Breaking Point a5-2

by Kristen Simmons

  “It was close to curfew,” he said. “I thought they were going to give us a citation for an Article Four.”

  I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest. Chase and I were always careful to portray ourselves as married in order to avoid a citation for indecency, but a couple walking the streets so close to curfew was bound to draw attention. Maybe Tucker was still too impenetrable to anticipate this, but Cara should have known.

  In order not to endanger Cara’s cousin, they’d passed the house and ducked into a nearby ditch.

  “But the patrol hit the sirens,” said Tucker. “So we ran.”

  They’d hidden in a large, tubular cement drain packed with trash and waited for the MM to lose them. Thirty minutes, Tucker said. Until the rats got used to their presence and came to visit.

  After a while Cara had ventured out, but Tucker had gotten a cramp in his leg. He’d stayed under cover while shaking it out.

  “It happened fast, man. Fast. I heard someone on the road overhead, and I looked over at her and she fell. Just like that. Shot in the shoulder, straight through the heart. Done before she hit the ground. I went out the opposite side of the drain and hit the road running.”

  “Coward,” muttered Chase.

  “I’m the coward?” said Tucker in disbelief. “It was a code one, Jennings. No arrest, no questioning. They’re killing any girl they think might be Miller. They’re the cowards.”

  For a moment Tucker’s words made no sense. It was like he was speaking another language. And then their meaning set in.

  Code One, Chase had told me. They can fire on suspicion alone.

  It had happened. Someone had been killed in my name. Someone had died as the sniper. A girl I’d known. I didn’t feel relief—my name wouldn’t be cleared once they realized it wasn’t me. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  I didn’t kill her, I told myself. But I didn’t believe it. She was dead because I’d escaped those holding cells, because I lived. Because my death was the death the MM wanted. What kind of world was this where people had to die for others to live?

  I backed away. I couldn’t listen anymore. Not just because I’d known Cara, because I’d worked beside her in the resistance and now she was gone, but because of the sincere pain in Tucker’s voice. He hadn’t hurt so much when he’d killed my mother, whom he’d shot in cold blood. When he’d been the coward. What was it that made Cara so much better than her? What made him care? Why could he feel remorse now, but not then?

  And Billy. We’d left him alone with Marco and Polo, and now he was gone.

  I wandered back into the grass, until I came to a wooden fence, glowing silver in the moonlight, cracked and splintered just like me. I tilted my head back and stared at the sky and felt the exhaustion bend me and weaken me and make my knees tremble. I hadn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours, but I was too afraid to close my eyes.

  My hands filled the deep pockets of the uniform skirt Cara had worn, and I felt it. A copper bullet, caught in the wool folds. The one I’d shown her that I’d found. She must have put it in her pocket and forgotten it when we were changing.

  I heard Chase before I saw him. I recognized the way his boots rolled on the grass. That tentative step when he thought I might bolt like a rabbit. I released the bullet, but felt it, solid against my leg.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly.

  “I know.” I grasped the fence hard.

  “No, you don’t.”

  I punched the fence hard enough to break the rotted wood. My hand stung, but my breath came more steadily. He didn’t crowd me, but stayed close, knowing exactly the kind of comfort I needed.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We returned to the car, and drove north.

  CHAPTER

  15

  I JARRED into consciousness in the cold silence, with the acute awareness that I was alone in the car. An eerie intuition crept over my skin. The others were in trouble. Something had happened.

  These thoughts had me out of the door before I drew another breath. It was frigid, but not so much that the puddles on the asphalt had frozen. The air cooled my knuckles, heated and swollen from hitting the fence. I clutched my elbows and scanned the shadowed parking garage, heart racing, furious at myself that I’d fallen asleep. Dawn cracked through the pewter thunderheads outside—I’d been out for three hours at least.

