At Any Cost Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Fawkes, K. M.

He threw the door open, telling himself to get over the paranoia, and climbed out, then made his way quickly toward the bed of the truck.

  “Step one. Bag,” he said under his breath. “Step two. Search for Evie. See if she’s replied to my message. Step three. Search the house again. Step four. Drop whatever I find at the truck. Step five. Get to the next house, rinse and repeat.”

  He pulled open the tailgate of the truck, and nearly screamed when someone popped out at him.

  “Do you always talk to yourself when you think no one else is around?” Alice asked calmly, putting her hands on her hips and staring at him.

  “And do you always just pop out from places where you aren’t supposed to be?” he asked, trying to control his anger and failing miserably. What was it with people jumping out at him from hiding places? “What the hell are you doing back there?”

  “Tagging along, what does it look like?” she asked archly. Seeing that he was about to argue with her over her presence, she put a hand to his chest and pushed him back slightly. “And before you argue with me, let me just tell you that you’re absolutely insane if you thought I was going to let you go gallivanting off to a deserted city all by yourself. You’re my closest friend here, and the reason I even got out of Green’s operation alive. You think I’m going to let you risk yourself like that? Because if you do, you’ve got another thing coming, buddy.”

  She paired the last word with another shove, and he retreated several steps—partly from the shove and partly because of the onslaught of words.

  “You… you came with me to protect me?” he asked hesitantly, unsure whether to be offended or gratified.

  She rolled her eyes. “Let’s at least put it in a way that won’t threaten your masculinity, shall we? I came with you because I know you need backup in a situation like this, and I know I’m the best backup you’re going to get. Besides, I wanted to see this fabled city with the full larders. And two people work faster than one. You got a problem with that?”

  He knew better than to tell her he had a problem with her logic. And the truth was, he was glad to see her. Glad not to be there on his own. And glad for the help.

  So he just nodded once and said, “Perfect. I’m starting in this first house. You start in the next one. The quicker we can get through them, the better. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to be. Any problems, use the woodpecker signal I showed you. And make it loud. I don’t know how thick these walls are.”

  Chapter 16

  He didn’t bother knocking this time. He just walked right into the house, calling out as he went to warn Evie—if she was here—that he was back. Then he turned around and slammed the door behind him, his eyes going right to where the new message from her should have been.

  Nothing.

  His heart sank further and further as his eyes scanned the door, desperately searching for what he had been so sure he’d find there. True, he hadn’t had any real reason to believe it, but his gut had told him that he’d return to find a message from her. And instead…

  Nothing.

  But he still wasn’t convinced that he needed to leave the idea alone. If everything went right in Las Ramblas today, they’d be moving out for Mexico within the next few days, and potentially the only person who knew about Evie’s predicament would leave the area. He wasn’t going to do that to her. He wouldn’t leave her alone, not if he could help it.

  So he went through the house again, top to bottom, calling her name and searching every nook and cranny that he came across. He grabbed supplies as he went, pulling things from the kitchen and bathroom and even stopping in the hallway closet for toilet paper and paper towels. Not things he would have thought to look for before, but still useful.

  And still he didn’t find anything that looked like it might point to an eleven-year-old girl still being in residence.

  He marched back to the truck, the wheels in his brain turning as he tried to figure out the next step. Could she have gone to the neighbors’? It made a certain sort of sense; if her parents had disappeared, she might have gone to search for other adults. Depending on what had happened to her parents, she might have decided that another house felt safer.

  The only way to know was to look through the other houses in the neighborhood. And he had to go into them anyhow, since he was there to mine them for supplies.

  He barged into the next house and repeated the process, coming back to the truck with even more supplies, since this new house hadn’t been ransacked yet. A small part of him was surprised at how many supplies he found, and when he got to the truck he met Alice, who had an equally stuffed bag.

  “This neighborhood is unreal,” she said, with more excitement than he thought he’d ever seen from her. “It’s like everyone went grocery shopping right before they disappeared. I wonder where they went?”

  “If my suspicion is correct, they holed up in the grocery store itself,” he told her.

  He went on to detail what he’d seen and smelled in the market and the hardware store, and Alice frowned. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would they hole up in there, and stay there until they died?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m starting to wonder whether it had anything to do with the bikers who’ve been bothering us,” he said, inspiration starting to dawn. “What if the gang showed up after everything went sideways and started causing trouble? What if the people of the town decided that they were all going to band together for safety?”

  “And stay there until they died?” Alice asked, shaking her head. “Gathering together makes sense. But I still don’t see why they would have stayed there—in a market, where they had food—until they died.”

  It was a good point, and Garrett realized quickly that they were wasting time. Whatever had happened here, it didn’t matter to their current situation. If it meant that the houses were fully stocked, it was to their benefit. No use looking a gift horse in the mouth.

  They agreed that they would put it out of their heads and went back into the houses, Garrett searching for a girl named Evie and Alice searching for food, water and as many medical supplies as she could find.

