah. I don’t think they’re following the Geneva Conventions inside there, either. So, I’m with you. Let’s not get caught. But we can still help.”

“How?” They turned a corner and walked over to the inside track along the wire, where many of the detainees strolled. It was the closest they could get to feeling unconfined.

Jill replied, “We can gather food, and supply it to them. We just have to figure out a simple way to keep our distance. And I have another idea, but it’s going to be a lot trickier. I’ll tell you about it later, when I’ve thought about it some more.”

“Well I got an idea about the food. We can charge for security.”

Jill glanced crossways at Python. “What?”

He shrugged. “We’re already running the muscle for our barracks building. Might as well charge the straights something for it.”

“Python, I need you to think like a cop on this one, not a con. Be a sheepdog, not a wolf.”

He laughed. “Me? A cop? You’re kidding.”

Jill stopped and faced the thin man, now a lot less grizzled and scarred. “I got news for you, Keith. Yeah, I know that’s your name. Don’t ask me how. You’re a different person already. You’re still a hard case, but I bet the thought of murdering someone in cold blood twists your guts up.”

He looked uncomfortable, shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

“Look,” she said, putting a hand on his arm, the first time she’d touched him with anything like affection since she’d passed him the Plague. “Violence has its place in the world. I know, because I spent my youth in a street gang and then I joined the Marine Corps. I’m not asking you to be weak. I’m telling you that you can be strong and good at the same time.”

Then she kissed him, for real. “Let’s go back to the barracks.”

He swallowed. “What about getting pregnant?”

And that proves you’ve changed, Keith my Python. The old you wouldn’t have even cared.

“I think we can have some fun even without that risk.”

***

“I can’t believe this is working.” Python shook his head. “Getting everyone in our block to chip in food…don’t make no sense.”

“Fear isn’t the only human motivator,” Jill replied. “Altruism, kindness, or just enlightened self interest work too, otherwise who would give to charity?”

“Tax breaks,” Python ventured.

“That helps,” she admitted, “and getting your name on a plaque, things like that. But some people just give because they want to help people. Or they believe in karma, or God, or something like that. What goes around, comes around.”

“And payback’s a bitch. Okay.” He looked at the pillowcases of food they’d collected from the nearly two hundred people in their building. It had become a popular block even before they organized better security, after Jill and Python had dealt with a couple of attempts to extort their fellow prisoners.

The place even had a waiting list, because Jill had organized a score of the men and a couple of the women into a neighborhood watch. Half the collected food went to them, adding roughly twenty percent to her unofficial security officers’ diets. It was only fair, since they did work the hardest.

The other half of the food filled the two pillowcases they carried. Now that one part of her plan had worked out, Jill was ready for the next. “Let’s go.”

Python didn’t ask where.

They approached the escape barracks as night fell, but before the lights came on. It was the best time to move around unseen. A challenge came from the side door they’d chosen: “Whatta yous want?”

“Boston or Philly?” Jill asked.

“Neithuh. Woostuh. I’m still askin’, whatta yous want?”

“Got something for you.” They set the pillowcases down on the steps of the entranceway, and turned to walk away.

“Hey, what’s this about?”

“Ask your boss,” Jill replied over her shoulder. They rounded the nearest building just as the lights began to glow along the fence line, throwing harsh shadows inward.

The next night they returned to the same building, different door, a few minutes earlier. This time they dumped the pillowcases, leaving the lookout to scramble as loose fruit, rolls and cookies spilled over the steps.

The third night they stopped by the side door of the nearest barracks and waved the lookout over. He ignored their gestures, but after a few minutes, a dark-skinned woman walked out past the watcher and over to them.

She looked young, as all Plague carriers did, except for her eyes, which seemed ancient. And she didn’t smile. “What’s this about?” she asked.

Jill gestured at the food. “We need our pillowcases back. We can’t give away two every time we bring you supplies.”

“And why the hell are you giving us supplies?”

“For your tunnel rats.”

The woman’s jaw worked, and she looked as if she would explode. Then she mastered herself with an effort, putting on a bland smile, and sat down on the steps next to them. Blazing lights came on just then, aimed inward on poles around the outside of the fence, and from dim twilight the three were plunged into deep shadow, shielded by the buildings.

“So who are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Reaper. This is Python,” Jill replied.

“Convicts.” Disdain tinged her voice.

Jill only laughed. “Convicts might be your salvation.”

“Convicts might be informers. We can’t trust anyone that isn’t an Eden.”

Jill snorted. “Oh, it’s a noun now? Edens, Sickos, Unies…labels. Doesn’t mean you can trust all Edens either. You think Edens are immune to fear or bribery, or threats to their kids? I bet the goons already know about your tunnel. We figured it out our first week here.”

“So why are you helping?”

Jill rolled up her sleeve, showing her the tattoo that perfected Eden eyes could see in the dimness. “Because I’m not a convict. I’m a Marine. It’s my duty to defend my country against all enemies, foreign or domestic. These enemies seem pretty domestic to me. And it’s my duty to escape.”

“What about him?” The woman glanced at Python.

“He’s with me. That’s all you need to know.”

The woman nodded slowly. “Okay. You can call me Cee. We’ll take your food, and thank you for it. What do you want in return?”

Jill smiled. “Two assault rifles and ammo would be nice.”

Cee snorted. “Fat chance.”

“Okay, then, how about information? We haven’t heard much news in a while. If anyone gets out, where is there to go?”

“Mexico and Canada…one of the Caribbean islands. Any other country, really, except China and Russia. Most places have no policy against Edens, so at least we wouldn’t be rounded up.” A light breeze began, bringing them the smell of earth and farm.

Jill nodded, musing. “And after you get some people out and running?”

“We have a few plans.”

“I don’t want details, Cee. I just want to know you have some kind of objective other than merely crossing the wire. We’re in the middle of a whole lot of nothing, and the little towns nearby won’t be hard to search, unless the entire population is noncompliant.”

Cee licked her lips. “I shouldn’t even be discussing this with you. I only just met you.”

“Whatever. But from being on the other side of this situation, I’ll tell you that the best time to stage your escape is when something changes – the bigger the better. Anything that disrupts the routine will provide an opportunity.”

“Understood.”

Jill turned to look the woman in the face. “And one other thing, since you asked. The thing I really want is a tipoff when you go. Twelve hours, even six.”

“You don’t want to go with us?” Cee seemed surprised.

“Oh, hell no.”

Cee waited for Jill to go on but she did not continue, so the dark woman shrugged and stood up. “All right. I’ll send a runner by your building on the day before.”

“Fair enough.” Jill held out her hand to shake, then Python did the same, surprising the other woman.

“Good luck,” he said, and Cee gave him a quizzical look before she walked back to her barracks and her tunnel. “Didn’t know quite what to make of me,” Python said when she had gone.

“That’s how I want it. Keep ’em guessing.” Jill slapped him on his shoulder, grown rock-hard with surplus food and the exercise regimen she demanded. “Let’s go.”

As they walked back to their block, Python asked, “I thought you said before you wanted to go to L.A. Now you’re asking about Mexico and stuff.”

“I did a lot of thinking about that. I’m not just listed as AWOL anymore. I’m in their records as infected. My biometrics, my fingerprints, probably my DNA…it’s too dangerous. Whatever happened to my family, I can’t help the dead, and I’d be just causing trouble for any survivors. You too, for that matter. The best thing I – we – can do now is just get away to somewhere that doesn’t lock up people like us. Then maybe we can think about fighting back.”

“I’m all right with that,” Python replied.

“How come you never talk about your family?” she asked him as they walked.

“I treated them like shit. They don’t want to see me. I don’t blame them.” He sounded regretful.

“Well, it’s never too late. My old man wasn’t happy with me running with a gang. If I hadn’t joined up, he’d probably have thrown me out of the house anyway.”

“He must have been happy when you enlisted.”

Jill nodded. “Yeah, he was proud of me, but I was so angry at him that I didn’t talk to him for years. And now…now maybe it’s too late.”

“You just told me it’s never too late.”

She laughed. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

The security men at their block door nodded to the pair as they entered their well-run barracks. People immediately started to approach; Jill had become a de facto judge and jury when anything was in dispute. She sighed, and said, “Give me five minutes, folks.”

Chapter Eight

Six weeks later

Despite all best-laid plans, something went wrong. It always does, Jill thought as sirens wailed in the middle of the night, waking her and Python from a sound sleep. They rolled out of bed and dressed hurriedly. Most of the detainees streamed out of the barracks, but he and she climbed up the improvised ladder they kept ready, and out the ceiling hatch onto the sloping roof. From there, they could see a lot of the camp.

SS guards poured out of their own living quarters on the other side of the main gate, toting weapons and jumping into every available vehicle. “It looks like they woke all three shifts up,” Jill remarked, craning her neck as she held onto a ventilation duct at the apex of the roof. “Something big.”

It wasn’t long before they could see that the troops had spread out around the outside of the camp, driving Humvees and trucks through the empty cornfields with lights blazing. Eventually about half of the available manpower concentrated itself off to the northwest.

Python got it first. “That’s near the tunnel block.”

“Shit. You’re right. Do you think they went early? Nobody told us. Damn.” Jill spat a few more choice epithets. “And no way we can break out now, not with a Humvee every fifty yards and the lights on. Why didn’t they tell us?”

“Maybe they thought we were informants.” He shrugged.

We could have taken the lights down, we could have organized diversions, we have improvised wire cutters to cut through and slip away in the confusion…damn you, Cee, we could have made you successful, or at least, not the fiasco this will be. Jill kicked the ventilation duct in frustration. “Let’s go talk to our block. Nothing to see here.”

Back inside, Jill coordinated with her building’s guardians, as she thought of them, telling them to keep the entrances secure and try to persuade people to come back and go to bed. Now was not the time to step out of line, not with the SS cocked and locked and jumpy as hell. Then she and Python settled back to wait, and eventually to sleep.

