“Anything?” he asked, as he walked through the door.
Joshua, sitting behind the desk, smiled up at him. Lisa was by his side, looking ecstatic.
“What is it?” Winslow asked.
“I did it. I cracked the code.”
Lisa nodded her head furiously, beaming brightly. “He did!”
Winslow rushed over, around the desk and looked down at the scribbled paper the boy had been working on. He couldn’t make much out of all the letters and numbers scrawled over the page in Joshua’s handwriting, except for a small phrase:
Confiden…
“What was it?” he asked.
Joshua pointed at the partial English word. “From the inside cover of the journal. I’m sure it was Confidential.” He held up the journal and poked his finger through the hole. “Some of the text is missing. I was right, though. It’s a substitution code…but there’s an extra layer. Remember how Griffin had found the Nelson Florider name? The man likes anagrams and puzzles. I should have thought of it before. It was a substitution, but then everything was written right to left.”
“Backwards?” Winslow asked.
“Yep. Look.” Joshua quickly jotted out a sentence from one of the pages in the journal:
The construction of the array will be rather expensive, but ultimately worthwhile.
“Now all we have to do is translate what we can,” the boy said, smiling.
“Not that we should trust everything in here,” Lisa pointed out. “It came from that horrible dragon-creature world, not ours.”
“They were Gila monsters,” the boy said.
“Fire-breathing Gila monsters,” Lisa said. “Whatever. Not everything on that Earth is going to be the same as on our own, right?”
“Absolutely correct,” Winslow said. “But this information might shed some light on what has happened on our world.”
“And maybe help us find a way home,” Joshua said.
Just then a fresh bout of screaming and wailing came into town on the breeze. Outside the window, it was nearly dark.
“Let’s hope so,” Winslow said, shivering.
5
Charley Wilson hadn’t been sober this long in probably a decade. It was actually starting to feel pretty good. He leaned against the side of a rusted-out Ford pickup he’d taken from Jimmy Stanley’s garage. They hadn’t quite been friends, but they’d tossed a few back together, and Charley had known the man well enough to know where he kept the keys to all the clunkers at the garage. The Ford wasn’t as good as his, which Frost had taken from him, but it would do.
Now clean and sober for over a week, he wasn’t about to go around town on foot. Most of the town’s population was gone—they’d been over to Ashland when the first shift had occurred. Of those that remained, many had already been killed by the horrors the town had encountered. He wasn’t going to be one of them. And if he was going to live—and sober no less—mobility was key.
Night was falling, and hazy smoke hung in the air. It wasn’t so thick he couldn’t breathe, but it might be soon. This crap needed to end, and he knew the one person who had answers.
He looked through his old battered hunting binoculars and watched as Cash Whittemore and Julie Barnes tromped through the overgrown grass on the abandoned Green Meadow Farm. They had already taken a cursory look at the main structures on the farm, but now they were walking away from the slowly turning windmill, and heading over a rise.
Stepping away from the truck, Charley paralleled them, heading further down the gravel driveway at the south end of the farm. Soon it would be too dark for him to see through the binoculars—if this crazy world’s sunset was in any way normal, that was.
It had taken sobering up completely for him to really grasp what a pawn he’d been for Ellison. He’d thought of going out to the monstrosity by the lake, but he’d overheard that the man was missing. Probably got out of town before the first shift. He’d only really done errands for Ellison. He’d had no clue that the old man had figured out a way to send the entire town to some other world or other dimension, or whatever this shit was.
All he knew now, was he wanted no more part of it. He needed to get himself and Radar out of here. But to do that, he needed to be sober and he needed to be informed. He’d been left out of the loop by the town’s self-appointed leaders, but that was typical. And could he blame them, really, after spending the better part of the decade with his pals Bud and Weiser?
He was pretty sure Cash wasn’t in on whatever Barnes was up to. But he’d also dealt with her enough to know she wouldn’t be on this little trip if it didn’t serve her needs. He peeked through the binoculars. The pair stomped through a field, heading down toward a small lump of concrete—probably an old junk pile.
But as he watched the two of them in the dimming light, he could tell from Cash’s expression, and the way the man pointed on the other side of the concrete, that they had found something unexpected. Curious, he lowered the binoculars and started across the field. As he closed the distance, a structure resolved. What he had thought was a pile of concrete or cinder blocks, was actually a curved concrete wall built into the side of the inclined hill. A concrete wall—with a door. Anyone looking this direction from the main farm buildings would have seen nothing but a field and a sloping hill. The door was only visible from this new angle.
Looks like a root cellar. Or a bunker.
Cash tugged on a thick iron handle on the door, but it didn’t budge. As Charley watched, unseen and from a distance, Julie Barnes stepped back, as Cash messed with the door. She reached behind her and pulled a small handgun out her jacket.
Oh shit!
There was no way to warn Cash and nothing Charley could do from this distance in time. He had a little .38 on him, but there was no way he could stop the woman. She leveled the gun at Cash, and at the last second, he spun around.
