Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

“It’s good to see you laughing, Syd,” Nathan said, “There’s not been a lot to laugh about recently.”

  “True. And we’re still not out of the doo-doo yet. And won’t be until everyone is out of that place.”

  “I’m sorry I brought you here, Syd. Sorry about everything. If we’d gone south from the start, then none of this would have happened. You’d not have run into Danny again, that’s for sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter where I am; Danny’s gonna wanna find me. He’ll follow me to the ends of the Earth and over the ledge. That’s why I was on the ledge myself, Nate. It’s the only way to escape him.”

  “Unless he isn’t around to follow you.”

  Syd looked at Nathan as if he were mad. “Danny doesn’t die. No matter what you do to him. I should know.”

  Nathan stroked the dog on his lap. She was turning onto her back, showing her belly in an act of trusting supplication. In many ways, when Syd was in a talkative mood, she was the same. Rolling over, exposing her belly, the act of trust that didn’t come easy. “You want to talk about it yet?”

  “It’s… difficult.”

  “I get that.”

  “We could have been an item, could have been together, but he wasn’t the waiting kind. I liked him. He was cool. He could handle himself, too. His gang was the best around, got the most stuff…”

  “But…”

  “I wasn’t ready. Not for… not for that. I liked him. Even loved him a little. I dunno. The world was crashing off the road and he looked like a driver. Maybe it was just a crush, I don’t know. But I fell for him. But… there’s something broken in him, Nate. Something twisted.”

  Nathan hadn’t yet told Syd what Danny had done to Dave. Dave hadn’t gone into details about being nailed to the floor and used as bait, either—perhaps it was too difficult for him to relate. He just used his bandaged hands as best he could and got on with it. Nathan could guess where on Syd’s body the emotional bandages would need to be wrapped. “Yes, I know that he is. And you don’t need to go into detail. I can guess.”

  “Thanks. I don’t think I could ever find the words anyway. Just that he wouldn’t wait. And that’s that. So, he kept trying. Night after night, he’d come to the apartment, with drugs and drink for Mom, and want me to spend time alone with him. But I knew where it would lead. And then Mom… Mom died, and he didn’t give me time, and still wouldn’t wait. He was focused on one thing and one thing only… me. I think he was obsessed, Nate. That twist in his head, it had curled around the idea he had of me, and he was tied to me. If there hadn’t been the Big Winter, I guess he’d be one of those creepy stalker guys you read about. Something not right up top, you know what I mean?”

  “All too well, yes.”

  A malamute was nuzzling into her ear now and alternatively licking at her cheek, so Syd nuzzled it back and hugged it around the neck. The dog wagged his tail and fluffed his fur with a shiver down his body.

  “Then, one night, about a month after Mom died, he came to the apartment again. I didn’t want to let him in, and he just kicked the door down, just like that. BAM. My place. My safety. He dragged me by the hair into my room and tried…”

  “It’s okay, Syd; no details.”

  “And when he… you know, started, I reached to the side of the bed where I kept my knife in case anyone got in while I was sleeping. And I stabbed him… there. Twice.”

  Nathan’s compassion for the young woman welled, and he wanted to hug her hard, but the dog was serving that purpose for Syd. Maybe, in a roundabout way, Nathan was just admitting to himself that right now it was him who needed the human contact of a hug. Syd continued. “He fell forward and I stabbed him in the back. Left the knife in him, got his keys from the pocket of his pants, and ran. I took Saber to his safe house, used his keys to steal a bunch of food, guns and ammo, and took his car. Saber and I got out of New York.”

  “You thought he was dead?”

  “I did. Like I said, he’s unkillable if he could survive what I did to him, and he will not, will never, give up.”

  “Well,” said Nathan, the rest of his plan crystalizing in his mind, “perhaps we can help you with that, too.”

  12

  “Freeson punched me unconscious. When I woke up in the snow, he and the Humvee had gone. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me. I wish he had.”

  Nathan had allowed Stryker’s hands to be untied. They sat in Rose’s kitchen, in the shadow of Horace, and were waiting for Dave to share the good or the bad news about getting into the Greenhouse.

