I’d stolen it from a Saudi prince’s vault. Being coerced into that heist was what had dragged me back into Big Eddie’s world. A lot of people, including two of my best friends, had died to get it. We never even knew what it did. The last time I’d seen the Scarab it had been inside an abandoned building in Nevada as it burned to the ground. How had it survived? How was it here?
“That is not your concern.” Sala Jihan closed his fist and the Scarab disappeared. “All that matters to you now is that it serves as evidence of your ability to reach that which I cannot. This was kept from me for a very long time, until you freed it.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You would not be so flippant if you understood what you have done.” He sneered at me, but I had no clue what that thing was for. “I am patient. I waited a lifetime to retrieve this device. I would do the same to have my revenge on the Montalban family. Only Katarina is too impetuous. She will act soon. If she is triumphant, the balance of power will change. Old orders will fall into chaos. That I will not allow. It appears once again the son of murder must go where the Pale Man is barred, and take for me that which I cannot take myself.”
Between the beatings and my overall awful condition, I was having a hard time following the creepy weirdo. Were we cutting a deal? “Take her life?”
The Pale Man nodded slowly. My freedom in exchange for assassinating Kat? That was a no-brainer. Or was he was he dangling freedom in front of me, just long enough to give me hope, only to snatch it away and toss me back in the dark? Was this just a creative new form of torture?
“In exchange, I grant your freedom and declare your punishment fulfilled.”
“Agreed.” And as soon as I said that, it felt like I’d literally made a deal with the devil.
“I suspected it would come to this. The only reason I did not have hot ash poured down your throat was so that you could still speak your lies. The only reason I have not castrated you was so that you would not lose your will to fight. I left your fingers so you can hold a blade and eyes to find your prey.”
Jihan went over to the fire and pulled out the branding iron. He held up the orange glowing metal, the firelight dancing in his black eyes, and satisfied that it was hot enough, turned back to me.
I cringed back as far as I could as he held the hot metal next to my face. So close that it singed my beard and I could smell burning hair. “We have a deal!”
“You still have a face, only because my mark would make it difficult for you to disappear amongst the sheep.” Jihan slowly pulled the glowing metal away from my eyes. “You will need all of these things where you are going.”
He jammed the branding iron against my chest.
I screamed and thrashed as my flesh sizzled. With shocking force, Jihan held it there, crushing me back against the stone. I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore. When he finally pulled the glowing metal away, a lot of skin went with it.
I must have blacked out, because by the time I came to, Jihan had put the branding iron back into the fire and the whispers had turned to shouts. Hanging there limp, I retched against the stench of my own charred flesh. If there’d been anything inside my stomach, I would have vomited. If I hadn’t been so dehydrated, I would have wept.
“Because you would die rather than break, that is not a mark of ownership.” The Pale Man returned, crouching next to my sagging body, so we could be eye to soulless black eye. I was flickering in and out of consciousness. “This mark is my final gift. You say you will not return to my kingdom, but I know that in time vengeance would tempt you. Fear would fade. Memories would grow dim. Then you would come back for me, and I would utterly destroy you. Thus I bestow this scar upon you, so wherever you go, for the rest of your days, you will never forget the cost of trespass against Sala Jihan.”
Daylight . . . actual daylight.
At first I wasn’t sure if I was alive, dead, or back in my cell hallucinating. The pain convinced me it was real. Moving at all caused unbelievable agony as the burnt hole on my chest pulled on the raw red skin around it, but despite the pain, I still had to raise a hand to shield my eyes from the piercing light.
I’ll be damned. That really was the sun up there.
I was on an uneven metal floor. There were great jagged tears in the roof above. There were holes—bullet holes—in the walls. Motes of dust swam through the beams of light. When I shifted my weight a bit more, I found that there were shell casings beneath me. Everything was covered in rust, vines, and cobwebs. When I lifted my aching head, there was a human skull watching me. There were mice living inside of it.
I’d been here before. This was the old crashed Russian bomber I’d taken cover in while running from Jihan’s soldiers. They’d left me in the exact spot where they had captured me. I listened carefully. There were birds singing and bugs buzzing. The wind rustled and sighed through the trees.
There were no whispers.
I couldn’t believe it. For the first time in months, there was quiet. I was out of the prison. It had to be some sort of trick.
Pulling myself up the wall, I saw mountains and trees through the bullet holes. Through the front of the cockpit, I could see the slope I’d climbed up from the river. There was the boulder where I’d been shot in the arm. My eyes weren’t used to all this glorious unimpeded vision, so they began to water badly. Okay, maybe part of that was emotion, I’ll admit it.
I reached out and touched one of the jagged bullet holes. One of these had pierced my leg. The last time I’d been here, this valley had been covered in snow. Now it was hot. Things had grown, and begun to die. It had to be late summer. That meant I’d been in Jihan’s prison for at least four or five months.
It was amazing that I’d survived that long.
Slowly, I dragged myself to the twisted doorway, and flopped through onto the dry grass. Everything hurt, especially the fresh burn on my chest, but I’d been burned before. I’d live. I lay there for a long time, just feeling the sun above and the grass below. Sala Jihan had actually let me go. Either that or this was just a twisted game, and slave soldiers were going to show up any second to take away my last shred of hope.
No . . . If I’d learned anything over the last few months, it was that Sala Jihan was tyrannical and evil, but there was a twisted code of honor in that madness. He’d said he’d set me free in order to stop Kat only because he couldn’t. The Pale Man wasn’t a liar. He didn’t need to be. But he’d also left me miles from civilization, injured, tired, hungry, dehydrated, barefoot, and in rags. So, the Pale Man may have had a peculiar code of honor, but that didn’t make him any less of an asshole. I was in no shape to make it out of this forest.
I laughed for a few minutes straight. And then I wanted nothing more than to sleep.
Focus, Lorenzo. Kat and Anders were going to do something horrible, and then they were going to murder my brother and pin it all on him. I couldn’t stop them by sitting here on my ass. The Pale Man wouldn’t have let me go if there was time to dick around. I didn’t just survive a stay in hell to die of exposure on a mountain or get eaten by a fucking wolf, so it was time to man up and get the job done.
Besides, I really wanted to murder Kat.
And once that was done, I could find Jill. My time with her had been the best days of my life. Was it possible to actually be happy again? I’d been living off of stubborn determination and hate for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to hope.
Ignoring the pain, I forced myself to stand up. I knew jack and shit about wilderness survival. I was more of an urban survivalist, but I remembered the maps of the region from when we’d been preparing for the raid. The nearest settlement was Sala Jihan’s compound, but I would be avoiding that haunted shithole. If I followed the river, it would take me back to the Crossroads. Once I was back in a town full of criminals I’d be in my element.
I limped toward the Crossroads.
It took two miserable days to reach the Crossroads. When you haven’t seen the sun
for months, you sunburn like a bitch. After roasting during the day, it still got damned cold at night. There wasn’t a security system in the world I couldn’t circumvent, but I didn’t know how to rub two sticks together to make fire. Bob had been the Eagle Scout, not me. Sure, I’d been a mercenary in Africa, but we’d ridden in trucks to battle, and when we did occasionally have to sleep in the wilderness, I’d had a lighter. So, fireless and miserable, I huddled next to a tree and shivered the night away. Even then it was the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time because of the real actual quiet.
In the morning I took what was left of my shirt and wrapped the rags around my feet because I swear the canyon was covered in sharp rocks, just because Mother Nature is a bitch. On the bright side, the horrific burn on my chest was so incredibly painful that it distracted me from torn feet. Yeah, I’m an optimist like that.
