“Guys, this isn’t my fight. I just came here to see if we could join up. My name is Nathan Tolley and I don’t want any trouble,” Nathan offered, still reaching for the leaden clouds, the cramp of the position starting to encroach around his shoulders. Lack of food and sleep had poured gritty fatigue into his frame, and the march from the first roadblock had sapped what energy he’d had.
Blaine eyed the walkie-talkie Baxter had passed to him and then pocketed it himself. “I’ll be the judge of who is or isn’t trouble, boy,” Blaine said, his voice thick with menace. “Okay, get them inside.”
Baxter and Reed pushed Mary and Nathan toward the inn while other men came from behind the cars, lifting Cal in order to take him down the slope to the entrance.
Cal moaned softly, applying his own pressure to the wound in his leg, but as he was manhandled into the building, thick rivulets of blood seeped between his fingers and left a drip trail behind him.
“He’s gonna bleed out if you don’t let us help him,” Mary said to Blaine as they entered the building.
Blaine looked at the trail of blood and Cal’s whitening face. “If I wanted him to die quick, I’d have shot him in the head.”
Mary didn’t respond. Nathan’s throat tightened and his guts twisted. Was nowhere a safe haven for him and his family? They’d come here with a sense that it might be somewhere better than Detroit. But, as ever, it seemed human nature in these desperate times was constantly defaulting to the violent rather than the cooperative. He had no idea what Blaine’s beef was with Cal, but this kind of factional conflict seemed like it was becoming the norm in Big Winter America. Was the gun the only regulator now? The gun and the brutality behind it?
Whatever notions Nathan had harbored over getting his family and friends into Casper had dissipated like smoke on the wind. The priority now was getting away from here, and getting away soon.
Inside the ‘Ev’ry-1-Welcome’ lobby, it was clear there had been a short and vicious battle which had resulted in a lot of bullet holes in walls, a smashed receptions desk, floes of smashed glass, Jackson Pollock-type sprays of blood, and a pile of corpses both male and female, which had been constructed into a stack at one end of the lobby.
Blaine pulled a cloth-covered lobby chair back onto its legs and sat down. Then Baxter, Reed, and the others—a motley crew of men with grizzled chins, winter coats, Stetsons, and baseball caps—arranged themselves around their big, blond-haired leader.
Cal was placed on the floor in front of Blaine like a tribute to a chief or a king. Cal’s eyes were flickering now, blood loss and shock taking over. If Blaine’s bullet hadn’t severed his femoral artery, then it had certainly nicked it. His pale hands had fallen from the ragged wound now, so blood was weeping and welling over the material of his jeans, drenching the denim a rich purple.
Blaine placed the Colt on his knee and then leaned back in the chair with his hands laced behind the back of his head like he was waiting for someone to bring him a coffee. Nathan eyed the routes to the exit and then the three corridors which radiated from the lobby into the deeper confines of the gloomy, unlit inn. Nathan knew he wouldn’t make it five paces before he was shot. Whatever happened now, he was going to have to ride this out and see what Blaine was planning to do with them.
But if it came to a choice between definite death and a sporting chance at suicide, Nathan knew which option he would take. The nearest corridor was fifteen feet away to his right. There were two of Blaine’s men who he would have to go through to get there and they both had shotguns at the ready.
The options for survival were short, but at least he knew that he would try, and he had the basis of a plan.
“We took over City Hall last night. There wasn’t what you might call much of a resistance from Stewart and the others.”
Mary’s bottom lip trembled. “You killed them?”
“What choice did I have, Mary? Come on, you know he wasn’t interested in sharing Casper with us.”
“You mean letting you run it.”
“Someone has to take charge. Stewart wasn’t the man for the job.”
“So, you shot him,” Mary spat out, a solitary tear working down her cheek.
“Of course we didn’t shoot him,” Blaine countered, as if his feeling were hurt, but Nathan could feel the follow-up coming hard on the keels of Blaine’s first sentence, before he ever heard the words. “No. We lynched him.”
