Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

“Didn’t see him. Dunno if he was already tied up in the truck or what. Haven’t seen him since he left with you.”

  Nathan was channeling Syd’s anger at Stryker. How could he have been so fooled by him? What had changed him over the years to present such a complete betrayal as this? Nathan couldn’t get his head around the concept at all. He couldn’t imagine the circumstances where he would act in the same way. It beggared belief.

  “When they drove off, I got back into the building. Found they’d shot… no, they hadn’t just shot them; they’d executed a bunch of residents. Back of the head. Not a firefight—just a walk through the building killing anyone they found. It was the worst, Nathan. They showed no mercy. It makes no sense.”

  “It’s a message,” Rose said.

  “And we’re hearing it loud and clear,” Nathan replied.

  “By why not kill dem other women? Why leave them alive? That is what I don’ see.”

  Nathan rubbed his head, knuckling the skin next to the scar where a bullet from the gang searching for Syd had grazed his skull on the journey to Detroit. The last time that his friends had been taken; the last time the women had been taken for a specific reason.

  “Rose, the gang… Danny’s gang don’t have an interest in keeping men alive.”

  Syd’s head dropped.

  “You mean…?” Rose’s breath whistled out of her mouth.

  “They call themselves the Seven-Ones.” Syd said, her face grave, eyes hollow as a freshly dug burial. “Seven women to every one man. Building a new army of babies to spread their gang and their culture across the land. They don’t care who they kill. They want women to breed, and they don’t care how they do that.”

  Even the stoic Horace looked uncomfortable by the time Syd had gone quiet.

  “We’ve run into them before,” Nathan said quietly. “Their leader, Danny, has some weird hatred for Syd. I think he’s here by accident. Otherwise, he would have come for her straightaway. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know she’s here in Detroit now.”

  “How?” Rose asked.

  “Because he’d be tearing the whole city apart to find me, and he wouldn’t rest until he did,” Syd answered, but with enough horror in her voice to lower the temperature in the room ten degrees.

  “Girl, wat did you do to this man?”

  “I made sure he’d never be able to breed anyone again.”

  Dave was getting stronger by the hour. Rose had been allowing him fluids, and he’d gotten more talkative as a result. After Syd’s revelation, Nathan had wanted to dig more and find out the details—however nausea-inducing they might be—but Syd had sunk back into her own internal doldrums, and Rose had taken her off to get some much needed sleep. Perhaps she was going to wake up in the taxidermy lounge, too, and hear the same story from Rose about what the animals reminded her of.

  “That girl is in a heap of hurt,” Dave said, turning to face Nathan, who was still on the stool next to him.

  “She is indeed. We’ve all been through the wrecker, but I can’t help thinking she’s had and seen the worst of it.”

  “True dat.”

  They let the silence swirl around them for a bit, and then Dave, finishing sucking on the straw he’d had dipped into a cup of water, offered, “So, I guess we need to get into the Greenhouse, right? I’m not leaving Donie there, and I know you’re not going to leave Cyndi and the boys there.”

  The pragmatic nature of Dave’s statement struck Nathan as having been stripped of all emotion. Just a thing to be done, rather than a heart-healing necessity. Maybe that was what he needed—a clear, dispassionate plan. Logical and direct. All the emotion could be saved up for later.

  “And how do you suppose we do that?”

  “While you guys were growing your potatoes and tomatoes, Donie and I were out in the suburbs most days, rescuing tech, checking stuff out, finding what we could. You never know what might come in useful, do you?”

  “I guess.”

  “One of the places we got into was a library, and it was the main archive for the city. Big old basement full of cataloged paper—remember paper? Anyway, it was also the repository of the city’s municipal plans and blueprints.”

  Nathan had begun to see where this was going. “Cut to the chase.”

  “You don’t have a sense of the dramatic, do you?”

  “I just want my wife and kids back.”

  “Yeah, ten-four. Gotcha. So, we found the schematics of the Greenhouse. The full plans.”

  Nathan was getting impatient. “Just tell me already.”

