by Dan Padavona
She pulled away from him, her eyes wide with betrayal. “What if it’s another trap? Do you want to run into more men like Mickey or James?”
“I don’t think we will. I have a good feeling about Florida Bliss. I think we should try.”
“You said we could go to the coast. You said we could find a safe place to stay until—”
“I know what I said.” He wiped fresh tears from her cheeks. “If you really want to live near the ocean, we will. But I’d like to see what’s going on with this place in Florida first. Wouldn’t it be nice to stop running?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I think we should at least check it out before we go in.”
“I agree. I’ll grab us a couple pair of binoculars, and we’ll scope the place out. If it looks safe, we’ll go in. If not, you choose the beach, and we’ll disappear.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Okay. I’ll try. But can we stay here a few days, just the two of us? I’m really tired, and after today, I don’t feel ready to meet a bunch of new people.”
“Yeah. Of course. We can stay here as long as you want. I even asked for a late checkout.”
She giggled through her tears, her eyes moving across the hotel interior as though it were an old friend. “Whenever we traveled, my father had to be the first on the road. He’d drag me and Mom through the hotel breakfast buffet and have the car packed before we finished our coffee.” Her mouth quivered between the sorrow and happiness of nostalgic remembrance. “I really miss them, Blake.”
He realized he hadn’t thought of his own father in days. The discovery of his adoption seemed to have occurred years ago. Guilt nudged up through his chest. Maybe his father had good reason for hiding Blake’s adopted status. What if my real parents were bad people and my father wanted to protect me from the truth?
“I know how you feel. I miss my father, too.”
She hugged him again, and this time her tears were fewer and her smile stronger.
When Blake awoke from his nap, the Georgia sun was behind the hotel, painting the strip mall across the street in burning reds. From the bed, he watched the hotel’s shadow creep longer across the parking lot toward the road. He watched her. She lay curled upon the bedspread as before with her arms clasped together and her knees drawn toward her chest. Breathing easily, her shoulders swelled and descended like bay-side waves.
The room, holding the day’s heat, grew dark. Soon Tori would be a mannequin-like silhouette. She desperately needed rest, but he wanted to wake her. The longer he went without talking to her, the louder the voices inside his head became. The voices wanted to discuss premonitions, adoptions, and black magic in South Carolina.
He lay awake for hours, tossing and turning as the pit of night deepened. Sometime after midnight, he finally fell asleep.
“Blake.”
Someone shook him by the shoulder.
“Son. Wake up.”
Blake’s eyes shot open. In the inky darkness of the hotel room, he could barely see beyond the edge of the bed, but he felt the mattress slumping to the side as though weighted down. He was dreaming of course. His father, Morgan Connelly, was not inside the room, and the weight at the edge of the bed was just his imagination.
“Blake.”
Blake’s heart beat louder in his ears. The man’s voice was not his father’s. He sat up, sliding away from the edge of the bed toward the headboard, drawing his knees up. He blinked, seeing the ambient moonlight disturbed by a man’s silhouette. In the next bed, Tori’s indistinct contours blended with the blankets.
“How did you get in here?”
Silence, and then, “Don’t worry. I mean neither of you harm.”
The mattress springs groaned under Blake’s shifting weight.
“You’re not my father.” The man was barely visible in the dark, but Blake felt his gaze.
“Am I not?” Blake shook his head, but something in the man’s voice sounded eerily familiar. “You are in grave danger, Blake. Both of you are.”
“That’s why we stopped for the night.”
“There is no safety here. They are coming for you.”
“I don’t understand. Who’s coming for us?”
“You must get Tori to the safety of those who gather in the south.”
As the man talked, Blake’s trepidation faded. For unknown reasons, he trusted the intruder.
