The Ten Thousand

by Doug Felton

  “Raisa!”

  She stopped short of the edge and looked at Josh, who stood over the unconscious form of the man he’d been fighting.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “They killed Alexander,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Zeke killed Alexander. He’s the one you want.”

  Raisa held the man over her head for another moment, wrestling with the anger that told her to pitch him over the edge.

  “Remember who you are,” Josh said.

  Raisa scoffed. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  “But I do. And that’s not you.”

  Josh’s words drained the strength from Raisa’s arms, and she dropped the man onto the roof. Looking over the edge of the building, she saw the man she’d pushed lying motionless with a growing pool of blood around his head. Not like superheroes in the movies, Raisa thought.

  They stood for a moment in the rain, neither one speaking. Raisa was glad for the rain because she didn’t want to face Josh. He’d seen the darkness in her soul, and she felt exposed.

  The man Josh had knocked out began to stir, and Josh hit him in the head, knocking him out again. “We need to go,” he said softly. “He won’t stay down for long.”

  The man stirred again, and Raisa nodded her agreement. Josh kicked him in the head before jumping from the building they were on to another and then another with Raisa close behind. She didn’t know where he was leading her, and she didn’t ask. As they raced through the watery night high above the streets of the city, she could only think about the man begging her not to throw him over and her all-consuming desire to do it. Tears mixed with raindrops as she wondered what her father would think of her now.

  Josh found a covered gazebo with outdoor furniture and potted plants on the roof of a building that must have been condominiums. No one was likely to venture out in the rain, so they took shelter there. The shelter did them little good against the cold as the temperatures dropped into the thirties.

  “Sit close,” Josh said as they tried to get comfortable leaning against the side of the gazebo. “We need to stay warm, and right now, we’ve only got each other.”

  Getting close to someone, even for warmth, was the last thing Raisa wanted to do, but she knew the dangers of hypothermia in cold, wet, and windy conditions, and she didn’t know how her augmented body would react to it. She angled her back toward Josh and pressed herself against his chest. His warmth mingled with hers. He said, “Do you mind?” as he put his arm around her waist. Raisa could tell he was careful how he touched her.

  “How long will it take them to get here?” she asked.

  “The Ten Thousand? I don’t know exactly. How do you think they’ll travel?”

  “I assumed they’d walk. How else can you move that many people without government transports, and I don’t see that happening. I think Zeke wants the drama of a horde of immortals walking into the city.”

  “That’s about 170 miles, but if they’re desperate and hyped-up on Zeke’s drug, they might try it,” Josh said. He was quiet for a few minutes and then added, “The average person walks about three miles an hour, but they aren’t average, so let’s say they double that—”

  Raisa could hear him doing the math under his breath. “Twenty-eight hours,” she said. “Sometime tomorrow night.”

  “That sounds right if they stick to that pace.”

  They sat, listening as the rain pounded the wooden roof above them and the concrete roof all around them. Despite everything, Raisa’s eyes slid closed, and the cold, wet world around her faded.

  She was almost gone when Josh said, “Other than drying out, do you have a plan for tomorrow?”

  “I do,” Raisa said without opening her eyes.

  “Care to share it?”

  “You’re getting a little pushy, Lieutenant. Don’t forget who’s the queen and who’s the soldier.” Raisa’s words slurred with the onset of sleep, and even as she said them, she realized how stupid they sounded given their arrangement at the moment.

  “Yes, ma’am,” was all Josh said, and it was the last thing Raisa heard before falling asleep.

  The sun felt good on Raisa’s skin as her mind breached the surface of consciousness. She was lying on her side, still under the gazebo, and her head was resting on something soft. As she sat up, she discovered it was a seat cushion from a chair on the roof. She pulled at a beach towel that now covered her. Her muscles ached from sleeping on the hard surface. As she stretched, they tingled with a milder form of the pins-and-needles sensation she’d experienced when she first took the serum. It was an effervescent feeling, almost electric, as if sleep hadn’t just refreshed her, but charged her muscles with an overabundance of energy.

