Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  Nathan finished the bandaging, his thoughts elsewhere. “And what does Donie and Dave sound like?”

  Dave looked up and flashed a broad, thousand-watt smile. “Superspies, Nate. Superspies.”

  Freeson and Stryker didn’t come back in the Humvee, and thankfully, neither did Danny or his gang.

  With more sheets from the linen cupboard, Nathan made as comfortable a place as he could for Dave to rest and recuperate while he went back across the street to the tenement.

  If the woman had been left there for the express reason of causing as much damage to whoever came looking for Dave as possible, then there was a good chance she’d have been left with food and drink. Nathan’s instincts had been right, which was the first confidence booster he’d had for a while since nearly everything else in his world had gone south. Moving gingerly around the pools of Dave’s blood, Nathan found a full hold-all in the corner of the room. In it, there was candy, bread, cheese, and chocolate milk, which made his stomach rumble painfully. But he waited until he was back across the street with Dave to start on it.

  Dave was snoring on a makeshift futon as Nathan took everything out of the liberated bag and placed it in front of him; apart from the food and the unopened carton of UHT milk, there was a SIG-Sauer, three full magazines, and two boxes of one hundred rounds per carton.

  Along with all of this was a pair of binoculars; a compact, rubberized walkie-talkie that, when he tried it, seemed to be fully charged; and a small plastic wallet that had two plastic keycards in it. There was no text on either card, but they were brown and shiny on one side, and white with a black magnetic strip on the other. Nathan didn’t think they were for opening hotel doors, but he wondered what they could open—and the only thing that came to mind were any of the entrances to the Greenhouse.

  Surely, though, Nathan’s luck couldn’t have changed that much?

  “Carol, you there? Come back.”

  The voice from the walkie-talkie startled Nathan so much that he dropped the keycards.

  “Carol, you there? Come back?”

  There was a hiss of static as the voice waited. It was male, and it was used to not being kept waiting by the sound of it. And it was also the same voice Nathan had heard from the Parka who’d nailed Dave to the floor.

  “I want a report within the hour, Carol. If they’ve come back to find their little black Jesus, I want to know. Clear?”

  Hissssssssssss.

  The snake in the walkie-talkie slithered away to silence and Nathan felt a rush of vertigo burst through him again. If Danny didn’t hear back from the dead girl within the hour—and he wouldn’t, obviously—he was sure to send someone back here to see what was going down.

  That meant they had to get as far away from this street as they possibly could, and hopefully get to somewhere with some pain meds for the boy.

  It would be ninety minutes of hard walking for someone able-bodied to get back to the Masonic from where they were now, so they didn’t have many options. Especially as he didn’t know what Harmsworth and Brant had planned for him—if anything, other than a swift end that could be passed off as gang-related.

  But Trash Town was just twenty minutes away. Looking back on his meeting with Rose, Nathan felt she had seemed genuinely uncomfortable with the idea that Nathan was going up against Tasha and Danny. Perhaps she wasn’t in cahoots with him, after all. Perhaps she was just like she’d told Nathan he oughtta be… terrified.

  And maybe she’d take pity on Dave, seeing as he’d been busted under her roof. Who knew?

  Nathan didn’t, but one thing was sure. They couldn’t wait where they were.

  Dave did his best, but the beating and the blood loss had taken a terrible toll on his ability to draw on reserves of stamina. By the time they reached the alley that led to Rose’s kitchen, Dave was only semiconscious and Nathan was all but carrying him.

  The snow had thankfully laid off, but the air had been sucking the life from even Nathan’s bones and he could only too easily see that it was sucking the life out of Dave, too.

  But even as they reached the door, as the first fingers of dawn sent long shadows down the thin cut between the two blocks ahead of them, Nathan hesitated. If he’d miscalculated again, then they were toast. Pure and simple.

  It was only the finality of Dave slumping to his knees in the slush of ice and snow as consciousness left him that made Nathan knock on the wooden door.

  After what seemed like an age, Rose opened the door herself, pulling a shawl around her thin shoulders as she did. She took one step out, felt Dave’s forehead as Nathan did his best to hold the boy upright, and then hissed back into the fragrant kitchen for Horace to join them. Rose looked up at Nathan.

  “Stryker Wilson wid you?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “Dat good. Dat boy be bad medicine.”

  Horace squeezed his bulk out of the door and stooped to pick Dave up with just one enormous hand. He rolled the boy into the crook of his arm and went back through the doorway sideways, as if he was carrying a sack of flour.

  Rose took one more look up and down the alley, and then led Nathan inside.

  Rose needed little time to get Dave stripped and laid out on the table in the middle of the kitchen. He was delirious, in and out of consciousness. She moved her quick hands up and down his body, checking his wounds and unwrapping the bandages Nathan had wrapped around the boy’s palms, tutting as she inspected the stigmata there. She felt around Dave’s belly and up to his chest, and paused just below his ribcage. There, she pressed in with her fingers. Dave’s face winced.

  “What is it?” Nathan asked, pacing like an expectant father as he stepped into the pool of light thrown off by the lantern hanging from the ceiling. Rose took his hand and placed it below Dave’s ribcage.

  “Look. Feel.”

  The skin was discolored, and tight to the touch, as if something underneath was burgeoning, pushing up. “I can feel the tightness and see the bruise. What’s happening?”

  “Man bleedin’ inside. Been kicked or punched hard in the gut. Split something. Blood vessel, maybe.”

  Rose’s words hit Nathan like the proverbial freight train. “Internal bleeding? That’s… that’s…”

  Rose smiled and reached up to gently cup Nathan’s cheek as if she was comforting a child. “Is not TV, pretty boy. Not everyone bleedin’ inside dies. Every time you get a bruise, that’s internal bleedin’, no?”

  “I’ve never thought of it like that.”

  “No one does—everyone jus’ tink about they see on the TV. