by Minton, Toby
Nothing.
Feeling a deep sense of pride, and possibly a cracked kneecap, she eased the lock and her tools to the floor, slowly lifted the latch, and slipped through the door onto the dark spiral staircase beyond.
Chapter 11
Nikki
Nikki’s break-in euphoria lasted almost until she reached the bottom of the steps.
By the time she set foot on the floor of the lower level, the weight of what she was about to dredge up had squashed the remnants of her short-lived happiness.
The look of the place didn’t help.
The lower level looked like an afterthought by the bunker's designer. It had a single, straight hallway, a little wider than those above, with four smallish rooms staggered on either side and a massive storage bay at the end behind a set of heavy blast doors. The hallway had the same arched ceiling and bare walls as the upper level, but down here they were darker, rougher, cut from bare rock without the smooth concrete and steel finishing touches. Conduits ran along the center of the arch overhead, feeding power to the orangey emergency-style lights in little cages spaced every ten meters or so. The nighttime light down here was weak, even compared to the night setting of the main lights upstairs, or maybe that was just her imagination. Combined with the irregular shadows in the craggy walls, the whole place felt like an ad for anti-depression meds, or the setting of a hinky slasher flick.
Nikki didn't know what the other three rooms down here were used for, and at the moment she didn't care. She had eyes only for the first deeper pocket of shadow ahead on the left—the vault.
She strode quickly from one patch of orange light to the next and stopped before the vault door to catch her breath. Her heart was suddenly pounding almost as much as it had the night before. Only this time she wasn't running hell-for-leather from a nightmare, she was walking right to it.
The reason for the anxiety was obvious. She didn't want to have this conversation with Gideon, not even a little bit. But it was necessary, for her own sanity as much as anything else. She had to know the true lay of the land here at the bunker so she could decide just how long she wanted to…lie in it. But getting to the truth would require opening up a room full of pain she'd walled off for a reason. Already she could feel the darkness seeping out of that room. She could feel the muscles in the back of her neck tightening, drawing her shoulders in.
Nikki, Michael's faint voice spoke into that darkness. What's going on?
His timing was just plain terrible, as usual. If she was going to do this, it had to be now or never.
She straightened up and forced her shoulders back with a grunt. Then she reached past the urge to bolt and grabbed the cool metal of the locking wheel. Before she could lose her nerve, she spun the wheel and pulled the door open.
Nikki, what are you doing?
He knew exactly what she was doing. He had to. Just like she knew the only way to get this done was to ignore him. Without hesitating she stepped over the lip of the door and into the dimly lit room.
From a metal cot in the corner of the nearly bare room, Gideon looked up at her. He was turned so his human side faced the door, and with just the pale light from the hall illuminating the room, his creature side blended into the shadows, making him look almost normal at first glance.
He'd been sitting in total darkness, but not as some kind of punishment, at least not doled out by anyone else. The light controls for this room were right inside the door. The darkness had been his choice.
There was no surprise in his eye when he looked up at Nikki, but plenty of resignation.
"Nikki." His low voice seemed smaller in the heavy confines of the vault. "I wondered when you'd come."
Nikki, you don't need to do this.
Nikki ignored Michael as her gaze slid to the chains in the center of the back wall and just as quickly snapped away. A tremor rippled through her belly that she struggled to suppress. The heavy manacles were nothing like what Savior's lab coats had used on her, but their position—one set on the floor for ankles, another hanging through rings high on the wall for wrists—was enough to push her over the edge into memories of that day. Which was inevitable, she supposed, considering why she was here.
"Did your fortune telling warn you?" she asked, the edge to her voice obvious to her ears. She stepped to the side just inside the door so she wasn't blocking all the light and crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
Gideon's mouth twitched slightly, but his expression remained hard to read, despite Nikki's efforts. She was good at reading people, world-class maybe, but Gideon had never been an easy subject. Regardless of the situation, he always seemed to look the same—guarded and haunted. Tonight was no exception.
"No," he said simply. Then he waited. He was going to make her do all the heavy lifting it seemed.
A thousand ways to ask the question ran through her head, but none of them stayed still long enough for her to grab one. This question had been bugging her for so long she'd built it up into a thing, a monster of its own. Now that its time had come, she realized she didn't know how to give it voice.
Nikki, please…
Walking into a confrontation with all this emotional confusion snarling her up inside was new territory for Nikki. She didn't know what to do next because everything felt so unfamiliar. Faced with a situation she didn't understand, she saw only one way to proceed—charge in.
"Did you know?"
On the cryptic scale, her question rated a solid ten, out of a possible five, but Gideon's eyes betrayed no confusion, just a deepening of the haunted look.
What do you hope to accomplish with this, Nikki? Michael's voice was stronger, and a little desperate sounding.
"Shut up," she snapped. When Gideon narrowed his eyes and stayed silent, she realized her mistake. She could almost feel Michael thinking, I told you so, despite his silence. He had, after all, told her at least a hundred times not to answer him out loud.
"You told Michael you see the future," she said, hating the break in her voice at his name. Hate led to frustration. Frustration led to anger. And anger, somehow, and possibly for the first time in her life, led to eloquence.
"He believed you. Michael believed you could see the future. Everybody here believes it. That's why they all trust you to lead them away from what you claim to see and toward something better."
Gideon watched her silently.
"Or trusted you, I should say. Some of them don't trust your powers anymore. They try to hide it, but I can tell. They think your fortune telling let you down, that it didn't tell you what was going to happen when you came to get me."
Gideon said nothing. Michael went another way.
Nikki, you don't want to do this. You don't need to do this. Not for me.
"Except Elias. See, I think that's why you two are on the rocks. He thinks your power still works just fine. He thinks you knew what was going to happen that day."
Michael stayed quiet as she paused for breath and a hard swallow, but she could feel the tension in his silence. She hadn't felt him this off-balance in a long time, which meant he was probably thinking the same thing.
"I think Elias has it right," she finished.
They stared at each other in the dim light—Nikki holding on to the challenge to hide her pain, Gideon using the silence to express his.
"Tell me I'm wrong." Nikki could feel herself rising toward the crest of an anger wave, but a strange ache building in her chest was making it feel more like a cliff's edge, and a crumbly one at that. Whether that ache came from her or Michael, she didn't know.
Michael was holding his tongue, so to speak. As much as he'd argued against this for months, he was on the edge of the cliff right alongside her, hanging just as much as she on Gideon's response. Their emotional spikes, as different as they were, were feeding each other, threatening to push them both over the edge.
Gideon blinked and looked down. When he looked back up, he seemed even thinner, weaker. He looked almost vulnerable. "You'r
e not wrong," he said evenly.
The cliff crumbled underneath her, but Nikki didn't fall into the dark water below that she knew was just a sea of weepy uselessness. The anger wouldn't let her. It was swelling around and inside her in a roiling wave, building its strength to hurl her at the man in front of her.
"Say it," she grated, her voice shaky with adrenaline begging to be put to use. This was more like it. This territory she knew like the back of her hand.
Gideon stood slowly, like he knew what was coming and wanted to face his beatdown on his feet. He turned to face her fully, his red right eye blazing out of the shadows.
"I knew."
Nikki's world went cold.
She'd imagined those words coming out of his mouth a thousand times, but hearing them froze her in place. The rage was still there, a rumbling tidal wave, but it was being held back by a wall she couldn't see.
Michael.
He didn't share her anger, she realized. That's not why he had been on the emotional cliff. He'd been battling some other feeling just as powerful. And now his cold wall of serenity was holding back her hot wave of fury. Even without a body, he'd found a way to stand between her and what she wanted to destroy, the way he always had.
"I knew Michael was going to die." Gideon repeated.
The anger surged. It should have crushed Michael's thin wall—but it didn't.
Something more was holding it back, something coming from her. She was holding back, she realized with a shock, because of the fear coming from her brother. He was afraid, but not of what Gideon was saying. He was afraid of something he wasn't.
As soon as she processed that thought, she felt Michael's resolve harden. She knew that feeling from him. She'd felt it so many times over the years that it came with a clear image of an all too familiar look in his eyes. He'd just made a decision to do something he felt he had to do, and nothing in the world would make him change his mind.
Nikki, he said at last. You can't blame him. It wasn't his fault. Gideon did know I was going to die—but so did I.
Padre
Padre crouched next to the last victim to look him over one last time before dragging him to the hole. He'd checked all four bodies before they started prepping them for disposal, made sure he had a clear picture of what had happened to each. But this one had a few broken twigs that still bothered him.
That was one reason for the study. The other was the guy's size. He was easily forty kilos heavier than Padre, and still mostly intact, so waiting for Elias to help carry was the smart move all around.
His roving gaze stopped on the broken nose, the first broken twig.
Padre's grandfather had taught him basic stalking and tracking when he was little, and one of the rules he'd drilled into Padre had been to always look for the broken twig.
He used to say an obvious trail was coyote work, but he said it "Coyote," cursing the name with an unmistakable capital. Daniel Tall Bear Lee blamed just about everything on Coyote, his nemesis. The way he explained it, the Old Man was pissed at him for marrying a woman from another tribe, and a Canadian at that, so he tormented Tall Bear in the form of Coyote. His grandfather believed Coyote, as one of his innumerable devious acts, made obvious trails to trick hunters, namely Tall Bear, into keeping their eyes ahead so they missed the real danger hiding in the brush.
Paranoia notwithstanding, his grandfather was right. Obvious trails did present a real danger when tracking. They had a way of lulling to sleep the part of a scout's mind that had to stay on task when he was stalking something with a temper. If the bear you were tracking stepped off the trail for a snack and you missed the sign—the broken twig that said you were on the wrong trail—you could end up on the wrong end of the hunt before you could say "scat."
Those lessons had served Padre well over the years. They'd helped him excel in scout sniper training. They'd helped keep him alive more than a few times in the field.
Turned out the same basic principles his grandfather had shared about stalking a bear applied to stalking a man—stay downwind, use all your senses, keep an eye out for broken twigs, and always assume Coyote is one step ahead of you. He'd felt safe to ignore that last.
Over the years, he had come to realize his grandfather was talking about more than just tracking and stalking with his broken twigs. Tall Bear's wry smile when he imparted his nuggets of wisdom should have been a dead giveaway, but as a teenager Padre had been too caught up in his own issues to do more than notice the quirk. It wasn't until later, after his grandfather passed away, that Padre started to understand the many meanings in those lessons.
For a man who spoke ill of Coyote at every opportunity, Tall Bear had much in common with his supposed nemesis. He was a trickster at heart, hiding a double meaning in every lesson, such as choosing the right seeds for planting, which was really about giving in to nature, or deciding which divorcee to surprise with a basket of his garden's best, which was pretty much about the same.
His grandfather's little smiles had showed his true feelings, but Padre hadn't seen them for what they were—broken twigs. They were the signs he missed because of the obvious trail his grandfather laid.
In truth, Tall Bear hadn't hated Coyote, he'd emulated him, revered him. Padre suspected Coyote was more guide than nemesis to his grandfather. Might explain the actual coyotes who still ghosted Tall Bear's cabin long after their food scrap source had passed on. They were probably still out trying to hide broken twigs to honor their fallen brother.
No coyotes here though. This Runner's twigs hadn't made it past Padre. If only he could interpret what they meant.
The bear of a man lying in front of him hadn't broken his nose during the fight with Gideon. Unless, of course, he'd called a truce to stop the bleeding. And the wood splinters in what was left of his tight, sleeveless shirt hadn't come from anything in this cabin. Wrong kind of wood. Which meant he'd been in a scrape earlier somewhere else.
Padre had a guess as to where, based on Nikki's state when he'd picked her up. He couldn't be sure though without asking her directly, and open communicating wasn't exactly something they did these days.
That was a worry for another time. He had plenty to worry about here and now, namely the other broken twig.
The other three victims had been smaller than this last. Their injuries had been more dramatic, harder to read clearly. Not so the big man. He had parallel slashes on his left side, like something made by a long-fingered, sharp-clawed animal. That made sense. What bothered Padre was the matching set on his other side.
Padre could picture a few situations that would lead to those injuries in a fight with Gideon, but the rest of the evidence didn't support a one of them. Those injuries just didn't track.
"You ready?" Elias asked. He stepped over the broken leg of the cheap coffee table—MDF, no match for the splinters—and squatted on the body's other side.
Filing away the broken twigs for now, Padre nodded and took the near side. On "three" they lifted the last body and carried it to the small back room where they dropped it through the hole they'd exposed by ripping aside the toilet.
This shack was a relatively new structure. Definitely not the first building to grace this lot. Whoever had built it had taken a common shortcut. They'd used an existing sub-level from the old structure to catch the waste of the new. Too few low-cost contractors would spend the money on a septic system or sewer tie-in when they could pocket that money by funneling waste straight into what used to be sub-street parking.
Padre and Elias weren't complaining. It made their cleanup work that much easier.
While Elias muscled the toilet back into the room, Padre took two small cylinders from his pack, cracked them, and dropped them into the hole. Once he saw the reaction start up, he helped Elias wrestle the toilet back into place.
"Good enough," Elias said softly, not sounding pleased in any way. He clicked his com as he headed back into the main room to weave his way to the door. "Mos, we're heading out."
"Clear. Come on," Mos's deep voice came over Padre's com.
He took one last look around the shambles as he followed Elias to the door. Then he stepped outside and tried to put the scene out of his mind to focus on his surroundings.
"Gotta tell you," Mos said, stepping around the makeshift porch to meet them. "I didn't envy you boys. That was one helluva mess."
Elias just nodded. Padre didn't respond. He focused instead on looking over the lot and the street beyond for any sign of patrols or watchers. Mos had been keeping watch, but that didn't stop Padre from double checking.
"Hell, there's blood all the way out here," Mos went on.
Padre brought his gaze back to Mos, then cut a glance back at the wall of the shack. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elias do the same.
"Show me," Padre said.
Mos didn't hesitate or take offense at what sounded like a command from his subordinate. They kept the rank structure they'd all known in their various militaries, but like any good spec ops unit, they knew when to defer to expertise.
As Padre followed Mos's direction and squatted over the darker patch on the ground, Elias said, "Must be from Gideon as he left."
Padre tended to agree. It made sense. Which is exactly why he needed to check it. After another glance up at the street, he switched on the flashlight tinted to protect his night vision.
He studied the blood, which it was, in small but regular patches heading away from the shack. Then he took a close look at the tracks accompanying the trail across the soft dirt and thick clumps of dark grass.
Clicking off the light, he quietly drew the suppressed pistol from under his jacket.
"We have a problem."
Nikki
"What do you mean, you knew?"