by Joe Shine
Fury soon took over, leaving no room for anything else. The tears had stopped, and guided by hate, I focused on the path ahead of me. I was almost there.
I turned off the last real road and onto well-groomed gravel. The car I was chasing was up around the bend. I would be on it soon. It was time to bring the pain, to unleash the suffering that I had suffered. Cole would pay, as Mr. S. had paid.
I had to give it to my brain, while stupid and awkward most of the time, it had stepped up at this moment. It had allowed me a brief moment to wallow in betrayal, and then segued nicely into what I was feeling now, into what I needed to be feeling now. I was not about to lose Gareth. Not after all this.
CHAPTER 28
ALL KILLER NO FILLER
I caught up to Cole a short time later and flipped off the headlights. The best thing about old cars—okay the two best things about old cars—were big engines and no running lights. When I flipped them off I was invisible. Using the GPS and the light from the moon I kept about two hundred yards behind them.
I hadn’t really thought of what I’d do when I got there. Shooting Cole or the tires could easily make the car swerve headlong into a tree, ending in the classic Hollywood fireball. And I didn’t know where Gareth was being held so ramming or sideswiping it was equally as unappealing an option as the first. No, what I had to do now would require a bit more finesse.
I had to channel my inner sneak again. It had been the hallmark of my earlier days before I toughened up. You needed a sneak? You needed clever? You went to Ren Sharpe. I needed to think like the fourteen-year-old me. Figure out what she would do. I was more threatening, but she was more dangerous.
I looked around. Trees. Gravel road. Old Mustang. Pistols. Not much to work with. I looked at the GPS for help. It told me Cole had been traveling at exactly 45 mph for the last ten minutes or so. Not a mph higher or lower. That was a good thing. It meant he was relaxed, oblivious not only to me, but to everything that had happened at FATE. Had he been alerted to my escape I’m sure he’d be flying down this road. He was driving like someone without a care in the world because in his mind all was fine back at FATE and I was unlinked.
And there it was. It wasn’t much, but I had my idea. I think.
My distance to target on the GPS began to shrink. He was slowing down. On the GPS screen, his dot was approaching a line that cut horizontally across the road. On the other side of the line read the words THE NEST.
Cole’s car stopped at the border.
I turned my headlights back on before I rounded the final bend. I found myself staring down the road at an immense wall, at least twenty feet high, the tops wrapped in coils of razor wire. Where the road ran smack dab into the wall there was a gate bathed in large floodlights. The gate was flanked by a small guardhouse. A black BMW was parked in front of it. Cole was casually standing next to the BMW, talking with two machine-gun-wielding guards.
My sudden appearance drew an instant reaction from everyone. Showtime. The two guards pointed their guns at me. Cole stiffened, confused.
“Pull over, now!” yelled one of the guards.
I pulled off the side of the road about fifty feet away from them, shut off the engine, and hopped out as if everything were normal.
“Get back in the car!” yelled the other.
I raised my hands. “Whoa, whoa, fellas, calm down.” The look on Cole’s face was priceless and I nearly blew it. “I’m here to help,” I added.
“Stop moving!” the first shouted.
“Who sent you?!” the other demanded. He lowered his gun and pointed a flashlight right at my face.
“Who do you think?” I said sarcastically as I shielded my eyes from the flashlight and kept moving toward them. I stopped when I reached them, and turned to Cole. “Wassup. Been a while.”
Cole eyed me, not entirely sure what was happening. I had to play it cool. I turned to the guard with the flashlight still pointed at my face. “Dude, seriously, can you turn that thing off?”
The guard turned to Cole, who gave the slightest nod. The flashlight went dark. The second lowered his gun too, but kept his finger on the trigger.
“Blake told me to come,” I said before Cole could ask any questions. “Said I should be here. Thought it would be good for me.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed. “So you know who’s in the car?”
I gave a fake yawn. “Some kid named Gareth? I don’t know.” I peered into the car, but it was empty. “He in the trunk?”
Cole nodded, his eyes on mine.
“Sooo.” I looked around. “What’s the holdup then?”
“Nothing.” Cole pulled out a tablet from his pocket like the one I stole from Mr. S. “I’ll call the professor and let him know we’re here.”
He gave me one last prying look. I raised my eyebrows like, What? He dropped his gaze and punched the screen.
Half a second later an obnoxious rap song, one I’d heard not long ago, blared from the tablet in my pocket. Busted. Cole’s eyes widened.
He opened his mouth, but before he could protest, I head butted him hard on the nose, sending him crashing to the ground in a heap. I spun kicked the first guard in the side of the temple, knocking him across the hood of the BMW and out cold. In the same motion, I whirled and grabbed the other guard by the vest, flipped him over my hip, and slammed him onto the ground. A quick punch to the head and he was out too. Three seconds, tops, and I was back on my feet, pistol raised and pointed straight at Cole.
“Up,” I said coldly.
“You broke my nose,” he spat in a nasal voice, sniffing and spitting blood. “Again.”
“Up,” I repeated.
He stood and dropped his hands from his nose. I backed away.
“Toss it,” I said as I motioned at the holster on his belt. “Slowly.”