  “There’s a tunnel system and underground railroad they built to heat the Greenhouse, and to move stuff around in a way that would cause the least amount of disruption on the streets above.”

  “And you have these schematics?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Dave, if you weren’t in a bad way, I’d slap you myself.”

  “Okay. I have them, but there’s slight problem.”

  “You have them at the Masonic?”

  Dave nodded. “If we’re going to use the tunnels as a way in and out of the Greenhouse, first we’re gonna have to go and get them.”

  “How did I know this wasn’t going to be easy?” Nathan breathed out.

  “Nothing worth doing ever is,” Dave replied.

  “They’ll get you away fast and you can go places that the cops won’t be able to follow in their cars.”

  John Crown—a thickly set, grizzled fifty-five-year-old in a winter coat over a boiler suit—reached into the chest-high tank he was standing next to with a handheld net on a pole. After a few seconds, he came up with a salmon that was wriggling and gasping.

  “The dogs love to pull. They’re bred for it. If you’re on that sled and you know what you’re doing, then the cops don’t stand a chance. Especially in the warrens. If you’re out in the open, things are more difficult, of course, but this team is better than any getaway vehicle you might use.”

  John took the salmon by the tail, whacked its head against the side of the tank to stun it, and then threw it into the enclosure where his dogs waited hungrily. The salmon was soon just a memory.

  “Now, I’m willing to trade you, but it’s got to be something I need.”

  “What do you need?” Nathan was impressed with the setup that John had created from the Cotton Family Wolf Wilderness area of the deserted Detroit Zoo. The wolves were long gone, but in the barn-like enclosure where he bred and trained his dogs, he’d also set up four tanks for his salmon farm. Everything—pumps, heat, and lighting—was run from two wind turbines on the roof, and Nathan thought he recognized the inverter he’d traded for seed with Rose in Trash Town in the setup.

  “What I need is gold. Only thing that means anything now. Good old gold. Food, I got; I trade and eat my salmon for that. The dog sleds, I use to carry freight around when people need stuff and can’t afford or find the gas to take it there by truck. Brant and his cronies keep most of that under lock and key, as I’m sure you know. So, gold. Gold is good.”

  Nathan didn’t know how much of Lucy’s jewelry remained at the Masonic, and there was a good chance that cops, knowing Brant’s similar yearning for the stuff, might have taken it. But they’d find out what was left when they went there to retrieve the schematics.

  Rose had taken Nathan and Syd to the old Detroit Zoo to meet John when Nathan had asked her if she could get them a truck to use. “No. I can’t,” she’d said. “But man who might help is not too far. He a good man. Hate Brant almost as much’s I do.”

  So, while Dave continued his recovery, Rose had brought Nathan and Syd, by circuitous route, to the north of the city, avoiding going anywhere near the Masonic or the Greenhousers. The city zoo, with its purple-painted water tower, was deserted. The animals had been shot, and those that could be had been taken for food. The city governors had considered it the most humane thing to do under the circumstances. Rose had told them that Brant and his buddies had had a shootin’ party in the
lion and bear enclosures. “Not ‘zackly humane, if you ask me. Drunk and unable to shoot straight. It’s what turn man against Brant.”

  “I should have shot him there and then,” John said now. “I had the opportunity and I didn’t take it.”

  John explained that he had been a volunteer keeper at the zoo as the city had wound down, and it had become increasingly clear—as the winters got harder and the situation more desperate—that the zoo had become a luxury the city could no longer afford. He’d built the fish farm to generate what food he could for the big cats, the wolves, and the bears, but in the end, food had been needed for the people of the outer city much more than it had been needed for the lion enclosure. So, the cull had been ordered… and enjoyed far too much for John’s liking.

  A lifelong malamute breeder, he’d moved his home operation to the zoo. No one had seemed to mind once the zoo had been out of commission, and he’d been left for the last few years to breed his dogs, make sleds, and trade them with anyone who might want one. He traded the salmon, too, and Rose offered his produce on one of her stalls under the canvas of Trash Town.

