Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  Jasper finished a cigarette and crushed it beneath his boot as he stared at the unassuming building down the street. "You think this is really it? The hub?"

  "That's what the travel pattern indicates." Cruz glanced up from the bag of supplies at his feet, his gaze settling on Dallas.

  Their leader wasn't looking at the warehouse. He was facing in the opposite direction, studying the wide road just behind him--the road you could follow straight north to Eden's walls.

  The dividing line between Sectors Four and Five.

  Mad was watching Dallas, too. "Having second thoughts, boss?"

  "Not many," Dallas replied, turning to face them. "If Fleming knows what's going on, this'll bring the war out into the open. If he doesn't? The bastard's got way bigger problems than me."

  "He knows." Bren's flat observation was certain, sure. "Shit like this doesn't go down right under his nose without one of his enforcers rooting it out. And someone bootlegging O'Kane liquor? He'd fucking die of glee."

  Dallas snorted. "If it wasn't his idea to begin with. His or that piss-face second of his."

  "Beckett," Noah said, not looking up from his tablet. "Logan Beckett. The man's fucking cold. And I'm not talking cold like he gets things done. I mean he's a goddamn sociopath. He's the one who came up with the shit that makes their drugs addictive."

  "Charming," Jas said sourly. "You got the blueprints yet, Lennox?"

  "I'm loading them up for everyone now."

  The datapad strapped to Cruz's vest vibrated, and he pulled it free and studied the schematic Noah had sent. It outlined the building's support structure. Bren had already gone over it and marked the sweet spots--the areas in the foundation where they were going to place the bags of explosives at Cruz's feet. Old-fashioned dynamite on timed charges. Blow them in the correct sequence, and the whole fucking building would fold in on itself like a house of cards.

  Dallas O'Kane had patience...until he didn't. And then he burned shit to the ground.

  Cruz lifted the bags, passed one to Bren, and shouldered the other. "I'm ready."

  Jasper ejected the magazine from his pistol, reinserted it, and chambered a round. "We clear on the plan?"

  Bren smiled, his typically perverse humor surfacing. "Yes, Dad. We're clear."

  But Jas eyed him grimly. "Get in, get to the basement, and do your thing. Leave the fighting to us."

  "We went over it a hundred times, McCray. We'll handle it."

  "Good." Dallas dropped a hand to his holstered gun and studied them all for a silent moment. "In and out, boys. Noah will handle access. We've got five minutes to secure the building, fifteen until the charges go off. Do not get caught in there when this shit blows, you hear me?"

  "It'd be ugly," Jasper agreed. "We're bringing the whole damn thing down. That's the message." He started for the building, and Cruz followed with the rest.

  The whole night was a message--a coordinated strike against the bootleggers' hub of operations along with every outpost the tracker had led them to. The leaders probably wouldn't be around. They'd scatter, but they wouldn't be able to hide, not with Liam and Dallas working together.

  Cruz just prayed they'd keep working together. For Rachel's sake.

  The street was deserted, as if its usual late-night occupants had sensed trouble and scurried away to hide from it. But even hidden away, they had to be watching. Cruz could feel the eyes on him, the sensation of being watched prickling up the back of his neck.

  Soon, Mac Fleming would know exactly what had happened at the edge of his sector.

  The front door to the building was newer than the rest of it, probably solid-steel core. Impervious to breach and secured with an access panel, a more robust version of the one he and Bren had found on that very first shack out in the middle of nowhere. Noah studied it for several seconds before pulling a flat, black case from his back pocket.

  He flipped it open to reveal a grid of small, metallic dots. They almost looked like stickers, the kind a child would play with, except Cruz was intimately familiar with their real nature and purpose. He clenched his hands into fists as Noah peeled them out of the case, one by one, and placed them at the four corners of the panel.

  He stepped away even before Noah motioned them back and pressed a tiny button on the outside of the case. The dots began to glow and then exploded in a sizzling shower of sparks. The lock clicked open with a heavy thunk, and Jasper and Mad shoved through the door, weapons in hand.

