Town at the Edge of Darkness

by Brett Battles

  Glaring Boy looked like he wanted to bite her head off, so she turned her attention to the nervous Nelly.

  “Don’t you say a word,” Glaring Boy warned.

  Ananke twisted back around. “Did I give you permission to speak?”

  The smartass opened his mouth to respond, but was only able to get fu out before Ananke’s fist connected with his jaw, rocking his head sideways. He lolled against the pillow, groaning.

  “Well, that’s disappointing,” Ananke said. “I was really hoping that would have knocked you out.”

  She punched him again, this time achieving the desired result.

  She swiveled back to the other guy. “Are you going to be a problem, too?”

  “N-n-no. Not a problem.”

  “Good. How do we get past the gate?”

  He licked his lips and looked worried.

  “You said you weren’t going to be a problem.”

  “Th-there’s a remote. I-i-i-i-it opens the gate.”

  “And where will I find this remote?”

  “M-m-mounted under the dash. But…but…”

  “But what?”

  “It’s, um, fingerprint activated.”

  “Will your finger work?”

  “No, just…”

  “Justin’s?”

  He stared at her, surprised, then nodded.

  “So all I need is his finger.”

  The kid’s face went white. “Oh, God. You’re not going to cut it off, are you?”

  Cold water arced through the air and splashed into Keller’s face. He sputtered and gasped, his head swinging back and forth, until the water had all run off.

  He sat back and tried to move his arms, but discovered he’d been tied to a tree. His gaze fell on Ananke and Harris, standing in front of him.

  “Welcome back,” Ananke said.

  “What’s going on? Why am I tied up?”

  “Because I want to make sure you understand your situation before you agree to assist us.”

  “Fuck you, bitch. I’m not helping some nig…someone like you.”

  “Hey,” Harris said. “Be respectful, asshole.”

  He glared at her. “I’m not listening to a dyke cop, either.”

  Ananke could sense Harris tense, and wondered if she would have to restrain the woman again, but the cop held her ground. Ananke stepped over to Keller and leaned down until her face was less than a foot from his.

  “I don’t think you fully appreciate what’s going on here.”

  She could tell he was planning to spit the moment the thought entered his mind, so she grabbed his nose and pulled his face forward.

  “I know you think you’re tough, but you don’t know tough. You, Justin, are a delivery boy. You want to know what I do for a living? I’m an assassin. I kill people, a lot smarter and a lot tougher than you, all the time.”

  She pinched harder, then twisted until she felt the cartilage crack. She then palmed his face and shoved his head into the tree, not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to leave a mark.

  “I ask questions. You answer truthfully. Nod if you understand.”

  He took several rapid breaths, his chin resting against his chest.

  “Don’t make me ask again.”

  Without looking at her, he nodded.

  “Good boy. Where did you take the four people you picked up from Devon Rally’s barn? Be specific.”

  He looked like he was trying to come up with the courage not to answer, but it turned out he wasn’t completely stupid. “The lodge.”

  “The lodge. That’s the big building on the other side of the gate.”

  He nodded.

  “Where in the lodge?”

  “The holding room. In the basement.”

  She tapped him on the cheek. “Excellent, Justin. Keep it up. Are they all still alive?”

  “For the moment.”

  “But not for long?”

  He shook his head, not in disagreement, but confirmation.

  “What are they going to do to them?”

  “Put them in the…the trials.”

  Ananke glanced at Harris, but the cop clearly didn’t know what that meant, either. “And what are the trials?”

  “A-a-a competition.”

  She grabbed what she could of his short hair and yanked his face up. “Look at me.”

  Wincing, he pried his eyes open.

  “You do not want to frustrate me. And right now, dribbling out little pieces of information like you are, that’s exactly what you’re doing. What kind of competition?”

  “H-h-hunting. The people we took are the…the….”

  Ananke’s blood turned cold. “Spit it out.”

  “Prey.”

  Ananke didn’t even try to hide her disgust. Though she might not yet know the why, she now knew what was going on here.

  “What about Natasha Patterson?” Harris said. “Did you take her to the lodge, too?”

  Keller looked confused, then figured out what she meant. “I didn’t take her. Mr. Slater did.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  Harris could barely contain her anger. “Is she already dead?”

  “No. She goes at midnight with the others.”

  “You bastard!” Harris yelled.

  If Ananke hadn’t been between them, Harris would have ripped Keller apart. As it was, Ananke barely got her arms around the cop in time to keep her from clawing a chunk of his face off. She marched Harris away, the woman huffing in anger as she stared over Ananke’s shoulder at Keller.

  Ananke said, “Calm down and remember what you promised me.”

  “Did you hear what he said? They’re going to kill them!”

  “They’re planning to kill them. And if we’re going to stop them, we need his assistance. Can you control yourself, or do I need to leave you behind?”

  Harris’s nostrils flared a few more times before some of the tension in her face eased. “I’m okay.”

  “Promise me you’re not going to attack him, no matter what he says.”

