Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5)

by Rob Cornell

  While she managed to pull her arms in to break her fall and keep her face out of the dirt, her right elbow struck another hidden rock. Pain jagged up her arm and brought tears to her eyes.

  “God damn it,” she shouted.

  The thick woods swallowed her shout, and made it sound feeble. Totally wrecked any satisfaction Jessie could get from cursing this plant-life prison.

  She lay on her side, cradling her hurt arm against her for a couple minutes. Something leafy tickled the back of her neck.

  A trio of birds squawked and chattered in the branches above, a dysfunctional little birdie family. She couldn’t tell what kind of birds they were from where she lay, but probably wouldn’t be able to identify them anyway.

  Again, not a nature girl.

  But as she lay silent, she heard another sound just behind the birds’ squabble.

  Rushing water?

  Jessie hauled herself back to her feet. She jerked her shoulders forward to hike up her backpack that, no matter how many times she had adjusted the straps, kept slipping down to her arms.

  She cocked her head and listened.

  Sure enough, she heard the faint sigh of running water.

  A creek? Maybe a river?

  She tried to pinpoint the direction the sound came from. It seemed to come from everywhere, echoing among the trees. If she could just pick out the loudest source.

  There. That had to be it. North, northeast.

  She trudged through the brush, taking careful steps, forcing herself to stay calm, not rush. She wanted to run. Not only was she dying of thirst, her tongue fat and dry in her mouth, but she figured she could follow the water and hope that it led her to some hint of civilization. Or, at the very least, out of these fucking woods.

  It took her ten minutes to pick her way through the gnarled undergrowth. Even when the sound of rushing water grew louder, she kept her careful pace. Finally, she reached the edge of a creek about fifteen feet wide.

  She could see the creek floor through the clear water. It was only a couple feet deep. Several rocks jutting above the waterline, the water’s flow breaking against them and making the sound that had led Jessie here.

  She flung off her backpack and dropped to her knees. With one hand she reached down and scooped some water and brought it quickly to her mouth. She slurped the water. It carried a rusty mineral flavor, but otherwise tasted clean. Of course, at this point, Jessie would have drunk from a toilet bowl. She was that thirsty.

  She indulged in the water until her stomach felt too full to take in anymore, then wished she hadn’t drank so much. Her belly sloshed like a fishbowl in an earthquake.

  For a minute or two she knelt by the riverbank, the moistness from the dirt seeping through the knees of her jeans. She didn’t mind it. The cool touch centered her. Not to mention that it was a nice contrast to the freaking humidity. Even with most of the sunlight blocked from the canopy of leaves above, her shirt was soaked through with sweat. Her armpits had rubbed raw from the wet friction.

  Once she was convinced she wasn’t going to retch, Jessie stood and started down along the edge of the river, following the water’s flow. If she stayed close to the bank, she could avoid the tangling weeds—or whatever the various greenery was; they were all weeds to her—and thankfully stay on her feet, any rocks in her path visible and avoidable.

  The mosquitoes still buzzed her ears. Sweat still ran down her back and sides. Between her BO and the clinging stench of garbage on her, she figured any hungry animals lurking in the trees would probably run whimpering, appetite ruined by the nasty human traipsing through their home.

  Either that, or her ripe scent would draw them in, salivating.

  She tried not to think about it.

  She also tried not to notice the growl in her own stomach. The creatures of the forest weren’t the only ones feeling a bit peckish.

  After a mile or so—or a hundred, which was more like what it felt—the shadows under the trees grew thicker. The humidity broke. The air turned cool in the darkening woods. Even on the river bank, the rocks became harder and harder to see as night drew down around her.

  Skittish rustling came from the underbrush and behind crooked bushes. Jessie jerked in the direction of every sound. The sweat on her skin began evaporating, leaving behind cold gooseflesh. Her sweat-soaked clothes clung to her like cold, wet rags.

  She began to shiver.