Blake glanced over at Tori, who slept despite the strange conversation. He had to be dreaming. The events of the last week finally caught up to him, making him lose his grip on reality. In a matter of hours, he would awaken to the morning sun and realize the man had never been in their room. He would see things more clearly in the light of day and—
“Trust your intuition, Blake. It is a gift. A powerful gift. Eventually the ones who seek you will find you no matter where you conceal yourself. But temporary safety will buy you time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time for Tori to understand her own gift. She is but a child riding upon the back of a tiger now. Until she truly understands what she is capable of, she is in danger of tearing herself apart. If you are there for her, if you are true to your blood and true to your heart, she will come to accept the power she wields, just as you must accept your own ability.”
“What she did to those men—”
“Was necessary. Had you died, all would have been lost.”
Blake buried his head in his hands. How can I accept what Tori did to James and Tyler? None of the recent events seemed real; he traveled through an endless nightmare. Blake was dreaming all of this, and when he awakened, he would find himself in his own bed. Watching through his bedroom window, he would see his father washing the car. There would be children on bicycles and neighbors returning from Sunday morning mass. There would be no Mickey, no Tyler and James, no lonely Georgia hotel room.
And no Tori?
That thought troubled him deeply. When he raised his head, the man was gone.
Blake swung his legs over the bed. Tori rolled onto her side, facing him, still deep in slumber. Where did the man go?
“Hello?”
In the distant night, a dog howled. Or had it been a wolf?
“Where are you?”
Moaning as she nestled her head against the pillow, Tori stirred. As the hotel’s hush deepened, Blake heard an unusual sound from the highway—the pitch-shifting whine of a vehicle motoring down the interstate. Was it another set of travelers following the signs to Florida Bliss? Or was someone searching for Blake and Tori, passing close enough to see their car parked a stone’s throw from the exit ramp? He remembered the man’s warning, then brushed it aside. There hadn’t been a man in the room. He had imagined the encounter, sleepwalking on the border separating nightmare from reality.
He called me his son.
The room’s warmth couldn’t melt the ice off his bones. Blake crawled beneath the covers and waited out the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Look At Me
In a sprawling brick central school southeast of Interstate-35 and Ames, Iowa, Jacob Mann sat watching Rob Humphrey flip hamburgers on a grill behind the buffet counter. Middle-aged and balding, Humphrey whistled an aimless, incongruous tune as he worked. Jacob didn’t like being cordoned off in Iowa like so much cattle, and he especially hated that their base of operations was a school. Here, the ghosts of his past seemed most active, taunting him in the halls and slapping lunch trays from his hands.
The ten-story Hampton Inn, which housed many of Victor Lupan’s community, was visible through the cafeteria’s plate glass windows, as it sparkled orange and white like cliff walls, glistening from Friday morning’s rain. Trees amid the buildings drooped over, their leaves shriveling. Black Dalmation-like spots dotted the flora, just as they had in Red Oak, New York. A commercial road wound past the Hampton Inn, leading to several more hotels. Two groups of men walked across the rural highway separating the hotel from the school. Jacob noticed the vast majority of the estimated t
wo thousand working under Lupan were males—perhaps as high as 85 percent—and the females weren’t attractive enough to catch his eye.
Humphrey, Jacob had learned, was a technological genius. Shane Richardson, a forty-something electrical worker from San Diego, and a small crew had gotten the grid up and running. But it was Humphrey who installed the computer system and set up their intranet. Humphrey was already considered one of the more valuable members of the crew, so when he pulled double-duty, running the kitchen at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, nobody questioned him. He might have been a guru when it came to computers and software, but his first love was cooking, and based on the amount of gut hanging over the waist of his blue jeans, eating was a close second.
Humphrey flipped a hamburger patty. Red meat sizzled and seared. A thin tendril of smoke rose off the burger, spreading a savory, greasy aroma across the cafeteria. Nine burgers sizzled in a perfect grid, the top row browning over while the newer, bottom row was still pink. Jacob watched the man sprinkle spices and fresh-cut onion onto the meat, thinking how easy it would be to introduce a little arsenic or rat poison into the food supply. Noticing Humphrey watching him from behind the counter, Jacob turned his head away.
Jacob spent the last year stalking Tori Daniels through school halls and along the side streets of Red Oak. He became obsessed with her, drawn not by her beauty but by something inside her he craved for his own.
