by Logan Jacobs
“That’s probably why Freya thought she could trust her,” I mused. “Swear her to secrecy, just like we used to do when we were kids, and she wouldn’t tell a soul about knowing Freya, or that she was a mutant.”
“And then Freya announced she was leaving,” Sorcha added. “And leaving Mary to fend for herself again.”
“So she did what kids always do,” I finished, “she did the one thing she knew would hurt Freya. She turned her in.”
“I so want to hate that girl right now,” Darwin sighed. “But I can’t.”
“We have the information we need,” Sorcha pointed out. “We should get out of here ourselves so we can work on our plans.”
We moved to the edge of the jail, just as Mary had, though we didn’t skip across the packed dirt. Darwin peered around the edge of the building first, then moved quickly back toward Main Street. Sorcha went next, and then I brought up the rear.
I was surprised to see that the crowd had grown just in the time that we had spent behind the jail. There was no longer an easy way to slip along the sidewalk without bumping into people, so we would have to push our way through if we wanted to reach the other side of the town.
“I suggest we take the roundabout way back,” I muttered.
“I’m not ready to leave,” Darwin replied. “I want to make sure that this crowd doesn’t attack Freya.”
“Do you trust the deputies?” Sorcha asked.
“Yes,” Darwin admitted after a pause. “The Chief runs a tight ship. He won’t let the mob take her.”
“Then we should go make our own plans,” Sorcha suggested. “And clearly, we’ll need to account for the crowd as well.”
I wasn’t sure Darwin would walk away from the Police Department, but he nodded a moment later and then led us along Main Street toward Lewiston Road rather than back toward the far end of the street. We had just passed the last lamp post when he turned onto a small dirt road that didn’t even rate a sign post. It was a dark, lonely stretch, and the few buildings I could pick out were shuttered for the evening.
But the road soon curved back to parallel Main Street, and the businesses gave way to a few homes with lights in the windows, and then a busier section where an inn, a saloon, and a brothel crouched on the same corner. There were plenty of people moving between the three buildings, but everyone deliberately avoided looking too closely at the other people on the street.
We made it past the last of the brothel crowd when our luck ran out. Two deputies strode down the road, though no one seemed to find that odd. I’d hoped they would pass us by without any comment, but something about our group must have caught their attention. One of the deputies, a slender woman with close cropped blonde curls, stopped as we passed each other and turned to watch us.
“Charles,” she called out in a commanding voice.
“Crap,” Darwin muttered. “That woman would have found Waldo every time.”
“Charles,” the woman repeated, even though the three of us had kept moving.
I heard her and her partner start to walk toward us, and I hesitated for a moment as my hand slipped toward the pocket where I’d stowed the Glock.
“You two keep going,” Charles said under his breath. “Pretend you’re not with me.”
Sorcha and I kept moving as Darwin turned around.
“Charles Darwin, I knew it was you,” the deputy stated, though she didn’t sound very happy about her discovery. “Couldn’t resist trying to get a look at your granddaughter, could you?”
Other people had stopped nearby to watch the unfolding drama, so Sorcha and I stopped as well. The woman deputy was focused on Darwin, but her partner scanned the streets, and I realized he was searching for us. I pulled Sorcha into the darkened entryway for a paint store and peered over the shoulders of the people who stood in front of us.
“What do you want, Lucille?” Darwin asked in a tired voice. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”
“Sorry, Charles,” Lucille replied, and she did sound sad. “But we have orders to arrest you as well.”
“Without a single shred of evidence,” he remarked.
“You know the drill,” she commanded. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Charles raised his hands over his head, and for a moment, it looked as if he would be arrested. Lucille’s partner moved toward Charles with a pair of handcuffs, but as he reached for Charles’ wrist, the old man dropped to a crouch and kicked out. The deputy tumbled backward as he tried to regain his balance, but Charles was already on his feet and sprinting down the road. Lucille started to blow on a whistle, and then took off after him.