  “Why did he attack you then?”

  “I can only suppose he’d worked out some of what was going on and thought it was best to dump me before I handed him over to Harmsworth—which, to be fair to him, I was going to do as soon as we got back to the Masonic. He wasn’t at all wrong on that count. At that point, I still thought Rachael was alive.”

  So, Freeson was out there somewhere. With a Humvee… causing mischief? Knowing Freeson, probably. And it would make sense to hook up with him before the attempt was made to get into the Greenhouse, but without any idea of his location, the way Detroit was right now made that damn near impossible.

  Rose had allowed them to use her house in Trash Town as a base of operations because, like many people, she wanted to see an end to Brant and his dysfunctional society of elite haves, all of them parasitically thriving off the outer city’s have-nots. “You give man a bloody nose from me, pretty boy, n’ make it bleed proper,” she’d said.

  Dave laid out the charts on the table and held the edges of the paper down with books from the shelf. The schematics for the main Greenhouse around the Chase Tower showed the full extent of the place, over six acres of glassed-in streets and pedestrianized walkways, offering detail up to the first floor of all the surrounding buildings. There were pipes that led directly to the river to pump water into the township and into a wind-powered purification plant. There were also plans for the hospital, the school, and various other public buildings needed for the running of the city. The schematics also showed three other satellite greenhouses dotted around the downtown area of Detroit, all of which were used almost exclusively to grow produce in hydroponic bays and keep chickens, pigs, and sheep.

  Stryker started to offer some background. “They’re just not producing anything like what they need,” he said, pointing to the outliers on the map. “They lost pretty much all their pigs to swine fever last year. They’ve tried to source new stock from us, but if they take more of our stock, they lose in the long-run and they know that.”

  Stryker was warming to his lecture, as if everything before was forgotten. As Syd made eye contact with a pained expression, Nathan could tell there were at least two of them in the room who were far from forgetting the past, but he let Stryker plow on with his potted history.

  “In the outer city, we were doing better with our animals and produce, but we have many more mouths to feed than the Greenhousers—what they have is a near monopoly on good water. Their purification plant is the one thing that works well. They feed us water and we barter the little surplus we have. In actuality, we don’t have a surplus, so we go without, but we need the water. It’s a vicious circle.”

  Dave took up where Stryker had left off. “And it’s those water pipes that are going to give us access into the Greenhouse. Here, there’s an access hatch, fifty yards from the river. It’ll be under a lot of ice and snow. We’re going to have to find a way to open it—we don’t know if it’s alarmed—and that will get us, through here, to the main tunnels under downtown, here and here. I suppose they just use them for storage now, or as emergency panic rooms if the Greenhouse is overrun. The tunnel will bring us up right in the hospital building, and near the plant room where the power from the windmills is inverted and streamed to the whole facility.”

  “Well, that gets us in,” Syd said, “which is all well and good, but how do we find Cyndi and the others? Six acres of buildings and glass walkways is not something we’re going
to be able to search quickly without being discovered, right?”

  Nathan approached the table, carrying the bag he’d taken from the dead woman in the tenement. He pulled out the keycards and handed them to Stryker. “That’s where you come in. Literally.”

  Stryker took the cards and studied them. “Yeah, they’ll get me in. But there will be guards. I can’t just walk up and let myself in.”

  “You’re not going to use them to get in. You’re going to use them to get out.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Then let me explain,” Nathan began, but before he could, a voice floated up from the bag. “Nathan Tolley? Nathan… is that you?”

  Everyone in the room looked from the bag to Nathan and back again. Nathan reached into the bag and brought out the walky-talky and held it as if he were handling a rattlesnake. He looked into the bag—there was a SIG that may have shifted at some point and flicked the device on. Whatever had caused it, it was live now.

  “Nathan? Nathan… come back,” the walky-talky crackled and spat. “It’s me. Freeson. Come back. Freeson Mack to Nathan Tolley, come back.”

  They couldn’t say anything meaningful over an open channel like the one on the walky-talky, so Nathan resorted to saying, “Freeson, we’ll meet at the Detroit version of that place where you-know-who threw up all down your shirt.”