Baxter sniggered, cricked his neck, and stuck out his tongue and mimed a rope behind his head.
Blaine grinned. “Which, Mary, because you’re such a fusspot and because I can’t trust you to be on our side under the… what shall we call them… the new, uh, prevailing conditions of Casper’s governance, is exactly what we’re going to do to you and your friend Nathan here.”
The wide grin came again, with the relaxed attitude in the chair and the voice which was soft, level, and calm. “Reed. Get the ropes.”
2
Blaine’s calm was shattered at the same time as his kneecap.
It wasn’t the sudden movement from the collapsed form of Cal on the floor in the widening pool of blood that caused everyone to look at Blaine. It wasn’t even the yell of desperate hatred from Cal as he kicked out with the solid boot heel of his uninjured leg, catching the side Blaine’s knee smartly and with maximum force, that made everyone turn. No, it was the sickening crack and crunch of Blaine’s leg collapsing like a clapperboard snapping closed in the first shot of a film that drew all eyes toward him, wide with horror.
The noise was sharp, final, and it stilled time in the lobby.
Nathan, who had already been checking which was the best route out of the area, was the first to react. He grabbed Mary’s arm and dragged her to their right as the first screaming howl from Blaine’s mouth erased the cracking bones from Nathan’s immediate memory and gave time permission to start up again.
Nathan barged into the nearest man and bowled him off his feet like the last pin in a bowling alley. The unbalanced man crashed into his nearest counterpart and they both went sprawling over the upended furniture, smacking into the beige, marble-tiled floor, their guns skittering away.
The guns, unfortunately, slipped so far that Nathan knew there was no time to bend and pick either of them up before the other men in the room tore their eyes from Blaine’s destroyed leg and raised their guns toward him. Instead, Nathan tightened his grip on Mary’s hand and dragged her into the gloom.
The corridor wasn’t wide, and had doors along either side, leading into what Nathan guessed were rooms or suites. Mary ran hard beside him, still holding on to his hand. Behind them, the bellows and shouts followed fast on their heels as Blaine’s men cocked their weapons and peppered fire down the corridor after the fleeing escapees.
The first bullets and sprays of pellets burst into the floor behind them, ricocheting upward, carving arcs along the walls or bursting the dead lights in the ceiling.
If Nathan and Mary had still been in that first corridor, they would have been zeroed in on where they ran, but before the men in the lobby had mustered the wherewithal to fire, Nathan, hearing the weapons being readied, had already kicked a door open on a room and dragged Mary inside.
He kicked the door closed behind them, too. “Chairs. Tables. Anything. Put it all in front of the doors!” he shouted at Mary.
The woman didn’t need to be told twice.
As Nathan upended the room’s metal bedframe and slammed it into place against the door, Mary began dragging a hefty, two-seat sofa across the carpeted floor and pushed it hard against the bed frame.
“That’s not gonna hold them for long,” she said, eyeing their makeshift barrier suspiciously.
“It doesn’t have to,” Nathan said as he lifted a leather-bound armchair above his head. “They only have to think we’re still in here.”
Nathan hefted the armchair, put his head down, and ran with it toward the window at the back of the hotel room. The rear window overlooked an enclosed cen
tral courtyard in the center of the complex.
The window burst open, glass dropping from the frame like melted ice. Nathan pulled the drape across the window sill so as not to catch his hands on the shards of broken glass which remained, and then he vaulted into the courtyard, landing at the bottom of the five-foot drop in a bed of soil that might have once held ornamental flowerbeds.
Mary dropped down beside him.
“What now?” she asked, looking up at the windows around the courtyard. Nathan looked, too—there didn’t yet seem to be anyone watching them.
“Follow me.”
Nathan grabbed the armchair, hefting it up over his head again and running now on pure desperation and bitter adrenaline. His heart was beating hard in his ears, his mouth tasting like metal and blood. He ran across the courtyard’s fifty or so feet and launched the armchair into another window. The glass split down the center with a crazy, star-crash pattern and the chair tumbled back to Nathan’s feet. He yanked the armchair up again and hurled it against the already weakened glass. The ice-dusted window broke open like a frosted merengue and the armchair disappeared into the dark.
