Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  No pressure, then.

  Forty-seven minutes later, exhausted and cramped, their knees barking and bleeding, Nathan, Syd, and Freeson made it out of the water pipe tube and into the main service tunnel that led to the Greenhouse.

  Here, they could stand up and stretch their aching backs, but there was no time to rest. Nathan consulted their map as they stepped out into the concrete bifurcation. Dave’s precise hand and detailed drawing told them to take the opening to the right. It was dark, and echoey, but at least it was dry. And as Syd said as she walked, checking her gun as she did, she was “happy to no longer be crawling through rat crap.”

  Nathan checked the walky-talky as they moved forward. There was no reception yet; even though the last hundred yards of the water tube had felt like a steady incline upward, they were still too far below the surface to get a signal. Nathan checked the illuminated dial of his watch next. They were cutting it finely. If Stryker didn’t get through, they’d be coming out of the tunnel with no idea of where to go in the whole facility. The twist of anxiety in Nathan’s gut had begun flexing and squeezing, and he could feel the effect it was having on his breathing. Placing his trust in Stryker again was a real challenge, but it was the only option they had if the plan was going to have any chance of success.

  “You want me to what?” Stryker had asked in Rose’s kitchen, the incredulity in his voice causing it to squeak at the back of this throat.

  Nathan had drawn a deep breath and told Stryker again what he wanted him to do. “You go to the Greenhouse. You ask to speak to Brant. When you get to him, you tell him that I’ve come to you, and you tell him I’m willing to give myself up, to work with him—if you can check that Cyndi, my kids, Donie, and Lucy are safe and well. But here’s the thing; once you’ve found out where they’re being held, you tell him where we’re holed up, offering a double-cross… tell him to send Harmsworth out to neutralize us. Tell him we’ve got gold, lots of it. That’ll get him interested. Doesn’t matter where you say we are, but tell him I’m just waiting on his word—that I wasn’t going to tell him anything about the gold. Once Harmsworth is out of the way and you’re finished with Brant, go to the john or wherever, whatever, but get out of sight and call us. Do it on the hour. If you can’t do it then, wait until the next hour. But the longer we wait, the less chance we’ve got of getting this done.”

  “If he finds that walky-talky on me, he’ll kill me.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t find it.”

  Stryker had been dropped off over an hour before. It was coming up to 11 p.m., and if all had gone to plan, Stryker was just waiting to give them the signal now. Nathan sped up and the other two followed in his wake. He knew that Stryker was the weakest of links, but there was no other way Nathan could think of to get at least some of Harmsworth’s men away from the Greenhouse to reduce their numbers.

  Freeson’s hand fell on Nathan’s shoulder, breaking him out of his thoughts. “Listen…” he whispered.

  They had reached a bend in the tunnel and couldn’t see more than twenty yards ahead now. Nathan strained his hearing, and there, some way ahead around the corner, Nathan could hear the indistinct sound of someone talking. Freeson turned off his flashlight and the presence of other people up ahead was confirmed by a weak light.

  Nathan motioned the others to stay quiet, and to stay back. He pressed his back against the cold concrete of the tunnel wall and crabbed forward as far as he dared. Within ten yards, he could see a fair way down the tunnel to a smear of yellow light that was static and unwavering. He leaned his head around, and there, perhaps another sixty yards ahead, were two Detroit PD officers guarding the exit from the tunnels.

  Dammit to hell. Had they been compromised, or was this just a routine security detail?

  But it took just another minute of listening to determine that these voices seemed calm and even good-humored. These were no cops on high alert. As Nathan dared to lean out further, he could see that both officers were facing the exit gates. Both had their weapons, Heckler & Koch MP4s, on their shoulders and swinging freely. Only one of them was wearing a tactical helmet. The other was taking his off and about to use it as a stool. Then the other officer did the same and then reached into his pocket to bring out a small packet—once he’d opened it and started to shuffle, Nathan could see he held a deck of cards.

  The officers began to play on the concrete in front of them. Nathan looked at his watch again. They were not going to make it.

