After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “Follow?” Freeson echoed. “Are you crazy? We’re the only two vehicles out there.”

  Nathan clasped Freeson’s stubbly cheeks and patted them, like he was explaining something obvious to Tony. “You’re in a Detroit PD Humvee. Drive like you’re on patrol and follow them from a distance. If you think they’ve made you, take off, and we’ll try and find them another way. Okay?”

  Freeson nodded and pushed Nathan’s hands away with the ghost of a grin. “You sure you want me to leave you?”

  “Yes. Keep an eye on Stryker, and don’t tell him anything about Dave—say we’re following some of them on foot, or anything. But don’t tell him anything other than that they came for their stuff and we want to know where they’re taking it. As far as Stry knows, we’re still following the plan.”

  Freeson nodded and shook Nathan’s hand. “I hope that boy’s okay.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to look myself in the mirror if he’s not,” Nathan said, and Freeson gave another grim nod of acknowledgement.

  They went out of the room together, moving down the stairs quietly and in silence, and then they split on the ground floor. Freeson went to the back of the building and Nathan to the front.

  Nathan hung back until he could no longer hear the engine of the Mack rumbling down the snowy, almost echoless streets. When the quiet descended again, he went through the door and out into the bitter night. Although the sleet had stopped and the sky was clear, the severe cold was turning the wet snow to lumpy sheets of ice, so Nathan had to be extra careful as he crossed from one sidewalk to the other. His heart was beating hard in his chest at what he feared he might find inside of the tenement now that Parka, Tasha, and the others had gone, but not taken Dave with them. Reaching the stairs, Nathan drew his colt from the shoulder holster beneath his anorak and took off the safety, and then he loaded the chamber. He clipped up the steps, which had been almost cleared down to the stone by the traffic of footfalls through them as the trailer had been filled.

  The paint-peeling green doors were already open when he walked into the entrance and across the checkerboard hall. He listened intently, looking up into the murk of the stairwell. He found it difficult to edit out his hammering heart thumping against his still painful ribs, but for all intents and purposes, the house was quiet.

  The room where he’d spoken to Tasha and where they’d found Frank’s bandages was empty. As were the other rooms along the hall. The room at the back of the corridor had once been a kitchen, but the floors and countertops were smeared with dirt and rat droppings. There was no sign of Dave, and thankfully there was no blood.

  Upstairs, then.

  There was no way of doing this silently. The stairs were old, and maybe even in their original pine form. They were gray and warped with age and overuse, with ghost markings where carpet rods might have once held something beautifully woven and tasteful in place, though they were now just spearheads of dirt. The wood itself was spongy and yielded beneath his weight. And, as it did so, it sent a sharp, crackling groan up through the stairwell.

  No point in trying to sneak up them, so Nathan took the steps two at a time and led with his pistol. On the second-floor landing, where the rooms were either doorless or unlocked, Nathan checked along them systematically. Toeing open what doors he could, turning doorknobs when he had to. Every room that he tried was empty, and eventually he reached the door of the secret store room. The door had been closed, but Nathan knew it couldn’t be locked. The frame was still splintered from where he’d kicked it in. The doorknob had also come loose at some point and rolled away down the landing to rest at the base of the kicked-out banister struts.

  Nathan again listened at the door, as he had done less than ten hours before. Silence.

  He held the gun up and licked his lips. Now or never. He pushed his shoulder against the door and it creaked open onto a horror.

  Dave was alive, but he’d been crucified to the floor of the store room. Nathan felt his knees turn to jelly as he saw the six-inch nails that protruded from the palms of Dave’s pale hands. A pool of fresh blood had settled around each of his wrists. Dave’s ankles were tied together, but his feet thankfully hadn’t suffered the same fate as his hands.

  Dave’s face showed that he’d taken a terrible beating, and although one of his eyes had been punched shut, the other was swiveling in the socket above his gaffer-taped mouth.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” was all Nathan could manage as he ran into the room to help his young friend. Dave’s eye locked onto Nathan’s and he could suddenly hear the boy screaming beneath the tape, even as he began lifting his head and shaking it.