  “10-4, good buddy.”

  If anyone was listening, which seemed unlikely since the radio hadn’t made any sounds for a few days, there was no way they could have worked out that Nathan was talking about the Detroit Zoo. He was alluding to a time when Freeson and Marie had taken toddler Tony to Adirondack Animal Land in Gloversville, NY. to give Nathan and Cyndi a break and a ‘date day’ for themselves. Freeson had, against Cyndi’s advice, given the boy too much candy, and had ended up with an epic chocolate stain down the front of his new shirt. The memory made the clue, and within the hour, Nathan took the sled to the zoo and met up there with Freeson in the Humvee.

  Freeson hobbled out of the truck, displaying that his car wreck injury was acting up, as it sometimes did in the cold and damp with harsh rheumatic pain. He embraced Nathan and Nathan hugged him back just as hard.

  “You remembered.”

  “How could I forget, man? You still owe me a new shirt!”

  They laughed and went into John Crown’s cabin for coffee and salmon.

  “I just put the pieces together, Nate,” Freeson said as he drank and chewed. “Stryker was all over you talking to Brant, calling you here, and like you said, about him picking the route… he was adamant that we went a certain way back to the Masonic. I wanted to go through the back streets, staying off the highway. But he was insistent. Then I saw him playing with the radio in the Hummer as I was going up the steps to the building. I took no chances that he wasn’t sending a message. I decked him and took the truck.”

  “What have you been doing all this time?”

  “Surviving, best I can. Causing trouble where I could, and… er… kidnapping. I mean, if they can kidnap, so can I, I figure.”

  Freeson led Nathan to the back of the Humvee and popped the door mechanism. The tailgate flipped up, and there among the cop gear, ammo boxes, shotgun cases, and riot gear was Frank, the gang member who had been shot by Stryker. “Say hello, Frank.”

  Frank spat at them.

  “How, what, why?”

  “I ran into him, literally. Hit him with the truck. Wasn’t going too fast, so I don’t think I broke anything. Maybe a headlight.”

  Nathan grinned.

  “He was with a bunch of scumbags beating on a couple on their way back from Trash Town—trying to steal their stuff. I… what do they call it… intervened. The gang ran, I gave chase, and sonny-boy here, because of his bad leg, didn’t make it. Quite enjoyed myself, Nate, I admit. So, I thought I’d find some place to interrogate the nasty piece of work and see if he knew what had happened to you and the others.”

  “Plan,” said Nathan. “Plan, indeed.”

  Freeson followed the dog team and Nathan back to Trash Town and Rose’s place. While Horace took the Humvee to hide it in a garage on Rose’s orders, Freeson and Nathan carried Frank into the kitchen and dumped him on the floor. After brief explanations regarding Frank’s presence, and hugs and backslaps with Dave and Syd, Nathan filled him in on Stryker and his wife Rachael.

  “Sorry to hear that, man,” Freeson said as Nathan came to the end of the story.

  “Thanks,” Stryker said.

  “But you still shouldn’t have sold us out!” Freeson lunged on the statement and had to be held back from hitting Stryker by Nathan and Syd.

  “Calm down!”

  “Okay! Okay!” Freeson shrugged off their hands and stood back, pointing at Stryker. “You’re okay… for now, but if those boys or those women are harmed, ain’t nothing gonna stop me. You get me?”

  Stryker nodded sadly.

  “You can get in line behind me!” Frank said from the floor. It had been the first thing he’d said since Freeson had shown him to Nathan in the back of the Humvee.

  “You shot Billy. You shot him in the face! You were only supposed to shoot over our heads!”

  All eyes fixed on Stryker. “It was an accident. I panicked. I’m sorry. I aimed to miss you, too… but I’m a lousy shot.”

  Nathan shook his head at the revelation of how deep he’d been played by Stryker. He felt like going for the blond traitor himself now.

  Stryker made an admirable job of changing the subject, as the tension in the room could have been cut with a chair leg, and Nathan could see that Stryker wasn’t enjoying being the subject of so much ire. “Nate, before you went to meet Freeson, you were going to tell me what you wanted me to do.”

