by Kyla Stone
“I know,” Logan said.
23
Maddox
Maddox staggered back to the street corner, to the man on the phone.
With shaking hands, he pulled out his Beretta and aimed it at the man’s chest. “Give me the phone.”
The man’s mouth dropped open.
“Now!” Maddox shouted.
Terrified, the man held out the phone. Maddox snatched it. “What’s the passcode?”
“14502.” The guy raised his hands, his eyes bulging with fear. His jiggly white belly sagged over his shorts. His armpits were as pale as his prodigious stomach. “Hey man, I thought we were cool. I gave you what you wanted.”
Maddox smiled, keeping the gun trained on the man’s chest. The guy’s fear energized him. He was the one in charge. He had complete control over this man’s future. Life or death, at the flip of a coin.
“Don’t shoot me,” the man begged as pathetic tears leaked down his fat cheeks.
Maddox watched him, but he wasn’t seeing the loser in front of him. He imagined Dakota on her knees, begging for her life, imagined finally enacting his revenge for all the pain and the suffering and the humiliation she’d caused him.
A blazing fury swept through him, a red mist of rage exploding behind his eyes.
“You don’t need to—”
Maddox squeezed the trigger. The gunshot rang in his ears. He watched with great satisfaction as the man’s eyes widened in surprise. Men were always surprised when they died, like it hadn’t happened to every human being throughout all of history.
The man sank to his knees, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. He collapsed to the sidewalk and didn’t move.
A curtain fluttered in the front window of the house on the corner, but no one came out.
“Thank you for the phone,” Maddox said to the body. “Blessings upon your soul.”
He straightened his shoulders, already feeling better. The anger and adrenaline burning through him provided the strength to stumble across the street to the school property. He checked the address embossed in a brass placard by the front of the school’s front doors.
He swiped the phone on and punched in the passcode. His hands were so sweaty he had to redo it three times. Two signal bars in the upper corner of the screen. Good.
He called the number he’d memorized by heart. Service is not available at this time, please try your call again… He dialed a second number. Same response. Service is not available…
He sank down against the stucco side of the school building, his butt on the grass. The grass was thick, stiff, and prickly. A red anthill grew against the wall a few feet away. He eyed it warily. He wasn’t sure if he had the strength to move, even if the ants started biting him.
Maddox decided to text. The phone’s former owner had said texts went through even when calls didn’t. It was all he had left. He texted both numbers. This is Maddox. Need an immediate evac. Address 1333 5th Court in Wynwood. A school. Plenty of space to land.
He didn’t know how long he waited. Maybe a minute, maybe thirty.
The phone vibrated in his hand. Do you have the packages?
He grimaced as he texted the response. A minute after he tapped “send,” the bars in the upper corner disappeared. No service.
Now, he waited again.
Dusk faded to night. Clouds covered the stars. The trill of cicadas filled the hot air.
He drifted in and out of consciousness. In his fever dreams, Dakota was still kneeling in front of him, her hands clasped in desperate pleading, almost in worshipful adoration.
And then she was laughing at him, mocking him, scornful of his cowardice, his failure, his weakness. His impotence.
He awoke to gunshots and screaming in the distance. He was too sick to even crawl around the corner. He remained where he was.
Sometime in the early morning, he opened his exhausted eyes to discover dawn pinking the sky over the palm trees.
The thump, thump, thump of a helicopter descended above him. The chopper dropped to the ground in the middle of the football field, the rotors surging, the palm fronds whipping, the wind slapping him in the face and stinging his eyes.
The chopper was white with blue lettering: Miami Sand and Sea Air Tours. His father’s men had come for him.
His father would be furious. But it didn’t matter.
All was not lost. He would still find Eden. He would still bring Dakota to justice. There’d be no mercy for her this time—of that, he was dead certain.
Maddox knew exactly where they were going.
24
Eden
Eden’s stomach was hot and queasy, her guts twisting like she’d swallowed rancid meat. She was shaky, her skin cold and clammy even as fever burned through her insides.
Her notepad lay beside her on the seat, but she didn’t feel like drawing. She didn’t feel like doing anything except curling into a ball and forgetting about the broken world, her sickness, Maddox—forgetting about everything.
She sat in the back seat of the truck cab behind Logan. Shay took the middle, and Dakota hunched in the far seat with her gun, keeping watch. Mr. Wilburn was still driving.
The Asian guy with the broken arm, Park, was in the back with the older Cuban man named Julio. Julio had offered to ride in the truck bed so Eden could have the air-conditioning inside the cab. He seemed nice.
Everyone seemed nice, but she was scared of Logan. He was intimidating—big and muscular, with a whole bunch of tattoos all over his arms. He never smiled or even looked at her.
Dakota seemed to like him, though. They talked a lot in low, rushed whispers.
But she didn’t want to think about Dakota.
With bleary eyes, she stared out the window at the scenery passing by. It was nothing like she’d ever seen before.
Most of the stores had been looted. Crushed cardboard boxes, bits of Styrofoam, and shreds of plastic wrapping were scattered along the streets and sidewalks, mingling with the glass shards glinting in the sun.
