He looked down at the half-finished cup of coffee beside him. His hands balled into fists. Then, in a quick series of events and without hesitation, he slammed his fists down on the table, finished the last of the coffee, and hit the Enter key.
Done.
Before Connor could decide how to respond, or if he even should, the mall was plunged into darkness. And for two long seconds, that darkness was accompanied by an equally unnerving silence. Shoppers had frozen where they were. The whiz and whir of so many machines had stopped. The escalators and elevators had ground to a halt.
Connor pulled out his phone and hit the flashlight app. He noticed other people, including Olin and Dylan, were doing the same.
The roar of excited conversation that had filled the mall just seconds before returned now as one of annoyance. “It’s 1977 all over again,” someone said, referring to a blackout that had darkened most of the city. Connor hoped he was wrong.
Dylan huffed. “That’s just great. The perfect end to a perfect evening.” She shined her light toward the boy she had come with. He was already on his feet, heading toward her, fighting against a sea of people who were all trying to get to the escalator.
Then Connor saw a man coming their way and moving faster than the rest. He was looking every which way but where he was going, so it was no surprise when he ran straight into Dylan’s friend, knocking him to the ground. He didn’t stop to help the boy up or even apologize. He just kept pushing people out of his way. But he didn’t go to the escalator, like everyone else. He went through a door that led to a stairwell.
A few shoppers saw where he had gone and followed, seizing on the opportunity to get out of the mall more quickly.
Dylan rolled her eyes. “Jerk.”
The boy got to his feet while shoppers continued on around him.
Somewhere outside—a boom. No louder than the kick of a bass drum within these walls, but Connor noticed. The boy did, too. He instinctively turned his head toward the sound.
“What was that?” Olin said.
“Hello?” Dylan held out her hands and gestured at nothing in particular. “Power generator, probably. I swear, sometimes I think everything in this city is falling apart.”
CHAPTER 40
Minutes earlier, Logan had been sitting at the table in the food court, watching the two boys as they got up and followed a redheaded girl toward the escalator. He slurped the last of the Coke out of the paper cup, put it back on the tray, and slid the tray to the other side of the table. He wondered what the boys wanted with her. Was she their sister? Had she snuck out of the house and their mother had sent them to find her? That seemed improbable.
Oh, to hell with it. What did he care? He just needed that damn hacker to do his job.
He watched as the boys caught up with the redhead, and then saw the three of them move together out of the flow of traffic. The boy she was with took a seat at a nearby table.
Logan imagined a conversation that fell in line with his theory that they were siblings.
Mom’s going to kill you.
Whatever.
You shouldn’t disrespect her like that.
Whatever.
You’re coming home with us.
Whatever.
Finally, the mall went dark. He immediately forgot about the strangers’ lives he had turned into his own personal soap opera. He unzipped the backpack by his feet, reached in, and felt around the device inside until he found a switch. He had practiced this move several times in his apartment, so even working in the dark, it took him only a couple of seconds.
Logan zipped the backpack up, placed it under the table, and pushed his chair in before walking away. He didn’t want anybody tripping over it and seeing the backpack. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what that bag was doing there.
He was more nervous than he’d expected to be as he headed to the stairwell. He worried about being spotted, remembered, identified later in a lineup. And even though he knew that was so unlikely as to border on absurd, he couldn’t help but look around while he walked. Was anybody staring at him funny? Did anybody have an inkling of what he was up to?
He slammed straight into the boy he had seen earlier, but he wasn’t about to stop. He went to the stairwell, pushed through the door.
Footsteps echoed down the stairwell behind him. Other people were coming. Although he had intended to sneak out this way alone, that was probably a good thing. He would be just one of many people exiting the mall this way. Harder to identify as anything more than a shopper.
Right when he reached the landing for the second floor, he heard a soft boom and knew exactly what it meant. Things were going according to plan.
When he got to the bottom of the stairwell, there were two doors. One led into the mall and one led to an open-air parking lot that extended off the garage. He expected this. He had scouted the mall a week ago, been down this stairwell. His Toyota Camry was parked in a handicap spot just beyond the door.
He went through the parking lot door, and then, once he was clear of the building, he turned around to watch. He saw some of the people who had entered the stairwell behind him follow him into the parking lot while others went through the door that led into the mall. He could only imagine that second group was trying to get their bearings now, looking for the way they had come in.
He glanced at his watch. It had been a minute and forty-two seconds, give or take.
The blast blew out the windows that ran along the food court and seemed to shake the whole building.
This couldn’t have gone any better.
CHAPTER 41
Connor watched the blast come toward him in slow motion. A churning mass of flames stretching out, consuming everything. Olin was already safely within the corridor that led to the bathrooms—or as safe as anybody on this floor could be, anyway. Dylan was not. She had started moving toward the boy she had come with. And the boy—oh, God. He had just gotten back to his feet, but there would be no time for him to get out of the way.
It wasn’t too late for Dylan, though. Connor could still help her. He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him just as a wall of flames and searing heat roared past them.