  Damn.

  “You there, Nathan?”

  Stryker’s voice from the walky-talky echoed down the tunnel as Nathan scrambled for the radio, grabbing at where it was hanging off his belt and turning it off. But the damage was done. As Nathan had thrown himself back against the wall, he’d seen the officer who had taken out the deck of cards looking straight down the tunnel towards him.

  At the very best, they were busted, with those cops coming to investigate.

  At the very worst, the cops wouldn’t even bother with that, and were going to radio for reinforcements immediately.

  Nathan shook his head and motioned to the others to stay back. He threw his gun to Freeson and said one word to his friend. “Carlton.” Nathan’s eyes implored Freeson to understand, and as the realization blossomed on his face, Nathan knew the message had gotten home. He turned, dumped his equipment bag on the floor, and, taking a breath that was so ragged with fear that he could have sawn wood with it, he stepped out into the full view of the cops, raising his hands as he did so.

  13

  Five.

  “Do not move! Stay where you are!”

  Nathan did exactly as he’d been told as the guards pounded down the tunnel towards him.

  Carlton Seeger was a bully. A certified nasty piece of work butthole who’d beaten his wife and anyone else who’d gotten in his way in Glens Falls. Trouble was, he’d known what he was doing in a fight. You couldn’t get to him in a toe-to-toe. He’d gut you.

  Four.

  This was the best that Nathan could hope for. The cops coming to him rather than them calling him to them.

  Carlton’s wife, Ingrid, had been a teaching assistant at the same school that Tony had attended before the Big Winter. She’d loved Tony and been friendly with Cyndi. One day, she’d turned up for work with both eyes blackened and a split lip. Cyndi had taken her back home and gotten the whole sorry story.

  Three.

  If the latter had happened—the cops calling Nathan on—this could have been a lot messier, and Nathan would have needed to at least try to deal with the cops on his own, in the first instance anyway. This was better.

  Ingrid had wanted to leave Carlton, or get Carlton to leave her, but had been too terrified to do anything about it. She’d been terrified that he would kill her. Nathan, working on a selector switch for the house boiler that had jammed, had heard everything. The anger had risen in his gut the whole time. Very few things made Nathan angry enough to blow, but the idea that a thug like Carlton would beat on his wife and carry on as if nothing had happened had sent his simmering ire into overdrive. He’d left the house without a word about what he was doing and driven off to collect Freeson from the auto shop.

  Two.

  The cops came at him now with their MP4s raised to eye-level, keeping him in their sights the whole time. If he was going to have to do this, he was only going to get one chance.

  They’d found Carlton in his usual haunt, a dive bar on the east side of town. Nathan had already explained to Freeson what he wanted him to do, and Freeson, holding his tire iron like Excalibur, had waited around the corner as Nathan went into the bar, found Carlton, and whispered in his ear that he was a “lousy, good for nothing piece of crap,” and that if he wanted to step outside, Nathan would explain exactly how crappy he thought he was. Without waiting for an answer, Nathan had walked out of the bar, asking Carlton over his shoulder if the “sissy boy” was coming or not.

  One.

  His one word—Carlton—would have sen
t the message to Freeson about what he was planning in that moment. The look of recognition in Freeson’s face had told him as much—message received. This might work with tire irons and fists. But MP4s? Only one way to find out.

  Zero.

  Carlton had followed Nathan, lumbering and rolling up his sleeves like Bluto in a Popeye cartoon. As they’d come from the bar, and then taken ten paces to the corner of the building, Nathan both times, back then and right, in this moment screamed “Now!” and bent double.

  The beating they’d given Carlton that day had been severe and, with hindsight, overly zealous, but Nathan hadn’t been able to help himself, and Freeson, not yet a widower, had piled in hard, too. When Carlton had lain on the floor, bleeding and spitting out teeth, Nathan had told the cowardly bully that he would be leaving town that afternoon and never coming back, or that he, Carlton—big, stupid Carlton—could expect the same sort of beating every Friday on the dot. And Nathan had had more than enough friends in Glens Falls to carry it out if he’d needed them to.