  “I promise I won’t until you say I can.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Ananke slowly let her go, ready to grab Harris again if the woman made a wrong move. She didn’t.

  Ananke returned to Keller. “Officer Harris isn’t particularly happy with you. As long as you continue cooperating, she’s agreed not to kill you. If you don’t, I won’t stop her next time.”

  Keller’s gaze flicked to Harris and returned to Ananke. He nodded.

  “The trials start at midnight?”

  “The ones your friends will be in…I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I don’t work the trials. I’m transportation.”

  “So, you’re done for the day?”

  He glanced away before looking at her again. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  She grabbed his nose again, pressing on the fracture point. “You’re lying again.”

  He screamed. “Please! Let go! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

  “The truth,” she said, still hanging on.

  “We-we’re heading home, but we’re not done.”

  “Then you did lie.”

  “I lied. I’m sorry!”

  She let go. “I forgive you. Now tell me, what else do you have planned for tonight?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Good evening, Ananke,” the Administrator said. “Are you still making progress?”

  Ananke stood beside the open driver’s door of the van, looking across the dark campground. “You could say that.”

  “Have you located the Patterson woman?”

  “We have.”

  “That’s excellent news.”

  “Not quite. We know where she is. We don’t have her yet.”

  “Perhaps you should fill me in.”

  “I’d love to, but there’s not a lot of time now. I’m calling because I need your help with something.”

  “What can
I do?”

  “There’s a truck that will be arriving at Bradbury tonight between two and two-thirty a.m. It’ll be met south of town by at least one Scolareon security sedan and escorted to the Scolareon facility, where it will drop off its cargo. I need you to arrange for the shipment to be intercepted. But not by local cops. It’s got to be the FBI.”

  “You and your team were sent there to handle whatever was happening. Shouldn’t you be dealing with this?”

  “Trust me, it’s going to take a while to unravel everything here, and I don’t think you want us hanging around that long. So, the feds are going to have to be involved at some point. Might as well be now. Besides, we’re going to be busy elsewhere.”

  “It’s already eight o’clock. That kind of operation may prove difficult to arrange.”

  “You don’t need a whole squad of agents. A handful would be enough in a pinch. I’ll text you the coordinates where the truck will rendezvous with its escort.”

  “The FBI won’t act simply because they are asked to. They’ll need a reason.”

  “You can’t tell me you don’t have a few strings you could pull. But fine, tell them it’ll be the tip of the iceberg to one of the biggest cases they’ve had in years.”

  “That’s still not very inform—”

  “Human trafficking. Tell them it’s about that. Oh, and premeditated murder on what I believe is a massive scale.”

  The line went silent for a few seconds. “I’ll make sure they show up. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. When we were flying back after the last job, Ricky mentioned the bugs you implanted in him.”

  “Purely a precautionary—”

  “I’m not questioning why you did it. What I need is real-time access to his tracking information.”

  Slater looked up as his daughter and Devon Rally entered the prep room. He and one of his assistants had just finished moving all six prey into individual wheelchairs—the five they’d brought over from the barn and the unused alternate from that afternoon. The trophies were all unconscious and would remain so until Slater administered adrenaline injections prior to the start of the midnight trials.

  Rally sauntered over and walked slowly in front the chairs, as if he were a general inspecting his troops. “These the two you told me about?” He gestured at the duo who’d tried to cause problems at the barn. Like the other prey, they were held in place by restraints, their heads drooping forward.

  “That’s them.”

  Rally frowned at the woman. Hair cascaded down both sides of her downturned face, and her small frame made her look almost like a child in the chair. “Pretty scrawny. Do you really think she’ll last very long?”

  “She’ll do all right,” Slater said.

  “If you say so. Though I’m sure I could find more…interesting uses for her.”

  Slater swallowed his disgust. He didn’t share his cousin’s lust for women of inferior breeding. He thought it made Rally weak. But there was no sense in saying anything. It was an illness, and words were useless.

  Rally continued his inspection, stopping again in front of the last wheelchair. “This one’s not so bad, either. Not great, but good enough for a little spin.” He patted Natasha Patterson on the cheek as if she were a baby, and glanced back at Slater. “Did I tell you I gave her a shot once? Thought she’d be an easy pickup but she blew me off.” He squeezed her chin. “Nobody blows me off, bitch.”

  Slater said to his daughter, “Are we still on schedule?”

  “Ahead, actually.”

  Good. That meant the participants were already in their rooms, resting for the midnight session.

  Slater’s brother would be happy to hear that when he arrived. If they’d had to adjust the start by more than an hour, he’d have to miss it, as there wouldn’t be enough time for him to get back to Scolareon to oversee tonight’s delivery.

  Rally walked over to him. “A decent crop. The guy you caught today looks like he should provide a nice challenge.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Well, if I’m not needed for anything else, I think I’ll go take a little nap.”

  Dylan and Liesel met the van on the dirt road, half a mile before the turnoff for the lodge, at 8:44 p.m. After she outlined her plan, Ananke obtained the specialty items Liesel had in her backpack, and then Liesel and Dylan climbed into the back of the van with three of the restrained delivery boys.