  Nathan picked up the keycards from the table and handed them to Stryker again.

  There were three feet of compacted snow and almost a foot of solid ice on top of the hatchway into the pipe tunnels down by the river. The calm weather of the last few days was over. A wind had begun ripping off the ice from the direction of Windsor, cutting around their legs like whips. The clouds were playing atmospheric Jenga, filling the sky from horizon to horizon with fat snow clouds that were soon to drop their cargo.

  After tying and leaving the sleds and dogs half a mile from the front entrance of the Greenhouse, well out of sight, where they could be left to sleep off a good meal, they’d taken the Humvee towards the river. In the back, Nathan had taken the walky-talky from the bag, as well as the one Freeson had liberated from Frank—who was still not enjoying being tied up on the floor of Rose’s kitchen—and set them both to a new frequency. They made one more stop to drop off Stryker, and to give him one of the newly re-tuned walky-talkies. “This is your chance to pay me back for everything you’ve taken. Don’t let me down, Stry. You help me get my family back and you will have my gratitude forever… don’t, and, well… I don’t need to spell it out.”

  “No, you don’t,” Stryker said grimly, and then he turned and went off into the dark.

  Freeson, Nathan, and Syd took turns hacking through the ice sheet with shovels and soon the metal of the door below was exposed to the air for the first time in what must have been many months.

  It was a circular hatch with a heavily padlocked bar across it. The first snow from what was promising to be the filthiest of storms started to flurry around them as Nathan, and then Freeson, tried to break the bar with the shovel blade, and then its handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “This crazy plan gonna fail at the first hurdle?” Freeson asked, breathing heavily and resting on the handle of the shovel. Nathan shook his head.

  “I’m not beaten yet, compadre.”

  He picked up one of the three cop shotguns they’d brought with them from the back of the Hummer.

  “You can’t use that!” Syd hissed. “We’re too exposed here next to the ice—they’ll hear us in Canada.”

  “Relax.” Nathan put the barrel of the shotgun against the padlock, then took off
his coat and packed it down on the door and bar, and as the wind started to saw into his back and his shoulders, he used rocks and snow to smother the coat and hold it down in the wind.

  “Ready?”

  Syd and Freeson shrugged. Nathan sighed, and then gave the padlock both barrels. The sound was muffled to a dull ‘crump’ and the shotgun bucked in his hand, and when the coat and snow were kicked away, the padlock was broken and twisted, and they wrenched off the bar by hand.

  Nathan put his coat back on, even though the back was riddled with shot and there was a double-fist-sized hole in the front of it over his heart.

  In this cold, some coat was better no coat.

  The storm fell upon them then as if on cue. A blizzard fizzing down from the sky with fat, sleety, stinging flakes. Freeson pulled the door the rest of the way open and climbed down the ladder he found just below the lip. When he was down, Nathan stuffed the bag of equipment through the hole and sent Syd on, and when she called up to say that she was at the bottom, Nathan climbed in and pulled the hatch shut behind him.

  Nathan was already soaked from the sleet and snow, and if he’d been hoping to warm up in the water tunnel, he was disappointed. The tunnel was freezing cold and unlit. Once they were all in, though, Freeson turned on his flashlight and they got a better look at their surroundings.

  The tunnel was roughly four feet in diameter, so there was no opportunity to stand up, and most of the space was taken up anyway by two plastic water pipes running the length of the tunnel. There were pools of stagnant water running as far as Nathan could see, and Freeson’s flashlight beam caught the skittering of a rat from thirty yards ahead as it raced to get away from this strange new threat.

  “Okay,” Nathan said. “Let’s get this done.”

  On their hands and knees, half on and half off the pipes, following the crazy swinging of Freeson’s flashlight, they began to inch up the tunnel.

  Nathan, pulling the equipment bag behind him, checked his watch when he could. They had an hour before Stryker was supposed to send them the information they needed. They would be in this crawl space for nearly three quarters of that time as they made their way towards the Greenhouse. That would leave them a scant fifteen minutes to take the larger tunnel to the area beneath the hospital and then get out to carry out the act of sabotage Nathan had planned.