  The stolen cruiser was parked beside a tarp-covered vehicle on the bottom floor of the structure. Sinister pieces of rebar and fallen chunks of cement cut jagged angles down the open frame to my side, where the natural light was brighter. Mountains of gravel and rocks outside blocked my visibility, and the breeze blew an instant film of dust over my clothing and hair. It was one thing to see the Wreckage on the news, but another entirely to stand among it, a soft body of flesh and bones. I had the sudden sensation that I had awoken in the mouth of some giant beast; shortly it would crush me in its concrete teeth and swallow me whole.

  A huge metallic sign lay strewn across the ground just beyond the exit. It was bent and scratched, but still readable.

  CHICAGO MIDWAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

  “Chase!” I whisper-shouted. No answer. Panic gripped the base of my neck.

  Sean appeared around the entrance. He was back in civilian clothes but for the gun holstered in the belt at his hip, and his face was warped with edgy frustration. He was closer to Rebecca than he’d been in weeks, but she was still just beyond his grasp.

  “Good, you’re up,” he said. He tracked my gaze as it rose behind him to the heap of gray rock that was once an airport terminal. “This is where Marco said we’re supposed to wait for a pickup, but the place is a graveyard. Literally,” he added.

  I knew he didn’t want to wait for the resistance. I didn’t either. I wanted to get Rebecca and get out, but we weren’t prepared. Tucker had offered some intel on the schematics of the rehab building and the placement of the guards, but Chicago ran this area. We couldn’t encroach on their turf without a formal introduction; Wallace would have called that bad form. And if they really were rough like Marco and Polo had said, we didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

  “Where is he?” I asked quickly. “Where are they?” I corrected.

  Sean pointed around the corner to where Tucker was leaning against the outer wall of the parking garage, sleeping in the dirt with his chin on his chest. The skyline weighed heavily upon us; rain was coming.

  “Chase,” I pressed.

  “Relax. He’s on point. Over that hill.” Sean motioned toward a rock heap on the opposite side of the building. “He asked me to keep my eye on you a while. I told him I had the first shift, but you know him….”

  I did know him. When his mind was set on something, no one could tell him otherwise. But I sensed something was wrong; he wouldn’t have drifted so far from Tucker otherwise.

  I took off in the direction Sean had indicated, noting all the fallen concrete blocking our view. There were walls of it, stained with weather and anti-MM graffiti. Shattered glass was sprinkled across the ground. A hundred eyes could be watching us here and we’d never know; there was just too much to hide behind.

  “Chase?” I called quietly, knowing my voice was muffled by the environment, but too wary on this foreign soil to speak any louder. My pulse quickened when I didn’t see him around the first bend. Long grass had grown here, covering the rough road and cushioning my steps.

  I held my breath, listening for any noise that might direct me to him.

  Gasps, ten yards away. My heart clutched. I surged through the foliage toward the sound without thinking. I found him alone on his hands and knees on the ground, his breathing strained, ragged. One arm locked around his midsection, as though he’d been shot.

  “Chase!”

  I ran to him. He heard me and jerked up, but not all the way. One hand motioned for me to stop.

  “Get back in the car,” he ordered weakly.

  I paused, ducking reactively and scan
ning the field. There was danger here, I could smell it in the electric air.

  “Get back in the car!” he said more forcefully.

  Scared, I kept looking but saw nothing. I listened, but only the breeze on the grass filtered through my heartbeats. It was just us. We were alone.

  “I… don’t understand.”

  “Please,” he begged, and fell to his hands and knees again. His back rounded in his struggle, like a dying animal, and I did understand then. There was no threat here but himself.

  The fear in his voice was so thick it shook me to the core. He was always so strong, but not now. Now he was falling apart. Like Wallace, on the roof of a burning building, he was pushing me away.

  I would not go.

  I approached him gingerly, each frenzied breath from his throat striking me like a punch.

  His pain hurt me in a way I’d never felt before. It was worse than my own pain. My strength wavered. I felt completely powerless.

