by Hondo Jinx
“Understood,” Jamaal said, “but we’ll get you in range. They’re cloaking hard, so we can’t pinpoint their exact location, but we know they headed north from Miami early this morning.”
“How do you know that if they’re cloaked?”
“They took someone with them,” Jamaal said. “Someone I know. And they didn’t think to cloak her until they were on the highway.”
“I’m guessing they were preoccupied by other events,” Hazel said. “Narrowly escaping a massacre can be very distracting, I assume.”
Jamaal grinned at that. “Based on this woman and her family, I made the educated guess that Brawley headed to the Panhandle.”
“And my intuition says Jamaal is right,” Hazel said. “When we detected Remi—oh, don’t make a face, Jamaal. What’s Tammy going to do, sell us out to the tabloids?”
“You would make a horrible detective,” Jamaal said.
“Thank goodness,” Hazel said. “What a miserable life you lead, chasing people all over. This is my first time, and I have to say it’s exhausting.” She reached out a hand twisted by arthritis and polka-dotted with liver spots and steadied herself against the counter.
Tammy offered the old woman a seat, but Hazel refused.
Outside, Luna started barking again.
“Glimpsing Remi allowed us to take a quick snapshot,” Jamaal said, “and we were able to generate solid conjecture about several adjacent truths.”
“Brawley, Nina, and Sage are all alive,” Hazel said. “At least they were when they left Miami. Brawley bonded with Remi and opened his Carnal strand, and now, they’re heading for Texas.”
“Probably,” Jamaal said.
Hazel nodded. “Probably. Louisiana has also occurred as a possibility. Jamaal and I are both operating independent of the Latticework, so we’re flying blind. But whether it’s Texas or Louisiana doesn’t really matter. We know which way to go.”
“Which is where you come in,” Jamaal said.
“Shit,” Tammy said, “you want me to go with you.”
Jamaal nodded.
“You think if we drive in that direction, we’ll get close enough that I can call out to Brawley.”
Jamaal and Hazel both nodded.
Tammy crossed her arms over her chest. “Forget it. I can’t go.” She poked her thumb in the direction of the bedrooms. “I have two kids sleeping down the hall. Not to mention work tomorrow. Back-to-back shifts, and my jobs are on opposite ends of the island.”
“They need us,” Hazel said.
Jamaal nodded. “They didn’t kill those people in Miami. Well, maybe a few of them but not most. There’s been a… development.”
“Yes,” Hazel said, “the—”
“No,” Jamaal interrupted, and his voice was different, inflexible. “We will not explain that unless she joins us. Suffice it to say, a reckoning is at hand. We’re talking potentially apocalyptic.”
Tammy looked back and forth between them, frozen with indecision. She was less worried about an apocalypse than her friend. But she doubted her own power to help Nina and had very little faith in these two Seekers, who seemed old and desperate and more than a little crazy.
Bottom line, Tammy had two kids to feed. If she lost her jobs, she was going to have a hell of a time doing that. And she’d rather usher in the damn apocalypse than let her kids starve.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You two seem really nice, and I wish you luck, but I can’t do it.”
To make matters worse, Luna was losing her damn mind out in the driveway. Her barking wasn’t just louder. It was frantic.
Jamaal and Hazel straightened suddenly. It was like an invisible prankster had goosed them both at the same time.
Oh shit, Tammy thought, registering the looks of concern coming onto their faces. “What is it? What’s happening?”
Jamaal reached inside his blazer grabbing the pistol.
Luna, Tammy thought, and rushed across the room to peer out the peephole.
She saw nothing but could tell that Luna was standing on the step, pressed against the door, barking wildly toward the road. But she couldn’t see anyone or anything out there, and a quick scan picked up no thoughts.
“Don’t open that door,” Jamaal said, touching her arm.
“Fuck that,” Tammy said, shaking her arm free and opening the door. “My dog is scared.”
Luna whined, scratching madly at the screen door.
“Luna, stop,” Tammy hissed. “You’re tearing the screen.” She popped the doors, and the terrified dog shot inside, her stubby tail clamped tight to her snowy butt.