  The claw hammer which had been used to crucify Dave scythed through the air, and it was only the rustle of his assailant’s coat that alerted Nathan that there was someone behind him. As the claw hammer came down, Nathan was already feinting back and to the right. This caused the end of the hammer to extend beyond his skull, and for the attacker’s hand to skim past his ear and then crack into the hard socket at the end of Nathan’s shoulder.

  The impact hurt like hell, but it didn’t kill him like it would have if the business end of the hammer had found its intended target. The attacker’s hand sprung open as his wrist was shocked by the sudden blow against Nathan’s bone and the hammer spun away and clattered into the corner.

  Nathan carried on pushing back along the attacker’s arm. Still holding the pistol, he grabbed at the wrist and yanked down with all his might, trying to snap the elbow by his ear over his shoulder. The assailant was wise to the street-fighting move and kicked at the back of Nathan’s leg, bending his knee and sending him crashing to the floorboards with a yelp, taking the pressure off the elbow joint.

  Nathan still had hold of the wrist he’d grabbed, and, dropping his pistol so that it clattered to the floor like the hammer he’d pulled forward, he bent at the waist. The attacker was lifted off their feet and rolled over Nathan’s head with a despairing gasp of surprise. Crashing face first into the planks, the attacker grunted as the air was forced out of their lungs.

  This was when Nathan saw that the attacker was a woman. She was thin, wiry, no older than Nathan, and had the look of intended murder hotly drawn on her features. As she rolled to a sitting position, Nathan realized with horror that the blonde murderess had come up holding his gun. She lifted it and aimed high at Nathan’s face. There was going to be no Kevlar protection this time.

  This time, it was goodnight and good luck.

  The gun fired, but the bullet blasted past Nathan and crashed high into the wall behind him. The woman’s aim had been knocked off course by Dave. He’d crashed his bound feet into the base of her spine just as she’d squeezed the trigger, and now she was sprawling forward. Nathan jumped up onto his feet, kicking the gun out of her hand, but she was committed to the charge she’d begun. Her savage momentum carried her through the door and out onto the landing. But where anyone would reasonably expect there to be a set of banisters, there was now empty space above the stairwell.

  The woman screamed as she fell.

  There was a crunch like a hundred bones snapping at once, a groan of escaping breath, and the clutter of a body, now a dead weight, toppling over.

  Nathan picked up the gun and went to make sure the woman was no longer a threat.

  She wasn’t.

  She’d fallen from the full height of the first-floor landing and drilled her head through the rotting wood below, and even if she’d survived that impact, then her unconscious body, falling over backwards, had crushed her throat and snapped her neck at the same time. Her body lay twisted like a treble clef, with a head at an angle that was completely inconsistent with maintaining life, let alone an airway. A drying froth of bloody spittle bubbled from her mouth and ran into her sightless eyes.

  8

  “He’s insane. Completely insane, and not just crazy insane, but that calm, got-it-all-worked-out insane, you know?”

  Nathan had found some bedsheets in a l
inen cupboard on the third floor of the tenement building and cut them into lengths to bandage Dave’s hands. It had taken precious minutes to get the nails out of Dave’s palms, but Nathan had managed it without resorting to using the hammer that had pushed them through the flesh in the first place.

  Once he’d been free, Nathan had taken Dave out of the building, past the dead woman buried in the broken stairs, and across the street to where he and Freeson had watched the Mack truck draw up and the stores be loaded into it.

  Nathan checked over the bandages as gently he could, and Dave clearly picked up the concern on his face. “It’s okay; they’re pretty numb,” the boy said with only the slightest of winces. His face was a mess of puffy bruises, and Nathan wiped dried blood away with water made from melted snow. Once he was cleaned up, he looked a lot better—apart from the plum-sized bruise his left eyelid had become and a missing bottom tooth.