  I imagined him in the car, acting calm as I fell asleep in the seat beside him, hiding that choking panic until I was no longer conscious. The thoughts that must have filled his head in my silence. My mother, murdered before him. Chasing me to the holding cells, then into the fire at the Wayland Inn. One close call after the next, finally culminating with a chance to reverse it all that had instantly fallen through.

  And so he’d made it to the meeting point, changed into his civilian clothes quietly enough not to disturb me, and escaped to battle his demons alone.

  I knelt beside him, placing one cautious hand on his back. Sweat had soaked clean through his sweater. My arm rose and fell as he swallowed what air he could, and I hurt, so completely, for him that the tears filled my eyes.

  “Can’t… breathe….” he ground out. He scratched at the stretched neck of his T-shirt.

  “Yes you can,” I said. My voice was low and even.

  Instinctively I wrapped my arms around his waist and leaned over him so that my chest rested on his back and my face pressed against his neck, sticky with sweat. I took a long breath, hoping he could feel my heart slow through the barriers of our clothes and skin.

  He tried to match my tempo but began to shake. His hand clutched mine over his flexing abdominals and squeezed so tightly I thought my fingers would break.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’m not letting go.”

  I breathed again, and he moved with me, a low, strangled moan seeping out his throat.

  In. Out.

  Again.

  Again.

  The terror passed quickly, leaving him exhausted and drenched. There was water in the car, in the bag Beth had given us, but I didn’t dare leave him even for a minute. I used the Sister of Salvation handkerchief to blot at his neck and forehead while he gripped my other hand, and when he fell back onto his heels, I somehow ended up shifting in front of him, so that I straddled his lap.

  My breath caught. Our eyes locked, both of us waiting for what would come next. His fingers slowly spread over my back, his thumbs grazing my ribs. I ran my hands through his damp hair, feeling his gaze, somehow staggered, linger on my face. Feeling our bodies warmly connected. Finally, his head came to rest on my heart and I held him, willing him to know that he was not alone.

  * * *

  “WAS I like Beth?” I asked, frowning. “When you came back. Did I seem so young?”

  I sat on the ground across from him, arms encircling my knees, chin resting on the crook in my elbow. He mirrored my position, watching the way our boots overlapped, but refusing, like me, to back away. The second we had separated he’d become shy, though not cold, and my mind drifted back to what had happened at my house.

  A small smile graced the corners of his mouth. “Maybe a little bit.”

  I thought of how naïve Beth had sounded, how idealistic that she was doing the right thing, so impenetrable to consequences.

  “I must have driven you crazy.”

  “You drive me crazy on a pretty regular basis.”

  I stomped on his toes. He grinned, and then blinked and rubbed his eyes.

  “You’re tired,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  He wouldn’t sleep until he was ready, but I wished I could do something to help him.

  “There’s food in the car,” I said. “Come on. You can eat something at least.”

  He reached for my hands and I pulled myself up, and then used all my remaining strength to hoist him off the ground.

  The pendant-shaped burn below my collar had begun to throb again, and I prodded it gently, thinking of Cara and how she’d needed St. Michael’s protection more than me. The lump grew inside of my throat. I still wasn’t sure what to feel. Anger that she’d been so cruel, so secretive. Guilt that she was killed by people trying to kill me. Pain, though we hadn’t been friends.

  We began slowly walking back toward the cruiser.

  “Listen, back there…” he started, then paused.

  I waited while he sorted through his thoughts. I hoped he didn’t try to apologize. What had happened out here had bound us closer, and it would have stung had he regretted it.

  “It just gets heavy sometimes,” he finished, with a great heave of breath.

  He didn’t have to explain further. I knew exactly what he meant.

  A muffled whisper diverted our attention, driving my heart into my throat. Chase’s hand was immediately at his back, where he’d placed the gun Polo had given him, but he didn’t draw.