  Josh wasn’t next to Raisa, so she scanned the roof and found him standing on the far side of the building, near the edge, looking out at the city. His silhouette against the morning light revealed a stillness that reminded Raisa of the first time she saw Josh in the dining room at Raven Rock, watching her. He was somebody who liked to watch and consider all sides before taking action or speaking out. The last couple of days of being on the run must have been hard on him, not giving him the time he needed to reflect. He looked like a statue, not moving a muscle. Raisa wondered how he stood so still if he had the same electricity running through his body that she did.

  “Hey,” she said, approaching him, “thanks for the towel. Where'd you find it?”

  “There’s a pool one floor down, and they don’t lock the door coming from the roof.” He tossed her something small in a wrapper. “Found these too. Not much of a breakfast, but it should hold us for now.”

  Raisa unwrapped the protein bar and devoured it.

  “I’ve been trying to reach Kaufman, but so far, I’ve got nothing. If the Ten Thousand keep up a good pace, they should get here sometime tonight.” Josh looked at Raisa with raised eyebrows as if to say, what is our plan?

  “Okay,” she said, “I should have talked to you about it last night. Here’s the deal; I want to know what makes Zeke Wellington tick. I want to know why he’s doing this, and I have an idea his father will be more than willing to tell us. We need to go see Micah Wellington.” Raisa looked down at her clothes that were rumpled from the rain and spattered with blood from the fight. “But, first, we need something to wear.”

  Getting new clothes was no small feat. Ernest had given them a modest amount of cash, but with every monitor in the city carrying the news feed with their pictures, shopping in public would be difficult for them, especially with the heavy presence of soldiers in Pittsburgh at the moment.

  “I’ve been watching people as they leave this morning,” Josh said. “There are a lot of young families living in this building. We can probably find something in one of these units.”

  “I’m not stealing someone’s clothes,” Raisa said.

  “Not all their clothes, an outfit. They’ve got to be doing well to live in a building like this, so they won’t even miss them.” When Raisa hesitated, Josh continued. “People are already looking for us. If we go out there looking like a couple from a shantytown, we’ll be even easier to spot.”

  Raisa reluctantly agreed. The advantage of living in a high-rise apartment is that you don’t have to lock your windows. This also gave Raisa and Josh their best idea for getting into one of them.

  They waited until the morning exodus of residents seemed to be over and climbed down the side of the building, looking for an easy entrance. They looked for apartments that appeared to be empty. Two-thirds of the units they checked were empty. Next, the window had to be unlocked. Of the empty apartments, they found four had open windows. The first three were dead-ends for clothes in the right size. Number four was the jackpot.

  “This guy has style,” Josh said as he riffled through his closet.

  Raisa held up a dress before putting it back and choosing a more practical outfit of pants and a blouse.

  Josh looked at her, holding the clothe
s, and then he looked at himself in the mirror. “We could use a shower, ma’am.”

  “I’m not showering in someone else’s home!” Raisa said.

  “There’s no point in us getting dressed up if we don’t clean up. Besides, these people would invite you to use their home if they knew who you were and what was going on.” Josh waited for Raisa to make a move. When she didn’t, he added, “We need to look as if we're not out of our minds when we talk to Micah Wellington, and not having matted hair is a big part of that.”

  “Fine, but we leave everything the way we found it.”

  Raisa made her way to the bathroom and got under the warm water of the shower, letting it wash away what was left of the blood and sweat. If only it could wash away memories and feelings too, but the image of Alexander’s broken body was fresh, and the need for revenge clung to her like a stench. She thought about Father Aasir and his faith and wondered if the waters of baptism could reach any deeper than the shower or rain and wash her soul. He had suffered violence in Africa and saw his family murdered, and yet he was at peace. Once again, Raisa envied what the old priest had that she didn’t.