  “He went absolutely crazy. Wouldn’t stop beating on me. But I didn’t crack, man. I didn’t crack at all. I know if I had, then everyone back at the Masonic would be dead.”

  Nathan quickly summarized what he thought he knew about Brant’s setup—how he was using the gang to terrorize the outer city dwellers in order to keep them in line and paying protection, and how his main focus had been on Cyndi and her skills, and how Brant would have to make sure Nathan’s death was a credible one if he was going to use Cyndi to full advantage.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Dave said in response.

  “Not as sorry as I am that I let you walk into that. I’m not putting anyone at risk ever again. No way.”

  “Nate. Don’t sweat it. I was the only one who could do it, and the plan worked. We found out who Tasha is working for and what’s going on. My eye and my hands will heal. We should be grateful for one thing, though.”

  Nathan was puzzled. “What?”

  “Danny—that’s his name, by the way—thinks people were crucified through their palms. He’s not the sharpest if he thinks that. The Romans did it through the wrists. Through the palms, and the body weight just rips you free.”

  “I have no idea how you can think of things like that now. It makes me sick just to think about what he did to you.”

  “If he’d killed me, you wouldn’t have come looking, and if I was obviously dead, you might not have come into the room. He only left me alive to have you or someone else in the room for the girl to brain with the hammer.”

  “I see what you mean by calm-insane.”

  “He’s the kind of kid who’d pull wings off a butterfly and go back for the legs after dinner.”

  A thought struck Nathan. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Tasha was the woman you met, yeah? She called him Danny a couple of times. Tasha and Danny. Made them sound like a bad country and western duo.”

  Nathan finished the bandaging, his thoughts elsewhere. “And what does Donie and Dave sound like?”

  Dave looked up and flashed a broad, thousand-watt smile. “Superspies, Nate. Superspies.”

  Freeson and Stryker didn’t come back in the Humvee, and thankfully, neither did Danny or his gang.

  With more sheets from the linen cupboard, Nathan made as comfortable a place as he could for Dave to rest and recuperate while he went back across the street to the tenement.

  If the woman had been left there for the express reason of causing as much damage to whoever came looking for Dave as possible, then there was a good chance she’d have been left with food and drink. Nathan’s instincts had been right, which was the first confidence booster he’d had for a while since nearly everything else in his world had gone south. Moving gingerly around the pools of Dave’s blood, Nathan found a full hold-all in the corner of the room. In it, there was candy, bread, cheese, and chocolate milk, which made his stomach rumble painfully. But he waited until he was back across the street with Dave to start on it.

  Dave was snoring on a makeshift futon as Nathan took everything out of the liberated bag and placed it in front of him; apart from the food and the unopened carton of UHT milk, there was a SIG-Sauer, three full magazines, and two boxes of one hundred rounds per carton.

  Along with all of this was a pair of binoculars; a compact, rubberized walkie-talkie that, when he tried it, seemed to be fully charged; and a small plastic wallet that had two plastic keycards in it. There was no text on either card, but they were brown and shiny on one side, and white with a black magnetic strip on the other. Nathan didn’t think they were for opening hotel doors, but he wondered what they could open—and the only thing that came to mind were any of the entrances to the Greenhouse.

  Surely, though, Nathan’s luck couldn’t have changed that much?

  “Carol, you there? Come back.”

  The voice from the walkie-talkie startled Nathan so much that he dropped the keycards.

  “Carol, you there? Come back?”

  There was a hiss of static as the voice waited. It was male, and it was used to not being kept waiting by the sound of it. And it was also the same voice Nathan had heard from the Parka who’d nailed Dave to the floor.

  “I want a report within the hour, Carol. If they’ve come back to find their little black Jesus, I want to know. Clear?”

  Hissssssssssss.

  The snake in the walkie-talkie slithered away to silence and Nathan felt a rush of vertigo burst through him again. If Danny didn’t hear back from the dead girl within the hour—and he wouldn’t, obviously—he was sure to send someone back here to see what was going down.