Using only his bloody index finger and thumb, he gripped the handle of the pistol and pulled it out. I nodded and he tossed it at me. I grabbed it out of the air with my free hand and threw it into the woods behind me.
“Happy?” he choked out.
I pointed at his ankle with my pistol. “Not yet. And again.”
He reached down, and once more, we did the same little grip-and-toss.
“Gareth, you okay?” I yelled.
I heard a muffled, “Yeah,” from the trunk. My heart skipped a beat, “Get me out of here,” he added. There was a thump.
At the moment, he was safe and out of the way. “Soon,” was all I could muster.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, how’d you escape?” Cole asked. He took the tiniest of steps forward, trying to cut the distance between us. I matched with a mini step back.
“I had help from a friend. And then from an unexpected one. Luka.”
Cole blinked. He swallowed.
“He told me everything,” I added.
Cole cracked a little smile. “Really?”
With my free hand, I pulled out the pair of glasses as I repeated, “Everything.”
The glasses made Cole smile wider. “And you believe Luka? How do you know he wasn’t lying?”
“Because he wouldn’t do that. He’s got too much honor.”
Cole laughed. “Oh, and you know this because you know him so well? Ren, my dear, I’ve seen that man cut off a man’s fingers knuckle by knuckle. He’s no better than you or I.”
“I choose to believe otherwise.”
“So which truth do you think you know? Hold on, let me guess.” He pretended to think hard before continuing. “How about the one where we say we found out Gareth creates a bomb that kills millions and we have to stop him. Wait, no, not that one. You’d probably agree with that.” He gave me a studying look. “The money one.” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a response.
I kept as stone-faced as possible. I wanted to shut him up but he had me second-guessing myself. He was winning.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Governments are trying to cut our funding. We need more money. That’s a good one.” He rolled his
eyes. “They keep stuff like that around to get people to do what we want, Ren. You think the people up top got together one night, had a few too many, and typed out a nefarious plan on a computer and hit save? Give us all a little more credit, huh?”
“So if that’s not the truth, tell me what is.”
He laughed again. “No.”
I pointed the gun a bit more assertively. “Then there’s no point keeping you alive anymore.”
“Guess not.”
“I will kill you, Cole.”
“If I tell you anything, the man on the other side of this fence will do to me something far worse than death.” He raised his hands and closed his eyes. “So just get it over with.”
I hesitated. I’d never expected, nor wanted, him to give up this easily. Where was the fight? What had happened to my tormentor?
“But know it won’t change anything,” he added. “There’s a long list of others just like me. You should have blown that place up when you had the chance.” The last part he said almost longingly, like he wanted it to be gone, wanted it over.
“And kill all those kids? Never. I’m not like you.”
“And that’s why people like me will always win.” He paused and opened his eyes, “So what now, Ren?”
“Now? Now I do something I’ve dreamed about for four years.” I tossed my gun into the woods behind me with the others. I dropped my knives to the ground. This was the moment I’d fantasized about since I was fourteen and had broken a kidnapper’s nose. I charged. He was ready. We collided with a thud, but I was stronger, my adrenaline powering me on. I grabbed him by the shoulders, picked him up, and drove him back into woods. I slammed him, hard, into a huge pine tree.
Four years of pain, humiliation, and suffering were packed into every blow that I unleashed on my old teacher. He took it, and tried his best to fight back, but failed. He was no match for me. Not anymore. I had gone wild, all control lost. Cole, with his eyes shut and his hands raised high, was down on his knees, broken and destroyed. I was now one of the ones he’d warned us about. I had “turned.” And he would be my first victim.
Wouldn’t he?
CHAPTER 29
FAMILY REUNION
“Why didn’t you kill him?” Gareth yelled at me over the roar of the wind.
We’d been driving in silence for nearly ten minutes, speeding away from the Nest in the Mustang. I didn’t really have an answer. I still don’t know why myself. Maybe it was pity, like Bilbo with Gollum.
“Maybe I’m getting soft,” I yelled back, but with perhaps a bit of truth behind the sarcasm. Killing people to save Gareth, I could justify to myself. But Cole had surrendered. He had given up. There was no fight in him. There would be no honor in killing him, or so my inner Luka insisted. And honestly, I’d had about enough of death.
As I pulled off the gravel road and back onto the highway, I glanced at Gareth in the passenger seat. He was mine again. The monster inside was satisfied and neither of us would ever let this happen again. I’d been unable to go five seconds without looking at him since I pulled him out of the trunk and hugged him. Yeah, you heard that right, I hugged him, not the other way around. And I’d kept hugging past the point of normal, past the point of awkward, too. At one point my knees went weak. All the emotion, exhaustion, everything had finally hit me. But he’d held me up.
Needless to say, he’d refused to come with me until I told him what was going on. Knowing we had to get going, and fast, I gave him the five second, super abbreviated version and swore once we were safely away I’d be the open book I’d promised earlier. Which left us where we were now.
“I still don’t know why we took this instead of the Beamer,” he said.
“How many eighteen-year-olds do you know who drive that kind of car?”
“Tons,” he lied with a smile.