But she fired anyway. Hitting him in the chest. Cash fell backward as the report from her gun echoed across the field. Charley was frozen in a state of shock. He knew she was a bitch, but this... This was a whole new level of nasty. She’d almost shot the man in his back. Would have, if Cash hadn’t turned.
Now the woman stepped forward, past Cash’s body in the grass. She pointed the weapon again, this time at the rusted lock on the door, and she fired twice more. The lock shattered, and bits of it hit the ground, before the sound of the shots had finished filling the air—far louder than the weeping, anguished shrieks drifting to the farm from the edge of town.
With the last shred of twilight, Charley watched the woman tug open the metal door to the strange structure buried in the hill. She stepped inside.
Then night fell like an anvil. One second it was twilight, the next it was pitch black.
The smoke was suddenly oppressive in Charley’s nostrils, and the howling screams from this new world sent a chill up his spine. What the ever-lovin’ hell is that bitch up to?
He stood in the dark and thought about what he should do for just a minute, before rushing toward Cash’s body. He didn’t know any first aid, but he knew Cash had one of the few two-way radios that Griffin had given out to a handful of key people. He couldn’t call anyone for help without it. So he pulled out his .38, lit the small LED keychain light he had on him and sprinted across the dark field toward the strange door.
As he ran, a new sound grew louder over the yowls and terror-filled screaming. It was the sound of flapping wings, as if the smoky sky behind him had filled with bats. Large bats. He ran faster.
6
Helena Frost was lost in her thoughts as she pulled her cruiser up to the old brick power station. Their situation in town was growing worse every day. She had made a good show of shoring up defenses with Griffin, but they both knew it was only a matter of time until they shifted to another world, where some kind of hostile incursion would sweep through town, killing off the last few residents.
She parked the cruiser on the crunchy gravel, cringing at how loud the car sounded�
�even over the chorus of howls on the smoky wind. Anyone out here knows we’re coming. No point in being coy about it.
The former power station was a four-story brick building. Even from the light of the cruiser’s low beams, she could see the orange brick needed repairs and a few coats of paint. Gaps were visible in the mortar, and some kids had spray-painted a parade of phalluses along the wall. She smiled briefly, imagining what Becky Rule might say. She’d been a stern, by-the-book woman most of the time, but when it was just the two of them, Becky’s rude humor had known no bounds.
It was unlikely that Ellison would be out here—the last anyone had seen the man, he had been wheelchair-bound. This building had been built prior to the laws requiring public buildings be handicap accessible. Despite that, there were few better places in town for someone to lay low. While Ellison would have had a tough time of it here, she imagined that the Turkette woman—whom she’d never even seen—would have little problem. Especially the way Griffin had described her behavior. As if the woman had military training.
A hand waved in front of her face, and Frost turned sharply toward the pastor in the passenger seat.
“Sorry,” the man said. “You were out of it for a minute there. I said ‘Are we going to go inside?’”
Frost smiled at the well meaning man. She was coming to like Ken Dodge more and more. After the first shift, when his own panic had taken root, he’d nearly worked the remnants of his congregation into a Devil-blaming tizzy. But he’d reigned in his fear, and now he gave comfort to the people who looked to him for guidance. He’d become a useful resource in the past days. Seemingly whenever people started to get riled up, he was there with a calming influence and sensible words. She knew he felt remorse over the loss of the woman—Jillian—who had been under his care, as she escaped an abusive domestic situation. Dodge had held a small ceremony for the woman and the men lost in the attempt to rescue her. He’d been sad, but never morose. And always helpful. Frost felt terribly guilty that she had assumed the worst about the pastor and Jillian.
“Sorry, Pastor. My head was miles away.”
“I could tell,” he said, handing her a long-barreled flashlight, and clicking on one of his own. They’d stocked all the vehicles with several flashlights. You could never tell when night would fall on these worlds. Once it fell, the sun might never rise again. They had no way of knowing.
They got out of the cruiser and splayed their lights around, ensuring they were alone. Frost crinkled her nose at the smoke in the air.
“I hope those fires don’t spread,” Dodge said, walking toward the building. He ran a hand through his short brown hair and then looked down at his palm. “I keep expecting to see ash.”
Frost chuckled. “I know, me too.” The thought of the dark world, where ash had continually fallen from the sky was unnerving.
Stepping up to the front door of the building, she could see that the pine boards across the frame hadn’t been disturbed, and there was no way anyone could have slipped past them.
“Let’s check the back and the windows.”
An overgrown lawn surrounded the building, bordered by a thick grove of birch, maples and pine. The darkness sent a chill through Frost. She whipped her light around the clearing again as they walked along the building’s side. When they got to a huge bank of block-glass windows, even though the glass was opaque, she could tell there were no lights inside the building. A small set of concrete steps and a metal handrail with peeling blue paint led to a back door. Dodge slipped his flashlight into his belt, like it was a police baton, then he aimed his M-16 at the door.
Frost went up the steps first, and kept her light trained on the door. She would open it and step to the side, allowing the pastor to cover her, then she would draw her pistol.
