Tasha laughed. “Unused apartments? Mr. Tolley, why would we go through the rigmarole of setting up a new apartment, connecting it to a turbine, drying it out, and sourcing furniture and the like when we can just have your apartment, and you can put in the hard yards. I’m a fighter, not a lover, as I think they used to say.”
Billy and Frank’s laughter rattled harshly on the air. Billy especially sounded like one of the pigs in one of the farm cloches. There was snot and phlegm in the sound of his laugh, and it disgusted Nathan, but still there was no way he could see out of this situation.
Until Stryker fell over.
At first, Nathan thought his friend had been pistol-whipped from behind, or worse still, been hit by some sniper’s bullet. Snipers were an occasional problem in the city. They usually shot, killed, and then came down to street-level to see what they could salvage from the body. Thankfully, last month Brant had ordered his police out of the Greenhouse to see if they could round a few of the miscreants up. It had been a rare positive step from the Greenhousers to help those on the outside, though Nathan felt sure that getting rid of the snipers would have had even more of a positive effect on the Greenhousers anyway. People could still be shot through glass.
Whether Brant’s forces caught or eradicated any snipers had never been reported, but the incidents of sniper fire across this part of the city had at least seemed to stop until now.
But, now, Stryker lay face down in the snow, groaning.
“Get up!” Billy shouted at Stryker’s prostrate body. There was no reply, other than Stryker starting to shake. His boots kicked against the icy crust on the sidewalk, his knees jiggered, his hips shook, and his shoulders bunched. His forehead began pounding into the snow and his spine arched. A low keening wail escaped his lips and, as his face smooshed down into the snow, Stryker’s breathing became ragged and painful to listen to.
“He’s having a seizure,” Nathan hissed, taking a step towards the stricken figure.
“Don’t move!” barked Tasha. “Billy, take a look at him.”
Billy knelt beside Stryker and put a hand on his shoulder, the savage shaking of his body immediately being transmitted along his arm.
“Turn him over,” Tasha said, covering Nathan with her pistol.
Billy pulled at Stryker, but such was the force of his shaking that it was difficult to get a purchase with one hand, so he put down his shotgun so that he could use both hands to turn his body.
It was Billy’s biggest and last mistake.
As he rolled Stryker’s body over, the hand beneath his body came up and fired one shot from a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 36 revolver. The bullet punctured Billy’s forehead and blew the back of his head out like an egg in a microwave. Before anyone else could move, Stryker fired again, hitting Frank in the fleshy side of his thigh, sending him spinning into the snow.
Unfortunately, Stryker wasn’t fast enough to stop Tasha. She fired two rounds directly at Nathan. Before he sailed through the air on the force of the double impact in his chest, and crashed to the snow in a haze of pain and horror, all he could hear were the frantic footsteps of Tasha as she ran back down the street, with the sound of Stryker’s bullets thudding off walls, metal, and snow.
Nathan had two cracked ribs and a starkly red bruise the size of three fists on the right side of his chest, but the Kevlar vest had saved his life.
Not content with making Nathan go out armed, Cyndi had insisted on the extra protection beneath his coat, and her survival instincts had now been proven correct. Although it made some movement difficult, for general use, the vest had been worth its weight in gold.
Literally.
Twenty-four hours after the run-in with Tasha and her boys, Cyndi was plumping the pillows behind Nathan’s head and offering him a cup of coffee. Nathan had been laying on his back, trying to get the ache out of his bones and not breathe so hard it caused a stabbing pain through his cracked ribcage. Cyndi had strapped him up and given him painkillers, but everything hurt like hell still and his mouth tasted like a sewer.
After assuring him that Tony was concerned, but okay health-wise, and that Brandon was feeding a little better, Cyndi moved the conversation around to putting Nathan’s mind to rest about security at the Masonic. “I’ve spoken to some of the other residents about posting guards on the landings in case this woman comes back.”
“It could have just been the three of them, or it could be a whole pack; I guess we’ll know when we know,” Nathan croaked. But no matter how lousy he felt, the bedroom was at least warm, and the food Cyndi had prepared last night had been welcome. “Where’s Stryker?”
Cyndi gave an exasperated shake of her head. “He’s planting the seeds and telling everyone what a hero he is.”
“I guess he was in way. He certainly convinced me he was having a seizure.”
“Yes, but you realize we’re both going to be ninety before he stops talking about it?”
Nathan grinned, not daring to laugh because he knew it would hurt too much. “And the others?”
“Free was all for going out with Stryker to hunt them down. Dave and Donie took the body of the one Stryker killed to the mortuary building, and Lucy is… well, Lucy is Lucy, I guess. I think she’d be more perturbed if we ran out of liquor. That would be a dizz-arss-ter, dahling.”
This time Nathan did laugh, and it hurt like hell.
Cyndi’s impression and satire of the mega-rich and awfully stuck-up Lucy was spot-on. Lucy had been found with her dead chauffer on the highway, and had formed an uneasy bond with Nathan and his family, but a stronger, physical one with Freeson, Nathan’s employee from back east.
They hadn’t yet been able to work out whether Lucy’s attachment to Freeson Mack was one with truly emotional depth, rather than one of convenience, but the cynically mordant guy was happy with the situation as it was. A longtime widower with a quick temper, Freeson had definitely mellowed in attitude since Lucy Arneston had arrived on the scene. They were an unlikely couple but, so far, a strong one.
Cyndi kissed Nathan on the forehead and ruffled his hair, “Get some rest.”
Nathan knew better than to argue, however much he wanted to get up from the bed in the apartment and go help secure the doors. Or help Stryker with the hydroponics, or even spend time with Tony. He’d gotten into the habit of reading to Tony at night in the Masonic. They were halfway through Treasure Island, and the boy was loving the high adventure and ripe characters. It seemed to help Nathan settle as much as it excited the boy. There wasn’t a lot of time for recreation in this new situation, and spending quality downtime with his son had become a priority. But Nathan knew he had taken a hard knock, and he’d be no good to anyone if he didn’t at least rest up for another day, Treasure Island or no Treasure Island.
The ache in his ribs offered a bitterly hot stab every time he moved, and he felt as if his insides had shifted around and possibly turned upside down. But he was alive, and he would live to see at least one more day. He turned gingerly onto his side and rested his arm over his head to stop his elbow from resting on his injured side.
Through the floor to ceiling window, the day was just getting started, its light was gray and steely. Flurries of fat flakes fell onto the panorama of black buildings he could see through the glass. Detroit seemed to shiver and waver beneath the fresh blizzard. There was no one moving in the streets, and even though it was morning, lights burned in many of the windows nearby and smoke was shafting up against the snow like becalmed but still running steam trains.
As sleep claimed him once more, the painkillers kicking in, the warmth of the bed seeped through his aching body and Nathan’s last thought was for the city spread out before him. The extent of his world had become the craggy buildings and the frozen wilds beyond.
His island of troubles set in the sea of winter.
3
Nathan was woken by the sound of Brandon coughing. The baby was in the makeshift nursery Nathan had created under Cyndi’s instruc
tions before the baby had even been born.
The room wasn’t entirely ready yet, but Cyndi had taken Brandon there over the last two nights so that Nathan, still full of pain, could get some undisturbed sleep. The pain from his cracked ribs had begun lessening as the bones began knitting their cracks together, but it was going to be a good few weeks before Nathan would be entirely pain free.
Nathan heard Cyndi shushing the boy gently and he imagined her soothing the sickly infant against her breast, willing him to suckle. The boy would only intermittently feed, and this had long been causing plenty of concern. They did have a small supply of newborn infant milk formula. They’d traded it from the Greenhousers’ hospital when the baby had been born there—before they’d been sent on their way from the relative safety of the Greenhouse Zone and back to the Masonic building.
The birth, thankfully, had been a straightforward one—as straightforward as these things could be, anyway—and Cyndi, now that she wasn’t constantly on the road and was getting adequate food, had recovered quickly. Nathan hadn’t bothered telling her to take it easy in the weeks after the birth because he’d known the answer she would give him. “Pregnancy is not an illness, Nate; stop treating it as one.”