Mary brushed past Nathan and made to start climbing.
“No!” Nathan hissed. “This way!” Nathan dragged her back across the courtyard to the window they’d just come from and prepared to pull himself up. From the room came sounds of banging and pushing as the men on the other side of the door tried to force it open.
“Are you mad?” Mary spat.
“Quite possibly,” Nathan said as he hauled himself up over the window ledge and back into the room. The door was starting to come open. There was no way anyone beyond it could see into the room yet, but it was only a matter of time before they did.
Nathan reached back out through the window, laying across the drapes and holding his hand out to Mary—whispering desperately, “Come on! We’ve got seconds!”
Mary’s face wasn’t sure, so her body made her mind up for her. She grasped Nathan’s hand and let him haul her back up into the hotel room.
Nathan didn’t wait for Mary to get her breath after all the exertion; he pulled her toward the room’s bathroom situated in the space immediately adjacent to the doorway, and just after their sofa and bed-constructed barrier. Once inside, Nathan closed the door quietly behind them with a soft click.
The bathroom had no light and no window. They were in complete darkness. Nathan felt for Mary’s face and put his fingers across her lips to remind her to keep quiet.
In the room beyond the bathroom door, the heaving and the crashing was starting to bear fruit. The tortured crunch of the bed frame, scoring a deep gouge into the wall as it was pushed back, cut across the air. There was a crash and a yell, and the door came free and crashed against the door behind which Nathan and Mary now cowered.
Nathan had made the calculation that their pursuers would clatter into the room without noticing the obscured bathroom door, and instead establish the smashed window and the connotations of a swift exit it implied—and once they spied the broken window across the courtyard, they would act accordingly.
It had been a huge gamble, but it paid off.
“They’ve gone through the window!”
“Reed! Get back to Blaine and tell him they’re in Block C across the quad!”
“Baxter! With me!”
There was a scrambling of feet over the window ledge and a curse or two as egress was made over the broken glass, accompanied by the sounds of footsteps running across the concrete beyond it toward the other smashed window.
Nathan counted to ten, then opened the door a crack. He sneaked a look through. The crack in the doorway brought thin gray afternoon light from the broken window into the bathroom.
The room was empty.
Indicating for Mary to follow him, Nathan came out of the bathroom, keeping his head low. He could hear the men across the courtyard scrambling up into the far room through the second window he’d broken.
Nathan moved gingerly to the doorway into the corridor and ventured one eye forward to look along it. It was lit only by light coming in from a frosted window at one end and the illumination bleeding up from the lobby. The guy who’d been charged with going back to Blaine, a thin, black-haired man with a padded yellow body-warmer over a denim jacket, was already jogging out of the corridor to report back to his boss.
As the four guys at the end of the corridor heard what Yellow had to report, they took the safeties off their rifles and shotguns and hared off down the middle corridor. Nathan assumed that the route they took would take the men all the way to Block C, where Nathan and Mary would absolutely not be found.
It gave them one hell of a slim chance to escape, but it was one he was willing to gamble upon.
Nathan’s scrambling brain tried to assess what forces might be ranged against him still in the lobby.
Two men had gone across the quad.
Yellow and four others had taken the corridor. Nathan racked his memory, trying to figure out how many people would be left in the entrance hall after all that. He’d been too interested in finding an escape route to worry about an accurate assessment of the forces. Now, he figured that on top of Blaine, there was just Cal—probably with a bullet in his head now—and two other men. Surely, they’d be dealing with Blaine right now, not expecting Nathan to show up exactly where they believed he wasn’t…
It was worth a shot.
“Wait here,” he whispered to the shock-eyed Mary, and with that, he set off down the corridor toward the lobby. His feet moved as quickly across the carpet as he dared without overtly announcing his presence.
