by Amy Lane
Jackson had to smile. “No, ma’am.”
“Then all should be well, my boy. My son’s mouth is better than an assault rifle. I’m hanging up now—you treat his property right.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said quietly, and the call ended.
The car was silent for a moment, and next to him Sonny breathed, “Jeeeeeeeesus! That was his mother?”
“Yup.” The tightness in Jackson’s chest had eased somewhat. He thought he might be a human being long enough to get his shit together before he and Sonny and Burt and Ernie went out to get the boys back.
“Does she eat sharks for breakfast or what?”
In spite of the situation, the terrible fear, the rubber band constricting Jackson’s heart, he managed a rusty chuckle.
“And bear for dessert,” he confirmed.
“Well, good thing she’s coming down here. Bear eaters are mighty useful when you’re going after bad guys,” Sonny said sagely. “Only reason Ace and me stayed alive.”
Jackson nodded. Ace was Sonny’s bear eater.
Ellery was Jackson’s.
Maybe the world wouldn’t end before Sonny and Jackson got them back.
He ignored the little voice whispering maybe it would.
THE GAS station at Victoriana was much as he remembered it.
The town itself was hardly more than a Carl’s Jr. and a Chevron station on one side of the road and Sonny and Ace’s garage on the other. Jackson had looked Victoriana up on the map after their visit in September and had been surprised to see a little stretch of suburb if you turned off what looked like a farm track on the east side of the Chevron station. There was a grade school, a middle school, a high school, a couple of blocks of tract homes and apartment buildings, and one—one—strip mall that featured a mom-and-pop grocery store that was more like the liquor store Anthony’s friend had been killed in than anything remotely having to do with groceries.
But none of that took away from the bare and vulnerable look of the garage on one side of the highway and the gas station on the other.
These two structures might have been the only two signs of civilization at the last outpost before hell.
Jackson turned into the garage’s driveway and pulled around the shop to park in front of the house, right before the mossy, algae-spore lawn started.
For some reason it felt like that lawn was cared for, nurtured, and loved.
“Wait!” Sonny cried as Jackson put his hand on the handle.
“What?”
“Ernie—he’s… he’s not like other people. You… I mean, I’m a fuckin’ mess, but Ernie knows me. You… you gotta be gentle with him. Like he’s a wild creature, like an owl or something, wounded.”
Jackson nodded, unsurprised, and took a deep breath. “My friend Crystal is like that,” he said. Once upon a time Jackson wouldn’t have told this rabbity psychopathic kid a damned thing that was personal, but if the last two hours had taught Jackson anything, it was that Sonny Daye didn’t do squat for you unless he saw you as a person. “Crystal is… sensitive. She needs protection sometimes from how awful the world can be.”
Sonny nodded, his face flooding with relief. “Ernie too. He likes it out here in the desert—he told me so. ’Cause there’s not so many people. He says it’s like silence in his head for the first time in his life.”
Jackson nodded. “Crystal needs the hum of the city, because otherwise loud noises scare her. It’s like their brains are so special, they’ve spent their whole lives learning to live with them so they don’t lose themselves.”
“You’re….” Sonny’s throat worked. “You’re nice. I… I can see why Ace trusted you. I just don’t know if I can forgive you if he gets hurt ’cause he did.”
Fair enough. “I won’t be great at forgiving myself,” Jackson told him. “Now let’s go talk to Ernie.”
The door opened as they walked over the spongy moss-lawn, and a tall, thin young man stood in the doorway, holding a tiny tan dog.
“Duke!” Sonny cried, and the young man put the dog down, where it gave a single little yip and ran into Sonny’s arms, whining and shivering and begging for reassurance.
Jackson was reminded of Billy Bob, and he had a sudden notion that maybe when your lives were broken in the same places you had some of the same patches over the damage. Then Ernie stepped forward and took his hand.
Jackson stared at the boy’s earnest, delicate features and fell immediately into the infinity pool of his brown eyes.
And fell.
And fell.