  Garrett had just moved into the next house on his side of the street when he realized that something was wrong. There was someone in the house. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but he could feel it. The silence held someone else’s breathing. Someone else’s heartbeat.

  He moved into the house, holding his breath, and wondering madly if this was where Evie had ended up. Maybe she was here, hiding in a closet or under a bed. Just two doors down from her house—near enough to be able to see if her parents came back. Far enough away to avoid whatever had happened there that had scared her so badly.

  He was so busy running his gaze around the house, trying to figure out where the girl might be hiding, that he never heard the man come out of hiding behind him. He only felt the muzzle of the gun pressed to the base of his skull.

  “’Bout time you got here,” a gravelly voice said. “Name’s Kraken. And we’ve got to have a talk, leader to leader.”

  Chapter 17

  Garrett turned slowly to face the man who held the gun to his head, disliking him from the moment he heard his voice. He didn’t know the guy, and had no foundation on which to base his opinion. But in his experience, anyone who put a gun to your head before they even introduced themselves was trouble.

  His opinion of the man didn’t change with the view. He was old and grubby looking, with at least a week’s worth of stubble on his jaw and a black kerchief tied around his head. He was tall—taller than Garrett by at least a couple of inches—and heavily muscled. Tattoos covered his arms. He also wore a white tank top, into which he’d tucked a pair of black sunglasses, and ratty, torn jeans. Black boots completed the ensemble.

  Garrett couldn’t have conjured up a more likely looking biker if he’d tried. The only thing the man was missing was a black leather jacket, and that would have been the height of unnecessary in the New Mexico heat. He
was such a caricature that it would have been funny in other circumstances.

  As it was, the situation was anything but amusing. Garrett didn’t even have to guess to know that this guy was the head of the gang that had been torturing his community for the last several days.

  “The head of the biker gang, I assume,” Garrett said calmly.

  The man grinned, showing that he was missing at least three teeth, and nodded quickly. “One and the same. Name’s Jack Nugent, but you can call me Kraken. Nice to meet you.”

  “I wish I could say the same, but your group hasn’t exactly been friendly,” Garrett growled. “What do you want?”

  The other man rocked back on his heels as if Garrett had physically hit him with that observation, and the grin melted off his face, replaced by a deep scowl.

  “I want,” he said sharply, “to let you know that you and your folks are treading on real thin ice around here. See what you don’t know is that my crew has eyes everywhere. We’ve been watching you lot for some time, but didn’t think it was worth causing any trouble. Didn’t think you had anything worth bothering over, you get me? Then we realized that you wouldn’t be surviving if you didn’t have anything worth bothering over, and that you might be valuable after all.”

  “So it was your group that broke into our stores,” Garrett noted, checking that off his list of mysteries.

  Kraken nodded, looking proud of himself. “Sure was, and we thank you kindly for helping us increase our own resources. Some of that stuff will come in handy, let me tell you.”

  “And it was your people who attacked the boy on the ranch near Trinity,” Garrett added, trying hard to contain his anger.

  The fact that this Kraken character was treating this so casually was driving him closer and closer to the edge of rage, and he wondered quickly how good the man was with that gun. If Garrett charged him, would he have the reflexes to get a shot off? Or would Garrett be able to hit him and get the gun away from him before he could make a move?

  Suddenly, Kraken narrowed his eyes and flipped the safety on his gun. “I can see your thoughts all over your face, boy,” he warned. “Don’t even try it. I get that you’re doing okay out here in the desert but you’re still nothing more than a city slicker. And I’ve been here a lot longer than you have. Me and my people have been here since the whole thing first went down.”

  Right, well if he was broadcasting his intentions that clearly, Garrett supposed he’d better cool it on the planning. He should probably count himself lucky that Kraken had seen fit to tell him he was broadcasting his emotions like that.

  “What is it you want?” he asked. The sooner they could get this over with, the better.

  Kraken shrugged. “Just wanted to talk to you about that tanker of gas you stole. You know the one. Well, it belongs to me and my crew. We went to quite a bit of effort to destroy that caravan of soldiers, and I wasn’t too keen on seeing you make off with the booty. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t know we’d claimed it. If you did, I figure you wouldn’t have taken it the way you did. You seem too… sensible for that sort of action.”

  “And?” Garrett asked.

  “And I’d like you to return it,” Kraken said pointedly. “You can find our compound in Helen Falls. It’s not too far from where you’ve set up your own camp. I’ll give you two days to bring the tanker back. If it isn’t with us by sunset, we’ll be coming to look for it ourselves. And I can tell you that we won’t be in any mood for friendly conversations if we have to do that.”

  “And why should we care about your men and their friendly conversation?” Alice asked coldly from behind Kraken, the nose of her gun pressing suddenly up against the back of his head. “Seems to me that you’re the one who wants something that we have. In which case you would be well advised to ask nicely rather than making threats. Collecting more bees with honey and all that.”