  Eventually, when the dark outpaced her vision, Jessie stopped and wrapped her arms around herself. The river whispered on her left side. The woods sighed to her right. She felt like she had walked into some giant, breathing beast. Or like she’d been shrunk and injected into a body like in Fantastic Voyage.

  An old, kinda lame movie. But with a unique charm.

  There was nothing charming about Jessie’s current situation, though.

  The idea of curling up on the riverbank and trying to sleep with all that…nature out there, made her cringe. At worst, something like a coyote or bear would try to eat her. At best, a bunch of creepy bugs would crawl all over her while she slept, maybe into her ears, maybe into her mouth.

  Just the thought made her spit and sputter as if the bugs had already gotten in.

  What other choice did she have, though? She couldn’t keep moving. Either the sky was overcast, or the moon was on the wane, but she didn’t have any of its light to travel by. The darkness was near absolute. She could now only see a dark waver when she moved her hand in front of her face.

  Besides, she could use the rest. Her body ached in those proverbial places where a girl didn’t know she could ache. She felt a lot like she had just done some hand-to-hand with a lurking grue—a nasty creature that looked like a cross between a goat and a crow. Jessie had had a scuffle with one a year ago during a raid of an imp nest. Apparently grues and imps were friendly. They liked the same dark environments and grues offered brutal protection against threats the imps couldn’t handle themselves.

  Which wasn’t much.

  If Ree hadn’t stepped in with his bowie knife, Jessie would have ended up grue food.

  The thought of Ree almost made her cry.

  The dumb bastard had sided with the wrong people and he didn’t seem to know it. She had thought better of him. Had thought he had a head screwed on at least a little straight.

  As it turned out, not so much.

  Even so, she sort of missed him. He’d always been cool with her. Right up until the general and little Miss Kinga showed up.

  Jessie dipped her shoulders and let her backpack slide off and thump to the ground. With her hands down to feel out the ground and make sure there were no rocks under her, she slowly sat down on the moist bank. She pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  The sound of the river soothed her. She almost fell asleep sitting there listening to it.

  No point in fighting it.

  She eased down onto her side, pulled her backpack over, and rested her head on the pack as a hard, lumpy pillow. The wet dirt shared its cold with Jessie’s body. She pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and crossed her arms against her chest. She almost wished for the humidity back. But she would get plenty of that tomorrow probably.

  She had another lovely hike to look forward to in the morning.

  As she tried to drift off to sleep, a hard lump caught in her throat. Tears welled in her eyes and ran down the side of her cheek.

  How had she ended up here? The Chosen One, curled up on a riverbank at night, alone and exposed to whatever nature had in store for her. She second-guessed her decision to leave the Agency. Sure, she would have felt just as alone in that place, the people surrounding her as sympathetic as the trees in these woods. But at least she’d have a dry fucking bed.

  At some point, despite every discomfort, Jessie fell asleep.

  She dreamt of her dad. He had something to tell her, something she had to understand. Her very life depended on it. But she couldn’t make out what he was saying. It sounded
like he was talking under water. She did understand the desperation in his eyes, though.

  She understood that whatever he had to say involved larger stakes than just her own safety.

  This shit was serious.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THEY GRUMBLED. THEY BITCHED. THEY second- and third-guessed him. But when Earl led his crew into the fourth vacant store from the right in the strip mall and took them across the dusty concrete floor into a back room and over to a closet with its folding door dangling by a single hinge and yanked that door clear of the doorway and shone his flashlight onto what looked like a metal hatch to a submarine with one of those wheels on top you had to spin to open—right about then, they all shut up.

  “See that?” Earl asked, shining his light on the hatch while standing to one side.

  Art, the only one who hadn’t griped because he knew Earl could be counted on, stepped forward and peered into the closet. “Where’s it go?”

  Earl smiled and waggled his eyebrows at his crew. They all stared at him, as slack-jawed as a bunch of rednecks drunk on their own moonshine. Sort of like Earl’s family back before he lost them all when Momma…

  You don’t think about that no more. Not now. Not until you set things right.