Plywood was nailed across building windows, as if everyone was bracing for a hurricane. Graffiti sprawled across the storefront walls. A few people were picking up the trash in front of their businesses. Others came out of grocery and convenience stores carrying the remnants of whatever they could find—Gatorade, candy bars, diapers, toilet paper.
In the neighborhoods they passed through, more people were outside. Some huddled in clumps, others pulled out their lawn chairs and just sat in their yards or carports, fanning themselves and drinking the last of their water or beer.
Everyone stared back at them, sweating, dull-eyed, shell-shocked.
There were no manicured lawns or fancy in-ground pools here. Weeds choked the cracked sidewalk. The dull, squat houses sagged, rusting chain-link fences surrounding tiny, scabby yards. A Rottweiler on a chain barked viciously, running back and forth in the groove his paws had worn into the dirt.
Logan and Dakota held their guns in clearly visible positions, so no one tried to approach the truck. A few other cars were driving around, but not many.
Heat shimmered off the asphalt. The sultry air was pungent with sweat, smoke, and the stink of rotting garbage inside empty, overheated houses and in overflowing bins at the curb. There was no one to pick up the trash.
The radio was on for a while, but it just repeated the same old information, providing evacuation routes and locations of emergency camps to receive food, water, and medical care.
The only new thing was a mandatory citywide curfew for all citizens, excluding emergency and law enforcement personnel, at seven p.m. sharp. Anyone out after dark was subject to arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.
Finally, Logan turned it off.
“You doing okay?” the nursing lady, Shay, asked her quietly.
Her whole body felt like it was burning up from the inside out. Prickly sweat gathered at her hairline. Her damp shirt clung to her skin. But she’d managed not to throw up into the small plastic tr
ash bin Dakota had swiped from the motel room. Yet.
Eden forced herself to nod.
She didn’t remember much of yesterday. When she thought about it, her stomach cramped with dread, terror, and confusion. Nothing made sense.
She’d been overjoyed to see her brother, but that joy had turned to brittle terror when he’d held a knife to her throat—and then horror when he’d killed that lady.
Just as quickly, horror transformed to grief. Her other brother, Jacob, was dead. Dakota had killed him.
That was crazy. Why would Dakota do something like that? But Dakota hadn’t denied it. Had Dakota really kidnapped Eden? Dakota hadn’t denied that either. If it was true, then Dakota had betrayed her, had betrayed her entire family.
A sudden anger surged up from somewhere deep inside her. She sucked in her breath, desperate to tamp it down. With the anger came the shame and that immediate, reflexive fear of those forbidden emotions—resentment, bitterness, hatred, rage.
You couldn’t get mad in the compound. You weren’t allowed to. Anger was a grave sin, a sign of the devil himself gaining a foothold in your soul. Her whole life, she was taught to be meek and mild and accepting, for everything came from the Lord or the Prophet—both good and bad was the Lord’s will.
It didn’t matter that it had been three years since the compound. Sometimes all the old thoughts and feelings came flooding back in a heartbeat.
Her mind swam, everything disoriented and muddled. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do or how she was supposed to feel. She couldn’t even begin to process it all—her whole world flipped upside down at the same time the real world was falling apart.
She just wanted everything to go back the way it was before. She missed her foster parents, Gabriella and Jorge Ross. They always knew how to make her feel better. They made her feel safe.
They’re never coming back. They’re as dead as Jacob.
She bit her bottom lip to keep from crying. When she was trapped in the bathroom in the dark for those two days, she thought everything would be okay once she was rescued.
But that wasn’t true.
She was scared and sick and surrounded by strangers. Dakota was the biggest stranger of all. Eden had so many questions, but she was too terrified of the answers to ask a single one.
A thought niggled at the back of her brain, dark and ugly. Something she couldn’t bear to think about. So she didn’t.
She leaned her head against the seat, fighting back a wave of sickness. Her stomach cramped. Her brain felt like it was boiling from the inside out.
“There’s something ahead,” Logan said tightly.
Everyone tensed.
The truck jolted onto the curb as Mr. Wilburn jerked the wheel to the right to miss a garbage truck stalled in the middle of the road.
“What the hell…” Dakota said.
“It looks like a checkpoint,” Mr. Wilburn said.
“It was a checkpoint,” Dakota said.
Mr. Wilburn stopped the truck in front of a long line of cars. Four police cars were parked across the road, six concrete barriers angled in front of them. Several large white Red Cross tents were clumped together in a parking lot just off the road. They appeared empty.
There were no people anywhere.
No people still alive, anyway.
“Bodies,” Dakota said quietly.
Little bits of metal glinted all over the road. From her time at the compound, plus the movies her foster parents let her watch, Eden knew what they were—shell casings.
The police cars were riddled with bullet holes. Some of the regular cars had bullet holes in them, too. Some of the cars had people inside them. Dead people. Blood stained the road like paint splotches.
Logan stuck his head out the window and studied the scene. “Looks like they tried to set up a checkpoint to control traffic and got overrun.”
“By who?” Mr. Wilburn asked. “Who would shoot at police officers?”