I looked at him again and my stomach tingled. So wrong, but so right.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Junie’s. Have to make sure Emily’s okay. We made a deal.”
“Who’s Emily?”
“She’s Junie’s you. She’s linked to him.”
It took him a couple of seconds, but he got there. He was basically a genius, after all. “Is she in trouble?”
I shrugged. “They know Junie came for me, us, so they could go after her for payback.”
“They’d do that?”
“I’m not putting anything past them at this point.”
“Wow,” he said under his breath. “With all that’s happened I think you should consider tendering your resignation.”
“Consider it tendered.”
I pulled out the tablet from my pocket and tossed it to him. “Here. Play with this.”
His adorable little nerd eyes lit up. “Whoa,” he gasped, instantly immersed, fingers dancing.
I slammed the gas pedal. The car roared ahead. Farther away from harm. Farther away from this day.
THE GPS TURNED OUT to be quite handy. As Gareth found out, it not only functioned as a classic nav unit, but also had full Internet, and provided real-time updates of the locations of all police officers and speed traps. With that knowledge we averaged about 120 mph, driving through the night and reaching Junie’s in a little under nine hours at mid-morning. Most of the drive was spent answering Gareth’s questions. I told him everything. Okay, not everything. I left out a few memories, the really personal ones that were either too embarrassing, or about Junie, but otherwise I was an open book as promised.
As had happened the previous time, the closer we got to Junie’s the more the butterflies in my stomach fluttered. But these weren’t only the butterflies of seeing him. Others nagged at me. Like what would we see when we got to his house? Would there be a TAC team waiting to kill us? Had Junie even made it? Or was he dead on the side of the road having bled out? What if the block was all burned down, the result of a massive firefight between Junie and them? On and on it went in my head.
I took the wheel with my left hand and gripped my pistol in my lap with my right as we made the final turn to Junie’s street. I prepared myself for whatever I was about to encounter. And that’s when I saw …
Blessed nothingness. Everything looked fine.
We passed a man mowing his lawn.
“Nice ride!” he complimented with a wave.
I waved back still scanning everything for a hint of danger but finding none. The truck Junie had taken was parked in the driveway. It was a little off center with one tire in the grass like it had been parked in a hurry, but that was understandable. I pulled in behind it.
Birds were chirping. The only other noises were the hum of the mower down the road, the sound of rustling leaves, unseen children in a nearby backyard laughing and squealing. All normal. Had Mr. S. called it a draw?
“Okay,” I said. “We’re clear.”
Gareth popped up from the back seat. I’d had him lay down just in case.
“Looks normal, too normal,” he said skeptically. He’d really taken to the idea that he was now part of the operation.
“Just stay behind me,” I told him. “And remember what we talked about.”
He nodded and kept a few paces back from me as we climbed silently out of the car and made our way to the house. I made it up the stairs silently, but Gareth hit a loud creak. I looked back at him and shook my head. He grimaced, knowingly. I tried the handle. It was unlocked. The well-greased door swung open without a peep. Safely inside, I drew my pistol. There was no need to search. If Junie were here, I knew where he’d be. I went straight for the basement.
As I made my way through the house I noticed how perfect it all was. The cleanup team had done a good job. All my bloody rags were gone and any broken windows or damage from the assault the other day had already been repaired. Like it had never happened.
The basement door was cracked open and the faint hint of blue light spilled through.
I looked back at Gareth and held up my hand. He nodded and hung back as I made
my way down the basement stairs. It had all been so easy. So normal. Gareth was right. So when I reached the landing, looked in the room, and saw him, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But my gun was at my side. I started to raise it.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Mr. S. said, waving his finger. His other hand held a pistol, shoved against Junie’s temple. Junie was kneeling on the ground: cuffed, beaten, bloody, and swollen. But he was still alive. He had duct tape across his mouth.
“Weapon on the ground, Ms. Sharpe.”
My eyes were locked on Junie. He shook his head, but I did as I was told, placing my gun on the landing next to the first step leading up. Mr. S. motioned with his gun for me to come down the stairs. I did so.
“Knives, too,” he added.
I placed my knives on the floor in front of my feet.
“Kick them to me.”
I gave them a little kick, purposefully not hard enough to reach him.
Without hesitation he shot Junie in the shoulder. The impact made Junie lurch forward.
“No!” I yelled.
“Then stop acting like a child,” Mr. S. snapped. He grabbed Junie by the hair and yanked him back to his knees.
“Please don’t hurt him,” I whispered. “I’ll do anything.”
Mr. S. raised his eyebrows and gave me a knowing look. “Anything?”
I frowned. “Not that.”
“But that’s what I want. He’s what I want. Your FIP.”
“I can’t, no.”
“Not even to save him?” he asked as he shoved the pistol hard into Junie’s head.
“Please. Please don’t make me choose. I can’t.”
“Here, I’ll make it easier on you. You say you can’t choose so I’ll do it for you.” He pulled Junie to his feet and dragged him over to the video screen on the far wall. The largest image showed Emily playing in the backyard with her mother. He shoved Junie’s face into the image. “Here’s what’s going to happen if you don’t give me who I want. I’m going to walk next door and put a bullet in her head.”