“What do we do?” Sorcha asked as the crowd poured into the street to watch the chase.
I’d kept my eye on the second deputy, and once he steadied himself, he didn’t leap after his partner like I had expected. Instead, he scanned the crowds again, and I saw his eyes land on Sorcha.
“Get moving,” I urged as I started to push our way through the gawkers.
“You,” the second deputy called out. “Stop where you are!”
Neither of us stopped, and the second deputy didn’t bother to call out again. I heard the tweet of his whistle as we made it to the edge of the crowd, and then Sorcha and I ran down the road after Darwin and Lucille.
It wasn’t hard to tail Darwin since Lucille kept blowing on the whistle. It was a clever, albeit annoying, way of letting her fellow deputies know where she was, which also meant more members of the Motown Police Department would soon join the chase.
The only thing that worked in our favor was that we were soon far enough away from the town that we were all running in the same dark expanse. The moonlight was muted, so the buildings and trees were little more than black smudges against a blacker sky. I no longer had any idea of where we were or where we were going, but I followed Lucille’s whistle until it suddenly went silent.
Sorcha and I both stopped when the whistle abruptly cut off and waited to see what would happen next. We were both breathing heavily, and I could see the little clouds that our breath made in the cold air. When nothing happened, we took a few more steps forward, then started running again when we heard a whistle behind us.
“Over here!” Darwin called out.
We stopped again and looked around, and I finally spotted the ex-trooper behind a weird pre-magic statue of a man with dark red hair in a yellow onesie.
“There’s an old trail we can use,” Darwin whispered when we joined him. “We’ll collect our gear, then head to the next camp.”
“Where’s Lucille?” Sorcha asked as she peered around the parking lot.
“She’ll be fine,” Darwin noted, “though she’ll have one hell of a headache when she wakes up.”
The whistles were drawing closer by that point, so Darwin ran across the parking lot, past a pair of pre-magic buildings, then disappeared from view completely. Sorcha and I gaped at each other as we ran after him, then stopped when we suddenly found ourselves on the edge of an old gulley. We could just see Darwin’s figure as he ran along the cracked concrete, and I wondered how a seventy-something year old man could keep up this pace.
I didn’t have time to consider it any further as the whistles closed in on the statue. Sorcha and I scrambled down the edge of the gulley, taking out a few shrubs and rocks as we slid down the side, then we ran in the direction we’d seen Darwin take.
It was nearly twenty minutes before we saw Darwin again. He had climbed out of the gulley and sat on the edge where he could see anyone else who might be behind him. He held up a hand when he saw the two of us, then watched as we stopped beneath him and tried to catch our breaths.
“Haven’t heard any whistles… in a while,” I managed to get out.
“They’ll stick to the road for a few minutes yet,” Darwin declared as he helped Sorcha climb out of the gulley.
“How far to your next camp?” Sorcha asked when she was at the top. “I’m assuming that’s where we’re going, since we did i
ndeed find trouble tonight.”
“It’s not that far,” Darwin assured her, “and it’ll be a lot easier on the knees from this point on.”
“That’s good to know,” I replied as I finally reached the edge and pulled myself onto the soil.
Darwin set off again, though at least he was walking rather than running. I couldn’t tell where we were, but there didn’t seem to be any buildings nearby, not even the rundown remains of the pre-magic Morristown. I was surprised, then, when I suddenly spotted the stone wall that ran around the McGraw property. We weren’t near the gate, though, and Darwin didn’t move toward the wall like I had expected him to. Instead, he veered off into a cluster of dead pine trees that had been taken over by a creeping vine.
“Meet our ride,” Darwin declared as Sorcha and I picked our way through the vines.
Darwin stood by a brown tarp that had been thrown over something boxy and about as tall as me. With an unexpected flourish, he yanked the tarp to reveal a pre-magic car.