  “Of course, you’ll need some training.”

  “We will? Don’t we just say mush and off they go?” Nathan asked, trying to bring a much needed tone of levity to the proceedings.

  “Sure,” said John. “But what do you say to stop them?”

  And that question stumped Nathan completely.

  “Oh, and no one says ‘Mush’, either.”

  “Okay,” Nathan said, warming to the man considerably. “What do you say?”

  “That’s why you need the training. The dogs are trained, but you—well, you ain’t.”

  “When do we start?” Nathan asked, wanting to get this done as quickly as he could.

  “Well, that depends on the gold,” John said, raising an eyebrow.

  Nathan felt his fists balling, but he kept his cool. “I told you. Plenty of gold and rocks at the Masonic. Once we’ve got them, you can have the lot.”

  John grinned and pointed at Nathan’s wedding ring. “I was thinking more of collateral…”

  The cold on his hands was nothing compared to the emptiness around Nathan’s ring finger. His hand felt wrong, lighter, colder and lesser than it had before. In the end, the negotiation with John had led to Nathan in effect pawning the ring to John in lieu of future riches, albeit with the promise that, when they returned to the zoo after the mission, the ring would be returned.

  But, oh, the ache on his skin and in his heart, now that it was gone. However temporarily.

  But John had been good to his word of offering dogs and training, so after three days of intense training at the zoo, Syd and Nathan were ready to take their sleds out of the two-acre field attached to the wolf wilderness enclosure, and onto the streets around the zoo.

  “Hike!” Nathan yelled to his team of four, and off they went on the command. Learning that ‘Hike’ was the correct command and not ‘Mush’ had been Dog Sledding 101. John was a good trainer, though, and now he could enjoy the feel of being pulled by the dogs, skimming over the fresh snow at speeds of, John said, twenty miles an hour over flat ground—the dogs couldn’t maintain that for long, but John claimed it wasn’t unheard of for dogs to pulls a fully laden sled cross-country nearly ten miles in an hour. And if the route-planning Dave was doing back at Rose’s house was any indication, they would make a fine getaway if luck was with them.

  Hopefully, Nathan thought to himself, they’d get in and out of both targets without being noticed or followed away, but he’d been burned by not anticipating the unthinkable before, and there was a good chance that their idea might go to manure at the first attempt. Who was it who’d said that no battle plan survived the first engagement?

  But sledding. Man! Nathan thought as the skis hissed over the snow, the dogs pulled obediently, and he steered with just the sound of his voice. Not having reins or a steering wheel had been thoroughly freaky to begin with, but the kissing sound to encourage and make them go faster… And then, Gee! to turn right and Haw! to turn left. Easy! to slow down, and, of course—Nathan kicked himself for not getting it—Whoa! to stop.

  The dogs liked praise, they liked salmon, and they liked Nathan. These were working dogs in the true sense of the word, and he’d been getting a deeper sense of the connection Syd had had with Saber, her malamute.

  For Syd, the days of training appeared to Nathan to be a fully bittersweet experience. She didn’t talk about Saber, but the way she looked at the dogs in her team and stroked them and played with them when they were free of the sled’s rigging told Nathan that the girl was hurting even more than usual. How much more would this young woman endure before he found her up on the roof ledge of the nearest tall building?

  Nathan had his own aching heart to deal with, though. He tried not to dwell too much on Cyndi and the boys—getting ready and being prepared to get them out of the Greenhouse had to be his priority, and a little bit of Dave’s pragmatism had started to seep into his thinking. But at four in the morning, tossing and turning instead of sleeping on the sofa in Rose’s taxidermy lounge, when Nathan couldn’t settle because he was too close to crying, he would picture Cyndi, Tony, and Brandon, each in turn, and reply in his head, and the words his daddy had told him— that bluff but kind auto shop owner who had taught Nathan almost everything he knew about fixing stuff—would all come back to him. The thing he’d drummed into his son from the earliest of ages.

  Family First.

  No ifs, nor buts.

  Family First.