  An alarm began to ring throughout the cavernous structure, joined by the sound of raised voices and shouts of warning. Cruz ignored the noise and headed straight for his objective--an office off the left side of the main room.

  The clatter of gunfire echoed behind them as Bren hurried through the dark office and kicked open the door at the back of it. He activated a small, handheld light that illuminated stairs leading down into a heavier darkness.

  The basement.

  Cruz waved him onward, tensed for the sound of footsteps behind them, but none came. Their training had served them well.

  The sub-level of the building was a confusing warren of storage and office space. Bren moved silently through the near darkness and skirted one half-wall before coming to a stop beside a fat concrete pillar. He dropped his bag, unzipped it, and dragged out a heavy-duty drill exactly like the one Cruz had in his bag. He worked fast and steady, laying out his supplies before beginning, the way a cook might gather ingredients before tossing them all into a pot to boil.

  He set the hollow carbide-tipped drill bit against the concrete, and a low buzz filled the dank air as Cruz took up his position on the other side of the pillar. Twin holes, drilled on either side, filled with three sticks of dynamite each, wired to a primer charge controlled by an electrical detonator.

  It took twenty-eight seconds to drill the hole, place the dynamite, and attach the wires. By the time Cruz adhered the detonator to the concrete precisely six inches above the hole on his side of the pillar, Bren had already dragged a pre-cut roll of shielding fabric from his bag.

  They wrapped the pillar in silence, and Cruz secured it. Dallas was determined to send a message, but not at the cost of innocent bystanders' lives. The sheeting would limit the range of the blast, keep it focused to the pillar itself. No mess, and no mistakes.

  They had already hit the third support column and were starting in on the fourth and final one when the muffled sound of gunshots died down above them.

  Bren looked up and shook his head. "Took them long enough."

  Longer than it should have, but Bren knew why as well as Cruz did. Dallas had no problem killing the men trying to infringe upon his territory, but he wouldn't take the easy path and tell himself he'd had no choice. When they brought this building down, Dallas would know who was in it and who wasn't--no accidents with wives or sisters or desperate children who'd been pressed into working.

  They drilled the final holes, and Cruz reached for the explosives. "What do you figure Fleming will do when this place caves in?"

  Bren snorted. "Pitch a hissy fit worthy of any cranky toddler."

  "And when he's done kicking his heels on the floor?"

  "Who the fuck knows? Come at us, probably. A crazy bastard like Fleming can only run the slow play so long before he needs a little blood-and-guts gratification."

  It could mean a sector war--a real one, the kind of messy bloodshed that hadn't happened in years. That sort of battle would spill past the O'Kanes and Fleming's men, dragging everyone in both sectors into a fight that would end with one side's death, or with Eden coming down hard on all of them.

  There was no safety in that option. Ace would be in the thick of it. Rachel, too, when it came down to it, though Cruz couldn't stand the idea of encouraging her back into the city. He needed them both where he could see them, touch them. Protect them.

  "We could take care of that," he said, keeping his voice carefully casual. "It'd only take one bullet."

  "Maybe, but without clear evidence that
Fleming moved against us first, a strike like that would make the other sector leaders nervous. We can't have everyone against us." Bren leaned around the pillar with a serious look. "You've got to trust Dallas, man."

  Cruz flexed his fingers and looked away, staring at the tangle of wires instead of his friend's face. "It's fucking terrifying, isn't it? Having to decide who's worthy of your loyalty?"

  "At first. It gets easier."

  Cruz managed a smile as he finished wiring up his side. "Can't get harder, I guess."

  Bren barked out a laugh as he double-checked his detonator and secured it to the concrete. "Famous last words."

  When they had wrapped the final charges, Bren zipped up both nearly empty bags and hoisted them onto his shoulder. They made their way back through the basement and up to the main floor.

  Dallas stood in the center, arms draped over his chest, watching as Mad riffled through a crate of liquor bottles. He scowled when he caught sight of Bren and Cruz, jerking his head toward the exit. "I considered looting the place, but Nessa would stab me if I brought her the shitty grain they're using. Set the charges and let's get the fuck out."

