“Who do you think man is seeing now?”
“You’re a doctor?”
“No. But I was battlefield medic and trauma specialist. Jamaican Defense Force, twelve years. Jus coz I dress like a Pirate o’ the Cribbeean don’ mean I is one. Don’ judge a book by the cover, pretty boy. You’ll miss the best stories that way.”
Rose covered Dave with a blanket and felt his forehead. “No fever as yet; jus’ taken a kicking and lost some blood. Let’s see how dis play out. Body bleeds. Body heals. We had internal bleedin’ for a lot longer than we’s had surgeons. Humans got along fine then; will now. We’ll check him out in a bit. If he deteriorate, then we think about what we might need to do, getting him into the Greenhouse, but I reckon dat’s not something you want to do right now. Am I right?”
“My wife and kids are in there. I want them out, but you’re right. I don’t want to go to the Greenhouse until I’ve got a plan.”
Rose took Nathan by the hand and led him from the kitchen. “Sleep first. Plan later. Not goin’ nowhere while boy is sick.”
Nathan awoke some hours later, stretched out on a deeply comfortable sofa in a room that looked like it had been stolen wholesale from a natural history museum.
Light was slanting in from a dusty window, running across a room that could have passed muster at a taxidermy college. There were mongooses threatened by cobras, foxes, and raccoons, an eagle rampant with a plastic trout in its claws, and a cloud of static humming birds attached to a bouquet of orchids, held in place by near invisible black wires. In the corner of the room, roaring, up on its hind legs and reaching almost to the ceiling, was a grizzly. Mouth open, claws raised, frozen in the moment before an attack.
Nathan couldn’t remember coming in here in the early hours. He did remember sitting with Rose in another room, and being given a drink that tasted of cloves, rum, and honey, and then—boom—waking up here. There was a blanket over him, and as he looked underneath it, he was relieved to see that he still had his clothes on.
He couldn’t tell if Rose was just being overly friendly, or if she did have romantic designs on him, and the fact that he’d kept his pants on was a good sign, especially since Rose had been plying him with drink.
Nathan got up and marveled at the room and its collection of animals from another time. Their eyes glassy; their feathers and fur on the cusp of reality and fantasy; their mouths filled with fake tongues, gums, and teeth.
“I keep dem to remind me what we lost if no other summer come.”
Rose had come into the room unnoticed. She was holding a tray with an omelet and coffee, the aroma of which suddenly had Nathan’s stomach churning with hunger.
As he tucked into the food and drank the coffee, he listened to Rose.
“No one needed the museum no more. Surviving don’t leave no room for beauty. So I took these from the museum to look after, jus’ in case we do need a place like that again. A place to take de kids on holidays. But also—I need they anger. I need they anger about what has been taken away from me by the Big Winter. I grew up in Jamaica—beautiful, beautiful island like a jewel in da sun. Full of life. Full of love. Everything trashed there by this. Everything. I not heard from my family or my friends. I need they anger to keep going. One day, I’ll go back. When spring come. But, until then, I’ll have me animals here. To remind me. Keep me angry.”
Nathan drained his coffee cup as Rose finished. “We’ve all lost too much,” he offered.
“Ain’t dat de troot, pretty boy? And Brant, he take de most.”
“You think he can ever be stopped?”
Rose’s deep brown eyes fixed him with their glittering beauty. “You gonna stop him, pretty boy?”
“I… don’t know. If I have to, maybe. Gotta deal with Danny first.”
“Dem two snakes of the same skin. Brant and Danny. Dey gonna need a big mongoose to bring they both down.”
Nathan nodded, and they sat in companionable silence for a while. Eventually, Rose took the tray and cup from Nathan’s lap, and put them on the floor. “Man, he feeling better. Bleedin’ stopped. And he conscious. Asking for you. Come.”
Nathan followed Rose from the silent menagerie back through the labyrinthine building to the kitchen. Dave was still on the table with his feet elevated, but the eye which wasn’t bruised closed was open, its pupil clear.
“Thanks for getting me here, Nate. Don’t think I would have made it without you.” Dave’s voice was thick and dry in his throat, but he was a whole lot better off than the last time Nathan had seen him. Dave’s hands had been re-bandaged, too, and taped up in a fashion that was far more professional than Nathan’s improvised work had been.
“Crazy talk. You’re strong as an ox, Dave. Strong as an ox. And anyway, Rose did all the hard work,” Nathan said, indicating the bandages.
“Maybe.” Dave smiled. “But I’m grateful anyway. I guess it makes us all square.”
Nathan smiled and held out his hand to shake Dave’s, but then realized that might not be the best of ideas under the circumstances.
Then, deep in the bowels of the house, Nathan heard a bell ring.
Rose said, “Front door,” and bustled off. Horace stood in the corner, still as big and as silent as the grizzly in Rose’s taxidermy lounge, and Dave drifted back off to a more peaceful sleep.
Nathan smiled companionably at Horace, but if the huge man was capable of facial expression, he wasn’t taking his collection out for a run today. He just crossed his arms and stared ahead as if he only operated under the direct command of Rose, and everyone else was pretty much an irrelevance.
This all left Nathan at a loose end, and so he sat down on a stool beneath a rail of hanging, dried herbs and tried to make sense of everything that had happened, and how he was going to fix it.
He had no idea what had happened to Freeson or Stryker. Whether Stryker ‘Bad Medicine’ Wilson could be trusted anyway had to now be a firm consideration at play in any plan he made. Perhaps he’d played along with Freeson and followed the truck to wherever its final destination had been. Maybe they’d done that and gone back to the Masonic as he’d originally suggested. He’d be willing to bet they hadn’t gone back to the tenement.
Nathan parked that train of thought for now, as thoughts of Cyndi, Tony, and Brandon came to the fore—if it was as he suspected, and Brant would rather Nathan be out of the way, how was Nathan going to get them out of the heavily guarded Greenhouse? Even if the keycards he’d found in the dead girl’s bag were entry coders for the Greenhouse, he was only one man, and he couldn’t just wander about in there asking where his wife had been imprisoned. He’d need specific information on their location, and a watertight plan to get them extracted. That was just not Nathan’s skillset. Nathan fixed autos. Now, he may have leaned a ton of stuff in the last few months since leaving Glens Falls, but a military assault on the Greenhouse, or even a clandestine secret-squirrel operation, was going to take a better head than his.
And then there were all of the others at the Masonic. How was he going to, on his own, get Donie, Lucy, and Syd out of there? All he had at his disposal were a couple of entry coders and some ammo.
It wasn’t exactly the winningest of inventories.
Nathan knew he had to do something positive to stop the overwhelming impossibility of the situation from taking him over completely and sending him into a downward spiral of a tailspin that would freeze him in Brant’s headlights, leaving him just waiting for the wheels of Danny’s truck to roll over him and squash him into the snow.
“I believe girl is one of yours.”
Rose had come back into the kitchen, and in the dim light from the lantern and the weak illumination from the window, it was difficult to see who had come into the room behind her.
When Syd finally stepped into the light, Nathan’s heart triple-somersaulted with a six-point-five difficulty landing.
Syd didn’t say anything, but her face was bruised—not as badly as Dave’s, but she’d been thro
ugh the mill, for sure. She saw the stricken boy, her face pretzelling at his condition on the table, and then ran across the room to encircle Nathan in the tightest embrace he’d ever known.
Nathan reciprocated and buried his head in the girl’s hair. She smelled of cold and fear.
“What happened?”
Syd looked up, her eyes welling, “Harmsworth and his men. Last night. They just started shooting people. Anyone who got in their way. Just shot them. In the head.”
Nathan’s heart ached. His worst fears coming true. I should have gone back!
“Then they got Lucy and Donie in a truck and drove them away.”
“My God. I can’t… Syd, how did you get away?”
