the deal.
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He shoved hard. All his might.
The door collapsed suddenly, but not the way Jack had
expected. It snapped at the top hinge and the deadbolt broke.
The door was still in the doorway, bent at an angle but held in
place by one hinge. Another push and it would swing in.
The sound of the gun was shocking.
Jack dropped to the floor. He covered his head, covered
his ears.
He yelled, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” but no one could
possibly have heard because now the firing was coming from
both sides. Whoever was in the control room was firing short
bursts through the gaps. BlamBlamBlam!
Drake was firing back in rapid-fire single rounds.
Bullets pinged off the steel and ricocheted in the hallway.
Drake yelled, Caine yelled, Jack yelled, and from beyond
the doorway a girl’s voice was screaming in rage and fear.
Then Caine struck. He hit the weakened door with a blast
of his own.
The steel door exploded inward.
It skidded across the floor beyond and knocked the legs
out from under a girl who kept firing as she fell, spraying
automatic weapons fire wildly in the air.
Jack hugged the ground, sobbing, “Don’t kill me!” Drake
leaped over him, gun in one hand, whip hand unfurled.
Lying on his side, Jack saw a crazy tableau, the girl, unable
to move, her legs twisted at impossible angles but bringing
the still-firing gun around toward Drake.
Drake’s whip hand snapping.
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The girl pointed her gun straight at Drake’s chest.
Click.
Empty.
Drake’s whip connected.
A scream of pain.
Another.
“Stop it!” Diana cried.
Caine, accidentally kicking Jack’s head as he rushed into
the room.
Again, the lash of Drake’s whip, and now he was yelling in
wild glee, crowing and cursing.
Jack crawled forward, blinded by tears. He knew the girl.
He knew her. Brittney. She’d been in history with him. Three
rows back.
Again Drake struck.
The empty gun fell from Brittney’s hand.
She was cut, bleeding, legs shattered from the impact of the
door, her face a mess of tears and blood and Diana screaming
abuse at Drake and Caine saying nothing to stop the psychopath and Jack wanting to cry, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but unable to find the words.
Diana reached Drake and grabbed his whip hand at the
shoulder. “Enough, you sick piece of—”
Drake spun around, face-to-face with Diana. He bared his
teeth and roared at her, roared like an animal, spit flying.
“She’s right: enough,” Caine said at last.
“Keep your girlfriend out of my face!” Drake bellowed at
Caine.
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Caine looked coldly at Drake. “I let you have your fun.
We’re not here for your entertainment.”
Jack was stunned. He was unable to tear his eyes away
from Brittney. She moaned, tried to move, then slumped to
the floor. Unconscious or dead. Jack didn’t know which.
She’d been in his class.
He knew her.
“Get to work, Jack,” Caine said.
Diana turned bloodshot eyes on Jack, eyes full of hatred
and sorrow. She brushed tears away. “Jack’s hurt.”
“What?” Caine demanded. “Jack?”
Jack wasn’t hurt. He started to get up, ashamed of cowering on the floor. But his left foot gave way. He looked down, mystified, and saw that his pants, from the knee down, were
soaking red.
“He’s losing a lot of blood,” Diana said.
It was the last thing Jack heard before the floor rushed up
and smashed him in the face.
Lana heard Quinn’s shouts. She heard the truck’s horn. She
was no more than two or three hundred feet away, just beyond
the reach of the stabbing flashlight beams.
Cookie walked stolidly beside her, quiet, though he must
have had his doubts.
Lana hoped Quinn and Albert wouldn’t come after her.
She didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to.
Patrick, too, heard the honking horn, so she whispered,
“Quiet boy. Shhh.”
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Lana had made sure to wear sturdy boots—a big improvement over the last time she had walked this route. She had her heavy pistol in her shoulder bag, which was another major
improvement. And she had Cookie.
If Pack Leader found them out here, Lana intended one
of them—she hoped it was she, not Cookie—to shoot him in
the face.
Also in her bag was a bottle of water, a can of button mushrooms, and an entire cabbage. Not much food, especially for a guy Cookie’s size, but then she expected to find at least a few
cans of something in the shed at the mine. Hermit Jim would
have stashed at least some food there.
She hoped.
The last time she had walked this path she’d gone in search
of Jim’s truck, hoping to use it to get to Perdido Beach. By that
point she had found the gold and figured out that the eccentric hermit was a prospector. She had followed tire tracks to the tumble-down, abandoned mining town hidden in a crease
of the hills. She’d found Jim’s truck but not the keys. Then she
had found Jim himself, dead in the mine shaft.
She knew now where the keys were.