  Nathan had to keep focused and sharp, but at four in the morning, when sleep was refusing to wash past his memories and drown him, it was near impossible.

  Nathan pulled the team around, off the street and down a narrow alley that was thick with fresh snow. The dogs barked and yelped, steering around any obstacles like overturned trash cans or crates, snaking the sled out of danger with faster reactions than Nathan could have mustered in his old Dodge wrecker, which he’d reluctantly left with an Amish community a hundred and fifty miles from Detroit and now missed terribly.

  He’d left Jacob’s farm with donkeys pulling his Airstream trailer, but oh, now he wished he’d left there with dogs. They would have covered so much more ground, more quickly, and been able to carry most of their possessions with them in the bargain.

  If the Big Winter had brought nothing but misery until now, it presenting the opportunity to learn how to drive a dogsled might have been worth it.

  Nathan and the team burst from the alley, snow carving up like the spray from a speedboat in a summer bay.

  “Whoa!” Nathan called out and the dogs did exactly as they’d been told as Nathan applied the brakes to the sled.

  He was ready.

  It was time.

  Family now.

  Dave was still not well enough to travel with them, but when Nathan and Syd got ready to leave the Detroit Zoo on their sleds, he insisted on coming with Rose to see them off and make sure they understood the maps he’d drawn.

  “There’s no guarantee these are totally accurate. Without access to the cops’ maps, I’ve had to use one of Rose’s copies of the Detroit street plan. The book is about fifteen years old, and I don’t know Detroit, and while you’ve been playing Nanook of the North, I’ve worked with Rose to give you the best route plan I can from the book and Rose’s memory—which, to be honest, was pretty good.”

  “Man, dem is right,” Rose growled in her best Jamaican bass. And then, when Dave might have thought her feelings were hurt, she gave him a wink and a smile, and he relaxed.

  The maps had been pinned to boards under transparent plastic and attached to the crossbar between the sleds’ handles. The routes marked out between the Detroit Zoo and the Masonic Temple seemed counterintuitive, bordering on the insane. But when you looked at them closely, they moved through areas of narrow streets and, where possible, across parkland and through trees. Anyone following in a police car, even a Humvee, simply wou
ldn’t be able to catch up, even if they’d gotten a good head start. Their only way to track them would be from the air, and according to John and Rose, Brant and the Greenhousers had no drones or helicopters. Going through the spaces between blocks, down rarely used thoroughfares, would also mean the buildup of snow and ice would be considerable… again giving an advantage to the sleds.

  “The biggest fly in the ointment is if they have Ski-Doos, but they won’t be an advantage even if they do, just an equal, and you’ll both be armed.”

  “Hopefully for the Masonic, we won’t arouse any suspicion anyway,” Nathan said. “We’ll go in underground, through the basement the way Syd got out.”

  Dave nodded. “And you know where the schematics are?”

  “And I know where Lucy’s jewels should be,” Syd said.

  Nathan looked at his watch. “Sundown in an hour; that’s about how long it’s going to take us to get there at a steady pace. You ready, Syd?”

  Syd produced her SIG-Sauer, checked that the mag was full, and put the pistol back into her shoulder holster. “I am now.”

  Nathan felt the sudden thud of a flashback to when he’d allowed Dave to go off to Trash Town, where he’d run into Danny. “You don’t have to come, Syd. This is going to be dangerous, even if we don’t run into any resistance.”

  “Try to stop me.”

  Nathan’s instincts rode the tension between wanting the young woman to be safe and needing her to make the plan work. Dave’s hands and chest were still in no condition to travel on the sleds, and if they waited for them to be ready, they might be too late. Nathan didn’t want to think about getting into the Greenhouse only to find it was already game-over for his family and friends.

  John, who’d been feeding the dogs chunks of salmon from a bucket, came back to the group and raised his hands. “I’d shake, but I stink of fish and you wouldn’t want to smell like me right now. Good luck. Bring back lots of gold.”

  Rose hugged them both, and Dave followed suit.

  And then they could wait no longer.