Except it wasn’t a car, or at least not the kind that I had seen before. It wasn’t completely enclosed, though there was a metal frame around the seats and steering wheel. There were only two seats, and behind that, a storage area of sorts that jutted out past the back tires. A smaller tarp had been tied down over the storage area, and Darwin lifted a corner to show us that our gear had all been safely stowed.
“What is it?” Sorcha asked as she took in the black and gray vehicle.
“An A-T-V,” Darwin said with a grin. “An all-terrain vehicle. I had to convert it to run on vegetable oil, but it still works, and it will get us to our destination tonight while the rest of the police force is still chasing their tails.”
“Club Car X,” I read aloud as I stood in front of the ATV.
“Yep,” Darwin agreed. “The fifteen fifty. It’ll handle just about any terrain. People tend to underestimate them because they usually think of golf carts when you say Club Car, but this beauty has outlasted a lot of the others.”
“It only has two seats,” Sorcha pointed out as she looked doubtfully at the ATV.
“Well, either one of you will have to sit in the other person’s lap, or someone can ride on the back,” Darwin replied. “I’ll let you two decide.”
Sorcha and I looked at each other as Darwin took the seat behind the steering wheel, then pulled a key out from his pocket. He inserted the key in a slot near the wheel, then turned it. The ATV sputtered for a moment and then started to make a humming noise. It wasn’t high-pitched exactly, and it definitely didn’t sound natural.
I slid into the second seat and Sorcha climbed up onto my lap. She grabbed a hold of the frame as well as the metal armrest, then nestled against me as tightly as she could. All I could see was a mane of golden hair, and Darwin’s grin if I turned my head.
The ATV started forward and just squeezed between a pair of beetle infested trees. One side scraped against the last bits of bark, and then we were through and on the road. We bounced along as the ATV picked up speed, and I found myself craning my head sideways to avoid the onslaught of hair in my face.
“Let’s see them catch this!” Darwin chortled as we barreled off into the night.
Chapter 14
I was glad we had the ATV. Between the distance we had to cover and all the gear we had to lug, it would have taken us a good deal longer to reach the next camp. Not that I could see much of the trip with Sorcha in my lap, but Darwin finally started to slow down, and I peered around the Irishwoman’s shoulder to try and get a sense of where we were.
It was definitely an airport, though not as large as the one that had become the Liberty Mall. The few airplanes that remained were smaller, for one thing, and the scattered buildings would have looked lost among the concrete expanse at Newark.
Darwin drove across the painted concrete and a line of airplanes, then pulled into a building that reminded me of a barn, except much larger. Two more airplanes sat inside, one with the door open, the other sealed tight. Darwin pulled the ATV into a corner and then finally stopped.
Sorcha hopped down first and tried to run her fingers through her tangled hair. I tried not to grin as I took in her wind-blown tresses, but it was hard not to laugh at the mess that was her normally smooth golden locks.
“So we’re going to hang out here with the airplanes?” I asked as I tested the word I’d picked up at the Liberty Mall.
“Not exactly,” Darwin said as he pulled a pair of mage lamps from the back of the ATV and handed one to me. “We’ll be moving underground again.”
“I knew it,” Sorcha groused. “I knew you couldn’t stay away from deep, dark places.”
Darwin laughed at the assessment, then shook his head. He removed all of our weapons from the ATV, which he passed around, along with the sack of food, and then placed the tarp back over the ATV.
“My wife used to say I couldn’t stay away from the lake,” the ex-trooper finally replied. “She’s always insisted that they would give me a Viking funeral when I died.”
“A Viking funeral?” I asked as we started across the floor of the barn and headed toward a small door.
“You don’t know about Vikings?” Darwin asked.
“They were ancient humans,” Sorcha replied. “They sailed around the northern areas and plundered any towns they came across.”
