Blackout (Book 2)

by Clarke, Alexandria

  “George!” he said, his eyes darting from the leader of the salvage group to me at their center. “What on earth? You should still be outside! Why do you have the girl with you?”

  George kicked me down and deposited me at Marco’s feet. “She followed us. Saw what we were doing.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I said to Marco, forcing my aching legs to stand. “You preach all this crap about how the Legacies are the chosen ones, and then you send your men out there to kill innocent people and steal their supplies. Tell me, Marco, what makes those people matter less than the ones you’ve collected here?”

  I didn’t bother to keep my voice level. It rose and wavered, drawing the sleeping Legacies from their rooms for the second time that night. My father emerged from his bedroom as if he had been sleeping there all this time.

  “What’s going on?” he said, stepping between me and Marco. “What have you done to my daughter?”

  “Nothing yet,” George said. “But she broke the rules. That means she has to be punished.”

  I sidestepped my father to confront Marco again. “I want an answer, Coats. Why save some and condemn others? What criteria do you judge your survivors on?”

  “You’re delusional,” Marco said calmly. “We are the only ones left. We are lucky to have—”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “I watched your men go out and kill someone over a few cans of food. Do the rest of the Legacies know how you’re feeding them?”

  From the expressions on the faces that lined the hallway, I assumed that the answer was no. Marco’s serene smile slipped.

  “Not every person is fit for membership with the Legacies,” he said. “They are chosen based on their ability to rebuild humanity.”

  “So you admit it then,” I challenged. “You’re the one choosing these people, not some bullshit version of fate or destiny. I bet you wished like hell that you hadn’t chosen me.”

  Marco’s eyes never left mine. “Gentlemen? Would you be so kind as to escort Miss Fitz to the main hall. I’m afraid George is right. She must accept the consequences of her actions. The Legacies do not tolerate disbelievers or insubordination.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and I drove my elbow up behind me, catching the other George under the chin. His teeth cracked together, and he dropped his gun to cradle his jaw. At the same time, my father aimed a blow to Jeff’s solar plexus. Jeff doubled over, and Dad relieved him of his weapon as well. We fired in unison as the other Legacies attempted to restrain us. I caught Marco in the foot and another bodyguard in the leg as I sprinted down the corridor.

  “Stop them!” Marco screamed, cradling his bleeding foot on the ground.

  The Legacies closed in, chasing after us in their pajamas. We raced for the exit door at the other end of the corridor.

  “What about the giant pit on the other side?” I yelled to Dad.

  “Get ready to jump!”

  He reached the exit first and swung the door open. I readied myself to leap off the edge, but it turned out that I didn’t need to. Someone had laid wooden planks across the gap in the ground, creating a safe bridge from one end to the other. I ran across it.

  “Dad, come on!”

  When my father was clear, I yanked the wooden planks out of place so that they fell into the pit below. The Legacies piled up at the door, trapped in the church by their own doing. We left them there to stare at our backs as we ran away.

  “This way,” I said, gesturing around the back end of the church. “We need to get back to the mountains.”

  “Well, that was a kick,” Dad huffed as we jogged through the alleys. I flipped on my stolen flashlight since we weren’t lucky enough to have night vision goggles. “Though I kind of wish you’d given me a heads up. I’m not exactly dressed for hiking.” He was wearing pajamas and boots, though he’d had the sense to steal a jacket from one of the Legacies on the way out.

  “What a waste of time,” I said. “That place was useless. I can’t believe we got stuck in there for an entire day.”

  “I can’t believe we made it out,” my father said. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think we were going to make that jump. It’s lucky someone laid those boards over that pit.”

  “Yeah, lucky,” I mused. “Either that, or someone else knew that we needed an alternate exit strategy.”

  “You think you made an ally in there?”

  I thought of Caroline, quiet but stalwart. “Maybe. This way.”