Cyndi had suffered preeclampsia during her first pregnancy with Tony, but whatever bad luck they’d had with the journey to Detroit, that specter hadn’t raised its ugly head for her second birth.
Cutting off his thoughts of luck, or a lack thereof, the door to the bedroom opened and Tony came in with a cup of ginger tea for Nathan.
“I made it myself, like Mom showed me.” Tony conscientiously walked towards Nathan, his eyes on the surface of the tea so as not to spill a drop. The Markstein’s, two floors below, grew ginger as well as other healing and useful herbs and roots in their own hydroponics setup. Cyndi had become firm friends with them, sharing recipes for poultices, balms, and healing teas. Ginger, she’d told Nathan, was a great anti-inflammatory and would aid healing. Cyndi constantly made the point that access to FDA-approved medications was going to be more difficult than getting food in the Big Winter. People were going to loot hospitals and pharmacies first in order to stockpile medications against future ailments. So, a return to the old ways of preparing medicaments from natural sources was going to be the way forward. At least hydroponic set-ups like Stryker’s and the Markstein’s would provide fresh ingredients as they found their way. Cyndi was never far away from her Culpeper herbal handbook, and even if she didn’t have it at hand, Nathan was convinced she knew it by heart anyway.
“How are you feeling, Dad?” Tony asked, setting the steaming cup down on the dresser. His face was earnest and stiff with concentration.
“Better.” Nathan winced as he sat up and the pain cut across his chest in a whiplash. “Well, some.”
He sipped the tea. “How’s things with you?”
Tony gave the answer some serious consideration before replying. “I’m okay. I wish Stryker and Uncle Free would stop arguing, though.”
Talk about alarm bells.
“Arguing?”
“Yeah, Syd and me are getting mighty… bad word… off with it.”
Nathan couldn’t help smiling at his son’s cute self-censorship.
Syd B4 was what the teen Tasmanian devil called herself, and she’d been the first straggler Nathan had picked up along the way—Nathan knew she wouldn’t have provided the same censorship his son had, either. She’d said her age was in the upper reaches of teenhood, but Cyndi had reckoned she was nearer fifteen than nineteen. Nathan had found her on the road in Glens Falls even before they’d made the decision to leave for Detroit.
Syd and Tony had grown to be strong friends, mainly through their great love for Saber, but Nathan guessed because they were youngsters adrift in a crazy world. That kind of deal throws people together hard, and sometimes they stick, whereas sometimes they bounce right off. Syd and Tony had stuck.
Nathan drained his tea and stood up, trying hard not to show the shock of pain that lanced through his torso.
“Come on, son. Let’s go see what the kids are arguing about.”
“Well, I say if Brant won’t come here, let’s go to him!”
Nathan could hear Freeson’s raised voice before he was halfway along the corridor to Stryker’s apartment.
“It doesn’t work like that, Free, and you know it. We can’t just turn up at the Greenhouse and ask to see him. There are procedures!”
Stryker’s voice was almost a whine. The doors to the apartment, which had been repaired by Freeson and Nathan in the months since Stryker had blown them up in his methane still accident, were ajar. As Nathan squeezed through them, with Tony in tow, he could already feel the tension in the place Stryker shared with Freeson, Lucy, Syd, and Saber.
There were enough rooms for them all, as Stryker’s hydroponic and living space was vast, with rooms that in a previous life had been storerooms and staterooms. There had been enough spare capacity in the apartment for Nathan’s family and Dave and Donie to live there, too, if they’d wanted that, but each had chosen nearby sets of room in which to live. Sometimes there was only so much Stryker you could take—especially after he’d led them to Detroit with such an economy of truth.
Why Freeson, Lucy, and Syd had decided to stay there was less about their history with Stryker and more about company. Nathan kind of understood that, but still wasn’t ready to fully forgive Stryker for his deception.