“I just ran! I’m sorry. I should have stayed, defended Lucy and Donie, but I couldn’t… I was too scared. You said you might come here looking for the gang, so I came looking for Rose…”
Nathan pulled her in and she cried into his chest. After a minute or so, the sobbing subsided and Syd looked up again. She had more words to get out, but the crying had stopped her from forming the sentence. Now that she had the emotion under control, her eyes started to burn the tears away. There was anger, and there was hate in her voice, but also incredulity, as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying.
“And Stryker just stood by and let it happen.”
9
Rose cleaned up Syd and gave her some fresh clothes while she took the ones she’d been wearing to be washed. Horace disappeared into the house also, and Nathan, seething, sat with Dave while Syd went off to get changed. When she came back, she was in a black t-shirt and a pair of jeans that had to be rolled up at the ankles, because they were too long, and belted tight because they were probably two sizes too big. She’d also lost all the makeup from her eyes and her lipstick, and without her war paint, she looked more young and vulnerable than Nathan could remember. When she sat down next to him and said, “I wish you’d let me jump off the temple,” Nathan’s heart broke all over again. But he didn’t argue. He just wanted to listen.
“I don’t know what happened to Saber. She attacked the cop who was coming for me, and he went down and I ran. Made it through to the boiler room in the basement and got out through the cellar doors where the fuel oil used to be delivered. It was so dark down there, and I was in a blind panic, I tripped and fell. That’s how I got these.” Syd pointed to the bruises and grazes on the side of her face. It injected a small amount of relief into the situation, to find out that she hadn’t suffered at the hands of Harmsworth’s men.
“I managed to get around the side of the building and saw them taking Lucy and Donie. I didn’t have a gun or anything to defend them. I knew, if I showed them where I was, they’d take me, too. Stryker was there, just watching.”
“And Freeson?”
“Didn’t see him. Dunno if he was already tied up in the truck or what. Haven’t seen him since he left with you.”
Nathan was channeling Syd’s anger at Stryker. How could he have been so fooled by him? What had changed him over the years to present such a complete betrayal as this? Nathan couldn’t get his head around the concept at all. He couldn’t imagine the circumstances where he would act in the same way. It beggared belief.
“When they drove off, I got back into the building. Found they’d shot… no, they hadn’t just shot them; they’d executed a bunch of residents. Back of the head. Not a firefight—just a walk through the building killing anyone they found. It was the worst, Nathan. They showed no mercy. It makes no sense.”
“It’s a message,” Rose said.
“And we’re hearing it loud and clear,” Nathan replied.
“By why not kill dem other women? Why leave them alive? That is what I don’ see.”
Nathan rubbed his head, knuckling the skin next to the scar where a bullet from the gang searching for Syd had grazed his skull on the journey to Detroit. The last time that his friends had been taken; the last time the women had been taken for a specific reason.
“Rose, the gang… Danny’s gang don’t have an interest in keeping men alive.”
Syd’s head dropped.
“You mean…?” Rose’s breath whistled out of her mouth.
“They call themselves the Seven-Ones.” Syd said, her face grave, eyes hollow as a freshly dug burial. “Seven women to every one man. Building a new army of babies to spread their gang and their culture across the land. They don’t care who they kill. They want women to breed, and they don’t care how they do that.”
Even the stoic Horace looked uncomfortable by the time Syd had gone quiet.
“We’ve run into them before,” Nathan said quietly. “Their leader, Danny, has some weird hatred for Syd. I think he’s here by accident. Otherwise, he would have come for her straightaway. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know she’s here in Detroit now.”
“How?” Rose asked.
“Because he’d be tearing the whole city apart to find me, and he wouldn’t rest until he did,” Syd answered, but with enough horror in her voice to lower the temperature in the room ten degrees.
“Girl, wat did you do to this man?”
“I made sure he’d never be able to breed anyone again.”
Dave was getting stronger by the hour. Rose had been allowing him fluids, and he’d gotten more talkative as a result. After Syd’s revelation, Nathan had wanted to dig more and find out the details—however nausea-inducing they might be—but Syd had sunk back into her own internal doldrums, and Rose had taken her off to get some much needed sleep. Perhaps she was going to wake up in the taxidermy lounge, too, and hear the same story from Rose about what the animals reminded her of.