Back then, back before so much had happened, she would
have been terrified of digging through the pockets of a corpse.
But that was the old Lana. The new Lana had seen things that
were so much worse.
She knew where to find the keys. And where to find the
truck. And she remembered the big LPG—liquid petroleum
gas—tank Jim used to fire the smelter.
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Her plan was simple: Retrieve the keys. With Cookie’s
help, load the gas tank into Jim’s truck. Drive the truck and
the tank to the mine entrance. Open the valve on the gas and
let it seep into the mine shaft.
Then light a fuse and run.
She didn’t know if the explosion would kill the thing in the
mine. But she hoped to bury it under many tons of rock.
The Darkness had called to her in her dreams and in her
waking dreams as well. It had its hook in her and she knew it
was drawing her in.
Come to me. I have need of you.
It wanted her.
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” Lana half sang, half whispered. “I’m coming to talk with you again.”
TWENTY-TWO
18 HOURS, 18 MINUTES
J A C K W O K E T O pain.
He’d been moved. Someone had turned him over. He
sat up too suddenly. His head swam, and for a moment he
thought he would pass out again.
One leg of his trousers had been crudely ripped to expose
the wound. There was a blue, blood-soaked bandage tied
around his lower thigh. It hurt. It burned like someone was
sticking a red-hot pok
er into his flesh.
Diana was beside him. It took him a moment to make
sense of her shaved head. “I found these in one of the offices.
Take them.” She transferred four Advil from her hand to his.
“It’s twice the regular dose, but I doubt it will kill you.”
“What happened?” he rasped.
“Bullet. But it just grazed you and kept going. It cut a
kind of neat little furrow. It’ll hurt, but the bleeding’s already
stopped.”
“Okay, Jack, snap out of it,” Caine said. He sounded harried
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and worried. Things weren’t going quite as he had planned.
“You know what you’re here for.”
Two of Drake’s soldiers returned, loudly abusing Mickey
Finch and Mike Farmer, who had their hands tied behind
them. They’d been found hiding in offices. Cowering under
desks. “Oh good,” Caine said breezily, “the hostages are
here.”
“We told them to throw down any guns they had, and this
retard just did,” one of the goons crowed. “All we had was a
shotgun and a pistol and this kid had a machine gun and he
still gave up. Little wussy. The other one didn’t have a gun.”
Mickey and Mike looked miserable and very afraid. Their
expressions grew bleaker still when they saw Brittney on the
floor in a puddle of blood.
Drake strode toward them, pushed Mike aside, and
grabbed the machine gun. He ran his tentacle over the stock,
over the cocking mechanism, holding it almost reverently.
There was an expression not far from love in his cold, blue
eyes. “I like this. The girl’s gun was a piece of crap, but this is
cool. Very cool.”
“Maybe you two should get a room,” Diana said.
“None of the freaks has power enough to mess with me if
I’m carrying one of these,” Drake said.
“Yeah, not even Caine,” Diana agreed brightly. “Now you
can be the boss, right?”
Jack stood rooted in place watching all this, still unable to
focus on his so-called job.
How had he let himself be dragged into this? There was a
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girl not ten feet away from him who might die, if she wasn’t
dead already. He could take three steps and be standing in
her blood, as he was sitting in his own.
“Jack,” Caine said. “Snap out of it. Get to work. Now!”
Jack moved like he was in a dream, shaking his head, his
ears still ringing from the gunfire. His leg burned. And the
material of his trousers, wet, clung to him. He stepped gingerly to the nearest computer console and sat down heavily in a swivel chair. The monitor was old. The look of the software
was old. The computer didn’t even have a mouse, it was all
keyboard-controlled.
His heart sank further still. Old software meant all kinds
of keystrokes, nothing he was used to. He slid open a drawer
hoping to find a manual, or at least a cheat sheet.
“How’s it look?” Caine asked. He laid his hand on Jack’s
shoulder, a friendly gesture meant to reassure Jack. For the
first time in his life it occurred to Jack that he wanted to spin
around and punch Caine. Punch him hard.
“It’s totally unfamiliar software,” Jack said.
“Nothing you can’t handle, though. Right?”
“I can’t do it very fast,” Jack said. “I have to work
through it.”
The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip. “How long,
Jack?”
“Hey, I’m hurt, all right? I got shot!” When Caine just stared
at him, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know. It depends.”
He could sense Caine’s tension, the bottled-up rage that
fed on fear. “Then don’t waste time.”
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Caine released him and turned back to Drake. “Put the
hostages in the corner.”
“Uh-huh,” Drake said absently. He was still fondling the
submachine gun.
