“Not safe,” Packard says.
“It’s not like we can check into a motel,” Jordan says, pulling bags out of a hole in the wall. “And we’re not leaving the city. Leaving our people behind.”
“There’s one place he won’t look,” I say. “Otto said so. One place”—I use quote fingers here—“he’d only go into feet first.”
Shelby widens her eyes. “Yes of course! Are you not hungry for kebabs?”
Packard isn’t amused. “No kebabs. We’re splitting up. It’s too dangerous to be with me.”
“You don’t have to split up if you go to Mongolian Delites,” I say. “It’s the perfect place. You can go there and be invisible.”
Packard stares hard into the distance. “We’re splitting up. It’s me they’re hunting.”
“Packard, it’s not like it was. The force fields are gone. It can’t trap you. It’s nothing but a restaurant.”
“Nothing but a restaurant?” His gaze is diamond-like. “I spent eight long years there. Eight dark years. You don’t know what one minute in that place will do to me. It was more than my prison. It was…” he looks around, as if he can’t locate the fitting term. “I’m not made of steel and circuit boards, Justine. To say it’s nothing but a restaurant, that’s like saying, ‘this operation is nothing but a lobotomy,’ or that death is nothing but the end of life. There are some places a man won’t go. Otto is right. I can’t go back there. God forbid even feet first…”
“Pashu!” Shelby plows into us with violent force as something crashes loudly into the wall behind us.
“Whoa!” I fall on my ass and Packard stumbles, then the three of us crouch behind the cement girder. Jordan shimmies over and crowds in next to us.
Pashu. ‘Heads up’ in Shelby’s native tongue?
“It looked reddish. Like a brick,” Packard says.
Another projectile smashes onto a concrete support behind us. Smashes, as in breaks apart. “If it’s a brick,” I say, “It’s being hurled with a hell of a lot of force.”
“Telekinetic attack. We are doomed now,” Shelby says.
“Is there a way out?” I ask. “That hole up there you guys came out of—where does it lead?”
“Nowhere. There’s no back door,” Packard says. “The good thing about this place is that it’s a hill against a wall. And it’s surrounded by slime. Easily defended—you have to pick around that ridge to get here, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth for most predators. The bad thing is that it’s a hill against a wall. And our weapons are up there.” He looks up at the hole.
“You must not,” Shelby says.
Packard springs up and leaps to the hole.
I gasp.
Shelby grumbles.
Packard leaps back down with a duffel bag and dives onto the ground as a brick curves in, but it looks like it catches him in the arm. He scootches in and throws down the bag.
“You hit?”
He touches his bicep. “Superficial.”
Jordan and Shelby pull some of those Scorpion guns out of the bag.
I take out my small revolver, and click off the safety, eyeing the blood spreading across Packard’s shoulder.
“We’ll handle it later,” he says to me.
“Or when you pass out from blood loss,” I say, “whichever comes first.”
Shelby peeks up over our barrier, then ducks back as another brick whizzes overhead. We scramble apart as it curls back around and smashes into our barrier, right about where my head was. “He is in crevice by red barrels,” Shelby whispers. “Peeped his head out.” She turns to me, gestures, “Perhaps, five or seven lengths of car. Down there.”
“He pokes his head out because he has to see to send his bricks this way,” Packard says.
“Let’s be ready this time.” Jordan peeks out and rests her gun over the barrier. Packard, Shelby, and I do the same.
I see a movement by the red barrels—a head peeking out. Loud blasts, like cannons, ring out in my ears, and just as I squeeze my trigger, my gun jerks right out of my hand. I look up and see all our guns arcing into the air above. Our telekinetic attacker took our guns. Packard pulls me down.
“I think he broke my finger,” Jordan gasps.
A splashing sound over the ringing in my ears. It’s our guns, dropping into the slime lake.
“Very bad,” Shelby whispers. “This is very bad.”
“Don’t you have more?” I ask.
“Elsewhere.” Jordan pulls a piece of corrugated metal over us.
“This will not protect us,” Shelby says.