  That meant they had to get as far away from this street as they possibly could, and hopefully get to somewhere with some pain meds for the boy.

  It would be ninety minutes of hard walking for someone able-bodied to get back to the Masonic from where they were now, so they didn’t have many options. Especially as he didn’t know what Harmsworth and Brant had planned for him—if anything, other than a swift end that could be passed off as gang-related.

  But Trash Town was just twenty minutes away. Looking back on his meeting with Rose, Nathan felt she had seemed genuinely uncomfortable with the idea that Nathan was going up against Tasha and Danny. Perhaps she wasn’t in cahoots with him, after all. Perhaps she was just like she’d told Nathan he oughtta be… terrified.

  And maybe she’d take pity on Dave, seeing as he’d been busted under her roof. Who knew?

  Nathan didn’t, but one thing was sure. They couldn’t wait where they were.

  Dave did his best, but the beating and the blood loss had taken a terrible toll on his ability to draw on reserves of stamina. By the time they reached the alley that led to Rose’s kitchen, Dave was only semiconscious and Nathan was all but carrying him.

  The snow had thankfully laid off, but the air had been sucking the life from even Nathan’s bones and he could only too easily see that it was sucking the life out of Dave, too.

  But even as they reached the door, as the first fingers of dawn sent long shadows down the thin cut between the two blocks ahead of them, Nathan hesitated. If he’d miscalculated again, then they were toast. Pure and simple.

  It was only the finality of Dave slumping to his knees in the slush of ice and snow as consciousness left him that made Nathan knock on the wooden door.

  After what seemed like an age, Rose opened the door herself, pulling a shawl around her thin shoulders as she did. She took one step out, felt Dave’s forehead as Nathan did his best to hold the boy upright, and then hissed back into the fragrant kitchen for Horace to join them. Rose looked up at Nathan.

  “Stryker Wilson wid you?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “Dat good. Dat boy be bad medicine.”

  Horace squeezed his bulk out of the door and stooped to pick Dave up with just one enormous hand. He rolled the boy into the crook of his arm and went back through the doorway sideways, as if he was carrying a sack of flour.

  Rose took one more look up and down the alley, and then led Nathan inside.

  Rose needed little ti
me to get Dave stripped and laid out on the table in the middle of the kitchen. He was delirious, in and out of consciousness. She moved her quick hands up and down his body, checking his wounds and unwrapping the bandages Nathan had wrapped around the boy’s palms, tutting as she inspected the stigmata there. She felt around Dave’s belly and up to his chest, and paused just below his ribcage. There, she pressed in with her fingers. Dave’s face winced.

  “What is it?” Nathan asked, pacing like an expectant father as he stepped into the pool of light thrown off by the lantern hanging from the ceiling. Rose took his hand and placed it below Dave’s ribcage.

  “Look. Feel.”

  The skin was discolored, and tight to the touch, as if something underneath was burgeoning, pushing up. “I can feel the tightness and see the bruise. What’s happening?”

  “Man bleedin’ inside. Been kicked or punched hard in the gut. Split something. Blood vessel, maybe.”

  Rose’s words hit Nathan like the proverbial freight train. “Internal bleeding? That’s… that’s…”

  Rose smiled and reached up to gently cup Nathan’s cheek as if she was comforting a child. “Is not TV, pretty boy. Not everyone bleedin’ inside dies. Every time you get a bruise, that’s internal bleedin’, no?”

  “I’ve never thought of it like that.”

  “No one does—everyone jus’ tink about they see on the TV. Has he bled from the mouth? From the backside?”

  “No. Not as far as I know.”

  “Dat’s good. Man not split his gut. Might just be a blood vessel.”

  “But doesn’t he need a doctor?”

  Rose laughed as she reached to a shelf behind her and took down a pile of old, dusty books. Without bidding, Horace lifted Dave’s feet and Rose slid the books underneath them before, more gently than Nathan would have considered possible, Horace put Dave’s feet down so that they were elevated nearly twelve inches.