When the sun came up, winter-late, she sent her people out with instructions to gather information about what had happened. Soon she had pieced together the story. “You called it,” she said to Python. “For whatever stupid reason, they went last night, and they all got caught. They should have told us, and they didn’t. They should have gone at nightfall to maximize their hours of darkness, but instead they went at two in the morning.”

“Were the guards waiting for them?”

“No, but they got alerted quick, so Cee was right about that. Someone ratted them out, just not us.”

Python smacked a fist into his palm. “So much for your grand diversion.”

“Yes, but now we have to worry about the crackdown.” Jill looked him in the eyes. “You know it’s coming.”

“Always does. They let the camp run easy for a while, but now whoever’s in charge has to make a show of strength, and punishment.” He picked up an apple, stared at it, then bit. “Gonna get interesting,” he said around a mouthful.

It didn’t get interesting until the next day, after an uneasy night. That morning the word spread after the usual pickup of food supplies for the dining halls: rations were being cut by one third; that is, one full meal a day. Additionally, the guards announced a curfew. Everyone would be confined to their barracks blocks between sundown and sunup.

And one more thing she had more or less predicted. All infected internees would soon be implanted with birth control devices, among a range of choices, or they could opt for sterilization. She wondered how long before the choices would evaporate and the SS would choose the cheapest and most permanent final option.

Jill expected – hoped even, that this would cause a surge of unrest, but if most people were sheep, then most Edens were lambs. Without a direct threat, their sense of outrage did not translate into action, and the virtue effect’s suppression of violent impulses rendered the critical mass needed to form a mob extremely unlikely.

Insight flashed through Jill, then, about why the camp had been so easygoing until now. To a certain extent the SS must have believed their own propaganda – which was always a danger of having too much control. They had thought that Edens wouldn’t even try to escape or resist in any way, but making people less selfish and violent didn’t mean they were always passive.

She herself didn’t feel any inhibitions on her own use of force, except if it was intended to kill: then, she experienced a physical revulsion. But compartmentalization was part of any warrior’s mentality, and so as long as she kept her goals, reasons – rationales, anyway – firmly in mind, she had no problem inflicting corrective action on those that deserved it.

Her conscience remained clear, and that was all the Plague seemed to care about.

Jill wondered about people who simply had no consciences – sociopaths, psychopaths. Would the Plague repair their brains? What if the abnormality was psychological and not physiological? What would people like that look like? Could they even be identified?

She filed those thoughts for later.

Immediately Jill did away with the contribution of food for the guardians. On two thirds of the former diet, every Eden would soon begin to waste away; in effect, starving. Normals – those few left in the camp, as infection naturally only went one direction – could get by on a lot less.

But most of those normals were hard cases, and were not likely to give up anything.

That would have been another benefit of organizing a mass tunnel escape. Leaving the ration cards behind in the hands of designated leaders could have provided a food surplus, at least for as long as it took the guards to sort it all out. That could have been stored against another contingency.

Now everyone would just grow weaker and weaker.

Jill turned to Python. “We have to act soon, on our own. Every day from now on, we’ll be less capable. And we can’t train hard anymore, because we won’t have the calories.”

“Yeah. We can stretch that out with the camp scrip we got stashed,” – they had built up a savings account from contributions – “but food prices are gonna go up. A lot.”

“Do you have any ideas on what we can do that won’t prey off people here?”

“Yeah.” He looked at her speculatively. “If by ‘people’ you mean the sheep. That leaves the hard cases. Get control of them and their ration cards, and there’s more food for everyone. Might get ugly, though.” He finished his apple, core and all, discarding only the stem.

“Too ugly,” Jill said, shaking her head. “We’re not equipped to keep them locked up, even if I could stomach starving them for our own benefit.”

“Who says we let them live?” Python grinned an evil grin. “Just kidding, boss.”

“No, but what you say has some merit. It’s given me an idea.”

“What?”

Jill grinned an evil grin of her own.

***

Python and Jill approached the hard cases’ block in the early afternoon. Though their number had dwindled, there were still forty or fifty of the convicts that preferred to live together, instinctively afraid of the Edens – of contamination, perhaps, or of being turned into sheep.

Or of being cured of their sick desires.

Behind Jill and Python, ten of their guardians waited, close enough to intervene if things got out of hand. At the bottom of the front steps the two stopped, looking up at the tattooed man that sat keeping watch. From inside the block Jill could hear the sounds of grunting and group encouragement – weightlifting, or a physical contest, she hoped.

“What?” the man asked disdainfully.

Python said, “We need to talk to Drake.”

“Drake don’t need to talk to you,” the bull-necked bruiser replied.

“Why don’t you let him decide?” Jill cocked her hip suggestively.

“Don’t need no Sicko whores, either.”

“Tell him we got something he wants.”

“What?” The man stood up, towering over them from the top of the steps.

Python shook his head, slowly. “For Drake.”

Finally the hard case grunted and signaled for another to watch the door while he went inside. A few moments later a fit man in a sleeveless undershirt stepped out. He looked about forty, with thick hair and intelligent eyes. Muscular, but not massive. Jill knew that somehow this man managed to keep these men in line and working for him, so he had brains as well as brawn.

“I’m Drake,” he said, wiping his sweaty hands on a towel. Unlike his underlings, he seemed devoid of bravado. “You are?”

“Python. This here’s Reaper. We have some information for you, and a proposition.”

Drake nodded, looking closely at them both. “Come in.”

Python smiled. “No thanks. How about we sit down at that table over there, where your boys and ours can all see us.”

Drake stared coldly at them for a moment, then turned to speak back through the doorway. “Get Fish.” A moment later a broad man with scarred knuckles stepped out, and the two convicts walked over to the nearby table.

Jill and Python went to the other side, and they sat down together. Drake stared at Python expectantly, until he made a motion with his eyes at Jill. “Ah, so you’re the boss,” the felons’ leader said to her. “His type I know. He’s been inside. But you…you puzzle me.”

“The same to you, Drake. I’ll enlighten you. I’m a military cop. The only thing I did wrong was get my legs blown off in the desert and then get infected with the Plague. You know what?” She lifted a trouser leg to show the two-tone skin of her calf. “I’m damn glad I did, because now I got new feet. Your turn.”

Drake’s eyes narrowed, and he took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one. He didn’t offer them to anyone else, not even his lieutenant. “I ran a little smuggling operation down south. I still have some connections, even here. I can get things no one else can.”

“And to the hard cases, you’re the devil they know.” Jill reached over to pluck the cigarette from his fingers with two of hers. Although she didn’t really smoke anymore, she had in her youth, and so managed not to cough as she drew a lungful before starting to hand it back.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ll put off getting the Plague a while longer.” He took out another and then lit it. The whole time his eyes never left hers. “You got balls, I’ll give you that, lady. What you want?”

Jill handed the smoke over to Python, who took it eagerly. “I want what everyone else wants. Out of this hellhole.”

“Hellhole?” Drake laughed. “This place ain’t so bad. Frickin’ country club compared to a supermax.”

“It’s not bad yet, but with two meals a day, food’s going to get tight. Can you keep all of your guys happy?”

“Probably. For quite a while.”

“With your connections, right,” Jill deliberately mocked. “But then there’s the attrition problem.”

Drake’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

Jill continued, “Attrition means –”

“I know what it means, Miss Reaper. I’m a well-read man. You mean that every now and again, one of my guys gets the Plague, and I lose him. But eventually they’ll ship some more hard cases in, and I’ll have reinforcements. And I prefer this arrangement over a supermax pen, even with the crackdown. So again,” Drake pounded his index finger on the table in time to his words, “what – do – you – want?”

“I have a plan to get out. You need to get out. Nobody but you is likely to want out. Me and Python, we’re different, but most of these people are sheep. By the time they get their courage up, it will be too late. They’ll be weak from lack of food. Eden metabolism is too fast. We can’t store fat the way the uninfected can. On the other hand, we can regrow limbs, so…” Jill shrugged.

“Get out how?”

Jill shook her head. “Not yet. Need to build some trust first. Bring four or five guys who can keep their mouths shut to the back corner of chow hall nineteen, tomorrow at two p.m. We’ll show you from there.”

“So you can jump us?”

Jill snorted. “In broad daylight? And where am I gonna get ten guys willing to attack you? My boys here do all right as long as they’re defending someone, but a well-read man such as you should know that Edens aren’t very good at making unprovoked assaults. Unlike yourselves.”

Drake took a drag. “Two it is, then.” Then he handed her the half-full pack of cigarettes.

She accepted it with a nod of thanks, knowing the gesture represented a step forward. Drake and Fish got up and strolled back into their block, and Jill and Python rejoined their own men, returning to their barracks.

They spent the evening preparing.

***

At two they met as planned, Jill, Python, Drake and five of his men. The convict leader’s bodyguards were just a formality to make him feel safe; she wasn’t planning to test them.

Nor did she believe they would do anything to her or Python. The risks to them – Plague contamination, being spotted by watching guards – were too high, especially in broad daylight.

“Follow us,” Jill said, and led the men casually into one of the communal male showers, one with an “Out Of Order” sign on it, guarded by four of her people to make sure everyone stayed away.

Inside, the hard cases looked around warily as Jill walked over to the small central drain grate, and lifted it.

“What, you gonna fit through there?” one of the cons scoffed, and the rest laughed. Except Drake. His eyes narrowed, and he watched.

Jill took out her multi-tool and used it to pry up an adjacent floor panel, about a foot across. Beneath it they could see two feet of space, and then a subfloor. “If we need to, we can pry some more of these up, cut our way through, and then have a reclosable hatch to access the ground under this building.”

“Another tunnel? They’ll be looking for that. Besides, we’re damn near in the center of the camp.” Drake had stated his doubts, but was still listening.

“Ah, but let me ask you. Where does the waste water go?” Jill tapped the shower drain.