  Garrett had never been happier to see anyone in his life. Alice’s face was cold and unfeeling, her hand steady on the gun, her finger secure on the trigger. Garrett had seen her kill before, and he knew she’d do it again. One wrong move from Kraken and he was finished.

  In front of him, Kraken was scowling—though Garrett couldn’t tell whether it was a scowl of anger or embarrassment. Instead of answering Alice’s question, he tossed a bundle at Garrett’s feet. Garrett bent down to grab the package and grimaced when he saw that it was a decomposing finger.

  No need to ask whether it had once belonged to Bart.

  “Two days,” Kraken snarled. “Or you’re all going to end up missing more than just a couple of fingers.”

  He turned and stalked out of the house without saying anything else, leaving Alice and Garrett staring after him.

  “Well that’s just terrific,” Alice said quickly. “You always make the nicest friends.”

  They were already on their way out the door when Garrett put up a hand to stop her. “Hold on,” he hissed.

  He eased the door open and glanced out onto the walkway, but wherever Kraken had gone, he had disappeared. One glance at the street in front of the house showed it to be empty—or at least empty of any functioning vehicles. There were plenty of empty cars and trucks still sitting around, but nothing that looked like it had moved in some time.

  “Where did he come from?” Garrett whispered. “How long was he sitting in here waiting for me?”

  “Think that falls on the list of questions that we don’t have time for,” Alice said bluntly. “We’ve got to get out of here. No telling how many other people he has in this place.”

  “Not without—” Garrett started. He stopped himself, trying to find some rationale, but knew that he had to search that first house one more time. “Not without Evie,” he finally said.

  Alice cocked her head, confused.

  “The girl,” he reminded her. “The girl who left the message. I don’t want to leave without knowing what happened to her.”

  The look Alice shot him told him that she thought he’d lost his mind. “Garrett, I know you want to help this girl. But are you serious? We’ve just had a man threaten us, threaten our community. And you want to stick around and look for some girl who might be long gone, or dead?”

  He knew she was right. He knew that he was being ridiculous. But… “I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t look one more time. I can’t live with the thought of having deserted her.”

  Alice bit her lip, but then nodded quickly. “I’ll help you. If we’re quick about it. But Garrett, if we don’t find her, you have to give this up. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said, already on his way through the door.

  They rushed back to what he now thought of as Evie’s house, threw the door open again, and started shouting for her. With two of them working the house, the search was even quicker, Alice taking the second floor and Garrett sticking on the main floor. But even after climbing around on his hands and knees and searching every cupboard in the kitchen, he came up empty. When Alice met him at the bottom of the stairs, she also shook her head.

  “There’s nothing up there,” she said.

  He shut the door and pointed at the message, needing to share it with someone so that he wasn’t the only one taking responsibility here. Alice read it and then closed her eyes in what looked like sorrow and regret.

  “That poor, poor kid,” she murmured. “But Garrett, we don’t know where she might be. She’s definitely not in this house, and she hasn’t answered you. We have to go. We have to believe that she found someone else to help her.”

  Garrett took a deep, heaving breath, and then nodded. Alice was right. He sent up a prayer to whoever might be watching them, asking that the girl be safe somewhere, and then walked out the door for the last time. As they were walking toward the street, though, Alice put a hand on his arm.

  When he turned to look at her, she was pointing.

  “Garrett, did you ever check the garage?”

  He hadn’t even thought of the ga
rage!

  Without bothering to answer, he darted toward it, went around the side, and yanked open the door he found there. Three steps in, his gaze sweeping the space, and he saw what he’d been looking for the entire time. A rope that hung from the ceiling. A rope that connected to a trap door.

  He only hoped that the girl was actually up there. And still alive.

  He found a ladder up against one of the walls and pulled it open to set it up under the trap door. Then, just as his foot was coming down on the first step, he paused.

  His gut was talking to him again. And it was telling him that he wasn’t going to like what he saw up there. He already knew where this was heading. He also knew that he didn’t have a choice about looking. He needed to know what had happened.

  Four steps took him up the ladder, and he pulled the rope to open the door. Three more steps and his head was peeking through the opening. There was a window up here, so light streamed in, illuminating the large space, and it didn’t take him long to find her. She was tucked into the corner, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, her eyes closed. And there was no doubting the fact that she was dead.

  “Must have starved up here, too scared to go down to the house,” he murmured. God only knew what had happened there that had scared her so badly. God knew where her parents had gone—or why they had left her. Garrett couldn’t help but think of his sister, and Fawn, and the millions of children out there who had also died.

  It was all so pointless. So wasteful.

  A tear slid down his cheek. Then he blew a kiss at the little girl that he’d wanted so badly to save, and he started descending the ladder again. He closed the trapdoor, leaving Evie to her resting place, and hoped that wherever she was now, she was at peace.

  God knew this world didn’t have much of that left in it. Perhaps she was better off to have left it entirely.

  Chapter 18

  “I told you it was a bad idea to take the tanker,” Steve growled.