  “It goes to our new home,” Earl said, still smiling even though he almost thought about what happened with Momma back when he hadn’t yet had half the hair on his balls he would when puberty had finished with him. “And the things we need to bring on the Dawn.”

  Art put his arm around Earl’s shoulders. “Go ahead. Show us the way.”

  Earl nodded. He moved into the closet, crouched beside the hatch—there was only a foot or so between the hatch and the closet wall, so he teetered on the balls of his feet—and spun the wheel.

  For all the time the hatch and its wheel must have sat, the wheel turned real easy until it clunked to a stop. Earl tried to lift the hatch door from where he crouched, but the bitch was heavy and his position too awkward to get any leverage.

  He looked out at Tony. “You wanna give me a hand?”

  Tony stepped forward without a hitch. The Negro finally acting like he knew his place. Probably wouldn’t last long, though.

  The big son of a bitch squatted, grabbed a handle on the side of the hatch and swung it open without any help from Earl.

  A stale, musty smell wafted up from the hole that reminded Earl of his grandpa’s cellar where he kept his pickles he jarred every summer. Dill pickles, spicy pickles with peppers, sweet pickles. Grandpap could do them all.

  But Earl never went down there to get any as a kid, because that smell scared him for some reason. He thought it smelled like old bones. He sometimes thought he could glimpse a skeleton in the shadowed corner whenever he stood at the door while Grandpap went down to fetch a jar.

  Earl wouldn’t learn till a decade later that Grandpap had killed a few men who had crossed him. So maybe Earl hadn’t imagined seeing that skeleton.

  The smell from the open hatch didn’t scare Earl now. It triggered a giddy anticipation. He was a rich kid at Christmas whose parents bought him all the toys Earl’s parents could never afford. That smell meant that the things down below hadn’t been spoiled by anyone after the master had left it behind. What lay below waited for Earl and Earl alone.

  And the crew, of course. Even Whisper. At least until Whisper’s purpose was served and Earl could put an end to him, taking his time in the doing, maybe letting Kit watch if she wanted. She deserved the chance, considering.

  Earl shined his flashlight down the hole. A metal ladder stretched down about thirty feet to a tiled floor. The tiles had cracks in spots, but other than a light layer of dust, looked clean, cared for, suggesting this wasn’t some abandoned rathole. Just like the master had promised, this place would suit them fine. Earl knew it would without having to see any more.

  While he stared down the hatch, Earl could hear Kit talking in the shop’s front room. She and Elka had hung back out there like Earl had told them to. Kit was yapping some nonsense about how her momma used to take her to the mall and buy her pretty things. Earl knew better. Her momma never bought a thing. She filched it.

  When would that girl learn her momma wasn’t the saint she thought she was? One way would be to send her back, have her live with the whore for a couple weeks. Probably wouldn’t even take that long. Kit would beg to come back after a couple days.

  He shoved all that aside. He had bigger things to focus on.

  Damn but he wanted to climb right down that ladder to see what awaited them. He kept himself back, though. He had a feeling, some odd sense that he shouldn’t go down first. Couldn’t explain why. But in recent days he’d learned not to ignore such feelings.

  Earl straightened and came out of the closet. Enough light came in through a small square window at the top of the room’s back wall so he could see his crew’s faces. He shined his flashlight at them anyway, each in turn, looking for something, a sign.

  He didn’t bother with Whisper. His fate came later.

  Not Art neither.

  He panned the light from Roddy to Laz and then around to Tony still standing by the closet. He looked them in the eye. Then he looked them up and down. He noticed Laz’s right hand trembling. Probably all those drugs from his past playing Dixie on his nerves.

  Was that the sign?

  He aimed the light back at Roddy. Kid had a green ball cap on backwards, canted on his head like it had slid down on him, but Earl knew he wore it that way on purpose. That annoyed Earl. Such a small thing, but he felt like it signified a kind of disrespect. You want to wear a hat, fine. Least you could do was set it right on your damn head.