  Raisa was self-conscious about the time, wanting to get out of the apartment as quickly as possible. She resisted the urge to stand and soak and ended the shower quickly, getting dressed in the clothes she’d picked out.

  Josh took her spot in the bathroom, and Raisa closed the bedroom door as she made her way to the living room. She sat in a kitchen chair, making sure she didn’t touch anything, and put her old clothes on the table. She’d have to dispose of them somewhere else.

  Raisa closed her eyes and prepared herself for the conversation with Micah Wellington. She wasn’t sure how they’d arrange for that conversation, but she was determined to talk to him, so she would make it happen. It was a gamble talking to the older Wellington; she didn’t know how he’d react, but Raisa had to get out ahead of Zeke. She needed to find his blind spot, and she didn’t know any other way to do it. He had a secret or a weakness, she was sure, and if he did, she’d use it against him.

  Raisa’s eyes popped open at the sound of three beeps at the front door, indicating that someone had unlocked it. She grabbed her clothes and rounded the corner from the kitchen to a small room set up as an office. The window shade was down, leaving the room in darkness. Raisa pressed herself into the shadow of a corner just inside the doorway as the front door opened, and a man entered the apartment.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  From her vantage point, Raisa could see most of the living room. She couldn’t see the bedroom door, but with it closed the man couldn’t hear the shower. Raisa fumbled with her clothes and realized that she didn’t have the dirty pair of socks she’d replaced with clean socks. Were they on the table, or had she dropped them between the kitchen and the office?

  The refrigerator door opened, and Raisa heard a bottle clinking before it closed again. She waited for the man to emerge from the kitchen with his beverage and take a seat in the living room. At least there she could monitor his movements. She nearly jumped when he called out from the kitchen.

  “Greta, are you home?”

  A second later, he stepped into Raisa’s view, holding the dirty socks in one hand and a drink in the other. He looked at the closed bedroom door and then around the apartment as if he sensed something was wrong. A sound from the bedroom drew his attention, and he put down his drink. He walked to a drawer and opened it, retrieving a small-caliber handgun, pointing it at the bedroom door.

  The man didn’t look as if he were military or law enforcement. He was probably in his late thirties and had up-and-coming executive written all over him. Raisa noticed that he wasn’t built to fight, but he handled the gun as if he had practiced with it. If Josh had been in the shower when the man spoke, he wouldn’t have heard him, and that meant he’d come strolling through the bedroom door any minute, right into the line of fire.

  Raisa’s senses were tingling on high alert as she watched the man’s eyes and strained to hear any sound of the door opening. The man was in front of her, facing twenty degrees to her left, so she couldn’t charge him without first being seen. The lights in the rest of the apartment cast a shadow in the office, but if she made a move, she’d give up her position. If it came to it, distracting him at a crucial moment might be her best option.

  Twenty seconds ticked by at the pace of a funeral dirge before the man’s muscles stiffened as Raisa heard the door slide open. She didn’t know what the man would do at the sight of Josh wearing his clothes, and she didn’t want to wait to find out. Without thinking, she threw her dirty laundry at the man, drawing his attention from Josh. He reacted by shifting his aim at Raisa and firing multiple rounds. She felt a tug on her shoulder and a burning sensation.

  The distraction was enough for Josh to take two quick steps and disarm him. Leading the stunned man to the couch, Josh said to Raisa, “Are you crazy? He could have killed you.”

  Raisa pulled the collar of her shirt aside and watched the wound begin to heal. It felt as if electrically-charged ants were running up and down her nerves. Before the wound closed, the bullet pushed out through the opening in her skin and fell to the floor.

  “Who are you people?” the man asked, looking at the bullet on the floor.

  “We’re not a threat,” Josh said, “but we can’t have you telling anybody about us.”

  The man didn’t look convinced. “Take whatever you want, but please don’t kill me. I have a family. I promise I won’t say a word.”