“Sewers? There’s some kind of treatment plant off to the east about a mile.”

Jill nodded. “Yes. That’s one reason they constructed this place here, I believe. To take advantage of the new waste plant that serves Osceola. And like any lowest bidders, the building contractors cut as many corners as they could. I’m sure they were under tremendous time pressure, and digging costs money.”

“So?”

“So they didn’t dig.”

Drake growled, “Get to the point, Reaper.”

Jill held up a forestalling hand. “Okay, short version. Old three-foot concrete irrigation pipes run right under this camp. One of them goes almost straight to the plant. Instead of digging a mile-long trench, I’m pretty sure the contractors cracked the pipe and started shoving ten-inch PVC through it, then did the same at the other end to connect to the facility. Or, perhaps, just ran the raw sewage into the irrigation system, but if that were so, I think we’d smell it more than we do.”

Drake smiled. “So if we can get into the pipe, we can scuttle almost all the way to the plant, and dig out there.” He laughed. “Ready-made tunnels. How did you know?”

Jill made an over-there gesture. “I saw the standpipes out in the fields. Those ten-foot-high things sitting in the middle of nowhere? But if you look close, you can see they line up, following the irrigation pipes. They relieve pressure on the system, otherwise it would burst from time to time. All I had to do was figure out where they crossed.”

“Beneath us.”

“Within ten feet of here. We just have to dig, then break through, and after that, bust out the other end. For that I needed muscle; people like you guys who can work hard on short rations.”

Drake nodded slowly. “It could work. Okay, I’ll go along with you for now. We dig, we bust into this irrigation pipe, then we see what’s what. After that, we’ll decide.”

“Fair enough. My guys will secure this place and set lookouts, since it’s near our block. We’ll smuggle in improvised tools for you. We’ll figure out where to get rid of the soil. You just have to rotate your guys in to dig. They’ll undress and work in their underwear, then shower and put their clothes back on to make it all look normal. You can come by any time to check. We’ll put everything back together at night. Deal?”

“Deal.” Drake stuck out his hand. “Kinda wish you weren’t infected.” He held onto hers a moment when she clasped it. “You’d make a hell of a business partner.”

Jill squeezed his in return. “You never know,” she answered, “but let’s stick to the business at hand.”

***

The breakthrough came quickly, on the third day. Lack of hard heavy steel slowed them down, but eventually the four inches of high-grade concrete yielded to the chipping by dismantled bunk poles, free weights, and a smuggled ball-peen hammer. Once they’d made the first hole, widening it took only another shift.

Jill and Python took their turns working hard. Both lost more than five pounds a day, and began to seem severely underfed, if not yet malnourished. Drake didn’t comment on it, but it was clear he’d noticed, and even took a turn himself, probably to show his men he wasn’t to be outdone.

Murphy never sleeps. Occasionally, though, he focuses his attention on the enemy.

Just before noon, one of the lookouts told Jill he’d heard something was happening at the SS complex out front, so she told the crew to keep digging while she and Python meandered over to have a look, along with half of the internees. For once the guards did not yell and threaten the people back, so they lined the cyclone-and-barbed-wire inner barrier, watching. Any break in the routine made for a relief from boredom.

Instead of pushing to the front, Python boosted Jill up on top of the chapel roof. She then gave him a hand up. They fended off a couple of like-minded joiners, afraid of attracting too much attention.

From their perch they could see military buses arriving, eight of them, along with a similar number of five-ton trucks. Troops of some sort disembarked and began to unload the cargo carriers, stacking duffel bags and plastic equipment cases neatly on the side of the parking lot.

Jill shaded her eyes with her hand. “They’re not Marines, or Navy…I don’t think they’re Army. Air Force?”

“What would the Air Force be doing here?”

“They have Security Police. Some good ones, too, matter of fact. I’m guessing these aren’t regulars, though. Air National Guard? And notice, no weapons, no tactical vehicles.”

“Huh.” Python seemed just as puzzled as Jill.

After more than an hour of sluggish activity, Jill told Python to stay and watch, while she went back to the breakout team. She found Drake there, looking for her.

“Something’s up, they tell me,” he said as she arrived.

“Yes. Looks like about three hundred Air National Guardsmen arriving. No idea why. But it could be the perfect time to bust out, when something is happening and the SS is distracted.”

Drake looked skeptical. “More guards mean they can cover more ground.”

Jill explained, “More newbie personnel mean more confusion. I say we try to create an exit in the pipe today or tomorrow, and leave tomorrow night at sundown. And Drake,” she grabbed him by the arm, “don’t tell anyone we’re actually going until the very last minute, and then leave your ration cards with the ones you’re leaving behind.”

Drake’s face blanked as he shook off her hand. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Jill stepped in close to hiss in his ear, “If you don’t, they’ll go running straight to the guards. Don’t do it because you’re such a sweet guy. It’s payoff to keep their mouths shut, and it will buy us all time, as the system sees your cards still being scanned.” She paused. “You were going to kill them, weren’t you? But there’s no need.”

Drake put his palm on her chest and shoved her away. “I said, I’ll think about it. Now back off.”

Jill shrugged and nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on what’s going on. Maybe I can find out something useful.” She headed back to the chapel and Python’s observation point.

When she rejoined him, Python said, “SS is loading up.” He pointed at lines of black-clad guards carrying gear to the trucks, and then boarding the buses.

“You got a good count?” Jill asked.

“Almost three hundred incoming, about the same outgoing.”

“Half the SS, then. For some reason they need them elsewhere.”

“Yeah,” Python said. “Setting up another camp?”

“That would make sense. Keep some experience here, backfill in with called-up Guard. This is good news, Python. Very good news. And they wouldn’t be boarding the buses if they weren’t leaving today. The guard force is going to be all screwed up, or at least thin, for the next while.” She turned to speak softly in his ear. “We’re going tonight, no matter what the convicts do.”

Python smiled.

***

Just before night fell, Jill and Python made their way to the tunnel building, each with a bagful of equipment. “We’ll sneak back later,” her sidekick told the crew of lookouts. She found it hard to lie to her faithful sheep, so she let him do it.

It was time to abandon this flock. Perhaps not forever, but for now.

As they opened up the floor, Python asked, “Do you think Drake will let them live?”

“The ones he’s keeping inside his block? I planted a bug in his ear. I hope he sees it my way.” From glimpses through the doorway, she’d realized the convicts kept haggard women, and possibly a few men, prisoner inside. Probably as sex slaves. Also, each one had a ration card they could exploit.

Jill and Python had gone around and around on the subject. They both wanted to rescue the captives, but had finally concluded the best way to do that was to have the convicts take themselves out of the way by escaping. Hopefully this would give the SS fits at the same time, and possibly divert resources from chasing him and her as well.

“I’m still not happy with leaving them behind,” Python grumbled.

“You want to wait one more night and try to go when they do?” It was the first time she’d really given him a chance to second-guess her, and it clearly made him uncomfortable.

“No, I guess not.” He resumed dismantling the floor.

“Think you’re skinny enough now?” Jill asked. Hard work and deliberate lack of food had reduced her five-foot-eight frame to under a hundred pounds. Python was two inches taller and perhaps only ten pounds heavier.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he replied.

Three minutes later they dropped through to the space beneath the building, and began to replace the concealing floor from below when they saw a flashlight shine from above.

“Well, well,” came Drake’s voice. “Glad I thought to check on things. You wouldn’t be thinking of selling me out, would you?”

Jill looked up at him but kept back out of the way. “No, Drake. We’re just leaving a bit early, and by a different route. Good luck, and goodbye.”

“Wait…just because I’m interested.” He squatted down at the hole, turning the light away so it wasn’t shining in their faces. “Tell me how. You can’t possibly break out of the pipe from the inside, not just you two skeletons.”

“Sorry, Drake. If you’re going to rat us out to the SS, we’re not going to make it easy on you.”

Drake stared. “I won’t, but I understand why you’d think that way.” For some odd reason he sounded disappointed. He seemed to care what Jill thought of him.

Perhaps that will be enough for him to spare his captives.

Drake covered up the hole with the modular tiles, and they heard him leave.

Once they had dropped down into the big irrigation conduit, they saw the PVC sewer pipe within, just as Jill had predicted. It led off to the east, toward the treatment plant, leaving the irrigation pipe relatively clean and dry. Because they had broken in near an intersection, they had a choice of three other cardinal directions as well.

First they donned improvised knee pads, gloves, and taped tiny battery-LED lamps to their foreheads. Then they turned south, directly toward the SS compound.

Jill had made careful estimates, and now they counted their steps – if that was what a unit of crawling on hands and knees could be termed. They passed a standpipe above at one hundred yards, and an intersection at two, then another standpipe at three, and finally they came upon more PVC descending at nearly four hundred.

When they’d seen three more vertical pipes drilled through the concrete from above they knew they were under the SS compound. A score of yards farther they reached another intersection, where they rested. PVC sewer pipe ran off to the east from here as well.

“What do you think?” Python asked, apparently more to fill the time as anything.

“I think you’d have made a good tunnel rat,” Jill said cheerfully. She took out a water bottle and a sandwich from her satchel and ate ravenously. “Eat,” she ordered. “With this kind of caloric expenditure we’ll need it.”

“Right.” He gladly followed her orders. “Glad we saved up during our diet plan.”

“It better pay off, or we’re going to be two very unhappy moles.” Jill slapped the concrete pipe wall. “Like Drake said, no way we’re breaking through this.”

“Don’t worry, boss. Your plan will work.”

“Damn well hope so.”

After a few minutes they pushed on south. One hundred yards later they found their objective: a standpipe above their heads.

“I can see stars,” Python said, peering upward.

“Soon we’ll see them in the open.” Jill unwrapped the grappling hook she’d formed out of bunk parts, and tied it to the length of parachute cord she’d smuggled in so long ago.