“He could send men out. Like he did with the snipers! Find this woman and her crew.”
“Why should he?” Stryker asked as he kept stalking up and down the hydroponic stands, fiddling with water runs, rubbing leaves between his fingers, and squinting at stems, but his back was ramrod straight and Nathan could see that the Hawaiian-shirted, blond-haired twenty-nine-year-old was spitting blood, he was so angry, and he wasn’t going out of his way to not show it.
“Fellers. Come on, what’s the beef?” Nathan stepped in between Freeson and Stryker. They weren’t yet ready to come to blows, but it wasn’t a far-off occurrence if he knew anything about testosterone charged situations like this one. Freeson’s face was twisted as ironmongery on a filigreed gate. He’d taken off his baseball cap and was scratching at his head in lieu of thumping Stryker.
Both Freeson and Stryker looked up at Nathan’s interjection. “You should be in bed,” they both said, together enough that it came out comically, as if they were twins.
“Yeah, well, when my son comes in and tells me he wants the two of you to stop arguing because it’s upsetting him, I guess I’m not going to be staying in bed, am I?”
Freeson’s eyes dropped and Stryker looked sheepish.
“I didn’t mean to tell on you, Uncle Free,” Tony said, obviously realizing what he’d done.
“Don’t apologize, Tone,” Freeson said. “You did the right thing. It was a stupid argument anyway.”
“Yes, he did, and yes, it was,” Lucy said, wafting by with her morning pick-me-up of a Bloody Mary in one hand and, in her other hand, another Bloody Mary. She was wearing a silk gown that made her look like a film star. “Perhaps you can knock some sense into both of them, Nathan? Lord knows they need it.”
Lucy sat on a nearby sofa and crossed her legs with the intricacy of someone making an origami swan, and there she began sipping her first drink.
Lucy was a piece of work, and rubbed Nathan up in all the wrong ways, but sometimes she was so amazingly and precociously above it all that it took Nathan’s breath away, so that he couldn’t help loving her a little bit for that one quality, at least. He wished he could rise above it and skate like Lucy, but Nathan wasn’t that guy. He was an up to his elbows in engine grease kinda guy, and the guts of this machine needed serious attention.
After a little head banging and rank pulling, Nathan got Stryker to explain the problem. Freeson wanted Stryker to go to the Greenhousers to make the representation that their police and guards should come out and take the gang down.
Stryker
thought it was pointless, mainly because they only had just about enough food and Bloody Mary ingredients to support themselves – Lucy raised her second glass and said “Cheers” with a wink to this – let alone pay Brant the tithe in goods and services he would demand for his goons to come out and make a sweep of the area.
“The snipers were a special case. They’d been attacking the Greenhouse as well as the people in the outer city. Brant had good reason to have them stopped—but a few protection racketeers getting heavy with the people in the Masonic? It’s not worth the steam off his morning leak”
Freeson appealed to Nathan, “We don’t know how many of them there are. They might be getting ready to attack the Masonic now. If Stryker hadn’t blown one’s brains out…”
“Maybe they’d have blown yours out, but they probably didn’t have the precision skills to find something that small!” Stryker shouted, throwing down the towel with which he’d been wiping his hands free of dirt.
“Shut up. Both of you!” Nathan roared.
Lucy clinked both her glasses together, “Seconds out, round three,” and giggled.
“Look, you’re both right. We could come under attack at any moment, but right now, according to Cyndi, we’re well defended, yes?”
Stryker nodded. “There’s a guard rota. Everyone who can use a gun is covering the entrances to the main building—front, back, and side—and we have a lookout post on the top floor below the roof. They’ll see anyone coming and raise the alarm.”
“They’re not trained. They’re not like Brant’s people,” Freeson said, anger on a steady simmer.
“No, they’re not,” said Nathan, “but then, neither are we and we got here.”
“Look, Nathan,” said Stryker. “There’s only one thing we can offer to Brant to give him the motivation to help us.”
“What?”
And so Stryker told him.
“Good luck with that,” Freeson and Lucy said at the same time.
Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2) Page 3