Then Tammy saw them.
Her involuntary scream was loud and long, and her first conscious thought after it had ripped from her lungs was to scold herself, thinking she might wake the kids.
Then Jamaal yanked her from the door, raising the pistol.
Tammy raced to the back of the trailer. She had to get the kids, had to get them away from the terrifying things out in the driveway.
She had merely glimpsed them, but a glimpse was all it took, because white-hot terror had burned the image permanently onto her mind.
It was the thugs from across the road. Only they weren’t the thugs anymore. Something had happened to them, wiping their expressions and minds utterly, irretrievably blank.
Marching slowly toward her home, they moved with placid grace. Their eyes had turned as black as a starless midnight sky. In contrast, their skin and hair had turned bright white. Their faces, which usually fluctuated between practiced expressions of boredom and cockiness, were now twisted into masks of unspeakable terror.
They were dead. Of that, she had no doubt. And they hadn’t just died and risen again. They had died horrific deaths, and now they were coming for her and her babies.
Tammy pounded through the bedroom door, flipped on the lights and shouted, her voice cracking with terror. “Get up, babies. Ty and Hannah, get up right now. We have to get out of here this second!”
Ty sat up, instantly awake. “Mommy? What is it? Is it a fire?”
“Yes,” Tammy lied, knowing Ty feared fires after a trailer down the road had burned last Christmas and a boy he played with had lost everything. “Come on.”
Hannah mumbled groggily, still half asleep.
“Hannah, wake up!” Tammy shouted, and before her sleepy daughter could even respond, Tammy scooped the little girl into her arms and turned toward the door. “Ty, come on, sweetie. Now.”
Ty dropped to the ground, eyes bright with fear. “But, Mommy, aren’t we supposed to get low in case of smoke and—”
“Come with Mommy right now!” Tammy shrieked, half out of her mind with fear, and the boy broke into tears; a thing he had never done since his father died, not even at the funeral, not even last fall, when he’d broken his wrist down at the creek.
Now Hannah was crying, too. Not just crying, howling. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
Tammy threw her daughter over one shoulder like there really was a fire and they were about to charge through the flames. With her free hand, she latched onto Ty’s wrist. The same one he broke down at the creek, she thought, her mind moving with the uncanny speed of the terrified individual high on adrenaline. I told him not to swing over those rocks, but the older boys were doing it, so he—
A gunshot boomed in the kitchen. The noise was unbelievably loud, so loud that it filled the room. So loud that Tammy not only heard but also felt it.
Tammy slammed to a stop, eyes rolling with terror.
Jamaal stood, half in and half out of the door, pointing his pistol into the darkness.
He fired again, then again.
Tammy jumped with each explosion, frozen with fear. Hannah wailed on her shoulder.
Jamaal fired again. This time, the sound brought Tammy back to her senses.
Without even making the conscious decision to do so, she hauled Ty into her arms and turned back toward the bedroom.
Open a window, she thought. Pop a screen, go o
ut the back, and run for it.
But Hazel appeared before her. The old woman’s face was unnaturally calm.
“Sweetie,” Hazel said. “You can’t go out that way. Others are waiting back there. You would run straight into their clutches.”
Tammy opened her mouth to protest but then realized Hazel was right.
Tammy couldn’t see or hear anyone back there, of course, no more than she could detect thoughts filtering from that direction. These walking abominations had no thoughts. But she was certain Hazel was right.
Jamaal fired again and turned to shout at them. “Come with me now! We have to get to the car. We won’t get another chance!”
Jamaal shot out of the house and Tammy followed, holding her children tight. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in the involuntary, primal snarl of a mother ready to kill or die to defend her young.
Jamaal hurried to his sedan, moving with a limp, and threw open the passenger door.
Several feet away, a corpse lifted from the ground.
It was Randy, the only thug Tammy knew by name, the kid nineteen or twenty and skinny as a rail. One morning a week earlier, she had bumped into Randy at the 7-11 after working a pain-in-the-ass double shift and torn him a new one, telling him to turn down the fucking music, she had kids trying to sleep.
In retrospect it had been a horrible idea, snapping at a young guy who was somewhere between playing gangster and catching his first real stint in jail. If his buddies had been with him and she’d yelled like that, Randy probably would’ve shouted back at her then paid her house a visit later to smash shit and maybe take a dump in her car.
She had been fried from work and genuinely pissed, though, and luckily, Randy had been alone. He stumbled through an awkward apology, and the next few nights, the music had been a little quieter.
But now Randy was dead. Dead yet pulling himself off the ground again. One of his arms dangled from the shoulder by a grisly tongue of glistening tendon, the rest of the meat there torn away by one of Jamaal’s bullets.
Jamaal fired again, and Randy’s skull exploded. He dropped to the ground, his face a caldera of blood and ruined flesh and other matter.
Then Randy sat up again.
And Tammy realized that other thugs, mostly disfigured by head shots, were also rising from the ground.
“Don’t just stand there, sweetie,” Hazel said, pushing her toward the car. “We have to get your babies out of here.”
My babies, Tammy thought, and her upper lip lifted like that of a snarling she-wolf. Have to save my babies!
Clutching her screaming children under her arms, Tammy raced after Jamaal, who threw open the rear passenger door and shouted to her before going around the front of the sedan.
Tammy ducked into the back seat of the sedan. “Luna, come!” she shouted.
The tiny dog didn’t always come when Tammy called, but this time Luna shot into the back seat like a woolly rocket.
Hazel shoved the back door shut, closing Tammy off and filling her with a rush of claustrophobia.
Then the night exploded in gunshots, and Tammy hunkered down, claustrophobia be damned, and clutched her screaming children close, pressing their faces to her body and doing her best to cover their little ears.
Jamaal fired again. And again. Then his door opened, and he slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. At some point, Hazel had joined them.
Something thumped into the rear of the car, and Tammy turned in her seat to see a figure rear up and swing its arm sharply downward like an axe. The back window smashed, raining down glass, and a white hand reached for her.
Tammy cursed, jerking her head back and forth as the hand swiped at her.
Jamaal gunned the engine. The car shot forward, and the ghoulish thug fell off the back of the car.
There was a loud thump. The car shuddered, and something tumbled noisily over the roof and into their wake.
Jamaal accelerated and jerked the wheel, swerving to avoid another figure, then hung a hard right out of her driveway.
Beside a white panel truck parked across the street, a short man in sunglasses, a baggy bowling shirt, and ridiculous little fedora pointed an empty hand in their direction as if he were aiming an invisible pistol.
Cosmic! Tammy thought, and she caught a snippet of thought chiming within the skull beneath that ridiculous little hat.
You will serve me.
Then, acting with the primordial lack of hesitation of a mother defending her children, Tammy inhaled all her staggering terror and launched it straight at the Cosmic asshole’s mind.
Whatever the man had been planning to do was temporarily forgotten. With a horrified scream, he dropped to the ground.
Jamaal sped away.
Tammy twisted in her seat and stared out the shattered back window.
Behind them, the Cosmic crawled beneath the truck.
Yes, she thought, slammed by a wave of relief, holding her crying children tight. Luna whimpered in the footwell, pressing her trembling body into Tammy’s leg.
Just as Tammy was going to turn back around and face forward, the terrified Cosmic tossed a sphere into the air. The lighting was poor, and Jamaal was racing off in the opposite direction, so Tammy couldn’t see the sphere clearly. When the object hit the ground, it changed shape, unfolding into a tiny animal, like a rat or a tiny dog or maybe some kind of weird, leggy armadillo, and scampered across the road toward her house.
Then Jamaal turned again, and they bounced away over the rutted main thoroughfare of the trailer park she suddenly suspected she would never see again.
Then they turned onto the highway, and Jamaal dropped the hammer, roaring north.
“We’re okay now,” Hazel said from the front seat.