The line was thin, but had a test strength of five hundred fifty pounds, plenty for her purposes. Whittled dowels tied every foot provided something to grip with hands and feet. The only question was: were their bodies thin enough?

The standpipes were eighteen inches inside diameter. They could certainly fit, but could they climb?

Without fanfare Jill made her first, experimental throw. The hook fell far short. Because the standpipes stood ten feet above ground level, she had to launch the thing more than twelve feet straight up and have it catch, with the ability to swing it only three feet to gain momentum.

“We should have brought that collapsible pole you thought of,” Jill said after several tries. “But it would have been awkward as hell.”

“Let me give it a shot.” Python did no better.

“All right. Plan B. I climb up the standpipe. You can push me part of the way. Then I have to power up the last part, and I’ll hook the line on when I get there for you. Get on your hands and knees.” When he set himself beneath the hole, she pushed herself in, arms up and holding the hook, line dangling down. She stepped up on his back, then widened her elbows, and braced her feet and knees up inside, supporting her own weight.

“Okay, get up and grab my feet, my ankles or something, and start pushing.”

Python did, awkwardly lifting. Jill used his strength to move upward as far as she could, then braced with her hands and forearms. Then she lifted her feet again, and set them against the sides, aided by his hands. Soon she stood on his palms as he extended his arms straight up.

“You all right?” she asked.

“No problem. I can do this forever.” His voice held no strain, so she believed him.

“All right. I’m going to try to throw this thing up. It’s only about three more feet, but I got almost no way to swing it.”

The fifth time she managed to get it caught on the rim, and with the line, climbed to the top. Once there, she boosted herself onto the rim and settled the hook solidly. She looked around at the cold, overcast Iowa December and wondered when the first snow would arrive. It was a week to Christmas.

“Send up the gear,” she said quietly. Soon she had brought everything up on the line, and dropped it gently to the dirt below, then jumped down. Just a football field to the north she could see the SS compound and the internment camp beyond, lit up like an outdoor stadium. Fortunately all the light pointed away from them. They should be invisible.

Python climbed the line easily, hand over hand, and came down the same way. He flipped the hook off the rim and caught it. “Lamp,” he said, removing his and turning the tiny thing off. She did the same. “We’d feel pretty stupid if they caught us because we were wearing ‘catch me’ lights on our foreheads.”

“Yeah,” she replied. “You ready to run?”

“Gonna really suck if we don’t come across a vehicle to steal.”

Jill grimaced. “We could try for an SS vehicle. They don’t even have a fence around their parking lot.”

Python stroked his chin. “That’s not a bad idea…”

“I was kidding.”

“No, really. Who’s going to notice a vehicle gone, with all the new people and the comings and goings?” Python’s eyes shone with reflected floodlight as he looked northward. “They’ll just assume someone else has it, running errands or whatever. They might not miss it for days.”

Jill thought for a moment. “All right. We’ll take a look. Let’s go.”

They crept across the field, crawling the last forty yards until they were in among the fifty or sixty various trucks, SUVs and Humvees there. The parking lot was poorly lit, and the vehicles haphazardly arranged.

“Damn,” Python muttered at the first SUV. “This model has kill chips. Can’t hotwire it without a bypass module.”

“How about a Humvee? All we need to find is one without its steering wheel chained…” She opened the first one she came to. “Like this. What schmucks. I’d have their asses if they were my troops, leaving their vehicles unsecure.”

“Down!” Python hissed, and they flattened and rolled under the Humvee. A truck with a half dozen troops in the back pulled into a parking spot twenty yards away, and they dismounted. With the driver and passenger in tow, they gaggled back toward the main SS building, rifles slung over their shoulders.

“Don’t even think it,” Jill said in a low voice as Python stared at them. “We don’t need weapons bad enough to risk getting caught. Stealing this Humvee is already dangerous.” She watched the eight men’s feet as they dwindled in the distance, then said, “Come on.”

They slipped into the vehicle, Jill in the driver’s seat. Once she was sure the patrol had entered their building, she hit the starter and a moment later the diesel rumbled to life. She didn’t wait, but immediately pulled out and turned on her lights. Leaving them off might have helped avoid being spotted, but if they were seen, someone would wonder what she was doing driving dark. Most people saw what they expected to see, and wouldn’t think a Humvee leaving was unusual.

She hoped.

Only when they were headed south on state route 169 did Jill finally relax. She let out a whoop, and grabbed Python by the back of the neck with elation. “Free at last, free at last, thank God I’m free at last!”

“I didn’t know you were religious,” Python remarked.

“It’s from a speech by Martin Luther King,” she replied. “Although right now I’d join the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster if it helped us get away.”

“Amen, sister. Preach it.”

They both began to laugh, and didn’t stop for a while.

Chapter Nine

“What are we going to do for money?” Python asked as they neared St. Joseph, Missouri.

Jill handed him a roll of bills the size of a packet of candy mints. “Three hundred. Should get us a tank of gas and some food.”

“Where the hell did you hide this?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know.” Jill chuckled.

“We’re pretty ratty looking, too,” Python went on. “We need some new clothes.” It was true; even discounting the dirt from crawling all over and under Iowa, they’d been wearing more or less the same few outfits for months.

“Truck stops see all kinds. We need to pick up the interstate while it’s still dark.”

“Right. I-29 South it is.”

“There’s irony for you,” Jill said. “We’ll pass within ten miles of Fort Leavenworth.”

Python didn’t respond, just slumped down in his seat. Then after a while he said, “I’m not going back.”

“Of course not.” She spotted a sign and turned the Humvee onto the on-ramp for the interstate.

“No, I mean it,” he said, turning haunted eyes toward Jill. “I’m done with prisons, even wimp-ass prisons like Camp 240.”

“I’m with you, Keith.”

“No, look, Reap, you’re not getting me. Dammit, what’s your real name, anyway?”

She took a breath. “It’s Jill.”

“Thanks, Jill. But listen to me good. I am not going back in. Whatever it takes. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You can’t think that way. No matter what happens, we have to survive. Now that we can live to a thousand, so they say, we can wait the normals out.”

Python snorted. “Or they can just torture us for a longer time.”

Jill glanced at him, saw the resolve and determination in his eyes, and for the next half hour she worried silently.

“Truck stop.” Python pointed.

“Right.” Jill took the exit. “You go in and pay for the diesel, and pick up two sets of clothes, sweats or something. I should fit anything you do, except shoes. I wear a women’s nine, man’s eight. Don’t forget socks, and a couple of ball caps. And get a couple of shower tokens.” Soon she pulled up at a pump in the truck section, away from the cars where the Humvee and their mismatched appearance would draw more stares.

Once she had pumped the vehicle full, she parked behind some semis, gathered her belongings, and met Python inside.

The hot shower felt incredible; water in the camp had never been more than warm, and was often barely above freezing. Ten minutes later she rejoined her partner in matching outfits of cheap sweats and hoodies. Their next stop was the burger joint inside, where they ordered eight meals in go boxes. They wolfed down two each while bagging the other ones for later, another decided contrast to the bad, bland camp food.

Thus fortified, they headed out to the Humvee.

Jill grabbed Python’s elbow and steered him off at an angle when she saw what waited where she parked. Two SS vehicles sat next to their stolen truck, and several uniformed troops milled about.

“We’re blown,” she said as they walked across the tarmac toward the on-ramp where the semis made their long runs up to cruising speed. “We have to get out of here right away, before they lock the place down.”

“Gonna hop a truck?” he asked.

“Exactly. Flatbed with something on it would be perfect.” They walked quickly into the bushes that lined the on-ramp, out of sight of any onlookers, or the drivers. Jill was sure the truckers were wise to unwanted riders, but she also knew they would not expect hers and Python’s physical capabilities. Probably as soon as they had achieved fifteen or twenty miles an hour they would be watching the road, not their mirrors.

She let five or ten trucks pass in the next couple of minutes, getting a feel for the right place to get on, and crept through the bushes to set up.

“Lowboy,” Jill said as a heavy hauler revved through its first few gears. It carried a large earth mover, chained down but not covered. Fortunately it was a standard load size, without an attendant safety vehicle. “This is it.”

As it came past them, they dashed out of the undergrowth and ran up on the trailer from directly behind, to minimize their exposure to the driver’s vision. Then it was a simple thing to sprint up and climb aboard, even carrying a sack each. Soon they had settled in the lee of the airstream behind the behemoth’s steel treads.

“You sleep,” Jill told Python, hooking a leg over him to make sure he did not roll with the sway of the trailer. “I’ll wake you up later.”

He didn’t argue, but pillowed his head on his sack and went out like a broken bulb.

***

“Where are we?” Python asked as he started to sit up. Dawn’s early light was upon them.

Jill’s restraining hand kept him down. “We’re on I-35 coming up on Wichita. Stay down and still. I don’t want anyone spotting us from behind and alerting the driver he has ride-alongs.”

“Okay. I’ll stay awake, you get some sleep.” He pulled his sack from under his head and began to awkwardly rummage in it, pulling out a crushed food carton to eat flattened burger and cold fries.

Jill nodded and closed her eyes, exhausted.

She awoke as she felt the truck decelerating. Looking through gaps in the caterpillar tread, she saw the semi had turned off for a truck stop. Beyond the plaza she could see the edge of a municipality, presumably Oklahoma City.

“Get ready to jump off,” she warned. When the truck decelerated enough, they dropped off the back. A trucker behind them eyed the couple with disinterest as he drove past.

Glancing around, Jill couldn’t see any SS or police presence. Even so, she steered Python toward a picnic area away from the service building. “I’ve been wondering how they picked up on us before, and I have a guess,” she said.

“Besides two scruffy people getting out of an SS Humvee?”

“Yeah, well that’s the other possibility, bad luck. No, I was thinking biometrics. Our faces are in databases now. Maybe they tap in to the security cameras around the building, via the web. With martial law powers, I’m sure the Security Service is sucking up every bit of data it can.”