  While Dad could find his way through the woods in a heartbeat, he wasn’t the best at navigating the city. I led the way through the dark alleys and trash piles. Denver wasn’t improving. It was stuck in its mourning process. It had been a few months since the EMP had taken out the country’s entire electrical grid. I would have thought that recovery teams might have made it out to the major cities by now, but walking through Denver was like picking through a wasteland. It was less chaotic than it had been a few weeks ago. Either that, or we were close enough to the borders not to run into anyone too violent. Not many people had survived in the city. Those who had were smart enough to stay far away from others. We gave the few survivors that we collided with a wide berth, and they afforded us the same courtesy. Behind a dumpster, I found a stash of men’s clothes that were about Dad’s size. The pants were too long and dragged beneath the heels of Dad’s boots, but they were better than the flannel pajama bottoms that he had left the church with. As he dressed and put his new gun away, he let go of a gusty sigh.

  “I’m really going to miss that crossbow.”

  “Dad, it seems unhealthy to mourn a weapon,” I said, peeking around the next corner. The trees were visible from here. We were getting closer and closer to home. Funny that I considered a camp in the woods my safe space now. It was like going back in time.

  The space between the buildings gradually widened until there were no structures left between us and the wilderness. Once we reached the trees, we walked along the woods’ border to look for the last match. I also kept my eyes peeled for other hidden traps. We didn’t have the time to waste escaping it. It had snowed since the last time we were here, and the match had long since been covered up. Dad’s nervous tic—rubbing his fingers together as if there were something stuck to the tips of them—came back in full force.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know how much Sylvester means to you, but we need to get higher and make camp. We don’t know if the Legacies are following us or not.”

  “You’re right.” He nodded, hiding his face from me. My father rarely cried. When I was young, he told me that crying was a display of weakness. Even now, upset as he was over Sylvester’s continued absence, he didn’t allow his waiting tears to fall.

  As we headed for higher ground, uneasiness washed over me, an instinctual feeling that someone else’s eyes were trained on my back. I scanned the area around us, sweeping the beam of the flashlight back and forth through the trees. The woods were quiet. The animals were gone, having migrated south or hibernating. The moon was absent, and the barren branches of the trees reached out like the fingers of inhuman nightmares. Nothing moved at all, so I tried to convince myself that the feeling of being watched was all in my head.

  Our strength waned halfway to the ruins of Camp Haven. We cleared a spot of snow, started a fire, and hunkered down for the night. We found fresh water at a half-frozen river nearby, but we had no food and no blankets to keep ourselves warm, so we huddled together and kept close to the fire. My toes felt like icicles in my boots and I wished for the warmth of Dad’s stone house high above, but I eventually dozed off out of sheer exhaustion.

  A few hours later, I woke up to the sound of a loud splash in the distance. The river’s steady gurgle floated through the trees, but it was punctuated by faint cries of help. I shook my father awake.

  “What?” He shot up from his prone position and looked around with bleary, wild eyes. “What is it?”

  “Someone’s out the
re,” I whispered. “Near the river.”

  We listened for a moment. Another stressed whimper made its way into our campsite. Dad stood up, shook off the snow that had settled on his coat, and drew his gun. I followed suit, and we jogged silently through the trees toward the river, following the cries downstream.

  The water came into view, gray and icy as it rushed down the mountain. The current was strong enough to float large chucks of ice along like miniature icebergs. I swept the beam of the flashlight along the river, but the cries had stopped, and there were no signs of the person who had made them. Then, out of nowhere, a dark-haired boy broke through the surface of the water a mere five feet from where we stood on the bank. He drew in a desperate gasp of air before the current overtook him again.

  “It’s Sylvester!”

  We broke into a sprint, following Sylvester as the river swept him swiftly downstream. The current was so rough that he struggled to keep his head above the water. Occasionally, a block of ice slowed his descent, but we weren’t fast enough to pluck him from the river. Each time we got close, he disappeared, and we lost track of him again.