“It’ll do more than your pathetic predictions of gloom,” Jordan snaps.
Packard helps position it. It’s like we’re in a lean-to now. “Just one telekinetic. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t imagine Otto sending a lone telekinetic.”
I say, “Maybe this is just another Tanglelands character.” Another brick comes in. We all brace as it smashes our flimsy shield into us.
“Ow,” Jordan says.
Packard’s sleeve is drenched with blood. “Now you’re going to let me look at it,” I say.
“You are no nurse,” Shelby says.
“But I’m in nursing school.” I help Packard off with his jacket and pull the sleeve of his shirt gently over his shoulder. Jordan tips the metal sheeting slightly forward so I can get more light. Packard’s skin glows pale in the gloom, broken violently by an ugly, bloody gash. I try to keep my touch clinical, but it hurts me that he’s hurt, and I don’t know how much I can do for him without supplies. His eyes lock on mine. “You’re a damned fine nurse,” he says to me.
Just like him to know what to say to jog me into nurse mode. “We’ll see about that.” I ponder a moment, then pull off my own coat and rip a strip from the lining. “I’m going to make a field dressing,” I say, winding it around his bicep.
Packard winces as I tighten the dressing. “It’s a good place to attack from. Close, well-defended…”
“Very powerful telekinetic,” Shelby says.
“The urge to kill tends to bring out people’s greatest strengths,” Jordan observes.
When I’m done, I decide the dressing is too tight, and I loosen it. Packard winces again. “Sorry,” I whisper.
He says, “I’ve seen lots of things down here, but I’ve never seen bricks. Bricks are not something you find in the Tanglelands.”
As if on cue, more bricks sail over us. Jordan tips the metal sheeting back to cover us and the bricks hit like a hellish blast of hailstones, smashing the sheet against our forearms and heads. Then the sheet itself flies upward. I grab at it too late. We watch it sail over and away, like a big, square Frisbee.
“Christ,” Packard whispers.
I stretch out my leg and pull a garbage can lid over with my foot. “Okay,” I say, gripping it hard. “I won’t let go. He’ll have to take me with it.”
Of course, I won’t be able to deflect multiple bricks. Shelby grabs a large rock and sets it in her lap.
“Where’s he getting the bricks?” Packard asks. “That’s what I don’t understand. He brought his own bricks?”
“Another copycat?” I venture. “The Belmont Butcher following Shelby, and now, a telekinetic slinging bricks?”
A man’s yell: “I don’t need to kill all of you. I just need Sterling Packard’s severed head.”
We all look at Packard, whose expression remains perfectly neutral. “My severed head,” Packard remarks, dryly. “Well, he could’ve just asked.”
“That’s not funny,” I say.
He peeks out over the barrier, then ducks as a brick sails overhead. We scramble to avoid it on its return.
“Packard!” I scold.
“This guy’s not a copycat,” Packard announces. “He needs his killing projectiles to be of brick. It’s a deep compulsion.”
“You got a read?” I ask.
“Yes,” Packard says. “Did any of you see him? The Brick Slinger? Back when he was caught? I know there was footage
.”
“Yes,” I say. “He’s a big guy with a brown beard. Paul-Bunyan type. That’s all I remember.”
“This guy would qualify,” Packard says.
“This guy has beard,” Shelby concurs.
“But Otto has the Brick Slinger sealed up in a soundproof toll booth on I-25.”
“A toll booth?” Shelby asks. “Does he not make trouble?”
“Apparently not.” I keep a frantic eye on the air overhead as I explain how Otto prefers his prisoners to be productive, if possible. Especially now that so many workers have left the city. “The Brick Slinger can’t communicate with the drivers, since the force field is soundproof, but they feel watched by him, which keeps the drivers honest. At the same time, the Brick Slinger is watched by the cars around him every hour, so if he escaped, or decided to strip his clothes off and make a spectacle of himself, there’d be consequences.”
“But is he still there?” Packard asks.
“Once they’re in, you know they don’t get out,” I say. “Unless Otto experienced some kind of breakdown. Which I’d know about.”