Tammy didn’t say anything. She might not be a Seeker, but she damn well knew if there was one thing they weren’t, it was fine.
She clutched Hannah, who wailed like a siren, to her chest. Ty, tough as always, overcame his fear and wriggled free to ask questions.
“I don’t know,” she told her boy, and the answer felt right every time he asked another question. “I don’t know, baby.”
One thing she did know, however. She was going to skin Brawley alive!
18
Cotter looked like he’d swallowed a June bug. “Keep your money, asshole. Not interested.”
They stood outside his office, Cotter looking old and sick in the yellow glow of the lights outside his office. Beside him the mechanical hound waited, ready to take off Brawley’s leg with its bear-trap jaws.
But Brawley was ready too. His arm crackled with force.
“Thirty-six thousand dollars,” Brawley repeated, holding the sack out toward the old man. “Three hundred and eighteen dollars more than remains on Frankie’s contract.”
Cotter spat a line of tobacco juice onto the gravel. “She ain’t for sale.”
“I’m not buying her,” Brawley said. “I’m buying her out.”
“Hell, it’ll cost you a lot more than contract value. You have any idea how much money this girl makes me? Tack another zero on the end and maybe we’ll talk.”
“Don’t bother to negotiate, husband,” Sage said. “Contracts governing indentured servitude are handled by Seekers. These contracts always allow the servant to pay off his or her obligation and strictly forbid any extra fees or demands by the master.”
“Son of a whore,” Cotter mumbled and spat on the ground. For a second, he rubbed his orange-stubble jaw. Then a wily smile cranked up the corners of the old Gearhead’s mouth. “The contract says she can buy me out, not some random asshole.”
Brawley held out the sack to Frankie. “Here you go, darlin. My gift to you. Free and clear. Do with it what you like.”
“Are you sure?” Frankie asked.
Brawley nodded. “Are you?”
Frankie looked over one shoulder, staring back at the hangar where she had worked seven days a week since signing with Cotter.
Brawley kn
ew she must be experiencing mixed emotions, but when she turned back around, a 1000-watt smile lit her pretty face. “Definitely,” she said, taking the bag. “Thank you, Brawley. You won’t regret this.”
They had struck the bargain back at the campground. Brawley would pay off her debt. In return, Frankie would travel with them and serve as Brawley’s personal Gearhead for three months.
The girls were elated.
Well, everyone but Callie, who got sulky and withdrew into the little bulkhead bedroom overtop the front seats, claiming she was tired.
After that, they’d packed up and said goodbye to the Scars.
Braxton gave Brawley a Gearhead-tweaked burner phone to reach him night or day and a .45 Glock 21 so Brawley could “start shooting like a Carnal.”
Brawley thanked Braxton, but Remi’s parents weren’t done yet.
Talia rolled out a beautiful black Harley, saying no daughter of hers would be without a motorcycle.
The gift made Remi cry, but she wiped away the tears, straddled the big bike, and brought it to life, grinning like a madwoman.
Finally, Braxton had called Brawley and Remi together, given their union his blessing, and handed them their “wedding present,” a wooden crate loaded with two dozen hand grenades.
All in all, it was proving to be an amazing night.
Unless, of course, you happened to be a crooked old Gearhead losing your meal ticket.
“Now you just hold on, girl,” Cotter said. “Who gave you a leg up when you hit rock bottom? Me, that’s who. Who gave you a place to stay and tools to use and taught you how to use them? Me. Now you’re going to leave me high and dry?”
Frankie nodded. “Spare me, Cotter. You’ve earned a million bucks off me.”
“Let’s negotiate,” Cotter said. “Work for me. I’ll pay you.”
Frankie laughed.
But Cotter grinned, eyes glittering confidently. “One hundred thousand a year. Full benefits. And a ten-grand bonus, straight out of that cash, if you agree to stick with me.”
It was one hell of an offer. Brawley shifted his eyes to Frankie, who shook her head.
“Not for a million dollars a year, Cotter,” she said, and thrust the sack in his direction. “Take the money.”