Caine strode quickly up to him and smacked the barrel of
the gun. “Hey. Take care of business. Brianna could be back
here at any second. If it’s not her, it’ll be Taylor. You’d better
not be screwing around.”
Brittney lay on the floor, not moving, not making a
sound. Was she alive? Jack wondered. Given how badly she
was hurt, and knowing now how much pain even a grazing
wound could cause, he wondered if she might not be better
off dead.
Jack found an ancient loose-leaf binder, smallish, with
torn page ends sticking out here and there, festooned with
age-curled Post-it notes marking pages.
He started to work his way through it. He was looking for
a guide to the function keys. Without that he had nothing.
The lack of a mouse was crippling: he’d never seen, let alone
used, a computer without a mouse. It was amazing that such
things still existed.
“Diana,” Caine ordered. “Read our two hostages. I don’t
want to find out they’re hiding some power. Drake? How’s it
going?”
“I’m going to string the wire,” Drake said.
“Good,” Caine said.
Jack stole a glance and saw that Drake was holding a spool
of bare wire, quite thin but strong looking. He was surveying
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the doorway, looking for something.
Drake shrugged, dissatisfied with what he was seeing. He
began to wrap one end of the wire around the broken middle
hinge where it was still attached to the wall. It was a tall door
with three hinges, one that was just above head level, one at
ankle height, one splitting the difference.
Drake stretched the wire from the hinge to a heavy metal
filing cabinet against the wall. He passed the spool through a
drawer handle and pulled it tight. He cut the wire with a pair
of needle-nose pliers and wrapped the wire back on itself,
tightening it further.
Diana stepped back from the two hostages and said,
“They’re both clear. The one may be a one bar, but at that
level he doesn’t even know what powers he has. If he even has
anything at all useful.”
“Good,” Caine said.
Diana sauntered over and flopped into the swivel chair
closest to Jack. She stared moodily at the monitor in front
of her.
“What’s Drake doing?” Jack whispered.
Diana turned her languid eyes on him. “Hey. Jack wants to
know what you’re doing, Drake. Why don’t you tell him?”
“Jack is supposed to be working,” Caine interrupted. “He’s
busy.”
Jack turned hastily back to the notebook. There it was: a
list of function keys. He frowned and began to work his way
through the keys, pressing, seeing the results, moving on
methodically to the next key.
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Drake had finished with the wire. He ducked beneath it
and disappeared down the hallway from the direction they
had come, uncoiling wire as he went.
old. This is, like, DOS or something.”
Despite himself he was becoming fascinated by the
challenge at hand. It was computer archaeology. He was
deciphering a language that was pre-Windows, pre-Linux,
pre-everything. It took his mind off the pain. Mostly.
“I hope you weren’t too madly in love with Brianna, Jack,”
Diana said.
“What? No. No way.” Jack could feel himself blushing.
“No. That’s stupid.”
“Uh-huh.”
He felt his way, step by step, through the directory, looking for controls that might not even be there, commands that might not even exist.
Drake reappeared. He was whistling happily to himself.
“Slice and dice,” he said. “Slice and dice.”
“Good,” Caine said. “That’s one. Now set up for Taylor.
Remember, we don’t want anyone shooting Jack or hitting
any of the equipment.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Drake said. He pointed his tentacle at one of his two thugs. “You. Bring the shotgun.” When the boy had complied, Drake spent a few minutes moving
him around the room, checking sightlines. “Okay. You have a
simple job. You see Taylor popping in here, you shoot.”
The kid looked pale. “I have to shoot her?”
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“No, you have a choice,” Drake said. “You can shoot her or
not. It’s up to you.”
The kid breathed a sigh.
“Of course, if you don’t shoot her?” Drake snapped his
whip arm. The tentacle wrapped around the boy’s throat. “If
you don’t shoot her? If you forget, or get distracted, or miss?
I’ll whip you till I see bone.”
Drake laughed happily and unwrapped his arm. “I believe
we are ready,” he announced. “Taylor has a load of buckshot
waiting for her. And if little Brianna decides to breeze on in
at a hundred miles an hour, she’ll hit the wires.”
“And set off an alarm?” Jack asked.
Drake laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever
heard.
“Slice and dice,” Drake said. “Slice and dice.”
Jack didn’t look at Drake. He looked at Diana. Her eyes
were windows on darkness.
“Get back to work, Jack,” Caine said.
The McClub was closed down. There was a sign on the door
that said, “Sorry, We Are Closed. Will Reopen Tomorrow.”
Duck didn’t know why he had been drawn there. Of course
it was closed—it was after midnight. He had just craved company. Hoped someone was hanging around. Pretty much anyone.
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