Another brick flies overhead. We scramble apart as it curves and smashes into the space where Jordan was. My blood races. They’re coming so fast, it’s pure luck one of us hasn’t gotten seriously hurt.
“What I saw in this guy…the compulsion,” Packard says. “He’s not the type to be a copycat. The bricks are likely from a specific source, or at least they resemble bricks from a specific source, one that is significant to him. This man’s all about the bricks.” He stares into the distance, thinking. “Either we have two sociopathic telekinetics who have deep, highly personal compulsions to kill with bricks, both appearing in this city in the same year, or, more likely, the Brick Slinger got out of that toll booth.”
“Meanwhile, let’s make a plan,” Jordan says.
“He will never let us get close enough to zing or zap him,” Shelby says.
“I’ve got nothing,” I whisper, cold with fear. I reach out to touch Packard and he takes my hand in his. We’re cornered by a powerful killer, and we have no weapons. I have the awful thought that most deaths in real life probably are just like this. Nonheroic. Just people up against a wall.
“Okay,” I say, trying to think, “this hill we’re on has some old rusted barrels mixed in with the rocks. Maybe we can get those barrels and construct some sort of suit of armor. Then one of use will wear it and get to him that way.”
“How?” Shelby bites out. “Do you have suit of armor to help you retrieve these barrels so that you might create your suit of armor? Do you have blow torch to assemble your suit?”
“At least I’m trying to come up with something constructive,” I say. The pulse in my ears is deafening, or maybe it’s the roar of cars, or the ringing from the shots. “Maybe he’s running out of bricks,” I try.
Packard shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s capable of hitting us with other things, though he’ll want the killing blow to be bricks.” He seems distracted. Lost in thought. “Killing us will feel like a release to him, a discharge of duty. Bricks represent duty to him.”
“Lovely,” Jordan says.
The moments tick tensely on. Why isn’t anything happening? I’m thinking about my dad, suddenly, the dinner Otto and I are supposed to have with him tonight. Will I see my dad again? “Back where I grew up, my dad…” I start laughing—it’s the seriousness of our situation hitting me sideways. “He would have the perfect suit. He has this hazmat suit—the kind you’d use in biohazard scenarios, and he attached this level-four respirator and armored the whole thing up. The “hazmat exoskeleton,” we used to call it. Designed for a societal breakdown caused by a pandemic. You wear it to forage for food and stuff.”
Another brick flies in. I deflect it with my garbage lid, but the impact smashes my knuckle. “Crap!” I say.
Jordan takes the lid from me. Will we die here? Will Packard?
Packard looks thoughtful, and suddenly I just know he’s going to try something. He says, “Loose bricks would likely obsess and disturb him. Enough of them piled together would put him off his game, representing overwhelming duty. Dark demand. That’s how it is for him.”
Shelby snorts. “Why should we care, Packard, what kind of man he is?”
“What kind of man he is always matters.”
I think how much I don’t know about what kind of man Packard is. I know a lot, but not everything, because he seems endless to me, like it would take a lifetime to delve into him. That thing he used to say strikes me in a new way now: You love to remind me that I’m a villain, but when I do something villainous, you act outraged.
I took him as a villain who was always ready to use me, but deep down, I knew that wasn’t so. That’s why I was always outraged when he’d act the villain. Now I want him to act the villain—anything but the hero. I have a bad feeling.
Shelby says, “You feared he will wear this suit to wedding?”
“What?” I ask.
“Hazmat exoskeleton—you feared your father will wear it to wedding?”
“No, he would’ve worn the everyday hazmat suit with a level-one respirator. No need to insult the other guests.”
She and Jordan chuckle.
“We don’t have much time now.” Packard gazes upward, staring hard into the gloom, looking all rebel fighter with his beat-up clothes and black hat smushing down his curls. “In a minute, he’ll figure out he got all our weapons and come at us big,” he grumbles. “He’s a careful man, but not a patient man. We need to buy enough time to get to him. We need to cross that tundra.”
Shelby looks worried.
