“Makes sense,” Nathan agreed, “but we should find out one way or the other, and right now I can’t think of a way to get that done. I’m open to ideas.”
Dave was looking through the Humvee’s side window, back along the derelict streets. He paused, scratched at his head, and turned back to the others. “Okay, maybe we won’t be able to find Tasha easier ourselves, or whoever she’s working for, but maybe we can make them find us.”
Nathan felt skeptical to the max, but tried not to show it. “How? It’s not like we can run up a flag saying ‘Come and get us!’”
“Oh yes we can,” Dave replied.
“Shoot.”
“That storehouse we found in the tenement—we already broke in. And you and Stry had been there already with Tasha. Suspects numero uno in fact. How about we advertise that we’ve found it, and we’re in the process of taking all of it for ourselves; that’d flush them out.”
“Maybe,” Nathan considered, “but again, it’s not like we can just send out invitations. So, what’s the plan?”
“How about we break out some of the choice items from the storehouse? Some guns and some of the more rare foodstuffs…”
“Yes?”
“And I go try to trade them in Trash Town. You, Free, and Stry hole up at the house and wait to see who comes back to check on their stuff.”
“Could work,” Nathan said, and Freeson nodded.
“Could get us all killed,” Stryker commented, that being the elephant in the room.
Nathan thought for a moment. Stryker had a point. If a large group came back to check on the stores, then a firefight would follow, though that would be the last thing they wanted. Maybe drawing them out in the first instance would give them enough information to combat their adversary at a later date. Perhaps they could follow them back to wherever they were holed up. Nathan hit upon a compromise. “How about we don’t set up inside the tenement?”
“I like the sound of this better,” Stryker said firmly.
“How about we set up across the street, on the roof maybe. See who comes looking. I reckon they’ll come to move the stuff, and that’s going to need a good few bodies, and a truck. If that happens, we’ll be able to follow them at a distance, back to where they’re staying, and perhaps giving that information to Brant—an easy take or kill—will persuade him to send us more men with better firepower.”
“A lot of ifs and a lot of buts,” Freeson said at last, before the silence after Nathan’s plan had become fully unbearable. “I’d be happier if we took a bunch of stuff from there for ourselves first—transfer it to the Humvee before Dave goes to Trash Town.”
Nathan nodded his enthusiasm. “Good call.”
Freeson scratched at his chin. “It’s worth a shot.”
“Don’t say shot,” Stryker said.
Three hours later, Dave took a duffle of AR-15s, a box of cigarettes, and three catering-size tins of freeze-dried coffee to Trash Town. While he did that, the others transferred bags of pistols, ammo, tinned beef, and painkillers into the Humvee and parked it four blocks away in a deserted street under a tarp, leaving Stryker on guard in a deserted apartment. It was as Nathan and Freeson holed up in the top floor of the building across the street that they got the answer to who Tasha and Frank were working with.
The first inkling that anyone was coming came with the rumble of a diesel engine, the scraping crunch of snow chains on tires, and the yellow cone of approaching headlights along the road, lighting up the darkness and the dead faces of the Detroit tenement blocks.
With Freeson ducked down below the window, Nathan dared to squint through the drapes covering the broken glass. The street three floors down was booming from a rumbling engine. The truck was a Mack eighteen-wheeler with a covered trailer. Up in the cab was a driver whose face was obscured by a parka hood, and then Tasha, and finally, to Nathan’s dismay, Dave.
Dave’s face looked strained with fear, and although Nathan couldn’t be sure, it looked like the twenty-one-year-old’s hands were tied behind his back in the cab. Tasha had her pistol out and was steadying it on the dash of the Mack, pointing it directly at Dave’s chest. She was saying something to the boy and he was shaking his head vigorously.
Dave’s plan had been that, if challenged, he’d say he’d traded the gear he’d brought to Trash Town away from guys who’d been offering it from the back of a Ford F-350. He’d tell them the people he’d traded with had had so much gear that he’d gotten it for two boxes of North Face parkas he’d looted from a warehouse in the Detroit suburbs.
It looked like his story hadn’t been believed at all, though—not even part of it.
The airbrakes hissed and the Mack came to a stop outside the tenement. The cab door opened immediately and Parka jumped down, followed by Dave, who Nathan could now confirm really did have his hands tied behind his back.
Dave said something Nathan couldn’t hear and Parka smashed the boy across the chops with his pistol. Dave fell to his knees in the snow, blood spilling from his mouth. The thick snow deadened the echoes, but sent those pin-sharp and terrible sounds up to Nathan. Freeson, who had joined Nathan at the gap between the drapes, sucked in his breath and winced.
Parka screamed, “Don’t screw with me, boy! Don’t screw with me!”
And then, putting a bullet in the chamber of his pistol before grabbing Dave by the lapel, he put the barrel of the gun against Dave’s temple and squeezed the trigger.
7
Dave said, “Oh God, I love you, Donie,” and squeezed his eyes shut, expecting swift death, his words traveling clearly through the still night air.
The gun clicked empty.
It had been a bluff.
Nathan’s heart crawled out of his mouth, retreating back down his throat into his chest. “That’s how easy it would be to end you, boy. Now, tell me again, why are you lying?”
“I swear, I’m not. They were just some guys! Just some guys I met. They wanted to get rid of the stuff and I had some coats they wanted! Dammit, man, why would I lie? You were going to blow my frickin’ brains out!”
“That boy has some cojones,” Freeson whispered from where he crouched next to Nathan at the darkened window of the mildew-steeped room. When Dave had been forced to the ground by the savage blow, the mechanic had grabbed Nathan’s shoulder in a reflex action, digging his nails in. If Nathan hadn’t been trying so hard not to give their position away, he would have gasped in pain; as it was, he’d been too focused on the plight of the boy he’d let walk blithely into his own possible destruction.
Nathan wished he’d taken the goods from the secret storehouse to the Trash Town tent himself, but he, Stryker, and Freeson were known associates. Dave had never been there in the months they’d been in Detroit, preferring instead to go on looting missions out in the affluent suburbs for computer gear and tech. The houses there had been abandoned early on in the crisis, and although laptops and other portable tech had been taken, there were plenty of desktop PCs, Wi-Fi hubs, and personal media servers that had been left around as rich pickings for his and Donie’s plans for the network and satellite link-up at the Masonic. And now, because Nathan had let Dave put himself in harm’s way without thinking how this plan might go wrong, they were where they were.
The idea had been that Tasha and her gang would come back and check on or possibly move the goods in the storehouse, and that much had been correctly prophesied, but it hadn’t occurred to Nathan that Dave might be taken and assaulted in this way.
These people would play hard ball, though, and they should’ve thought of that. Nathan had already been warned of it.
“You should be terrified.”
Rose’s word echoed through his head like a hot accusation. Yes. Nathan should have been, and now he was.
Tasha went around to the back of the truck’s trailer and opened the doors; fifteen or so people got out, all of them heavily dressed against the cold, their breath following them along their line like the smokestack on a steam
train as they walked in a line up the tenement steps and up towards the building. One of those from the trailer lagged behind, walking with a pronounced limp, and Nathan recognized the coat he was wearing. It was Frank, the guy Stryker had shot in the leg. It had obviously only been a flesh wound, or he wouldn’t have been up and about now, and looking at the way he was walking, there was a good chance he’d received excellent medical attention at some point.
Frank was the last into the building, talking animatedly to Tasha as she went up the final steps.
Dave was still on his knees with Parka, who stood behind the boy, watching his people go into the building. When everyone had passed, Parka pulled Dave to his feet by the hood of his jacket and pushed him with savage fury towards the tenement. As he did so, a gust of wind caught in his hood and blew it away from his head just enough for Nathan to see his face.
It was the boy/man who had caused such a strong reaction in Syd when she’s seen him going into the Greenhouse. The guy with the AK-47, who Captain Harmsworth had let in with just a cursory word and a nod-through, right into the same Greenhouse where he’d just sent his wife and children. The same Harmsworth who was supposedly guarding the Masonic from attack by the same people who’d moments before been threatening to blow Dave’s brains out all over the snow.
The sick cold in Nathan’s guts rose up in a rush of bitter bile. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have let this happen? Why hadn’t he forced Syd to tell him everything she knew about the Parka, this boy/man?
The hand on his shoulder patted Nathan, catching his attention. “Nate, dude, it’s okay. We’ll get him out of there. They have no reason to harm him now. They believe him.”
But they both knew that might not be the case. Parka might only be going through this pretense because he was trying to do exactly what Nathan had been trying to do to him. Flush him out.
If Brant was at the center of this web, playing all ends towards the middle, he wouldn’t want to be seen getting his hands dirty by eliminating the threat that Nathan and the others presented. He’d already gotten what he wanted. Cyndi working for him in the Greenhouse. He only needed plausible deniability if Nathan’s piece was to be removed from the game. What better way to keep Cyndi on his side than to show unequivocal proof that her husband had been killed in a squalid gang fight?
Nathan had been played like a two-string violin and he knew it—he knew it right now. Hard and hot and sick in his heart.
Nathan turned from the window, placed his back against the wall, and sank down to rest his head on his knees. His breathing was rapid, his head a cloud of panic. What should he do? Stay here, help Dave, or drive as fast as he could to the Greenhouse and rescue Cyndi?
What should I do?
What should I do?
What. Should. I. Do?
The slap from Freeson came hard against Nathan’s cheek and it shocked him from the crazy panic loop in his head and back into the room. There was a line of dribble coming out of the side of his mouth and his cheeks were wet with tears.
“Nathan! Nathan!” Freeson’s harsh whisper cut through as the mechanic shook Nathan’s shoulders. “Snap out of it, man. Come on! You’re having a panic attack, and we need you in the room, man. Come on. Back in the room.”
Freeson stopped shaking Nathan and pulled his head up by the cheeks and looked directly into his eyes. “Breathe, fella… Breathe. Slowly. Big breath in. Long breath out. Slow it down. Come on, slow it down.”
Nathan tried to do as he’d been told, but it wasn’t easy.
Cyndi.
Tony.
Brandon.