He was in a peaceful darkness with the whoosh of the ocean in his ears, and his breath, heartbeat, frantic worry, all of it stopped.
Ernie stepped back and broke contact, and Jackson filled his lungs with oxygen like he’d been underwater.
This boy made Crystal look like a brain-deaf state worker.
“Sonny?” Ernie said softly, never looking away from Jackson’s face.
“Yeah—did you talk to Burton?”
“I told him you were going, whether he said yes or not. He said to take Jai, and so I called him.”
Sonny nodded, shaking like the dog in his arms. “Fair enough. You’re coming, right?”
Ernie stared at Jackson for a moment, considering—but what he said was “Of course.”
“Burton know that?”
Ernie’s jaw hardened. “He’s not making that call.”
Jackson wondered what it was about his face that made this boy decide to walk into hell, but Sonny was already on the move. “I’ll go get the guns from the drawer—that gonna freak you out any?”
Ernie glanced at him and shook his head. “No. Burton left some under the bed. I’ll bring those—”
“You can’t come,” Jackson blurted. No. Not this kid. Sonny, yes. Sonny knew how to handle a gun. This kid—
“Burton will need me,” the kid said calmly, then bit his lip. “You… you are not okay. You are good—so good—but you… how have you not bled out yet?”
“Because the guy we’re going to go get holds me together,” Jackson said harshly. “Look—I can’t… I can’t talk about feelings like I have them right now. Tell me what else Burton said, okay?”
Ernie nodded. “Here. He sent me a link—let’s go look at the map.”
IT HAD taken them an hour to get from Walmart to Victoriana, and Ernie had used the time damned well.
He beckoned them into the house, which was just as square and utilitarian on the inside as it had been on the outside—but cared for, in a way.
The carpet was newish, and judging by the boots and shoes in the entryway, everybody did their best to keep it like that. Jackson kicked off his sneakers as they walked in, using the same instinct that kept him from parking on the sad little lawn.
The house opened directly into a kitchen, where everybody’s shoes sat back behind the door, and as he walked in he could pretty much see everything else. There was a bathroom to the left and a doorway just past the kitchen that opened into a bedroom, but the bulk of the house was a living room, with a futon and what looked like dressers on either side of it. On the far side of the living room, what appeared to be the addition to the house sat—a plain wooden door, painted white like the wall that apparently divided one side of the world from the other.
There were posters of race cars on the walls, and a cheery throw on the futon, and even a couple of beanbag chairs between the futon and the television.
The smell of motor oil and fresh wood pervaded the place, and Jackson felt the wrongness of invading it in the pit of his balls.
“Don’t worry so much,” Ernie chimed, moving past Jackson. A small Formica dinner table sat by the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house, and he sat down in front of the laptop set up on it. “You fit here just fine. You’re as damaged as the rest of us—it’s like this could be your home.”
Jackson thought of their real home, Ellery’s luxurious bed, the closet filled with suits Ellery practically lived in, and
oh God, Billy Bob, who was probably lost and alone at Crystal’s house.
“I’d miss my cat,” he said faintly. “Tell me what the map says.”
“Okay, both of you come here and look—it’s super important. Burton says there’s bombs in the ground all around the place, and you can’t see all of them by looking at the piles of dirt.”
“Land mines?” Jackson squeaked, watching as Ernie traced a path around the dot on the map. “Oh dear God—why?”
Ernie blinked slowly at him, probably masking the infinity of his soul as he did so. “Because these are bad men who like to hurt people,” he explained patiently. “I know you’re thinking they’re soldiers, like Burton, but not anymore.”
“Not anymore?” Jackson tried hard to swim in the reality pool and forget that breathless moment of tranquility that had happened when Ernie shook his hand.
“No. See, back in early November, Burton was given this contract to kill me—”
“I’m sorry?” Jackson’s brain almost cracked.
“Kill. Me. He’s a government assassin, and I was his target. But he usually only kills bad guys, and so he just watched me and tried to figure out what to do.”
Behind them Sonny snorted inelegantly, and Jackson looked at him.