“That girl is in a heap of hurt,” Dave said, turning to face Nathan, who was still on the stool next to him.
“She is indeed. We’ve all been through the wrecker, but I can’t help thinking she’s had and seen the worst of it.”
“True dat.”
They let the silence swirl around them for a bit, and then Dave, finishing sucking on the straw he’d had dipped into a cup of water, offered, “So, I guess we need to get into the Greenhouse, right? I’m not leaving Donie there, and I know you’re not going to leave Cyndi and the boys there.”
The pragmatic nature of Dave’s statement struck Nathan as having been stripped of all emotion. Just a thing to be done, rather than a heart-healing necessity. Maybe that was what he needed—a clear, dispassionate plan. Logical and direct. All the emotion could be saved up for later.
“And how do you suppose we do that?”
“While you guys were growing your potatoes and tomatoes, Donie and I were out in the suburbs most days, rescuing tech, checking stuff out, finding what we could. You never know what might come in useful, do you?”
“I guess.”
“One of the places we got into was a library, and it was the main archive for the city. Big old basement full of cataloged paper—remember paper? Anyway, it was also the repository of the city’s municipal plans and blueprints.”
Nathan had begun to see where this was going. “Cut to the chase.”
“You don’t have a sense of the dramatic, do you?”
“I just want my wife and kids back.”
“Yeah, ten-four. Gotcha. So, we found the schematics of the Greenhouse. The full plans.”
Nathan was getting impatient. “Just tell me already.”
“There’s a tunnel system and underground railroad they built to heat the Greenhouse, and to move stuff around in a way that would cause the least amount of disruption on the streets above.”
“And you have these schematics?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Dave, if you weren’t in a bad way, I’d slap you myself.”
“Okay. I have them, but there’s slight problem.”
“You have them at the Masonic?”
Dave nodded. “If we’re going to use the tunnels as a way in and out of the Greenhouse, first we’re gonna have to go and get them.”
> “How did I know this wasn’t going to be easy?” Nathan breathed out.
“Nothing worth doing ever is,” Dave replied.
“They’ll get you away fast and you can go places that the cops won’t be able to follow in their cars.”
John Crown—a thickly set, grizzled fifty-five-year-old in a winter coat over a boiler suit—reached into the chest-high tank he was standing next to with a handheld net on a pole. After a few seconds, he came up with a salmon that was wriggling and gasping.
“The dogs love to pull. They’re bred for it. If you’re on that sled and you know what you’re doing, then the cops don’t stand a chance. Especially in the warrens. If you’re out in the open, things are more difficult, of course, but this team is better than any getaway vehicle you might use.”
John took the salmon by the tail, whacked its head against the side of the tank to stun it, and then threw it into the enclosure where his dogs waited hungrily. The salmon was soon just a memory.
“Now, I’m willing to trade you, but it’s got to be something I need.”
“What do you need?” Nathan was impressed with the setup that John had created from the Cotton Family Wolf Wilderness area of the deserted Detroit Zoo. The wolves were long gone, but in the barn-like enclosure where he bred and trained his dogs, he’d also set up four tanks for his salmon farm. Everything—pumps, heat, and lighting—was run from two wind turbines on the roof, and Nathan thought he recognized the inverter he’d traded for seed with Rose in Trash Town in the setup.
“What I need is gold. Only thing that means anything now. Good old gold. Food, I got; I trade and eat my salmon for that. The dog sleds, I use to carry freight around when people need stuff and can’t afford or find the gas to take it there by truck. Brant and his cronies keep most of that under lock and key, as I’m sure you know. So, gold. Gold is good.”
Nathan didn’t know how much of Lucy’s jewelry remained at the Masonic, and there was a good chance that cops, knowing Brant’s similar yearning for the stuff, might have taken it. But they’d find out what was left when they went there to retrieve the schematics.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 34