  "Yes, sir." Bren dragged the control box from one of the many pockets on his vest.

  The moment he clicked the yellow arming button, an explosion rocked the floor beneath them.

  Something had gone wrong. Cruz's brain tried to process the possibilities as the floor shuddered beneath them and his ears rang with the painful aftermath. Dust billowed up, damn near blinding him, too, but he was still alive, which meant all of the explosives couldn't have detonated--

  The building kept shuddering. Kept groaning. Dallas staggered and Cruz lurched, landing painfully on his knees as he watched the far side of the floor crumble away, taking Mad with it.

  Jas was already on his feet, running toward the crater and listing walls that used to be the rear right quadrant of the building. "Bren, what the fuck?"

  Bren was just as fast. "I don't know! The detonator must have shorted out--"

  Too much of the structure had gone down on top of Mad. Digging him out of the rubble from here would be hard. Doing it before the rest of the fuses blew--or Mac Fleming responded to the first one and swept down on them--would be fucking impossible.

  His brain struggled to the realization, but his body was already shifting position. Up to his feet, stripping away his heavy gear because he had to go. "The tunnels! Lennox--move your ass."

  Noah's bootfalls thudded behind him as Cruz sprinted out the door, around the corner to the access hatch set into the cracked pavement of the alley. They'd already removed the rusted bolts--just in case they needed an escape route--and shimmied the heavy steel plate loose. Cruz pried it up as he ruthlessly ordered his thoughts.

  No room for panic. No room for any emotion but calm. He could find the closest point to the cave-in, open the secured door with Noah's help, and work from there. But he couldn't do it if his mind acknowledged the ticking clock, so he locked that away.

  He had time. All the time in the world.

  He jumped the last few rungs of the ladder down into the tunnel, ripping a light free of the pocket of his cargo pants as he landed. He'd committed the tunnel schematics to memory, more out of habit than anything else, and now he was damn glad he had.

  One hundred meters due north, second branch to the left.

  All the time in the world.

  Noah started swearing before they reached the door--and its ominously dark panel. "The power supply's been disrupted."

  "Can you open it?"

  He bit off another curse and smacked the wall beside the panel. "These locks re-sequence when they lose power. I won't be able to override it again without cracking it, and brute force'll take twenty minutes. Minimum."

  There was another way, a destructive last resort no one was supposed to know about. Cruz had learned about it during his training on Base, and employing it now would reveal exactly how much knowledge he possessed about Eden, the sectors...and everything that lay beneath them.

  "Out of the way." He slapped his emergency light to the wall. Then he jerked a multi tool out of another pants pocket, flicked it open, and pried away the recessed plate beneath the panel.

  A bevy of wires greeted him, a rainbow of colors oddly out of place in such a cold, sterile construct. Blue, red, green, yellow, white. Ace would probably have other names for them, prettier ones that would distract from the horror of the situation.

  Cruz only had a blade.

  One by one, he stripped away the plastic coating, keeping the wires carefully separated as he worked.

  "No, you can't do that." Noah stopped just short of grabbing his wrist, but his hand hovered there. "You can't overload these. You think I haven't tried? You'll jam the damn lock for good."

  Not if you did it right. Cruz rattled off the sequence he'd learned all those years ago, vaguely surprised by how easily it all came back to him. "White and blue to yellow. Yellow to red. Red to green. Any other combination won't work. It'll fry the circuit, but it'll disable the lock first."

  Boots pounded toward him from the far end of the tunnel. "Why isn't this fucking thing open?"

  Dallas. Noah answered him, repeating his caution about the danger of fucking around with the circuitry. Cruz blocked it all out as he held his breath and twisted the first wires together.

  "Bren--"

  "Shh." Bren cut off Dallas's question. "He knows what he's doing."

  Dallas cut through Noah's protest with a curt noise, and put his trust--and Mad's life--in Cruz's hands. "Get him out of there."