As she got closer, she could see scratches on the edge of the door, which wasn’t fully closed.
Someone’s been here. Question is, how long ago? And are they still here?
She pulled the door slowly, in case it creaked. It did, but not as badly as it might have if she had yanked the door open quickly.
No sounds and no light from inside.
Dodge stepped onto the stairs.
Frost pulled her pistol and slipped inside and to the side of the door. She turned her flashlight in a full arc through the huge space. Most of the ground level was one giant room with a concrete floor. Rusty bolts stuck up from it where equipment and big machines were once attached. There was a rectangular pit in the corner, that had filled with murky green algae-coated water. Piles of disintegrating empty cardboard boxes were scattered around the room. Old newspapers and a few beer cans broke up the monotony of the cardboard.
Place has probably been unlocked for years. Never thought to come round here and have a look at it myself.
She took a few cautious steps further inside. A bundle of cloth in a far corner looked like a sleeping figure.
She hissed to Dodge and pointed. He saw the strange mass and nodded. They tip-toed across the space as quietly as they could.
As they got closer, the lump was easily identifiable as a pile of rags and more cardboard boxes that had gone flexible and fabric-like from wetness. But the arrangement made it look like someone had been bedding down here.
“Well,” Dodge said aloud, startling her. “Whoever was here is long gone now.”
Something glistened in the pile of fabrics. Frost squatted and pulled a sheet of crinkly plastic from beneath a moist chunk of cardboard. The object was revealed under the glow of her flashlight.
Not plastic.
Skin.
Orange and black, and mottled like bubble wrap, belonging to one of the fire-breathing reptiles two shifts back. Like the skin the savage Griffin in that world had worn.
She held the skin up for Dodge to see, and his mouth opened in shock. The man clearly leapt to the same conclusion Frost had.
Just then the door behind them slammed hard, making them both jump and turn back toward it. Frost swept the area with the beam of her light, but nothing moved. She hurried to the door and Dodge followed her. She started to step outside, when something fell from above and crashed to the concrete steps.
She let out a small shout and backed into Dodge. The man let out his own startled cry. Then they were moving forward to see what had fallen.
“Look!” Dodge urged.
The creature that had just missed them was the strangest thing Frost had yet seen. It had long dangling simian arms. The hands looked almost human, but the rest of it resembled a bat, with long leathery wings folded and canted at strange angles. But where it should have had a body, it had only a massive mouth full of pointed teeth, like a Venus fly trap or a huge deadly taco. With arms and wings.
Frost could barely wrap her head around the idea of something like this even living. But as horrifying as the creature was, it frightened her far less than the javelin sticking out of its body. The weapon glinted in the beams of their flashlights.
She swung her arm wide, the light stopping when she found him. Standing on the edge of the woods, one arm blackened and shorter than it should have been. He was dressed in rags, his scraggly beard all tangled. But even across the wide lawn, she could see his mouth of rotting teeth, exposed in what she was sure was more a snarl than a smile. Then the savage alternate of Griffin Butler melted back into the trees and disappeared from view.
“We seem to have picked up a hitchhiker,” Frost said.
“Man’s crazier and deadlier than a toilet full of scorpions.”
“At least this time he was trying to protect us,” she said, heading toward the cruiser.
“God bless you, Helena, for thinking the best of folks. I’m betting he’s simply acting like a good predator, killing the competition.”
Frost looked at the dead abomination. “Competition?”
“Why else do you think he was killing our people out in that wasteland? To him, we’re just food.”
7
Griffin looked around the foy
er of Ellison’s mansion, a deep frown on his face. Each additional visit to the estate did nothing to improve his sense of disgust at the overwhelming wealth. From the look on Avalon’s face, she felt the same.
“Where should we start?” she asked.
“Everywhere we didn’t look the last time we were here.”
Griffin headed for the main staircase, a huge thing with banisters that looked like they held more coats of wax than a used car lot. The steps were covered by thick red Persian carpeting that was fitted to the tapering width of the ascending case.
“At least there’s no suit of armor on the landing to make the stereotype complete,” Griffin said as he walked. Avalon snickered. She wore a small backpack, and Griffin noted the tip of a silver cylinder sticking out the top of it.
She took the javelin, he thought. Interesting choice of personal weapon. He considered asking her why she’d taken it, but he couldn’t figure out a way to broach the subject without sounding disapproving. She was carrying a lot of guilt around, after her withdrawal. He didn’t want to make it worse. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. He was glad she was armed with something, despite the emptiness of Ellison’s home. Then he realized—the baton might not extend for her. It had worked only for him and not for Frost or Dodge. Maybe she had brought it along for him as a backup weapon or something.
“Let’s start at the top and work our way—”
“Wait, Dad.” Avalon had stopped on the stairs and had a look on her face like she was working out a puzzle. Her nose scrunched up and her eyes squinted like they always did when she was thinking really hard or working out a math problem in her head.
“What is it?”
Refuge Book 5 - Bonfires Burning Bright Page 3