  Roddy’s eyes glistened in the flashlight’s beam. He didn’t squint when Earl shone it in his face. In fact, he opened his eyes wider as if trying to take the light into himself, eat it through his pupils.

  Boy always seemed strange to Earl, now that he thought about it. Not Whisper strange. But strange nonetheless. Earl supposed he’d passed it off as quirks of youth. He saw more clearly now that it harkened to something more…

  Off.

  Best word Earl could think to describe it.

  And Earl needed his team to be on.

  He licked his lips as if he needed to slick them up enough to let his words to come easier. “Roddy, son?”

  Didn’t seem possible, but Roddy’s eyes grew wider still. “Yeah?” He sounded as excited as Earl had felt while looking down the hatch.

  Earl knew the kid was dedicated to the cause. He wore his loyalty like a Boy Scout badge, proud and clear. Still…

  Off.

  “I want you,” Earl said, “to be the first one down.”

  Roddy’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed big. “Yeah?”

  “Yessir.” Earl lowered his flashlight to his side and stepped up to the boy, grasped one of his shoulders. “I want you to realize how important you are to this crew. Just cuz you’re the youngest, don’t mean you shouldn’t share in some of the glory.”

  Roddy started breathing quick through his nose. His eyebrows crawled halfway up his forehead. He even started to shake a little. “I…I don’t know what to say.”

  Tony groaned. “Are you fucking serious? I opened the damn hatch for—”

  Earl whirled on Tony and stabbed him in the face with the beam from his flashlight. “Hush. You learn your place, boy.”

  Tony’s eyes darkened and narrowed. His black skin glistened like the flank of a horse after a good gallop. “What’d you say?”

  Normally, Earl could keep his opinion of Tony’s kind to himself. But he’d let a little of his true self slip. Time for some damage control before the native went wild. “All I’m saying is, you need to respect my decisions. I brought you this far. You gotta trust me.”

  “Didn’t sound like that was all you was saying.”

  “Don’t read into things that ain’t there, okay?” He patted Roddy’s shoulder. “Now let’s give this young man a chance to be a p
art of history.”

  The Negro crossed his arms like he meant to block the way, but he stepped aside, gaze blazing at Earl all the while.

  Earl ignored the evil eye. Tony wanted to cause any real trouble, Art would step in. Tony had more bulk than Art, but Earl had seen Art take down men at least as big, if not bigger. Back in the early days—four years ago, though it felt like Earl had known him his whole life—when it was just the two of them, a couple of fucked up guys looking for a reason to live.

  Their master, Mr. Dolan, had given them that reason.

  Now they had come so far.

  Earl put his arm around Roddy and guided him forward. When they came to the closet’s entrance, Earl stepped back. “Go on, son. Make me proud.”

  Roddy looked over his shoulder at Earl like a little puppy waiting for his master’s approval. His tongue slid along his smiling lips. “Thank you so much for this.”

  “Nah. Should be me thanking you.”

  The boy’s smile grew as wide as a jack-o’-lantern’s. His eyes danced. He looked almost stoned. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?

  Off.

  That was the heart of it.

  Off.

  But that was okay. Roddy had his place in this. He really would make a mark on history today. Just not in the way he thought.

  “Okay,” Roddy said. “Here I go.” He sounded like was talking in his sleep in the middle of a wet dream.

  Earl smiled and nodded his encouragement.

  Roddy backed up to the open hatch and crouched down on his hands and knees. He reached back with a foot, found a foothold on a rung of the ladder, and walked back on his hands to lower his other foot down.

  “Someone want to give me a light?” he asked.

  Earl stepped forward and obliged, shining the light down the shaft and illuminating the floor below once more.

  Didn’t look like anything dangerous waited there.

  Maybe he was being paranoid. Maybe he was giving up the chance to be the first to step foot in their new home and marvel at what awaited them.

  Roddy carefully climbed down the ladder. His heavy breathing echoed upward.