  Mad

  Mad hated the dark.

  He hated the silence of it, the emptiness. It wasn't natural. Outside, under the night sky, the world gave him a hundred subtle sources of sound and endless pinpricks of light. God had never intended for man to have to survive alone in the darkness.

  He hadn't meant for man to survive underground, either. Mad could feel the weight of the earth pushing in around him, and not just because a few chunks of building had landed on him in the aftermath of the explosion.

  Lucky. He'd been so, so lucky. The floor had crumbled and carried him down, but he'd managed to roll before the ceiling followed it. Trapped in claustrophobic darkness was still better than crushed to death, even with a body bruised and his head throbbing with the kind of pain that would have Doc in a panic.

  If he ever saw Doc again.

  If he ever saw anyone again.

  He couldn't think in the dark. He couldn't breathe in it, either. That was the only sound left, the dim, faraway rasp of air flooding his lungs and rushing out, and it was probably his imagination that it felt thinner every time his lungs expanded.

  "It's all right, mi hijo. We're going to get out of here."

  No, no they weren't. But she sounded so confident every time she said it, because Adriana Rios had grown up as the daughter of the prophet, Sector One's adored, benevolent princess, and she refused to believe in a world where love didn't conquer all.

  "Here." Something brushed the backs of his fingers, a phantom touch that crawled over his skin. "Squeeze my hand. Can you do that for Mommy?"

  His hand would be larger than hers now. God, it almost had been then. He hadn't been thirteen years old in decades, but he'd never forget the shame of clutching at her hand like a little boy when he was old enough to be a man. Maybe if he'd been a better one, she would have walked out of that cramped cellar with him.

  But he could feel her now. Hear her. Maybe that meant his time had run out. The first explosion must have been a misfire, but the next ones wouldn't be. There'd be no time to dig Mad out, and Bren or Jas or someone would do their fucking duty and drag Dallas to safety before it blew. The end was rushing toward Mad, and his mother had come to take him home.

  The next rough voice dispelled that perversely comforting thought. "You treat him like a child, Adriana."

  "I don't want you," Mad whispered, and he didn't care that he was talking to empty air. Sound fille
d the silence, whether it was the rasp of his own voice or the murmuring of ghosts.

  But not this ghost. Not him.

  Rubble crunched under boots, and Mad felt hot breath on his face. "Live or die," his grandfather whispered. "It isn't in human hands. Your fate is God's to decide."

  God hadn't thrown Mad and his mother into a dark room. God hadn't held a gun to Mad's head, grinding it so hard against his temple he still had the scar, swearing to Adriana that he'd kill her son if she didn't convince him to slice off her finger.

  Her fate had rested in the prophet's hands. In human hands.

  Mad's fate rested in human hands, too--but not in his grandfather's. Not this time.

  Rolling over meant a moment of dizziness, but Mad forced himself to his knees, and then his feet. Panic made his heart pound. Pain made his head swim. The bomb had to blow, any minute now, any second--

  The blueprints Noah had flashed at him floated through his head. They'd considered coming in through the tunnels, at first, before discarding the plan as too complicated. But they were there, a way out, if he could just move his feet--

  --if Dallas remembered the tunnels--

  --if someone got there in time to open the doors--

  "I'm not a Rios," he told the ghosts, ignoring the insanity of talking to them at all. The first step nearly sent him sprawling, but he found the wall and oriented himself, struggling to remember the path he had to take. Away from the explosion, away from the wreckage.

  Toward his brothers.

  He wasn't a Rios. Wasn't even a Maddox, though that was the name he'd taken as his own. He took step after staggering step because he knew Bren wouldn't have dragged Dallas away. Dallas wouldn't have let him.

  Mad had faith. The door would open.

  "You can do this." His mother's voice--calm, level. No hint of the terror she'd tried so damn hard to hide from her little boy.

  The door would open.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, only to realize it was too sticky, too warm. Blood, and he could taste it on his lips when he wet them. Every step hurt. It would be easier to lie down and close his eyes.