  Tucker jerked out from behind a cement blockade just to our left. “Scared me.” He was wearing the same jeans and sweat-stained thermal he’d been in earlier, though now I noticed a streak of burnt copper down his left side. Was that his blood, or Cara’s?

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “No one,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

  “Where’s Sean?” Chase didn’t bother to hide the accusation in his tone.

  “Still on guard,” Tucker answered. “But he didn’t rotate back. I thought maybe he came to find you.”

  My shoulder blades tightened. I glanced around, as if Sean might appear, too, but there was no sign of him. Somewhere closer to the heart of the old city, the clouds began to groan.

  “So you thought it was a good idea to leave post, too, huh?” said Chase.

  Tucker didn’t lower his gaze. “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t the FBR anymore, Jennings. It’s every man for himself out here.”

  “Actually it’s not,” I said flatly. “Come on, let’s find him.”

  Chase held me back, tilting his head toward Tucker as if to say, after you. Tucker hesitated only briefly before turning and walking quickly back toward the parking garage. Though I searched the entire time for Sean, Chase, just to my side, did not once turn his head away from his old partner.

  “Do you think Tucker’s telling the truth?” I whispered to Chase. I reached into my pocket to feel the copper bullet once again. I wanted to show him, but not with Tucker around.

  “No.”

  “Do you think Cara’s really dead?”

  He nodded once.

  So it wasn’t her death that he questioned, but the manner in which she’d died. I felt the shiver run through me. Tucker had seemed genuinely affected by the sequence of events that had led him to my door. But what if he’d lied? What if he’d reported us, and somehow turned Cara in? And then turned Billy in, just after?

  And now Sean, wherever he was, was willing to risk his life on Tucker’s supposed contact in the MM. If Chicago didn’t offer any better options—and I really hoped they did—Chase and I would, too.

  We were seriously considering placing our safety in the hands of the one person I trusted least in this world.

  We searched the garage and the outlying area, calling for Sean only as loudly as we dared. As the minutes passed, my dread began to build, until Tucker finally admitted he’d last seen Sean near the terminal. With a harsh word, Chase took off immediately in that direction, and I followed closely behi
nd, feeling Tucker clinging to my shadow.

  We crossed what had once been a street and went left around a large base of construction waste. We found him there, just beyond the bend, facing the opposite direction.

  “Sean!” called Chase. “What are you doing out here?”

  Sean jumped at the sound. “Thought I saw someone. Over there, behind…”

  Three men in ragged clothes emerged from the asphalt and concrete dunes, twenty feet away. Two were in their thirties, and handled their rifles with an unsettling degree of confidence. The third man was younger, close to Chase’s age, with a massive muscular torso, and a baseball bat resting over one shoulder. He looked like the type that might bulldoze anyone that got in his way.

  Resistance. They had to be. But if they were, Marco and Polo were right. They did not look friendly.

  Chase deliberately placed himself in front of me.

  “You lost, strangers?” asked the man in front with a rifle. He had a crisp, city accent. His dark hair was tussled and he hunched slightly to hide his immense height.

  “I doubt it,” said Chase.

  My pulse quickened.

  “Then how may I be of service?” The tall man grinned.

  “Knoxville sent us,” said Chase. “Before the FBR burned it to the ground.”

  The man snickered. “Any weapons?”

  “Possibly,” said Chase.

  “Yes,” confessed Sean. “But I’m sure as hell not giving it to you.”

  The tall stranger’s smirk dissipated, ratcheting up the silence to a tighter, tenser level of unease as he clicked his dirty fingernails along the rifle shaft. He was clearly trying to intimidate us.

  I was tired of being intimidated.

  “Stop,” I said. “We’ve come a long way, so if you’re not planning on shooting us, put your gun down. Please.”

  My words hung in the air. All eyes locked upon me; all but Chase’s, as he was still watching the tall man. Someone began to chuckle. I turned toward the bulldozer with the baseball bat; he was missing one of his top K-9 teeth.