“Well, I suppose that’s accurate,” Darwin noted. “In any case, they were sailors and survived by knowing the seas. In one version of the death rites, the body was placed on a pyre built on a ship or barge. The pyre was lit, the ship released into the water, and everyone stood on the shore to watch the dearly departed return to the seas one last time.”
“Fire and water,” Sorcha murmured.
We stepped through the door and walked across a parking lot with a few cars, then down a short slope to the remnants of an old rail line. There wasn’t much left of the track except one rusty rail, which we followed to a small range of hills. The rail disappeared, but Darwin followed the edge of the hill around a curve, then he suddenly vanished from view.
“What the--?” I asked as I stopped. “Where did he go?”
“Nifty, huh?” Darwin’s voice called from somewhere just ahead of us.
“I thought he wasn’t supposed to be a mage,” I muttered as Sorcha and I started forward again.
The curve we had been following bent back toward us as it met another hill and the resulting mashup had created a fantastic landscape filled with boulders, stone pillars, and a gray-green moss that covered everything. There was a point where the slopes ran together, and on first glance, it looked like solid stone. But I could see a glimmer of mage light among the tumbled rocks, and as I picked my way through the scree, I saw that there was a small cut in the face, just wide enough for a man to slip through.
“What is this place?” I asked as I slipped through the crack.
I could hear water dripping nearby and smell the earthy tang of cold stone. Darwin didn’t respond, simply led us deeper into the narrow crack. We finally emerged into a tunnel that was far too smooth to be natural. A railroad track ran along the middle of the tunnel and disappeared in the inky blackness beyond our lamplight.
Darwin led us along the track until we reached a point where a pile of rocks blocked the rail, then edged around to the other side through a narrow gap. I followed more cautiously and let out a low whistle of appreciation when I stepped into our next camp. Over the years, Darwin had dug a fire pit, hauled in plenty of dry wood, added a shelving unit which held several boxes, and stashed away several sleeping bags. It was dry, if cold, despite the water that I could hear.
“How did you know about this tunnel?” Sorcha asked as she slipped through the gap.
“This tunnel was built just before World War Two,” Darwin replied as he worked on building a fire. “It was built to make it easier to transport steel from Allentown to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and needless to say, it became a lot more important after the war started. Once the Navy Yard shu
t down and the steel mills closed, though, the rail line was largely forgotten. But my old man was a history buff, and he used to love nothing more than to drag us kids along with him on the weekends when he would go looking for the forgotten places.”
“World War Two,” I mused. “That was, like--”
“A really long time ago,” Darwin interjected. “And no, I wasn’t alive then. The war happened some seventy years before I was born.”
It turned out that the rock fall served as a tidy wall, making it difficult for anyone to sneak up on us, even if they somehow found the entrance to the tunnel. It also trapped the heat and light on this side of the track which kept everything nice and cozy despite the chill in the tunnel.
After we’d snacked on some jerky and gulped down some water, Darwin opened up one of the boxes on the shelves and pulled out several pencils and a pad of paper. We gathered around the fire pit as he drew a map of the interior of the Police Department and showed us where all the offices were located as well as the cell where Freya was kept. We talked about the number of deputies in the department, as well as the rotation schedule they kept, and some of the other precautions that Darwin had helped establish in the department. By the end, we had a simple plan but one that would, hopefully, go off quickly and without any problems.
“So Medrick does this town meeting every week?” I mused.
“It’s mostly so he can talk about how great he is,” Darwin replied, “but he does sometimes help out the local citizenry as well. It also gives the townsfolk a place to complain, even if Medrick doesn’t intend to actually do anything to address their complaints.”
“Hopefully, Medrick will have a good turnout tomorrow night,” I said as I thought about the crowd gathered outside the jail. Our plan would work a lot better if we didn’t have to deal with an angry mob as well.
“You can count on it,” Darwin snickered. “They won’t pass up their chance to complain about the mutant invasion and Medrick will be happy to tell them all about his plans to kill off any surviving mutants.”