  Carlton had left town that afternoon, and Ingrid had never seen him again.

  On Nathan’s command, and as Freeson had done that Friday at lunchtime so long ago, Freeson and Syd came forward, seemingly out of nowhere from the cops’ points of view, and fired. The cops dove to the ground as the bullets whistled past them and stung the walls. Nathan leapt towards them, pulling his knife from his belt as he did so. The nearest cop was trying to bring his MP4 up to bear, but Nathan kicked at the muzzle, landing with his knees on the cop’s chest and putting his knife against the exposed throat. Nathan looked at the other cop then, who was attempting to decide who to shoot.

  The element of surprise had worked, leaving Nathan thankful that Freeson and Syd weren’t the type to run away, but instead good for meeting a threat head-on.

  The other cop was moving his gun from Freeson to Nathan, back and forth. His eyes were wide with indecision.

  “Don’t make us shoot you,” Nathan said to the cop with the MP4 in his hands. “And don’t make me fillet your friend here.”

  Nathan pushed the knife harder against the cop’s throat beneath him.

  “Just put the weapon down and I swear you won’t be harmed.”

  “Do it, Gray!” the cop with the knife against his throat spat. “He’s gonna slice me!”

  There was rabid panic in his voice—these men were soft and complacent. They weren’t used to any kind of resistance from the people they came up against. It’s what Nathan had bet on. These guys were door-kickers; women-slapping, point-guns-at-children types who, back in WWII, would have been happy to pull on a snazzy black uniform, a swastika armband, and pile Jews into cattle trucks. They might have just been following orders, but these were the kind of guys who would have enjoyed them. The first sign of any real resistance from people armed to the same level as them, and they fell apart. They didn’t appreciate it if their own lives were threatened. They could only cope with threatening others. It was safer that way.

  Cowards. Carlton. These cops. All the same.

  MP4 Cop took Knife Cop’s advice and laid his MP4 on the ground in front of him, and then put up his hands.

  Freeson covered him while Syd took handcuffs from the belts of both men and Nathan helped her secure them.

  Nathan next reached into his equipment bag and pulled out a roll of gaffer tape and sealed both their mouths, then secured their ankles.

  When the cops were sitting against the walls, taped to a utility pipe so they couldn’t move, and when their guns, stun grenades, TASERS, and shoulder radios had been removed, Nathan allowed himself the luxury of clapping Freeson and Syd on their shoulders. “Thanks for remembering, dude. Hot damn, that felt good.”

  “ESP man. ES freakin’ P.” Freeson grinned back at him, and they walked on towards the exit.

  Nathan pulled the walky-talky from his belt and turned it on. His watch said 11:03. Would Stryker still be available, or for the first time in his life—the time when Nathan might not want him to—would he have followed orders?

  “Stry, you there? Come back?”

  A hiss of static, a mumble, and a whispered response, “Shut up. Shut up. Wait.”

  There was a crackle, and then the sound of a door opening and then closing. As they reached the exit gate at the end of the tunnel, Stryker came back on. “Yes, I’ve found out where they are, and Harmsworth is leaving with his men in ten minutes. What happened? Why are you late with the call?”

  “Stuff we had to do. Where are our people?”

  “Lucy and Donie are locked in a room in the residential block on Michigan Avenue.” He gave them an address, and then added, “Two guards. They’re pretty damn angry about being locked up.”

  “And Cyndi?”

  “She’s at the hospital with Tony.”

  Nathan’s heart crashed in his chest. “What, what’s happened?”

  “Don’t panic. He had a bad asthma episode, so they’ve got him in for observation. Cyndi and Brandon are with him; I’ve just come from there, and they’re going to be fine. It’s just getting them out that will be problematic.”

  “Why?”

  “Danny’s gang is using the bottom floor of the hospital as their base of operations. They’re all over the place like a rash. No easy way to tell you, man, but I can’t see you getting them out of there without one hell of a fight.”