  Ananke drove to the intersection with the lodge road and stopped. She turned to Keller. He was kneeling in the gap between the front seats, Harris’s gun jammed into his ribs.

  “You do anything to screw this up, you’re dead,” Ananke said. “Do I make myself clear?”

  Keller winced as Harris ground the muzzle into his side.

  “Yes, clear,” he said.

  Ananke continued to stare at him.

  “I won’t screw up. I promise,” he said.

  She took her foot off the brake and made the turn.

  When they reached the gate, Ananke said, “Okay, now.”

  Keller reached two fingers under the dash and touched the special screen on the remote. As he’d described, four floodlights switched on, turning the area surrounding the entrance into daylight. The gate began rolling to the side. Ananke drove through.

  When they were out of the glare of the floodlights and surrounded by trees again, Ananke stopped the van, turned back to Keller. “Tell me again. The road leads to…”

  “The east side of the lodge.”

  “And there are no guard posts or cameras between here and there?”

  “No.”

  “I’m starting not to believe you again.”

  “I-I-I—”

  “It’s okay,” Ananke said. “It’s not really that important.” She unzipped the palm-sized, leather case Liesel had given her, and withdrew a preloaded syringe. “Your usefulness has run its course.”

  She stuck the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger. Within seconds, Keller’s eyelids drooped and his body tilted forward, his head knocking against the dash as he lost consciousness.

  Ananke and Harris transferred Keller into the back, where Liesel and Dylan had already given similar injections to Keller’s associates. When the van started moving again, Liesel stood on the running board beside Ananke’s door, holding on through the open window, while Dylan did the same next to Harris. Ananke kept their speed slow as all four searched for somewhere they could stow the van.

  A creek running into the woods provided their best opportunity. Ananke carefully guided the van down the slope and into the hubcap-high water, then followed the stream a good hundred yards around a bend before killing the engine. In the daylight, the vehicle could probably be spotted through the trees, but at night, not a chance in hell.

  Ananke climbed out of the cab and joined Liesel, Dylan, and Harris on the other side. “Let’s go find our friends.”

  Yates was running late. He’d been planning on getting to the lodge by eight so he could help Slater with the final preparations, but it was nearly nine by the time he used his remote to open the gate to the lodge.

  There’d been a small snafu on that evening’s Scolareon security schedule. Flynn Hart, a newbie Yates had been forced to hire because the guy was some bigwig’s nephew or something, had been assigned to graveyard. But it was delivery night, and the last thing Yates wanted was some Goody Two-shoes accidentally seeing what he shouldn’t.

  Yates had come up with some mandatory training bullshit to explain the last-minute reshuffling of personnel, and then had to figure out what that training would be. That’s what he got for delegating. Of course, it didn’t help that it was a trials week, when his attention was always pulled in several directions.

  He drove onto his cousin’s property and down the entrance road at a pace faster than was safe. But he’d taken the road so many times that he knew every dip and hole and turn. When he was about halfway to the lodge, he caught a flash of red lights through the trees. A
pparently, another car was on the road ahead of him. He kept expecting to catch up to it, but he made it all the way to the lodge without seeing anything.

  It had probably been one of Slater’s men out on a 4x4, doing a security check.

  After parking his sedan, Yates walked over to the lodge and headed around back to use the kitchen entrance. When he rounded the corner, he saw the transport van parked by the opened doors to the basement lift. Light glowed from the shaft, and he could hear the hum of the electric motor. A few seconds later, the platform reached the top, carrying his brother and Bryan Evans and two warm bodies in wheelchairs.

  Apparently, Yates wasn’t as late as he thought.

  “Hey, let me give you a hand,” he called as he jogged over.

  Ananke and the others had barely set out when they heard a car drive past on the road, moving pretty fast given the conditions. It had come from the gate and was heading toward the lodge.

  For a moment, she wondered if its speed meant the van had been spotted driving off the road, but it seemed highly unlikely. They’d been walking by the time the sedan was anywhere nearby. The driver was probably one of the hotshot kids who worked for Slater, exercising his God-given teenage right to ignore common sense.

  Keeping the distance between themselves and the road at a hundred feet at least, they hiked on a northern heading that should take them straight to the lodge. Any cameras would likely be concentrated on the road rather than scattered in the wilderness. But just to be safe, Ananke tasked Dylan with making periodic binocular sweeps on thermal setting, and Liesel doing the same with the electronics detection app.

  It took eight minutes before they caught their first glimpse of the lodge. Three stories and as wide as a city block.

  Light oozed out from several windows on the first and second floors, while on the third, only two were lit. Those glowing on the second floor were grouped together near the middle, and on the first spread from end to end. Five chimneys rose from the roof. Though it was too dark to see any smoke, one of the fireplaces must have been in use because Ananke could smell the burning wood.

  A well-manicured lawn fronted the building, creating a wide gap between the lodge and the woods. Off to the right, where the entrance road let out, was a dirt parking area containing several cars.