“Burton’s totally in love with him and not talking about it,” Sonny said, with the same air of someone talking about a favorite soap opera. “It’s weird. It’s like the guy is made of solid one-hundred-percent no-bullshit, but he looks at Ernie and turns into an ice cream sundae.”
Ernie shrugged and smiled, but his infinity-pool eyes grew shadowed and sad.
“I was a surprise,” he said softly. “And I was really a surprise when he realized I had no business being a target.”
“Why were you a target?” Jackson would probably like to know more about the Burton and Ernie show—sometime when Ellery hadn’t been hustled out of Walmart at gunpoint.
“I was a special project,” Ernie said without self-consciousness.
“Of Burton’s? Do assassins have special projects?”
“No!” Ernie rolled his eyes. “No. Have you ever heard of Project Stargate?”
“Like the TV show?” Sonny asked—apparently he hadn’t heard this part either. “Because those two guys totally belong together, and you can’t tell me they don’t.”
“No,” Jackson said thoughtfully, looking at Ernie with speculation. “Like the CIA project where they tried to use psychics to get an edge in the cold war.”
“You lie!” Sonny burst out, eyes huge.
“No, it was a true thing,” Ernie confirmed. “I… I wasn’t on the books, you understand. But Commander Karl Lacey—”
“Fucking scumbag,” Jackson clarified.
“Yeah. Him. He… my parents were killed in a car accident, and when I went into the foster system, I… I wasn’t too coherent, but I was an open nerve, you know? So I was reading people left and right, and it actually made it into my foster care records. I’m not sure how Lacey got hold of it, but right before I turned eighteen, I got to be a ward of the state. I got to be a ward of his state. He kept me for a year and….” Ernie shivered. “I saw… I saw what he was doing to the new recruits. He… he kept trying to use me, as like a meter.”
Jackson swallowed. “Like when you said I was good.” Oh. Oh no. God. Ernie. Jackson thought his damage was bad—
“Your damage is bad,” Ernie said, like Jackson had said it out loud. “I wasn’t mistreated. I wasn’t starved. I didn’t see horrific things. What he did to the soldiers was… well, awful. But no worse than I’d seen in high school, sometimes. Just more… organized, more—”
“Systematic,” Jackson filled in.
“Exactly. And my job—my only job—was to tell him if the person I touched was, in his words, ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”
“That’s so dangerous,” Sonny breathed.
“That’s so stupid!” Jackson argued, appalled.
“Why’s it stupid to know if someone’s good or bad? Good or bad saved me and Ernie’s life when those bad guys came by!”
“Well, yeah—but that’s because they were bad because they meant harm!” Jackson blurted.
“Don’t most bad guys mean harm?”
“The guy we chased in November didn’t think about it like that,” Jackson said, stomach a cold stone, bowels a frozen river. “That guy we chased in November didn’t see his victims as people—they were dirty pretty—they were like him. So he wasn’t ever thinking ‘I’m a bad guy, I’m going to do harm—’”
“He was thinking dirty-pretty people have to be stopped,” Ernie supplied with a shiver. “I think I met that guy. I knew what he was becoming. I tried to tell Lacey too, but he just wanted to know if he was good or bad. And he never defined that, you know? But I finally realized that to him, ‘good’ meant a good soldier, and ‘bad’ meant someone who would question orders—but by then, so many of my ‘good guys’ had washed out of his super-special behavior modification unit that Lacey let me go.” He shivered again. “Had his guys drive me to Albuquerque and leave me there with ten thousand dollars in the bank and enrollment in the local junior college. Like he was doing me a favor, right?”
“And that was how long ago?” Jackson asked, the timeline in his head coming together.
“That was about four years ago,” Ernie said, looking at him curiously.
“So when Galway and Owens were being trained—”
“And they got shipped out not long after that,” Sonny said. “’Cause Owens was a legend and Galway was an asshole four years ago. Ace and I got stateside two years after that.”