“So how do we beat that?”

Jill’s eyes narrowed as she rummaged in her dirty satchel, coming up with a burger and couple of stray fries. “Stay away from cameras. Stay hungry. Stay off the grid.”

“Okay. I’m getting used to starving.” He opened up his own bag and found a burger of his own, and half a cookie. “We’ll need water eventually, though.”

“Radiator refill hose,” Jill said, pointing with her chin. She finished off a plastic bottle and put its cap back on the empty.

“So what now? Steal a car, hop a truck?”

“Neither. Let’s see if I can find us a ride.”

“Why you?” he asked.

“Duh.” She unzipped her hoodie, tied up her t-shirt to show her rock-hard abs, and stood up. “Because most truckers are straight. But hey, if you want to look for one that isn’t…”

“Okay,” he said, putting up his hands. “I’ll refill the water bottles.”

“Keep your head down and your hood on. There are cameras above the pumps.” With that, she walked off to talk to truckers. Five minutes later she had secured a ride, but not with her bare midriff; it was her Corps tattoo that did it.

The driver looked about fifty, corpulent but still muscular, with ink on his arms that matched hers and a lot more. “Name’s Greg Hadley, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, retired,” he said, shaking hands with them both. He turned Python’s arm over, holding onto it to look at his tattoos. “You been in,” he stated.

“Yeah, but I’m reformed now, boss,” Python responded humbly, and Jill almost snickered. Any con worth his salt knew when to suck up.

“As long as my sister in arms says you’re okay, you’re okay by me,” the man declared. “I was in the Gulf, you know,” he began, and for the next three hours he regaled them nonstop with war stories.

Now I know why we got the ride: he wanted an audience. Cheap at twice the price, Jill thought.

As they approached the Fort Worth area, the traffic began to slow down until it was creeping along. Up ahead they could see flashing lights from at least a dozen vehicles.

“Bad accident?” Greg asked, peering ahead.

Jill’s Eden eyesight reached farther. “No, looks like a checkpoint of some sort. Gunny, it’s been great, but we have to go.” She nudged Python to open the passenger door.

“Yeah, I don’t blame y’all,” Greg said wistfully. “Good luck, and stay away from Laredo.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Jill said. “Take care of yourself.”

“Ain’t nobody else will,” he replied with a wave.

They hopped off the running boards onto the shoulder next to the long line of traffic and then walked a few steps off into the verge. “Now what?” Python asked in exasperation.

“We go back, split up. You cross the traffic and walk along the other shoulder. They may be looking for a couple like us, or it may be a routine roadblock. Once you get parallel to the back of the line, where the cars are moving a bit, come on back.” Jill turned to walk northward as Python worked his way across the stopped traffic.

Once he had rejoined her, she pointed toward some nearby woods. “Let’s go there. I have an idea.”

As they descended the embankment they could see some sort of grand stadium-like structure off in the southwestern distance. “I think that’s a racing track. NASCAR or something,” Python remarked.

“Good,” she responded. “Railroad should be nearby.”

They picked their way across a cattle fence and crossed a pasture, eventually approaching a small herd of beef loitering near the tree line. The animals stared as they walked past and into the forested draw. On the other side, they found more field and pastureland, and they hurried along dirt roads, giving farmers on tractors friendly waves.

Some squinted suspiciously, but most of the folks seemed pleasant, or at least Texas-polite. Jill remembered she’d done some training at Corpus Christi and the culture shock had been severe. At first she’d wondered whether they were all faking it, but eventually came to understand that the cool Angeleno disdain she thought of as normal was as alien to the Lone Star State as their genuine respectfulness was to her.

Two women on gorgeous Palominos overtook them, tipping their Stetsons with sheepskin-gloved hands. It was a great day to ride, chill but sunny. “Mornin’. Where y’all headed?” the leather-faced older one asked with innocent curiosity.

“Los Angeles,” Jill replied with a casual smile. Always stick as close to the truth as possible, she thought.

“Los Angeles, West Virginia, Anchorage, Vladivostok…bad business. Pandora’s box.”

Jill connected the dots. “I’m sorry…Anchorage? Vladivostok? Do you mean they got nuked?”

“Yep, and a few more places I can’t pronounce, in China and Russia and some o’ those Stans. Kablinkistan or something. People goin’ crazy.” Her gelding tossed his head, as if agreeing. “How you folks travelin’?”

“Hitchhiking, but the guy who gave us a lift made us get out before the interstate checkpoint. Guess we made him nervous.”

“Everyone’s nervous nowadays,” the pretty younger one echoed sympathetically. “Getting so you can’t go anywhere in your own country without some jackbooted thug from back east asking for your ID.”

“They’re not using Texans for local security?”

The older rider snorted, a sound that expressed disbelief and disgust. “Security. Don’t need no goddamned Federal security. The Rangers and sheriffs do just fine. Now they’re talkin’ about violating posse comitatus, callin’ up Texas Guard for duty up in Iowa and Nebraska, them camps, usin’ ’em against American citizens.” She patted a six-gun in a holster tied to her leg. “Reckon they might end up with a leetle uprisin’ here soon.”

Jill licked her lips and narrowed her eyes, not sure how far she could trust this outburst of local spirit. While she was dithering, Python made the decision for her.

“Is that a railroad line I see up there?” he asked, shading his face with his hand.

“You got good eyes there, sir,” declared the elder. “Union Pacific comes through here, transits Fort Worth, and there’s a spur that heads to El Paso and parts west. You thinkin’ about hoppin’ freight?”

Python shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well,” she looked down at him speculatively, “you’re gonna want an express. Bypasses the rail yard. You’ll know it from three locomotives, y’hear? Two or one, it’s gonna stop in town. Three or more, generally speaking, gonna go through on the bypass.”

“Thanks,” he responded.

“Yes, thank you,” Jill seconded. “What should we call you?” she asked.

The rider shook her head. “Best don’t call me nothin’, ma’am. Best we just say so long and happy trails.”

The younger woman burst out laughing, and Jill did too. “You didn’t really just say that, did you, mama?” she guffawed.

Her mother’s eyes twinkled. “Just a bit of fun. You folks take care now.” She clucked her horse into a trot, and her daughter did the same, waving over her shoulder.

“You know, people like that give me hope we’ll come through this all right,” Jill said.

“Yeah,” Python agreed. “Would be nice to have a place to call our own…you know, ride horses and stuff.”

Jill turned to Python in surprise. “I didn’t know you rode.”

“I don’t, but I can learn.”

Impulsively Jill hugged him. “Yes, sir, you can.” A kiss from her lit up his face. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find an express train to hop.”

Chapter Ten

It had taken a long day of searching for a good spot, where the train had to slow before a descending corner, and then more waiting for the early nightfall to hide them jumping aboard. They drank water from a running stream, but did without food, hungry all the time.

They climbed aboard a flatcar without incident. Snuggling up next to construction machinery against the cold airflow was starting to seem routine, and the smells of West Texas mingled with the odors of diesel and grease.

“Home stretch,” Python said, his mouth close to her ear. “We should have asked more about the border.”

Jill turned to him so they could converse, practically rubbing noses. “Not if we’re supposedly heading for Los Angeles. We got two choices. One, try to slip through at a busy border crossing. They didn’t used to check outgoing Americans. Or two, try to cross at some lonely spot at night. You heard anything that would help make that decision?”

“No. I’ve been inside for twelve years, remember?”

“What do you think, then?”

Python chewed on his lip. “I’d rather take my chances at night in the open. They could have face cameras, blood tests, fingerprinting. We got no ID anyway.”

“We could try to get some in El Paso. I’m sure you can find someone who makes them.”

He laughed. “All the good fake IDs are made south of the border. The only things you can get here barely fool bartenders.”

“All right, night crossing it is.”

They looked up at the skies for a time, clear now that the glow of sunset had faded and they had left the lights of Fort Worth a hundred miles behind. “I ain’t seen stars like this in a long time,” Python said. “Prisons don’t like cons outside in the dark.”

“And your eyes are like a kid’s again,” she responded.

“Something else is like a kid’s again,” he half-joked.

Jill smiled and kissed him. When he stayed silent, she asked, “Run out of words?”

“I got enough words. A few of them just for you.”

Jill put a hand up to his mouth. “Not until we’re safe.”

Are you even intending to keep that implied promise? she asked herself. You crossed that line already but…why? To keep him loyal? To reward him? You don’t love him…do you?

She didn’t know how to answer herself, so she put such thoughts out of her mind and rolled into his embrace. The rhythmic jouncing of the flatcar made her body wish for a full joining, but in her rebellious mind, she remained glad that was verboten. It gave her conscience some salve to believe it wasn’t really real until that last act took place.

Besides, she hadn’t the energy, and probably neither did he. She felt dreadfully weak, her body’s fuel reserves as low as they had ever been.

From time to time they saw traffic off in the distance, lines of headlights and truck running lights that seemed to crawl, though she knew they must have been doing seventy. For hours they paralleled what she believed to be I-20, and passing through towns they shrank back deep into the shadows of the caterpillar treads for fear that some stray gleam might betray them. Jill was grateful for the tip about the express train; it dodged a lot of potential trouble that local stops would have brought. Now and again they passed an eastbound, and clung to one another as the cold winds buffeted them.

Eventually the long train diverged from the freeway again, rails running out into the badlands west of Pecos. Moonlight illuminated scrub-covered hills as the engineered grade cut straight through them. By this time her tongue felt swollen from thirst. They needed water, and food, soon.

After more than an hour of suffering, they passed through a final notch to see the interstate off in the distance – I-20 or I-10, she thought, depending on where they rejoined the big roads. Should have had Python buy an old-fashioned paper map at the truck stop so long ago, she thought, rather than relying on memory.