“Breathe, fella. Come on. That’s it. Slower, slower.”
In a minute and a half, Nathan’s breathing was back to something approaching normal and he could think through the panic again.
He put his head back and thumped his skull against the wall, twice. The pain gave him something else to focus on, at least. Freeson let go of Nathan’s cheeks and rocked back on his haunches.
“Geez, fella. You good? You okay?”
Nathan wiped his wet cheeks and the drool from his mouth and shook his head. “No, I’m not. But I’ll be okay. Thanks. Where did you learn to do that?”
Freeson looked at the floor, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t tell you everything, dude. After Marie was killed… I had some problems. Problems up here.” Freeson tapped the side of his head. “Still do sometimes, but I had to speak to someone about the panic attacks I got. They told me what to do. Concentrate on the breathing. Focus. The slap… well, that was my own thing. But, yeah, man. Panic attack.”
Nathan couldn’t have felt more connected to Freeson than he did in that moment. Marie, Freeson’s wife, had been killed in a car wreck when Freeson had gone with her to upstate New York to visit her rich and snobbish sister and surgeon husband. The car had left the road and Freeson had gotten only a busted hip, but Marie had been killed outright in the seat next to him. Freeson hadn’t driven because he’d been angry, and ever after that, he’d had to live with knowing that if he hadn’t been so stubborn, then Marie would have lived and he would have died. Nathan had always felt he’d understood how Freeson could feel so guilty, but it wasn’t until right now that he could have said he’d walked in the thirty-six-year-old’s shoes. He’d sent his wife and kids into danger, and that revelation had sent him over the edge.
Nathan outlined the whole situation to Freeson. The mechanic’s expression upon seeing the agonizing dilemma perfectly matched what Nathan was feeling on the inside.
“Not a word to Stryker,” Nathan finished.
That widened Freeson’s eyes. “You guys have ancient history…”
“Don’t care. He put that aside to trick us into coming to Detroit. And something I’ve just remembered from when we were first jumped by Tasha and her crew tells me he might not be all that he seems. Still.”
“What?”
“He picked the route to and from Trash Town, so that it would go by that building and…”
The words stuck in Nathan’s throat, and he so wanted not to feel the rush of betrayal coursing through him now, but he did. He finished, “…Tasha knew his name. She used it.”
Freeson blew out his cheeks. “You think this whole thing was a setup from the start?”
“I don’t know, man; I just don’t know, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like it.”
Parka’s crew started the business of filling the trailer with the goods from the secret store. It was hard, backbreaking work since the crates and boxes were big and awkward. And there were a lot of them. Even Tasha was helping.
Nathan and Free hadn’t seen Dave for nearly an hour; apparently, he was still inside with Parka. Limping Frank was assisting as much as he could, but this mostly amounted to him calling up to the guys who were already in the trailer and telling them how to stack the crates.
The weather wasn’t assisting things, either. Sleety snow fell steadily from a dark, cloud-fat sky. There was no light left in the street other than the swinging flashlights of the crew bringing out the boxes.
Nathan had made the decision not to run off and extract Cyndi from the Greenhouse. Conversely, because of her usefulness to Brant, she was probably the safest of the lot of them at the moment. Also, Nathan didn’t want to risk showing Brant he’d discovered the game he was playing with the people of Detroit. Just now, he was more concerned with Syd, Lucy, and Donie back at the Masonic. For all he knew, they could have been taken hostage at the very moment Nathan and the others had driven off in the Humvee. Could they risk going back there now? There’d be too many questions from Harmsworth about Dave’s disappearance, and Nathan absolutely felt he couldn’t trust Stryker as far as he could throw him.
In the last hour, whenever he’d felt the constant knot of anxiety climbing up from his gut and affecting his breathing, he’d brought the sensation of a brewing panic attack down with the breathing exercises Freeson had taught him. Nathan didn’t think he’d be taking up yoga
or meditation any time soon, but he sure was able to feel much calmer when he needed to.
And meanwhile, Stryker was waiting two blocks away with the Humvee while he and Freeson watched the tenement. Although Nathan half-expected to find the Humvee gone or on fire when he was ready to make the trip back there, such was the amount Stryker’s stock had fallen in his eyes—coming down from an admittedly low base.
“They’re done,” Freeson whispered. He was still watching, crouched against the window ledge. Nathan had sat back down after he’d needed to check his breathing a couple of times, and was still down there now. At Freeson’s word, he got up and peered over the ledge.
Frank was closing up one door of the trailer, and had half-pulled the other, but he needed a hand from someone inside to get back inside himself. Once in the trailer, he pulled the door closed and Tasha appeared around the side of the trailer to slam home the bolts. Then, Tasha jogged to the front of the cab of the Mack and met Parka coming down the steps alone.
Alone.
No sign of Dave, and Parka was wiping a wet smear of what looked like blood down the front of his anorak.
“Where’s Dave?” Freeson asked with redundant and obvious excess.
“I need to get in there and see. Free, go to Stryker and you guys follow the truck; find out where it goes and then meet me back here. If I’m not here when you get back, I’ll have made my way back to the Masonic.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 32