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Josh said, still holding the gun he’d taken. And then, pointing at Raisa, “You need to get a new shirt, and then we need to get out of here.”

  Raisa headed into the bedroom to replace the shirt with a bullet hole and blood on it. Picking through a drawer, she found a plain white tee, changed into it, and then leaned against the dresser, her eyes closed and her head pounding. That man showing up at his apartment had complicated things. Someone must have heard the shot and would likely call the authorities. He would identify Raisa and Josh and the two suspects being hunted, which would only play into Zeke’s narrative that she and Josh were complicit in the queen’s abduction. Of all the dumb luck.

  Raisa grabbed a black leather jacket from the closet and headed back to the living room, where she found the man still sitting on the couch and Josh watching him from near the front door. He still had the gun in his hand, but he was careful not to point it at the man. It seemed Josh wanted to make good on his claim they were not a threat.

  Raisa stood next to Josh with her back to the man on the couch. “What are we going to do about him?” she asked in a low voice.

  Josh said, “Our best bet is to tie him up to keep him from calling law enforcement, and get out of here as fast as we can.” He angled himself more toward Raisa as he spoke. “With any luck, we will be long gone before—”

  A shot rang out, hitting the door frame, and then another hitting Josh in the side. Instinctively, Josh raised his weapon and fired back at the man who was now standing with a pistol pointed at them. Josh hit the man in the chest, and he went down, a red stain spreading across his shirt. A drawer in a stand next to the couch stood open.

  “How many guns did this man have?” A string of curses filled the air as Josh ran to the man and put a finger to his neck. “Dammit! We need to get out of here.” He ran to the bedroom and emerged a minute later wearing a fresh shirt.

  Raisa’s eyes fixed on a picture of the man with his wife and baby on a table by the door. The boy couldn’t have been over six months old. She drew in a deep breath to keep her emotions at bay, only partly succeeding. Zeke’s megalomaniacal quest and her need for revenge had led to this man’s death. Raisa wondered how many more innocent people might die before this was over.

  Next to the picture was a key fob that Josh grabbed. He put his hand on Raisa’s elbow and said, “We need to go. Now.”

  The hallway of the building was empty when they stepped
through the door. A sign directed them to the stairs, which they opted for in lieu of the elevator. As they neared the stairwell door, one of the apartment doors cracked open. A pair of eyes appeared in the crack before it closed.

  Then a voice from down the hallway called, “Hey!”

  Raisa looked over her shoulder to see a man standing next to the open door of another apartment looking at them.

  “Here,” Josh said, pushing the stairwell door open.

  The stairwell’s design provided an open shaft in the center to the ground floor, six floors below. Josh grabbed the railing and launched himself over, falling feet first. He landed in a crouch and then moved out of the way, making room for Raisa. The stairwell door opened behind her when she leaped, and she heard the man from the hallway calling for her to stop as she cleared the railing.

  On the ground floor, Josh and Raisa walked out into the lobby, keeping an even pace and their heads down. They exited the building and found themselves on a busy city street. A New World soldier stood at the intersection to their right, so they went left. Raisa’s heart was pounding, and adrenaline charged all of her senses. A hundred sets of eyes passing by made her feel naked as if each one of them knew who she was and what they had done.

  Josh pulled the key fob from his pocket and pushed the auto-retrieve button. The three minutes that it took for the car to arrive might as well have been an hour. When the white BMW pulled up to the curb, they got in, Josh taking the driver’s seat.

  “Where would you like to go?” the car asked.

  Josh disengaged the auto-driver and pulled away from the curb slowly enough to not draw attention.

  Raisa watched the apartment building shrink in the side mirror and thought of a mother and wife who would soon be told two strangers had gunned down her husband. She thought about losing her mother as a child and how that changed the course of her life. If her mother had survived the accident that took her life, she might not be queen, and the man up in that apartment might not have died.