As they approached the line of vehicle lights perhaps half a mile away, the train slowed through a curve. It appeared that instead of crossing the interstate, the railroad would pick up parallel to it again.

“Get ready to jump off,” Jill yelled. “This might be the last slowdown before El Paso.” He nodded, and they stuffed their meager belongings back into their pillowcase sacks. “Protect your head and roll,” she instructed.

At the sharpest part of the curve, they leaped off, despite the ground rushing by beneath them. Jill estimated they were still traveling at thirty miles per hour, and the impact knocked the breath out of her. Rolling through brush and over rocky soil tore skin off her arms, back and knees. She clamped down on the pain and told herself to be thankful for no worse injury.

Python was not so lucky. His right wrist was sprained at least, possibly broken, swelling up quickly. She knew that without food and water, the Eden Plague would mindlessly try to heal him. Like a stupid construction crew that tore down good buildings to repair bad, the disease could not be shut off.

Jill supported him as he walked, grimly stomping over the broken ground toward the freeway. It seemed the only source of what they needed. Perhaps someone would stop and help them. She started concocting a plausible story about their car breaking down in the hills and having to walk out to the interstate.

She also resigned herself to the possibility she might have to steal the car of whoever stopped, or even kidnap them for a short time. One of those might be the only option. She couldn’t let someone call the police or an ambulance.

The irony of possibly mugging a Good Samaritan did not escape her, nor did it make her feel any better.

They stumbled along across country, closer and closer to the divided four-lane. Off to the right Jill could see an overpass, and she inferred on and off ramps from the truck she could see exiting. It cloverleafed around and headed away from them on a road only visible because of the vehicle itself, toward a cluster of lights about a mile south.

“You see that?” Jill said huskily, barely able to talk. “Whatever it is, it’s better than trying to flag down a car on the freeway. Any facility should at least have water faucets.”

Python just mumbled something unintelligible and kept plodding, holding his arm. Shortly they came up to the freeway, and they waited unsteadily for a break in the westbound traffic. When it came, they shambled across the lanes and into the divider.

The cold took its toll, as well as thirst and hunger. In the arid southwest, winter days were pleasant but the nights could easily dip to just above freezing. Jill’s body screamed for calories, reminiscent of the swim that had begun her odyssey. For agonizing minutes they waited for a break in the steady eastbound traffic, then ran across when they could.

“Come on, Keith, only a mile to water, and maybe some food. Gotta be something.” They stumbled down the grade into a field of sage and weeds. Jill felt as if she was floating, her feet operating on automatic as her eyes glued themselves to the harsh lights on widely spaced poles ahead.

“I hope that’s not a camp,” Python muttered.

“No way. Not enough light, and they wouldn’t put it so close to Mexico.”

“How far?” he croaked.

“Dunno. Just a few miles, I think. That was I-10; I saw a sign. It parallels the border. Worst case, we can drink from the Rio Grande.”

“Not sure I’m gonna make it.”

“Don’t give up on me yet, Python. You are far too badass to quit now. Just put one foot in front of the other.”

It seemed like forever but was only minutes before they approached the mysterious group of buildings. These resolved themselves into eight to ten huge yards, each with a long low central open structure and a couple hundred black-and-white cattle. In the center of it all stood a larger, closed building. A dozen trucks of various kinds stood in a parking lot next to it. Most of the light came from there, with the rest of the complex soaking up moonlight.

“It’s a dairy,” Jill realized aloud. “Feed and water in those long sheds, and they get milked twice a day in the big building.”

“Water,” Python croaked, and began struggling over the retaining fence around the nearest corral.

“Not yet. We’re too close to the main building. We might be seen. Let’s go around the perimeter to the farthest one.” Jill grabbed him and pulled him to the left, along the fence line.

Two hundred yards later she felt it safe to cross the barrier, and they trudged through the dimness atop drying dirty manure, aiming at the end of the feeding shed farthest from the central building. Its roof stood at least twenty feet high, providing shade and space for cows, and for trucks to pull up, to drop off feed and other supplies.

When they reached it, Jill and Python found troughs of relatively clean water, kept full by floater valves. They plunged their heads into the life-giving fluid, sputtering and drinking until they could hold no more. Most of the sleeping animals ignored them, but a few lowed mournfully, a sad sound of protest against their domain being invaded during the sacrosanct night.

“Now the feed,” Jill said, feeling herself strengthen already. “Must be some around here…” They split up and searched until they found a line of bins that looked like they would dispense grain. They found a few leftover buckets-full of stuff that they ate, unsure of its provenance. It smelled like food but tasted like wood.

Jill mused, “Silage, I think. Ground up corn with the cobs, stalks and all. Mostly these cows eat hay, but silage adds protein.”

“How do you know all this stuff? I thought you were from the city?”

She replied, “If you grow up in California, at some point you’ll go on a school field trip to a dairy. It’s agribusiness. The state produces more milk and cheese than Wisconsin and more beef than Nebraska.”

“Okay, teach. But this stuff ain’t gonna be enough.”

“I know, but it’s all we got.”

“Why don’t we go try to steal a truck? Then we can go to the nearest town and get drive-through,” Python said.

“Hell, no. That’s asking for so much trouble. We can make it. Here, suck on some of this.” She took out her multi-tool and chipped a piece off a whitish block.

“What is it?”

“Salt block. Mostly salt, some sugar and minerals. Keeps them drinking, keeps them making milk.”

Python put it in his mouth and hummed with pleasure. “Makes me thirsty again.” He headed back for the water troughs, while Jill choked down a couple more gulps of silage, and dumped some more into her sack. Then she drank water again alongside him.

“Let’s go. Home stretch. Just a few miles, and then a swim.”

“Swim?” Python stopped short.

“Yeah, the Rio Grande is the border.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay.”

“You can swim, right?” Jill asked.

“Sure, I swim like a fish.” He didn’t sound sure.

Jill clapped him on the back. “Come on, snake. Let’s go. And remember, like you said, anything’s better than being caught. No matter what, we’re getting across.”

Python didn’t reply, just put on a burst of speed across the dirt and manure to escape from the corral over the fence. She followed him, and was just starting to relax when she heard the roar of an engine.

Looking back, she saw a pickup truck speeding along the outside of the dairy behind them. It turned the corner and picked up speed, chasing them from two hundred yards back.

“Run off the road,” Jill cried, and they turned left out into the scrublands, away from the dairy. The truck braked nearly to a stop in a cloud of dust, then turned its headlights toward them until they speared the two in their beams. A moment later they heard a rifle shot, and a bullet kicked up dust near their feet.

“Separate, get out of the light, keep running!” Jill screamed, and turned right while shoving him left. Several more shots came before they got far enough away to be out of easy sight.

“They’re not supposed to shoot at people fleeing!” Python grumbled as he rejoined her in the dim moonlight.

“This is a new country, with martial law and all the fear. And besides, Texas is an HNK state.”

“What?”

“He Needed Killin’. That’s the standard defense against manslaughter. Basically, if you see a crime in progress, you can confront and use any level of violence necessary to stop the felony from taking place.”

“That’s crazy!” Python said.

“Really? Texas has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the nation. You were a hard case. Would you ply your trade here?”

“I’d look for an easier state,” he replied vehemently.

“I rest my case.”

“Okay, maybe not so crazy,” he conceded.

Jill held up a hand for silence, pulling Python to a stop. “I hear an engine again.” She looked back, but saw no headlights. “I got a bad feeling. Let’s run some more.” They sped up, jogging along a track that seemed to go in the right direction. She had no idea how far the border was. It could be five hundred yards or five miles, but she knew it was close.

The sound of a revving motor came louder and louder, but they still could not see anything. Stumbling over gorse and sage and other woody scrub, Jill caught a glimpse of something off to her right, movement and reflection in the light of the dairy behind them. It was a vehicle, some kind of light truck or SUV, running blacked out, jouncing over the rough terrain.

“Border Patrol, I bet. They must have night vision goggles, or infrared,” Jill yelled. “Somehow they can see us. Get lower down, and ditch the sacks.” She crouched and ran that way, feeling the fire of straining muscles with a surfeit of lactic acid and without enough glycogen. Python followed behind, his breathing ragged.

The sound of the engine steadied off to their right, not growing closer, but gradually getting around in front of them. “They’re trying to cut us off,” Jill panted. “Angle right. We’ll come across behind them. They won’t expect that.” They continued their bent-over scramble. Soon they seemed to be following in the wake of the hunting vehicle, and then it moved off to their left.

A subwoofer pounding alerted Jill to another problem. “Helicopter,” she said. “They’ll have infrared for sure. Keep going. We have to keep going.” Python said nothing, the only sound his labored breathing.

The aircraft arrived fast, from the northwest, the same direction from which the vehicle had come, probably from El Paso. Jill could see its running lights and strobe. Had she been armed, she might have used those markers to show them what fools they were, but as it was they hardly made a difference. The two could not run fast enough to dodge its range of vision.

The aircraft roared over them at low altitude with a blast of rotor wash, then climbed a couple of hundred feet as it turned back. Undoubtedly it had spotted them, so Jill straightened up. “Run now! Fast as you can!” They sprinted over the broken ground, miraculously avoiding anything more than brief spills and the tearing of sharp-thorned shrubs.

The helicopter came to a hover overhead and they saw the truck heading back for them, directed from above. Darkness loomed, and they thought all hope was gone, when the ground fell away in front of them. Suddenly they found themselves scrambling and rolling down a slope, toward an unnaturally flat stretch of ground in front of them.

This was no impediment to the helicopter, which hung overhead like an unavoidable angel of doom, but the truck slammed to a stop at the edge of the semi-cliff and they could hear yelling as searchers dismounted.

At the bottom of the slope, they bolted out into the open, only to find themselves suddenly ankle-deep, then up to their knees, in water. What they had thought was level ground in the darkness turned out to be river.

“This is it!” Jill cried as she stripped off her hoodie. “Swim, Keith, swim!” She waded farther out, until she was up to her armpits.