There was plenty to drink. The river water was wonderful, colder, clearer, and fresher than the cups of brackish sludge I’d been given in the prison, but I was still weak with hunger. Luckily, I found a fresh animal kill, half eaten. I don’t know what killed it, and don’t even know what the animal was—what was left had hooves kind of like a little deer—but it wasn’t rotten, and that’s all I cared about. I used to be a connoisseur of exotic food, the weirder the better, and Carl often said that I could eat things that would make a goat puke, but let me tell you, you’ve never really vomited until you try to choke down chunks of bloody raw meat after months of eating nothing but gruel. On the second try I kept some inside, and that gave me enough calories to make it the rest of the way. I’d probably get some parasites and microbes or shit, but if I could get back to civilization, they had pills for that.
The Crossroads may have been run by a bunch of criminals acting like competing fiefdoms, but it was a real town. I was going to find some criminal faction to con or suck up to, get myself real food, see a real doctor, then find a way to steal some clothes, shoes, money, and a ticket back to the world. Then I was going to find Kat’s people, and torture them until one of them gave me her location, so I could shoot her in the face. Then I was going to find my woman, put this place behind me, and never think about it again. I was really looking forward to my exciting new life plan.
But when I got there, the Crossroads was gone.
Well, not gone, but mostly underwater and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still standing, but they were flooded, only the roofs or second stories sticking out of the new lake that had formed where a city had been. There were still people living around it, mostly in yurts and shacks made out of scavenged materials, but the criminal empire, the trading houses, the chaotic businesses, the gun runners and drug dealers, the world’s best illicit flea market, it was all gone.
There had been tens of thousands of people in this boomtown just a few months ago, now it was maybe a few hundred, tops. Before, there had been representatives of every regional group. Now they appeared to be mostly nomadic traders. Men with rifles watched me suspiciously as I approached their settlement.
The rail line was on the high ground, and since plants weren’t growing over the rails, I assumed trains still passed through here. When I got closer, I saw that the train station had been burned down, and all that remained was an ashen wreck with a collapsed roof. What the hell had happened here? Last I’d heard, the Montalban Exchange was supposed to have made a move against Sala Jihan’s garrison in town, but they’d chickened out. Had the Pale Man run everyone out after that? But the Crossroads didn’t feel like the victim of a battle, more like a derelict ghost town, and where had this friggin’ lake come from?
I hailed the nomads when I got close enough. They didn’t shoot me, probably because it was obvious the emaciated scarecrow hobbling in on bloody feet wasn’t too much of a threat. I went through a mishmash of languages until they responded with really bad Russian. I had nothing to offer, nothing to trade, but I hoped they’d show some hospitality to a starving man.
When I got close enough that they saw the brand on my chest, they fled in terror.
It wasn’t what I expected, but I could work with it. As the nomads retreated toward the other yurts and huddled there for safety, I went to the closest tent and started looting. I was too worn out to run, and if they were going to come back and shoot me, I’d at least die with a full belly. There was a pot of rice, still warm, and I sat down and ate it with my fingers.
While I ate, I looked over the new lake. Though it was leaning to the side now, the Montalban Exchange building was only partially submerged. It had been built to look sort of like a pagoda. My search for my brother had brought me there, and it was only later that I’d learned he’d been prisoner there the whole time, locked in a cell in the basement. I’d thought Bob was in Sala Jihan’s compound, and he’d been right there, under my nose the whole time. I’d visited the Montalban Exchange building several times during the preparation and planning for the raid. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Anders, being a dick, had taunted Bob about my searching for him the whole time.
Looking at that lopsided pagoda gave me an idea though. Bob was crafty. Everywhere else he’d gone, he’d tried to leave bread crumbs. Why not here?
A few minutes later a single nomad approached. Dressed in lots of wool, leather, and strangely a really faded Chicago Bulls t-shirt, he was probably in his forties, so close to my age, though it was hard to tell because he was so incredibly weathered by the sun, and I couldn’t even guess which of the minor regional groups he belonged to. He had an old Mosin Nagant rifle in his hands, but he was polite enough not to point it at me. He stopped near the tent and squatted there. “We are not enemies or friends, but you may eat this meal.” His Russian was pretty good, which meant he was probably their leader, or at least their main trader or negotiator.