He heard the windows shatter, people screaming. A crash, like some part of the floor had given way.
Dylan was screaming, too. Demanding Connor let go, saying she needed to get to the boy—Tom was his name. But Connor could barely hear her. There was a ringing in his ears that drowned out almost everything else. He refused to let go. “Help me hold her!” he yelled at Olin, as he caught a glimpse of the devastation left by the blast. A glimpse of Tom. It was a sight he would never forget.
“Don’t look out there,” he told Dylan, trying to turn her away. “Keep her under control,” he told Olin, as they both fought to keep her from seeing what he had seen.
When she stopped struggling, stopped screaming, Connor asked if she and Olin could hear him. Olin made a face like he was trying to figure out what Connor was saying.
“We’re going to get out of here!” Connor shouted, loud enough to make sure he was heard. “But don’t look, Dylan! You got it? I don’t want you to see what I’ve just seen.”
Dylan nodded with her back to him. He would know soon enough she was doing her best to hold back tears. “What about Tom?”
“It’s bad, Dylan. I don’t think he’s able to walk. We’ll send help for him. Right now, we have to get out of here.”
Dylan nodded again, still with her back to him. She seemed to know it was a lie, because she did not ask again to talk to Tom, did not try to see him.
“What do we do?” Olin said. Something about it reminded Connor of when he and Olin were trapped in the laundry room of Dylan’s house. Perhaps it was just that Olin was again looking to him for a plan.
Connor steeled himself for what he was about to do, then poked his head out of the hallway, using the flashlight on his phone to assess the situation. The food court was filled with smoke and getting worse. He
couldn’t see much besides the fires that seemed to burn all around them and the massive hole in the floor where most of the tables had been. That was a blessing. He didn’t want to see any more of the bodies than he had already.
Then he remembered—“The stairwell.” It was close. They could get to it without . . . He refused to think about what it would mean to go down the escalator. “Dylan, promise me you’re not going to look until we’re in the stairwell.”
“How am I going to see where I’m going?”
“I’ll carry her,” Olin said.
For Connor, carrying Dylan while he navigated his way around the bodies would be difficult. He was pretty sure Olin could handle it without much trouble, though.
“Are you okay with that?” Connor asked Dylan.
She nodded.
Another crack and a crash, like more of the floor giving way.
“We have to go.”
Dylan climbed onto Olin’s back. Connor checked to make sure her eyes were closed and reminded her one more time to keep them that way. The smoke was getting thicker, making it harder to see by the second, and all three of them were starting to cough. He led them to stairwell, navigating partly from memory and refusing to look down.
He pushed through the door and held it open until Olin had passed through. Not much smoke had gotten in. Connor was still coughing, his ears were still ringing, but at least he could see again.
Dylan climbed off Olin’s back and opened her eyes. Somewhere along the way, much of her hair in front had slid out of the bobby pins, which made her seem even younger than she had before.
The three shared a look, an unspoken confirmation from each to the others that they were okay. Then they hurried down the stairs and through the door that led them outside.
They ran until they were on the far side of the parking lot, where Connor slowed to a stop and leaned over to cough some more. It was getting better. So was the ringing in his ears. But neither was completely gone yet.
He turned around to see the mall. Olin and Dylan did the same. They weren’t alone. There were people all over the parking lot, some standing dangerously close to the building. From here, the damage didn’t look as bad as it was. Sure, the windows along the food court were shattered. You could see the restaurants closest to them in flames and smoke billowing out. Glass and debris were scattered across the parking lot nearby. Some tables, fully intact, had landed on cars, crushing hoods and shattering windshields. But you couldn’t see the hole that had been blown through the floor, the small fires that burned all the way back to the escalator. You couldn’t see the bodies.
And thank God for that.
Connor hardly noticed when Dylan turned away from the mall and toward the road beyond. “Guys.”
“Yeah?”
“Look.”
They did.
It wasn’t fully dark yet, but it was on its way. The streetlights along the alley in front of them and the buildings beyond it should be lit up. They weren’t.
“The whole city’s gone dark,” Olin said.
Hopefully not the whole city, Connor thought. Then he remembered the comment someone had made about the 1977 blackout.
But this wasn’t like that. This wasn’t some random blackout caused by ancient and overworked equipment. This was planned. It had to be.
Now Olin was pointing off to the left. “What’s that?”
Connor strained to see. There was a flicker. Maybe smoke. Another fire, he thought.
He remembered the boom he had heard outside the mall. That had to be where it had come from, which meant there had been two explosions, at least.
“There were riots in 1977,” Dylan said. Apparently, she was also thinking about the comment Connor had heard in the mall.
Connor turned to face her. “How do you know that?”
“I read stuff.” Then her eyes grew wide. “Tom. We have to get help.”
That took Connor by surprise. In the mall, he had thought she understood Tom was dead.
Dylan pulled out her phone. She dialed nine-one-one, but the call wouldn’t go through. From where he was, Connor could hear a message from AT&T telling her all lines were busy and to try her call again later.