Checking backward, she noticed Python had stopped. “I lied, Jill,” he said in an agonized voice. “I can’t swim to save my life.”

Irrationally, she came back toward him, frantically trying to think of a way out of this mess. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have tried to go across in town!”

“It doesn’t matter. You have to get away. I deserve anything that happens to me, but you have to go!” He backed awkwardly to the shore, regaining dry ground where he stopped. “Go, swim, damn you! I’ll buy you some time, so don’t waste it. I love you Jill!” he cried, and then he was gone, running eastward along the shoreline.

Her heart tore within her, but she could see the line of four or five armed border guards coming down the slope. He was right; it made no sense for both of them to get caught. She swore to herself that she would figure out a way to come back for him, to come back for all of the unjustly imprisoned people that a frightened nation had made its scapegoats. Then she turned back to the river.

Shots rang out on the shoreline, and she turned to sidestroke, swimming so she faced eastward, straining to see what Python’s fate would be. A blaze of gunfire, muzzle flashes in the night, showed that either he had gone down fighting, or they were not interested in taking prisoners. Her tears mingled with the water that surrounded her.

He said he couldn’t go back, but I have to believe he might be alive.

Jill rolled over to begin a steady crawling stroke across the slow-flowing Rio Grande, when the first bullets smacked into the water near her. Startled, her training did not fail her as she gulped a breath and dove under, swimming frog-style beneath the surface. Suddenly, brightness blazed around her as the helicopter turned on its spotlight, its infrared now useless.

She stayed under as long as she could, then popped up for a breath. More splashes in the water showed they definitely had given up on the idea of arrest, and would be content to kill her.

Kill me for what? Escaping their clutches? It’s proof that genuine law has broken down, to use deadly force against someone who is no threat to them. Ironic, how the worm has turned: Americans frantically trying to make it into Mexico.

One of the bullets poked hot into her calf, its momentum slowed but not stopped by two feet of water. Her lungs burned within her and she kicked off her cheap tennis shoes, all but wrecks now anyway. Another gulp of air and she stripped off the rest of her outer clothes, leaving nothing but bra and panties.

Pushing herself as far as she had ever done, she stayed under until she had to rise, thankfully outside of the circle of the helo’s searchlight. Several deep breaths restored her somewhat, enough for another dozen yards beneath the surface. Then she did it again, and again, in increasing darkness. It appeared they had lost her, or given up.

Coming to the surface to swim, she saw a low bank in front of her, and reached down with her foot to find the river bed. Something sharp stabbed a toe as she tried to get purchase, but she ignored it, just grateful to have made it to the other side. Once she reached the waterline, she stopped to rest, just lying there with her head in the dirt.

Something rustled above her head, and she rolled over to look upward into the faintly dawning sky. The silhouette of a uniformed man with an M16 blocked her view as he bent over to look at her closely. “Hola, Señora. Bienvenidos a México.”

Jill started to cry, whether from joy or grief or just exhaustion, she was not sure. The Spanish she had learned so long ago from her grandmother came back to her, well enough. “Gracias Señor. Solicito asilo en México por favor.”

“Si, bella dama. Ven conmigo.” He held out his hand, and she took it.

Epilogue

Tunja, Colombia

Jill curiously examined the unmarked compound and compared it to the address on the piece of paper the Mexican civil servant had given her. It appeared to be the right place, and she saw several gringo faces behind the fence, along with people of other races. She walked up to the gate and pushed the button on the intercom, and waited.

The Mexican Federales had put her in a holding camp not much different from the one in Iowa, except that in this one, people also got to leave. Buses rolled up every day, names were called, and off they went to some form of resettlement. In her case, they'd sent her here, with a plastic bag of basic supplies and this address.

A man in khakis walked out of a nearby steel-framed building and let her in when she showed him the paper. He read it carefully before handing it back. “Military experience?” he asked as he shut the gate behind her.

“Semper Fi,” she responded, baring her left shoulder.

“Excellent. We need women.” With that cryptic comment he led her into the battered windowless warehouse. Inside, makeshift walls had been erected, reminding her of a temporary barracks on a deployment. People came and went, mostly men, all with the look of warriors.

“What did you do?” the man asked as they threaded their way toward the back.

“3RT. Tactical police and training.”

He grunted, a sound that might have held pleasure. “Doubly excellent. I’m going to make an executive decision and take you straight to The Man.” She could hear the capitals.

He knocked on a nondescript door, and then stuck his head inside. “Sir, I think I got a Class One for you. Jill Repeth. Marine Corps.”

From inside she heard a male voice say, “Excellent.” Apparently that was a buzzword around here. Her escort shoved the door wide open and motioned her to enter the room, and then closed it behind her, leaving her alone with its occupant.

Bright black eyes in a sharp face greeted her, beneath a severe buzz cut on a man shorter than she by at least two inches. His height seemed immaterial, for he filled the room with a presence, a force that told her this was someone to be reckoned with.

He held out his hand with a smile. “Hello, Miss Repeth. I’m Tran Pham Nguyen. You may call me Spooky. I’m putting together a special unit for covert operations within the United States. Interested?”

A slow smile filled Jill’s face. “Oh, yes sir. Yes sir; you bet your ass I am.”

THE END of Reaper's Run.

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READ ON for an excerpt from the next book in the series, Skull's Shadows.

SKULL'S SHADOWS Excerpt

Chapter 1

The worst things in life are never free, thought Alan “Skull” Denham as he watched the two-engine turboprop plane rise into the faint glow of approaching dawn. Though cool in the high desert of southern Arizona, he didn’t feel the chill.

A black ice of loneliness and wrath, a thing he’d fought off with action and hatred, now threatened to consume his being. He’d set those things aside long enough to get Daniel Markis, Larry Nightingale and the others safely away on that plane.

Now, he embraced them. Now, the time had come for retribution.

People who knew the tall thin man might describe him as quietly unsettling. When he did speak, he did so purposefully, often accented by cutting sarcasm that revealed a quick and dangerous mind. Yet, he was neither a clown nor a man to be safely ignored

Even those who knew him well would not have described him as exceptionally philosophical, but they’d have been wrong. Skull often contemplated deep truths about the world and himself. One truth: genuine friendship was so extraordinarily rare it might as well be an apparition, a specter, a ghost. Another truth, one so deep and so hard it felt like a spear though his chest, was that Zeke Johnstone had been his last and truest friend. The depth of the emotion surprised him.

Against his will he relived the events outside Zeke’s Fayetteville, NC home. Members of a secret government conspiracy had murdered Zeke in front of his wife and children. Undoubtedly they’d wanted him alive, to trace him back to the Sosthenes bunker where those infected with the healing Eden Plague hid, but they’d started the shooting.

In the mayhem, a bullet had blown Zeke’s head open.

Skull ground his teeth at the memory and walked back to the SUV. He thought of those men who had killed his friend and caused such pain to Zeke’s family. On Zeke’s orders, Skull, Spooky and Larry had injected the killers with the Plague, in his opinion a grave injustice. The killers had deserved to die.

More like them could be coming after him soon. Their crimes could not go unanswered. He knew his chances of finding the specific men responsible were unlikely, but not impossible. The new INS, Inc. headquarters in Maryland would be a good place to start.

Skull felt the fluttering of dark wings around the edge of his mind and relied upon the old antidote...revenge and death. Many deserved it, cried out for it, and Skull knew he’d been made to fulfill that purpose, an angel of death.

Why else had he been born?

Starting the SUV, he turned north away from the abandoned airfield outside of Tucson. He didn’t fear anyone he might run into; he’d always known that when his time to die came it would be at his own hand, but until then, he didn’t want anyone to interfere with his work. The only work that was ever right. His primary purpose in existing.

So be it, he thought and smiled grimly at the orange light rising over the stark mountains.

Driving just above the speed limit, Skull kept an eye out for anything unusual. His vehicle should be clean and as far he knew no one who might be looking for him had his physical description, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. This thought made him lean back in his seat until he felt the reassuring pressure of the Glock 37 .45 caliber compact pistol concealed at the back of his waist.

The sun rose on a beautiful day, the sky clear over the panoramic mountains. A man could almost forget that the U.S. government had detonated two nuclear weapons on its own soil in the last few days, or that martial law now oppressed all of America. He wondered what could be happening out in the larger world as he drove north.

South of Phoenix, Skull hit the first checkpoint, obviously a hasty affair with plastic cones and police cars as barriers. He slowly rolled down the window to speak to a policeman who waved him forward.

“How’s it going?” asked Skull with a friendly smile.

“License and registration,” the man answered back without any trace of personality.

“Sure,” said Skull pulling out a California driver’s license with his picture and the name Victor Erickson. He reached for the registration and proof of insurance that matched the false identification.

The policeman examined the documents so closely, Skull wondered if the man could read. Just sound it out, Skull thought helpfully. The big words can be tricky. With iron self control, he kept the thoughts from forming words.

“Where are you headed Mister Erickson?” he finally asked.

“Back to Sacramento,” Skull answered. “Got to be at work on Monday.”

“And what is it you do for work?” the policeman asked, looking skeptical.

“I’m the manager of Prince Lumber and Construction Supply.” Skull felt confident giving these details since he had already paid for the backstopping. If the cop decided to call the company they would verify that Victor Erickson, a tall bald man, worked there and was expected in Monday.

The cop peered at the growing line of traffic behind Skull’s vehicle. “And just what was your purpose in Arizona?”

Skull saw in the line next to him the police had pulled the family out of their station wagon and were searching the vehicle and making them turn out their pockets. If they did that to him, the game could be up given all the weapons in the vehicle. He mentally marked the positions of the policemen. Only the one he was speaking to was paying him any attention.

“Sir? Why were you in Arizona?”

“I’m sorry, officer,” Skull replied with an embarrassed smile. “I was visiting my sick aunt in Sonoma and realized I was supposed to call my wife before I left and didn’t. She gets so pissed when I do that.”