The first things he heard were Blaine’s moans and cursing. His voice was a low rumble, and Nathan inwardly winced when he imagined what pain the man might be in. Cal’s kick had collapsed the leg like a house of cards. Apart from a few cracked ribs and a dislocated thumb playing football in college, Nathan had never experienced a fully dislocated fracture of a limb. The way Blaine’s moans and curses were ripping through the air, Nathan thought that he definitely didn’t want to. Especially in this world, where the majority of hospitals were closed, society had broken down, and doctors were rarer than a hen’s teeth.
Nathan reached the end of the corridor, leaning his back against the wall and weighing up what he firmly believed were his only two options. If he wanted to make it into and out of the lobby alive, he was either going to have to attack like a cornered cougar or walk in like he owned the place.
If he rushed in, he’d not have much time to assess the situation, but if he caused enough confusion by selecting the second, but much bolder, course of action, he just might pull this off.
“Try not to move, Blaine… Ralph’s getting splints.”
“Don’t touch my leg!”
“I’ve got to, man. It needs to be straight. Here, bite on this.”
“I’m not biting on anything! Leave my leg alone!”
Nathan listened to the conversation, thinking on what it told him. Ralph was gone. Gone where? Out to the roadblock. How long had he been gone? He could be back any second, but right now there were only two voices. Blaine and the guy offering him something to bite on for the pain.
You can do this.
You can do this.
Nathan took a breath so deep it almost popped open his jacket, and then he walked out into the lobby, unarmed and fully exposed.
Cal was on the floor looking like there was more blood outside his body than in it. His eyes were closed and there was no time to see if he was breathing. Blaine had been laid out on a three-seat sofa, and a short fat guy who looked like all the hair on his head had migrated to his chin was bent over the injured man. Short-Fat’s hand was on Blaine’s shoulder, and there was a matte black Beretta 1301 tactical pump-action shotgun laying by Short-Fat’s feet, the stock wallowing in the spreading pool of Cal’s lifeblood. Blaine’s Colt was on the seat where he’d been earlier, and of Ralph, there was no sign.
Short-Fat’s back was to Nathan
, and he was also obscuring Blaine’s line of sight to the corridor from which Nathan had emerged.
Nathan had already committed himself to his forward trajectory—if he stopped in his plan now, there would be more than enough time for Short-Fat to turn, see Nathan, and pick up the 1301.
In for a penny…
“Blaine, Baxter and Reed say they can’t find them in C Block, so they’re gonna sweep back to B,” Nathan said levelly and firmly. Short-Fat was trying to keep Blaine still. Blaine for his part was bucking with pain, and still not able to see beyond his subordinate. Nathan had guessed that he was in too much pain to differentiate voices at this point, and he was right.
“I don’t care! Just find them, you moron!” Blaine screamed hard enough to rattle the lobby windows, but it was enough. Nathan pocketed the Colt, lifted the 1301, and then began to turn to get out of the lobby before Short-Fat looked around or Blaine managed to find a sliver of focus through the shattering pain.
It would have all worked out fine, too, if the guy Nathan assumed was Ralph hadn’t come back into the lobby right then with two short planks of pine under one arm, holding a SIG Sauer in his other hand.
“Dammit! It’s him!” Ralph shouted as he fired.
Nathan was already diving to his left, and the 9mm bullet smashed into a picture frame already skewed awkwardly on the wall. Nathan hit the floor, crunching his shoulder hard into the marble, and this had the effect of jouncing the muzzle of the shotgun in his hands up—he pulled the trigger reactively.
Ralph’s face bloomed with blood and his head snapped back so hard that a crack not unlike the one that had accompanied the breaking of Blaine’s knee became the starting pistol shot marking the beginning of his slow pitch backward.
Short-Fat was reaching for the 1301 that was no longer there, Blaine screaming in a mixture of panic, rage, and agony.
Nathan leveled the 1301 on them both, fixing them with a look that he hoped would chill their hearts as he got first onto his knees and then to his feet. “Reach, boys. I don’t want to have to shoot you like Ralph now—and please, Blaine, do not under any circumstances shout again or I will, so help me god, end you here and now.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 52