“You’ll be hit.” I say. “Don’t be a hero.” I can’t believe I’d say that, after months of complaining he’s only out for himself.
Packard wrestles off his jacket and shirt.
“What are you doing?”
He takes off his hat too, so that all he’s wearing is jeans and the arm bandage, dark green silk gone black from blood. There are smears of dirt over his broad chest, his lean stomach—he has the look of a tiger.
“Put these back on!” I shove his shirt and jacket at him.
He ignores me, leaning far over to the side, reaching down into the rocks. He comes back with a handful of slime, which he swipes across his chest, smearing it over the solid planes of his muscles.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Interfering with his concentration. Vulnerability and a lack of logic will disturb him. And the bricks exert a pull…” He turns to me, and there’s a forlorn light in his eyes. “I have to do this thing, Justine.”
“What?”
He pulls me to him, kisses me hard.
“Packard!” I push him away. The last time he kissed me like that he was sending me off. “No you don’t.”
“There’s no time.” He leaps over the concrete barrier and starts loping quickly toward the ridge. “Hold up!” he calls out. “I have to tell you something! Midcity is purchasing the Great Wall of China!”
What? Has he gone insane?
“Midcity is importing the wall, brick by brick, right now!” He strides, totally unprotected, toward where the Brick Slinger hides. “They’re bringing it here on a boat, in its raw brick form, to be deposited in the Maverick’s stadium!”
I gasp. He’s nearly there.
A brick flies out from behind the red barrel, but Packard ducks in time; the brick hadn’t picked up enough speed. It sails out and circles back, but Packard’s storming the crevice. There’s a scuffle and he yanks a burly, bearded figure from between the barrels. Shelby and Jordan and I scramble over our barrier and run toward them. The brick is coming back for Packard, but at the last second, he spins the man around, using him as a human shield. The brick stops, feet from them and starts back our way. Shit! I flop to the ground. Shelby and Jordan run back toward our protective little wall.
Packard hauls off and punches the man in the face, again and again. The man crumples to the ground.
There’s a splash as the brick drops into the slime lake.
Still clutching his shirt and jacket, I scrabble along the ridge to where Packard stands over the man.
The Brick Slinger is splayed out sideways in a way that would be terribly uncomfortable if he were awake. He has a thick beard and a gray camouflage suit. Urban warfare outfit, perfect for the Tanglelands. Probably why I didn’t see him when I passed. A wheelbarrow full of bricks is hidden behind another set of barrels.
Packard just stares down at the man, trancelike, muscles pumped, dirty chest rising and falling. I get the sense that he’s trying to recover.
I am too. I’m shaking, I realize. Packard’s the one who went at the man, but I feel as though it was my heart—exposed and vulnerable—my life that almost ended a minute ago.
“My severed head indeed.” Packard sweeps the area with a glance, not meeting any of our eyes, then he looks back down at the crumpled man. “Shelby, how much of that knockout stuff do we have back there?”
“Five pins.”
“He needs one. Now.”
Shelby heads off.
I glare at Packard, resisting the urge to shake him. “That was so risky. It was too goddamned risky.”
“Was it really?” Jordan prods the man with her toe. “A highcap needs to concentrate to do his deed. Packard read the man and saw how to break his concentration, just enough to get to him and punch the daylights out of him.” She beams at Packard. Jordan has dimples. I never noticed that before. “That was the weirdest thing you said. Just weird enough.”
Packard simply stares at the man.
Shelby’s back. She presses what looks like a modified staple gun to the man’s arm. Click. Then she stands. “Midcity is going to buy Great Wall of China?”
“It was just weird enough,” Jordan says again.
“The Great Wall of China has bricks of some sort, right?” Packard says casually. “Ten seconds of hesitation—that’s all I needed.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I say.
“Damn straight.” Jordan grabs Shelby. “Let’s get the rest of the stuff.” They march back to the little encampment.
Packard finally looks at me, and that’s when I see it—a kind of animal wildness, like the muscles around his eyes won’t untense, like the emotion is too high. And it’s here I know—he wasn’t at all sure it would work.
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