Jackson nodded. “Okay. It makes sense. I… I’m pretty sure they’re not the only two serial killers he created with his little behavior-mod schtick—”
“They weren’t,” Ernie said with grim confidence. “I… there were a lot of bad guys I tried to warn him about, but they were perfect soldiers, you know?”
“Yeah.” Jackson couldn’t sit at the table anymore. “But Owens was the one who got caught—or at least put in the spotlight, when Scott Bridger got arrested. We realized Bridger was just muscle for a corrupt politician, but his buddy Owens was a scary piece of work—”
“When was that?” Ernie asked, like it mattered.
“August.” Jackson laced his fingers behind his head. “Why?”
“Because the hit on me was issued in early November.”
Jackson had heard the time mentioned before, and his stomach suddenly clenched. “So we think Lacey is looking for funding—all the tech he’s using is out-of-date, and he has a small group of men working for him but not unlimited resources.”
“Wait!” Ernie stood up excitedly. “I got it! See, that’s the thing. Lacey used the military to put the hit out on me, but he also hired a mercenary group called Corduroy to finish the job. So he loses his funding—people hear the name Tim Owens—”
“We tried to make a stink about it,” Jackson said softly. “We thought nobody was listening.”
“Well, Lacey heard, and then in November—”
“In November Owens killed the wrong person and we got close,” Jackson said tightly. God, no—this kid was traumatized enough. Jackson wasn’t going there. “We got Owens, and Ellery made the connection between Lacey and Galway and Sonny and Ace—”
“Why’d it take you so long to call us up, then?” Sonny asked curiously.
“I got hurt,” Jackson said tersely. God, they were so off track here. He wanted nothing more than to go charging after Ellery. For Christ’s sake, Jackson knew where he was. But the more they knew about their enemy, the more they knew who they were facing, the better chance they’d have to get him back alive. “I just went back to work last week and….” He let out a weak little laugh. “The first thing I did was get concussed and end up in the hospital again.”
“Stop it,” Ernie begged softly. “You’re doing this thing in your head where your heart is screaming and your mouth is saying these really simple thing
s. I hate it. I hate that. Just tell us what your heart is saying—”
“We don’t have time!” Jackson snarled, and Ernie made a hurt sound. Oh fuck—Jackson had promised to be gentle. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “So sorry. Look, Ernie—maybe I should just go alone. I’m sorry—you and Sonny and Jai—you know each other. You’re a family. Let me go, do some recon, see where Ace and Ellery are being held. I can scope things out, make a plan—”
“And get killed,” Ernie said softly. “Please, Jackson. Wait. Let’s reason this out together. I won’t make you tell any more about yourself than you need to.”
“I’m sorry,” Jackson muttered again. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You were making a long story short,” Ernie said perceptively. “I forget sometimes, because I can see it, because I can feel it, that doesn’t mean people are ready for the rest of the world to know.”
“Exactly.” Jackson’s ears hurt, his throat was so tight. “So November, the shit hits the fan, Owens gets taken down, and Lacey—who has no funding at this point—starts using what he’s still getting to hire mercenary groups to clean up his loose ends.”
“That’s you, Ernie,” Sonny said in all earnestness. “You’re a loose end.”
“Literally the story of my life,” Ernie said winsomely, and Jackson thought of AJ and Anthony and the lost boys in AJ’s flophouse. Gagh! This kid—no wonder a superhero didn’t know what to do with him. He gave Ernie his kindest smile and kept thinking.
“So, Ernie—what’s Burton been doing since November—besides ditching out on a relationship, that is?”
“He sort of joined Corduroy,” Ernie said, like that wasn’t a bomb. “I mean, not really. He wanted to see what Lacey was doing, so he pretended to be a bad guy and, you know—”
“Infiltrated the enemy camp,” Jackson said in wonder. “So he’s actually where they’re being kept right now?”
“Yes.” Ernie smiled a little. “He worked their coms. He says he got to listen to you and Ellery have sex a lot. Said you fucked like rabbits. I think it made him sort of horny, so thank you for that.”