Mrs. Wilburn shot her husband an incredulous look. “Who else? Gangs.”
“The Blood Outlaws are trying to take over the city,” Dakota said.
“Why am I not surprised?” Mrs. Wilburn said. “They’ve been attempting that particular feat for a decade.”
“I only see four uniformed bodies,” Logan said. “They were understaffed. A bunch of gangbangers firing automatic weapons jumped them. It’s not hard to see how they got overwhelmed.”
“How far are we from the airport?” Dakota asked.
Shay looked down at the map in her hands. She traced her finger along one of the tiny lines. “Looks like about three miles still. We can backtrack and go around.”
“Let’s go,” Logan said.
Mrs. Wilburn gave a pained sigh.
Mr. Wilburn reversed the truck and eased backward, banging into the fenders of a few cars on the way. With each jolt and jerk, sickness clawed at Eden’s insides. Beads of sweat trickled down the sides of her face despite the air conditioning.
She closed her eyes. Lights danced behind her eyelids, everything lurching and sliding with vertigo. She tried not to see all those dead bodies in her mind’s eye, tried not to feel the razor edge of the knife against her neck.
And she tried not to imagine the radiation invading her internal organs, slowly poisoning her from the inside out.
It didn’t work.
25
Logan
Logan scanned the area warily, alternating between the road ahead and the side streets. They’d been forced off 28th Street when it turned into a parking lot. Now, they wove west along 36th Street.
This road wasn’t as congested. Dozens of vehicles still clogged the shoulder, but there was enough room to squeeze past. More people wandered around outside, too, which made Logan nervous.
Occasionally, they drove past bodies on the side of the road, their skin blistered and burnt, chunks of their hair missing, their eyes hollowed, glassy—dead. These people had fought as hard as they could to escape the hot zone, giving up everything they had, only to discover it wasn’t enough.
It didn’t matter how far or how fast they ran or where they went. The poison was already inside them—an invisible, insidious enemy silently eradicating cells and tissue, destroying the body from within.
Logan couldn’t help himself; he shuddered. Was this the fate that awaited them, too?
It was all anxiety and dread, conjecture and speculation—the fear of the unknown. What he wouldn’t give for a few shots of vodka to drown it all out. To get that fine buzz going, that soothing warmth that hushed all the dark voices, the vile whispers, the hideous images always slithering into his brain…
He shoved those thoughts out of his mind. He had to stay alert, had to focus on what was right in front of him.
To his right, a strip of palm trees separated the street from a small park and a block of apartment buildings. A bunch of people congregated beneath one of the picnic shelters, fanning themselves or smoking cigarettes.
Without A/C, life in South Florida was quickly becoming unbearable. It was probably close to a hundred and as humid as ever. How many people were suffering from heatstroke? The elderly would struggle. Some would probably die, if they hadn’t already.
A headache throbbed at his temple, joining the nausea roiling his gut. He was supposed to rest last night during Dakota’s watch; instead, he couldn’t sleep.
He’d tossed and turned on the hard floor, the lumpy pillow beneath his head as comfortable as a rock, until finally he’d given in with a muttered curse and stalked out to the balcony to confront her.
It hadn’t gone anything like he’d planned.
A part of him wished he could despise her, dismiss her, expel her from his mind and be done with it. She was nothing if not an infuriating headache.
But she’d sat there, refusing to justify herself, and she’d told him the truth. Not all of it, but enough.
Enough for his anger and frustration to dissipate and something else to take root.
And he knew what it was like to trust no one but himself. Wasn’t that how he’d lived the last four years? Completely alone. Isolated. And if he were honest with himself, incredibly lonely.
As much as he wanted to hate her, he couldn’t. He understood her.
He had his own past to answer for. His own darkness. His own demons. He couldn’t blame Dakota for hers.
Movement snagged Logan’s attention. Along the right side of the road, two teenagers pedaled by on bicycles, eyeballing the truck as they passed. The butt of a gun bulged from the back of the largest boy’s waistband.
Logan watched them until they turned into an empty parking lot and disappeared.
A few minutes later, a long line of cars appeared ahead of them. The line stretched on and on. Though drivers were at the wheel, none of the vehicles were moving.
“There must be fifty cars at least,” Shay said. “Maybe a hundred.”
“What are they doing?” Vanessa asked.
Carson pointed ahead. “Gas.”
He slowed as they approached a gas station on the corner. A young Cuban guy stood beside the road, sweating and holding a large handwritten sign scrawled in black marker: “Five-gallon limit. Thirty dollars a gallon. Cash only. No exceptions.”
“Thirty dollars a gallon?” Vanessa asked incredulously. “Are they out of their minds?”
“They’re charging what the market will bear,” Carson said. “From a business perspective, it’s smart.”
“It’s taking advantage of people in a crisis,” Shay said from the backseat. “It’s not right.”
“Why the five-gallon limit?” Vanessa asked.
“Because people will hog it all,” Dakota said. “If things stay bad, the government will probably close most of the gas stations to civilians and restrict the gas to emergency and government vehicles.”