Power? Yes. He sensed and undefinable power lurking inside of her.
He had broken into Tori’s house after the townsfolk disappeared, but she escaped before he could kill her. Victor Lupan, who controlled Jacob like a puppet on a string and also wanted Tori killed, punished Jacob by sending him to this strange Iowa compound of survivors.
For every day Jacob was trapped within his prison, Tori got farther from him. He ached to slip away and pursue her, but realized the compound members expected him to attempt to escape. Lupan had probably put everyone on alert to keep an eye on Jacob, which explained why Humphrey kept eyeing him.
Don’t you look at me, pig. I’ll cut your eyes out and feed them to you like the swine you are.
The drone of voices echoed from down the hallway. Occasionally Lupan shouted from a distant classroom, causing a ringing reverberation through the halls. Other times, the sound of a hundred or more guns simultaneously cocking rattled from the far corridor.
Lupan must be teaching the new grunts how to handle a weapon.
That was decidedly better than it had been at sunrise, when Lupan had returned to the hotel and school complex after vanishing for the last 24 hours. Just thinking about Lupan made Jacob shiver. How did the man plant thoughts in his head, and how did Lupan manage to travel from one end of the country to the other in the same day without air transportation? Whatever the mysterious man had been up to, it had apparently gone badly. Molten anger had been in the man’s eyes this morning, everyone avoiding him the way they might a pit viper on the loose. Now Lupan was back to training and organizing instead of stalking the gloomy hallways with murderous intention.
Jacob bent a fork in his hand, curling the shaft within his closed fist so the tines jutted out from between his fingers as he eyed Humphrey.
I don’t need a gun to kill someone. And that includes you, swine.
“Hey, kid.”
Jacob looked up from the table, slipping the fork into his shirt sleeve. Suspicion covered Humphrey’s face.
“You want some lunch, or are you just gonna sit there, screwing around all afternoon?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“A body’s gotta eat.”
“You should know,” Jacob said under his breath. Bringing his fist up below the table, he scraped the tines along the wooden underside. Lupan had taken Jacob’s knife away, saying he could have it back once he learned to fire a gun properly. But Jacob was resourceful. With this fork, he could plunge the points through an eye or rip away a chunk of flesh before his victim reacted.
As he stared at the disgusting pig behind the grill, his mind wandered back to Tori Daniels. Yes, there was something special about her, just as Lupan had professed in Red Oak. Something Jacob couldn’t put a finger on. Was it that something that drew him to her, fueling his obsession? When had the obsession begun? Unlike the popular, pretty girls in school who stuck their noses up at him, Tori had been nice, offering a kind word or simply saying hello when she passed him in the hallway. When had attraction become obsession? He couldn’t recall.
Humphrey shrugged and went back to flipping burgers.
Between the cafeteria and the front door to the school stretched forty-two paces of hallway. Jacob knew. He had counted. Forty-two paces between him and the humid afternoon. Forty-two paces until he was following Tori’s trail.
More shouting rang out from down the hall. On Lupan’s command, unloaded rifles were readied. Lupan yelled, “Fire!” and the grunts pulled their triggers.
If I run now, I’ll never get past Lupan. Even if Jacob made it to the double doors, Lupan would find him no matter where he went.
“Jacob.”
Jacob jumped.
He spun around, lifting his fist from which protruded the makeshift weapon. Victor Lupan glared down at him. I didn’t even hear him approaching.
Lupan glanced down at Jacob’s fist, smiling, focusing on the fork. Suddenly the utensil felt like a hot coal, and Jacob’s fist opened. The fork clanged against the cafeteria floor, briefly glowing orange. His mouth hanging open, Jacob looked at his palm, upon which a red welt swelled. Had he held the fork a second longer, his skin would have blistered.
“You weren’t considering using that on me, were you?”
Jacob’s mouth went dry, his tongue flopping uselessly. “No.”