The man seeming to relax a little. “Yeah, mine too.”

“Officer, is there some sort of problem? Is this because of the terrorist attacks?”

“Yeah,” he answered leaning back so he could see the full extent of the forming lines. Now both vehicles on either side of Skull’s were getting tossed. “Martial law, you know. Those damn terrorists. I had friends in Los Angles.”

Skull forced his eyes to get soft and watery. “I had a brother there.” He rubbed his face and looked away. “Haven’t heard from him since...since...well, since then.”

The policeman handed back his identification and papers. “We’ll all get through this. Just stay tough and hang together. The President will give them what they deserve.”

“I sure hope so,” said Skull taking the papers. “You take care.”

“You too,” the policeman answered. “And stay to the north. They’re saying fallout is still drifting east from L.A. Shouldn’t be too dangerous, but even a little radiated rain is bad.”

Indeed it is, thought Skull. It wouldn’t just be radioactive rain; it would be ashes from millions of innocents killed to cover up a lie. Skull was under no illusions what the leaders of the government would do to contain the Eden Plague that threatened to disrupt their comfortable power blocs and politics. He’d seen dozens of examples in his time all over the world. The average Joe thought it couldn’t happen in America, but all it took was a big enough threat. 9/11 had made people so afraid they were begging the government to take their rights in exchange for security. It had taken decades for the feds to back away from knee-jerk reactions to every imagined danger, and now all that progress had been wiped away again.

Skull passed through several more checkpoints, none as thorough or efficient as the first one. These policemen appeared to only be making a show of checking people’s identification and were nearly apologetic for stopping motorists. Fortunately, traffic was light. Most people stayed at home during this time of uncertainly and crisis, heeding the public service announcements.

Needing coffee and food, Skull pulled off at an exit for a large gas station. He noticed an agitated group of people near the pumps. Driving around them slowly, he examined the posted signs: ALL FUEL RATIONED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR. SEE YOUR LOCAL COURTHOUSE FOR RATION CARD.

Skull looked down at his fuel gauge. That could be a problem, he thought. The large SUV still had over a quarter of a tank, but that wouldn’t take him too much further. Maybe he could get into New Mexico. Hopefully the governor there hadn’t enacted similar measures.

Parking in a spot he could see from inside the large convenience store, he grabbed a basket from a stack near the door and started tossing in nuts, jerky, and any other food that would keep for several days. He also pitched in a few packages of flashlight batteries before getting himself an extra-large coffee with double cream and sugar to ward off what would be an inevitable burnt flavor. A couple of irradiated egg and meat sandwiches that had been under heat lamps for who knew how long would serve for breakfast.

Walking over to the checkout, he set his basket and coffee in front of a small round woman with glasses.

“That be all for ya today?” she asked with a cheerfulness that seemed out of place.

“Sure,” he answered. “What’s up with the gas rationing?”

The cashier cackled loudly like a witch from one of the old movies Skull used to watch as a kid. “That just happened this morning. Pissed lots of people off. My manager ain’t too happy either because we have to give gas to police and state officials without charging them. We only get their receipt with a state IOU. Meanwhile, he says we still have to pay all our bills in cash.” She laughed and shook her head while placing his purchases in a bag, clearly enjoying herself.

“Total seems a little high, don’t you think?” Skull said as the numbers rang up.

“Got to charge more, otherwise the hoarders’d buy us out right off and we’d have nothing at all.” Reaching out to take his money, she lowered her voice. “Mark my words, this is all because of something those Jews did in Israel.” Then her smile faltered, as if noticing his bronzed skin for the first time and wondering at his background.

Actually, Apache in his ancestry had bequeathed him the skin color, much more noticeable when he’d gotten sun. “Mazel Tov,” Skull said with a straight face, taking his coffee and bag of food off the counter and walking to the door. He stopped at the sight of the newspaper stand near the exit. The headline read, MILLIONS KILLED IN TERRORIST CULT ATTACKS IN LOS ANGELES AND WEST VIRGINIA. TWELVE STATES DECLARE EMERGENCIES. He read a little further. The article stated that Federal authorities had placed Daniel Markis at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list as the leader of the terrorist group at fault. The article also stated that his group was believed to be responsible for the sinking of the cruise ship Royal Neptune.

Skull knew he shouldn’t be surprised or disgusted, but felt both. So Markis is America’s most wanted man, he thought. Maybe that’ll keep the heat off me. Let self-righteous DJ be the face of his new movement and draw all the attention so I can do what I need to. Leafing through the paper, he didn’t see pictures of any others from the Sosthenes group.

After loading his food and batteries into his pack, Skull sat in the SUV, ate his sandwiches and drank the sweet foul coffee. Watching the angry and growing crowd at the pumps, he decided things were getting a little too unpredictable right there. Better not to get caught up in a violent situation that was bound to attract a law enforcement response.

He hadn’t used the embedded vehicle GPS yet, but now he turned it on. The system wanted a destination, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to type in the INS Inc. facility in Maryland. Instead, he put in Amarillo, Texas, a good waypoint in the right direction. More importantly he set the GPS to avoid traffic jams and freeways. That should help conserve gas and maybe even get him around most of the checkpoints, even if it did cost him time.

Skull drove the SUV back out onto the interstate and then, at the direction of the GPS, exited six miles north at Camp Verde onto State Route 260 running generally southeast before turning back to the northeast. The two-lane road was nearly deserted except for an occasional pickup truck with a dog in back. The noon sun illuminated orange rock, pale soil, and hardy, stunted plants, all that survived in this unforgiving land.

Skull remembered how much he enjoyed the desert and its pitiless nature, unforgiving of errors or weakness.

Of all the places where he served as a Marine, rugged Afghanistan was the most beautiful, despite all the raghead assholes living there. High mountains, wide-open vistas, and in the north, green fields and swift primordial rivers. Skull had enjoyed watching the landscape from his sniper positions in the downtime between servicing targets.

Afghanistan had been as close to sniper heaven as he’d ever found.

Much like northern Arizona, Skull thought. I would really like to kill someone here. Someone deserving. Someone on the wrong side.

Only problem was, he wasn’t yet sure of the sides. Still, he knew if he just stayed patient, evil would reveal itself.

It always did.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a police car across the road ahead. Skull considered turning around, but they may have already seen him. Running now would be like poon tang to hounds, an admission of guilt. Hoping this checkpoint would be no more difficult to get through than the others, he slowed as he approached the lone cruiser.

A policeman as tall as Skull, but much heavier, exited the driver’s side door, paced by his shorter, younger partner. Both cops rested their hands on their weapons, a sign of the times.

The bigger officer held his free hand up for the SUV to stop. When Skull complied, the cop walked over, followed by the other.

Skull calmly handed them his license and registration. “How you doing today?”

The big cop looked at the license plate on the SUV and then the identification. “California? You’re way off the freeways, partner.”

“I was trying to get around all the traffic and maybe find a place to buy gas,” Skull improvised.

“Good luck with that,” said the smaller cop. “Everyone in the state is scrambling to buy gas now. Damn thing caught everyone by surprise. Not just gas but other stuff too.”

“Other stuff?” Skull asked.

The big cop gave his partner a stern look, shutting him up. “Where you headed to?”

“Amarillo,” Skull said, thinking of the destination he entered in the GPS. “I’ve got family there I’m going to visit.”

“Really?” asked the big cop. “Seems like a strange time to hit the road, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“You mean with the crazy attacks and all?” asked Skull. “Well, my parents have been bugging me to come visit for a long time and with everything that has happened, it just seemed like maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get out of California.”

The cop nodded. “You carrying any contraband, Mister Erickson?”

“Contraband?” asked Skull with a confused look.

“Yeah, contraband,” said the smaller cop. “Drugs, explosives, guns.”

“Guns are contraband in Arizona?”

The big man frowned. “Ever since the State Security Measures were enacted, it is illegal to transport more than one weapon in a vehicle. Why? Are you carrying firearms?”

“Me?” Skull laughed. “Hell no. I’m from California. If you even say the word ‘gun’ there, you get a ticket.”

“Then I guess you won’t have any problems with us searching your SUV, will you?”

Skull looked at both men and saw they had already made up their minds. They were likely just bored and before martial law he might have been able to push back and assert his right to refuse, but things had changed.

“No problem at all,” he answered with a smile, getting out and stepping aside.

“Stand over there please,” said the big cop, directing him near his partner.

Skull kept a sharp eye on both without seeming to. His weapons and gear were hidden, but a careful search would probably find them.

“Must get old sitting out here,” Skull said to the smaller cop, trying to distract him.

“You ain’t lying,” he answered. “All the action is up on the highways, but the chief thought someone might try and sneak through out here.”

“What exactly are you looking for?” asked Skull.

The cop shrugged. “You know. The usual suspicious types. The recent attacks have got everyone on edge; this is all mainly just a show of force. Calm everyone down and make them feel safe.”

Skull stiffened as he saw the older cop lift out a long black case. He laid it on the hood of the SUV and began to unzip it.

“Mind if I take a piss over here,” asked Skull slipping behind the smaller cop and on the same side of the police car. “I drank at least four cups of coffee this morning.”

“I hear ya,” answered the cop, his attention on his partner.

Skull slipped behind the second man and off the side of the road to a slightly elevated position. He noted both men were wearing body armor under their uniforms.

“What...the...hell?” said the big cop turning slowly. He was holding the detached heavy barrel of Skull’s sniper rifle in one hand, the stock in the other.

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Table of Contents

Knights and Demons: Tanshuku
Massacre at Lonesome Ridge: A Zombie Western
You Will Be Like God
Ink: Red
Numbers Game
Swarmers
Thrown Away
The Flense: China
Zombie Maneuvers
The Moon Dwellers
No Kinda Life
The Protectors

Reaper's Run