  “We need to get ahead of him,” I called to Dad, who ran alongside his surrogate son and shouted encouraging words. I looked downstream. Sylvester was rapidly approaching a drop in the river up ahead. It was a short fall, but the rocks in the water below would make for a rough landing. A massive tree had fallen over right before the river dropped off, its trunk propped over the water. “Stay with him!”

  “George, where are you going?”

  I sprinted along the bank as fast as I could, scrambling over large rocks and squeezing between the trees that lined the river. I ripped through the dead branches of a low bush, drew ahead of Sylvester, and put on a final burst of speed. When I reached the fallen tree, I pulled myself up by its roots to the makeshift bridge over the water. Then I flattened out on my stomach, the bark rough through my clothes, and dangled my hand over the river. Sylvester was heading right toward me at a breakneck pace.

  “Grab my hand!” I shouted.

  Sylvester reached out. For one heart-stopping second, I thought that the river would rush him right past me and over the rocks, but my adrenaline kicked in. I seized Sylvester’s wrist, and he took mine, locking our hands together as the current tried to drag him off. With all of my upper body strength, I hauled him out of the river and dragged him onto the log by the back of his sopping sweater. He trembled violently as I half-carried him off of the tree and laid him down on the bank.

  Dad caught up with us and knelt beside the teenager. “Sylvester!”

  The kid’s lips were blue, and his face was so drained of color that the veins beneath his eyes were visible. “D-D-Dad?”

  My stomach plummeted at the word. This kid had been calling my father his for the past several years. I wondered if he had had a more pleasant upbringing than my own.

  “You’re alive,” Dad gasped, catching the boy up in a hug. “Oh, thank God. I thought you were dead. I thought you didn’t make it out of Camp Haven.”

  Sylvester tried to reply, but his chattering teeth made it impossible for him to form full sentences. “S-s-still h-h-ere.”

  “We need to get him back to camp,” I said. “He’s freezing.”

  Dad picked Sylvester up from the ground and carried him through the woods in his arms. Sylvester’s long limbs, which he had not yet grown into, dangled from Dad’s grasp, as though he didn’t have the strength to control them. At the camp, I hurriedly stoked the fire to encourage a bigger flame. We got Sylvester out of his damp clothes, laid them out to dry, and dressed him in Dad’s spare pajamas from the church. Even so, he shivered so much that he looked like he was trying to vibrate into a different dimension.

  “His pulse is racing,” I muttered, pressing two fingers against the inside of his wrist. I picked up his hand. The tips of his fingers were turning blue. “Dad, he’s hypothermic. We have to find a way to warm him up and fast.”

  Dad held Sylvester closer, using his own body heat to warm his son, and stared up the incline of the mountain. “The house is too far away. We’ll never make it up there in time.”

  “The city’s closer,” I said. “I can run back in and find supplies.”

  “No.” Dad rocked Sylvester back and forth like an oversized child. “It’s too dangerous for you to go alone.”

  “I have to,” I said. “Do you want him to die?”

  “N-not d-d-dying,” Sylvester muttered.

  “I hate to break it to you, kid, but you will be if we don’t get your temperature up as quickly as possible,” I told him.

  “What makes you think you’ll be able to find anything useful in the city?” Dad challenged. “The place has been picked clean. You would have to raid someone else’s camp, and that’s asking for trouble. Even then, you’d have to find a camp to raid first.”

  “But we already know of one,” I reminded him. “The Legacies.”

  It seemed counterintuitive to return to the group of people that we had just spat in the face of in order to ask for help, but Sylvester’s condition left me with no other option. I couldn’t let the kid die. It would bury my father. As I traversed the city, following the same path in that we had taken out, I kept a lookout for anything I could make use of. Unfortunately, all I could find were a few pages of old newspaper, good for bunching up to use as personal insulation, but not the best for warding off hypothermia. The church loomed ahead. Candlelight glowed in one or two of the windows, but the rest of the building was dark. After the excitement of our escape, I hoped that Marco Coats and his minions had taken the rest of the night off.