“Forks are for eating, Jacob. Very resourceful, nonetheless.” To Jacob’s surprise, Lupan bent down to retrieve the fork and handed it back to him. Fearing the utensil would sear his flesh again, he reluctantly took hold of the fork. But it was cool to the touch now, even cold if that was possible.
Lupan stepped toward Jacob, the man’s black eyes looking right through him, his form casting a long shadow over the table. Hamburger meat sizzled and smoked behind him.
“It seems we have a bit of a problem, Jacob.” Jacob’s heart pounded. “It has come to my attention that we have members among us who wish to leave.”
As soon as Jacob had thought about making a run for the front doors, Lupan had appeared. Can Lupan read my mind?
Lupan grinned wide. “Anyone who leaves becomes a liability to the group. What we plan here must stay within these walls. Anyone attempting to escape must be treated as a traitor. I’m sure you understand.”
Jacob considered running. He was pretty sure he could outrun Lupan, and maybe he would get past the new trainees at the end of the hall if he was lucky.
Lupan placed a cold hand on Jacob’s shoulder. His touch held the deepest chill of the winter solstice. Those black eyes, a doll’s eyes, peered at Jacob.
“Come with me.” Lupan turned his back and walked toward the cafeteria doors. Jacob’s sneakers felt frozen to the floor, his legs not obeying. “Now.”
Jacob broke out of his stupor and rushed to catch up. Lupan turned left into the hallway, away from his class and the front doors. At the end of the hall, he ascended a staircase toward the unlighted gloom of the second floor, Jacob following several steps behind. Their footfalls echoed like water dripping off of stalactites in a forgotten cavern.
The stairs ended at the second landing. Ahead stretched a dark corridor of lockers and classroom doors. Off to the right, letters cut from construction paper and hung from a string spelled Welcome Spring. Magazine pictures of green forests, flowers, and waterfalls were taped to the wall. Lupan passed the display, walking deeper into the shadows until he was a ghostly silhouette. Jacob slowed his pace, thinking again about the number of paces to the front doors.
“Keep up, Jacob.”
Jacob walked faster. Halfway down the corridor, Lupan tur
ned and pushed a door open. Outdoor light filtered through the opening. Jacob swallowed.
When he entered the classroom, he noticed the desks were pushed to the back of the room. Two very large men stood inside the classroom. Jacob recognized them as Brant Masters and Quinn Harsted, two of the men instrumental in helping Shane Richardson repair the power plant turbines.
So Lupan ordered two thugs to beat me senseless before he kills me.
But Masters and Harsted shared a look, as if neither had any idea what was happening.
Harsted cleared his throat. “You wanted something from us, Mr. Lupan?” Harsted looked between Lupan and Jacob. Worry crept onto the man’s face.
“I have gone to great lengths to gather all of you together. I have provided electrical power, housing, meals, and training, yet you conspire to abandon our cause. Isn’t this true?”
Jacob’s fingers curled and uncurled. Maybe Lupan wasn’t accusing him. Maybe Lupan was angry with the two men.
Harsted began to say something, then his mouth closed.
Masters did something Jacob didn’t expect, and by the look on Harsted’s face, he hadn’t expected it either. Masters stepped toward Lupan.
Masters towered four inches over Lupan, probably outweighing him by seventy pounds. A bear of a man, Masters looked like a cross between a lumberjack and an offensive lineman. His swagger suggested he was not a stranger to brawling.
“It’s still a free country, Jack.” Masters’ hands balled into fists. “You didn’t turn the power on. That was our crew. The lights, your precious computer system, even the hotel—you have us to thank for that. I’ve done my part, and so has Quinn. I’m not saying we’re leaving, but you need to better understand our relationship.”
Harsted, who was almost as huge as Masters, seemed to grow with each word Masters spoke. He stood taller. The ice coating his spine melted.
“Do tell. What exactly is our relationship, Mr. Masters?”
“Quinn and I are independent contractors. This isn’t a 9-to-5 job with a clock to punch, and I don’t see a union. The way I see it, we are free to move on anytime we choose.”