“Thank you.”
He pointed two fingers at my burn. “You are the one he freed?” the man asked suspiciously. I hate the pronoun game, but in this case there was no doubt who he was.
“I’m guessing that doesn’t happen often.”
“You are the first. Enjoy our hospitality, and then be gone. You cannot be our guest. We do not want his eyes upon us. Everything he touches is cursed.”
“Agreed.” I kept chewing. “When does the train pass through?”
“Toward Russia or China?”
“Either.”
He pulled back a sleeve and checked his watch. I don’t know why it surprised me that a nomad at the ass end of the world had a big fat digital watch. “About three hours.” I grunted acknowledgment and kept shoveling rice in my face. I was probably going to get sick, but it was worth it. The nomad seemed happy that I would be leaving. After a minute passed, he got up the courage to ask. “My people tell stories about his prison. Are they true?”
I didn’t know what the stories were, but I could guess. “Worse.”
He nodded thoughtfully, expression hard to read, but I suspected he might be taking pity on me. He went into the tent and came out with a can of some Russian soda. He tossed it to me. I cracked open the warm can, took a drink of the Motherland’s version of Mountain Dew, and it was so magical, it made my teeth hurt. I’d always been a health nut, but I’d missed sugar.
“Oh, man. Thank you. You have no idea. Thank you so much . . .” Right then it felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. “So what happened to the city here?”
“The night they attacked the Pale Man, they hurt the dam too. A bomb started it leaking. It could not be repaired. The city began to flood. The criminals fought each other. Business slowed. The bazaars moved elsewhere.”
Blowing the dam must have been Exodus’ backup plan. If they couldn’t kill Sala Jihan, at least they could cripple his empire. That explained why Ling and Valentine hadn’t been on the raid, too. The sneaky bastards had managed to shut the whole place down and keep the death toll to a minimum. I had to hand it to Exodus, that was clever.
The nomad gestured toward the leaning pagoda. “A year later,
it is like this.”
A year? It was summer. I’d been captured in spring. That couldn’t be right. “What’s today’s date?”
The nomad looked at me funny, then he checked his giant watch again. Of course it had the date on it. “It is the twenty-second of August.”
So I’d been captured five months ago . . . But if the Crossroads had been abandoned too long, that made no sense. “What year?”
He told me. It took a moment for it sink in.
I’d been in prison for almost a year and a half. For a long moment, I couldn’t even wrap my brain around the number.
“Are you alright?” the nomad asked.
I didn’t know. A year and a half . . . Damn. What else had I missed? “I will be.” I looked toward the leaning Montalban building. I’d noticed something when the nomad opened to tent flap to get the soda can. “Can I borrow that flashlight?”
I swam through the flooded hallway, the borrowed LED flashlight cutting a narrow beat through the dark. Silver fish scattered ahead of me.
This was stupid. Repeatedly diving into the lower floors of a flooded, rotten, collapsing building would have been dangerous with a wetsuit and an air tank. Doing it while freezing and holding your breath, when you were already in bad shape, was suicidal. I swore, not for the first time, that someday I was going to choke the shit out of Valentine. In the most convoluted way possible, he’d once again managed to make my life more difficult. I wasn’t going to leave the Crossroads emptyhanded, though, one way or another.
This was my fourth trip down. Most of the lower rooms had been easy to reach, but none of them looked suited for holding someone prisoner. The Montalbans had left all of their furniture behind. It wasn’t as if once you betrayed Sala Jihan, there was much time to pack, so it was pretty easy to tell what each room had been used for, and the ones I could reach had been barracks for their employees and hired muscle mostly.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed, so I had to squeeze between the boards. I stuck the flashlight between my teeth, and used my hands to pull myself along. I cut my thumb on a protruding nail, but I got through. I’d have to squeeze back out though, which would take even more time, so I couldn’t spare a second in this next room.
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 4