Since now was later, even if only by seconds, she tried again, and got the same message. “Everything’s tied up.” She sounded desperate. “What about you? Can you reach anyone?”
Connor and Olin, who had both seen Tom’s body, dutifully pulled out their phones, tried to call nine-one-one. They were not able to get through either.
Then there was a flash of lights and sirens that caught their attention and all three turned again to a see a pair of firetrucks pulling into the parking lot. Firemen hopped off, even while the trucks were still moving. They worked fast, hooking up hoses to fire hydrants, suiting up, sending men in to look for survivors.
Connor hadn’t realized he had put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder to comfort her until he spoke. She didn’t pull away. “They’ll get him out,” he said. He hated lying to her, but there would be plenty of time to grieve Tom’s death later. Right now, they had a more pressing matter. “We need to leave.”
“But, Tom—”
“We don’t know if this is over. We need to get somewhere safe.”
Dylan didn’t seem convinced.
“Your parents would want us to do that,” Olin said.
Dylan scoffed.
“So would Tom,” Connor added.
She looked down at her shoes. Red Nike sneakers. Later, Connor would wonder if she had picked the shoes to match her hair, if the outfit that looked thrown together had actually been thoughtfully coordinated for her date. Right now, he wondered only what she was thinking.
When she spoke again, she said, “You’re right. We need to go. I can’t do anything if I stay here.”
“But where are we going to go?” Olin said. “I don’t think we can make it back to the suburbs. Traffic’s—”
“Going to be terrible.” Connor had already considered that. “I’ve been staying with a guy. A friend. I don’t think his apartment’s too far from here.”
He hoped Dylan wouldn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want to tell her what had happened to his parents. Or Olin’s. No matter what she was capable of doing with a computer, she was still just a child. She had enough to deal with right now.
CHAPTER 42
Traffic was worse than they thought it would be. The first block had taken them twenty minutes and, since then, they hadn’t moved at all.
By the time Connor turned around in the passenger seat so he could see Dylan, the sun had set, and the street was lit exclusively by headlights. “You said you found out Matthew Jones was my dad from my birth certificate. But you must have gotten it mixed up with something else. I’ve seen my birth certificate.”
She shrugged. “I know what I saw.”
In the silence that followed, Olin turned on the radio and was met with static. He tried several stations. None of them were transmitting. Then he gave up and turned it off. “I saw a documentary about adoption once,” he said a minute later.
“Sounds exciting,” Dylan responded.
Olin looked at Connor. “Sometimes when babies are adopted the parents will amend the birth certificate to include their names instead of the original parents’. Something about creating continuity for the child. I didn’t really get it, but . . . you were young when your mother remarried, right? So maybe that’s what happened.”
Connor had never heard of an amended birth certificate, but he also had no reason to doubt Olin. Could that be what had happened? It tied in nicely with the facts he already knew, and it certainly made more sense than the idea that his mother had had an affair.
Okay, but so what? This wasn’t going to help him get his parents back. Of course, he’d known that when he came to the mall. This whole exercise had been action for action’s sake. But now it was worse than that. He had put Olin and Dylan in danger, not to mention himself. Or Tom, who would have made it safely
to the second floor before the blast if Connor hadn’t pulled Dylan aside to ask her a question he knew was irrelevant.
He was acting like an idiot.
Don’t do that to yourself. You couldn’t have known.
That was true, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
“That site of yours. TruthSeekers,” Connor said, desperate to think about anything else. “Why did you put it up?”
“Why did you hack it?”
“Dylan, come on. Answer my question.”
Dylan crossed her arms over her chest, then defensively said, “It was just a bit of fun. Bigfoot. Vampires. Who’s going to believe that, anyway?”
“Sites like that—okay, maybe not yours, exactly, but sites like it—they change how people think. You have to be careful—”
“Hey, Connor,” Olin said, cutting him off.
“What?” As soon as he asked, he realized he didn’t need to. It was obvious what Olin wanted to draw his attention to.
On the sidewalk ahead of them, someone swung a baseball bat at the window of a Best Buy, smashing it. He climbed in, followed by a swarm of others, and emerged a minute later carrying a laptop. As Connor watched from inside the car, the mob emptied the store of TVs, monitors, iPads, cellphones, and a whole assortment of boxed electronics he couldn’t identify from his vantage point.
Along the way, one of them must have set the business on fire, because it wasn’t long before Connor saw flames inside the shop. He flashed back to the mall they had just fled, then willed the memory from his mind.
Olin hit a button, and all of the car’s doors locked. “We should be all right if we stay here.” He didn’t sound confident.
“As if we have a choice,” Dylan said. She was once again leaning forward so she could get a better view.
Connor tried to reason his way through the situation. To his surprise, he realized he had been good at finding his way out of tough spots lately. But he couldn’t see a way out of this. Every street in every direction was bumper to bumper. Even if a cross street magically cleared, there would be no easy way to get to it. There were three lanes going east, and they were stuck in the middle one. There was nothing they could do but inch their way along.
A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust Page 15