  Syd raised her gun and put a round in the chamber, ready. “Then fight, we will.”

  This was not how Nathan had wanted it to go, but as he already knew and had articulated, no battle plan survived the first engagement.

  “Okay, Stryker. Stand by. You’ll see what happens when we do it. We’ll meet you at the main entrance on the way out.”

  “You’re still going ahead with this? Are you crazy?”

  “Little bit,” Nathan said, and with that he killed the link. He reached up, threw the bolt on the grate, pulled it open, and walked into the next patch of darkness.

  The plant room was humming with power. The Industrial Transformers that fed power from the wind turbines to the whole Greenhouse area, now that they had been taken off the city’s defunct main power grid, were ranked along a wall in a cavernous room in the basement section of Chase Tower.

  Syd and Freeson watched the door for security as Nathan laid the charges. Rose had supplied them with detonators, batteries, and copper wire. Nathan had made four firebombs from gunpowder reclaimed from cartridges, all of them packed with gasoline-soaked wadding and shot. These had been packed into soup cans and drilled through the base to give access by copper wire to the embedded detonators. It would have been easier to use a block of C4 plastic explosives, but as Rose had said, “None o’dat in Trash Town, pretty boy; whatedder man got t’trade.”

  Nathan worked quickly as he could to maintain his safety, gaffer-taping the innards of each of the four transformers as indicated by Dave on the schematics. He jimmied the doors open with a crash, and it made Freeson and Syd whip around from the door, guns raised.

  “It’s okay. Watch the corridor!”

  Once the four charges were in place, Nathan trailed the wire from the bases of the four cans to a plastic spur, screwing them in with his sweat-slicked fingers slipping on the handle of his screwdriver. Once fixed, he trailed the now single trigger wire out into the corridor and closed the door. Freeson and Syd moved to either side of him. Nathan held the two ends of the stripped wire in one hand and a nine-volt battery in the other.

  “Tell him.”

  Freeson operated the walky-talky. “Stryker, we’re about to go. You ready?”

  “Yes. Ready,” came the crackled reply.

  Nathan made contact. The boom from the plant room was much louder than he’d been expecting and the door was pushed out a couple of inches, hitting him painfully in the shoulder.

  A second later, all of the lights went out. If he’d done his job correctly, that situation would have been replicated all over the Greenhouse.

  He looked into the pl
ant room. Through the haze of smoke and a gutter of flames, he could see that the transformers were all but destroyed. They wouldn’t be getting the power on from here any time soon. And with any luck, this blast wouldn’t just have taken out the Greenhouse’s lights and power, but also their ability to call back Harmsworth from his fool’s errand.

  The cops they’d tied up in the corridor had had Maglites on the barrels of their MP4s, and Nathan and Freeson had appropriated them. Now, Nathan took point, with Syd slightly behind them with her flashlight.

  They emerged from the service area onto what had been the main entrance concourse beneath Chase Tower. Two floors above was where Nathan had met with Brant on a fool’s errand of his own.

  Nathan pulled out his map and spoke quickly. “Syd and Free, you go to the accommodations block here and see what you can do about springing Lucy and Donie. I’ll go get Cyndi and the kids from upstairs here. If you’re not on the walky-talky to Stryker in ten minutes, and I’m in a position to, I’ll come for you. Okay?”

  Freeson and Syd nodded, and then they were gone.

  Nathan turned off his flashlight and let his eyes get accustomed to the near dark. There were figures he could see moving through the frosted windows that faced the pedestrianized areas and hydroponics bays outside the building. He needed to clear this area soon because someone was bound to come down and check on the plant room before long if the outage didn’t look like it was going to fix itself.

  He headed for the stairs he’d been taken up when he’d visited before and as he did so, a woman appeared out of a door just in front of him. Nathan didn’t hesitate to hit her in the face with the butt of his gun, saying “Sorry” as he lowered her unconscious body to the floor. To make him feel extra shamed, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform. He tried to map a horrific Nurse Ratched persona onto the memory of her prone form as he started up the stairs, but it didn’t quite work.