  I circled the church to look for the best way in. The bell tower was off limits. There was no way I could take a shot at getting past Marco’s bedroom twice in one night. Ultimately, I decided on the door that we had used for our own hasty exit. The wooden planks that someone had so kindly dropped for our escape plan were still there, propped up against the edge of the pit. All I had to do was haul them out of the hole and position them across the top of it again. I tiptoed across the rickety boards and pressed my ear against the door. There were no sounds on the other side, so I cautiously entered the building.

  The hallway was deserted. Marco hadn’t bothered to station guards anywhere. Perhaps the bullet hole in his foot had distracted him from his leadership abilities. Either that, or he had lost all of the competent ones in the fight. Smears of blood stained the floors and walls. The majority of it had been mopped up, but the Legacies couldn’t entirely erase the losses they had suffered that night. Maybe it would make them think twice before killing other people for their own benefit. I doubted it.

  I crept down the hallway, keeping light on my toes, and knocked on a door that was a few rooms away from my temporary bedroom. A face peeked out through the window. Caroline’s eyes widened. She drew the door open, grabbed the front of my jacket, and yanked me inside.

  “What the hell are you doing back here?” she whispered. “Are you insane? If Marco finds out that you stuck around, he’ll kill you!”

  “I’m pretty sure Marco was a dentist in his former life, so I don’t think he has the stuff for murder.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Caroline said.

  “He’s got a bullet hole in his foot,” I reminded her. “He wouldn’t be able to catch me anyway. I need your help.”

  She let out a small laugh. “You need my help? No way. My reputation is already on the rocks here. If they figure out that I was the one who told you about the salvage group and the bell tower, I’m dead meat. Not happening.”

  “But it was you, wasn’t it?” I asked her. “You were the one who set the planks down over the pit outside the exit door. You knew that we would need another way to get out of the church.”

  Caroline paced back and forth, but the room was so small that she had to change direction after every three steps. “Fine. Yes, it was me.”

  “So you’ve already helped me once,” I said. “You’re not o
ne of them, Caroline. You’re not really a Legacy. You put someone else before yourself because you saw that they were in trouble and needed help. That’s an amazing quality to have, and it would be great if you could access that quality again.”

  “What do you need anyway?” she asked. “I thought you would be halfway up the mountains by now.”

  “We were,” I told her. “And then we found the person that we came down here to look for. The only problem is that he fell into a freezing cold river and now he’s dying of hypothermia. We need supplies. Clothes, food, warming blankets if you have them. Oh, and our weapons back. My dad loves that stupid crossbow.”

  Caroline stopped pacing to cross her arms and fix me with a steady stare, as though she was trying to figure out if helping me again would be worth the hassle.

  “Please, Caroline. The kid’s only sixteen. He doesn’t deserve to die out there in the cold.”

  She slid her feet into a pair of slippers and drew a coat on over her pajamas. “Fine. Follow me. And be quiet, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Thank you so much,” I whispered.

  We snuck out of the room and hurried up the hallway. Caroline’s slippers were silent against the stone floors, but the thump of my boots echoed if I moved too quickly. She shushed me multiple times, but we made it to the storage rooms near the community center. Caroline moved swiftly, searching through cardboard boxes full of spare clothes. She stuffed everything into an empty duffel bag.

  “We don’t have warming blankets,” she muttered, as she rolled up a wool comforter and added it to the duffel bag. “But we do have a ton of those disposable hand warmers. If you use enough of them, you should be able to get his body temperature back up.” She located the box of said warmers and dumped them into the duffel.

  “Did I mention how grateful I am to you right now?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Keep moving.”

  She led me to the kitchens next, where she plucked cans and boxes from the shelves. We couldn’t take too much. Otherwise, Marco and the others would notice that someone had stolen from them. After the kitchen, I followed Caroline to another room with a locked door. She knelt down and picked the lock with a hair pin from her pocket then twisted the handle free. It was the weapons room, stocked full of stolen guns and other explosives.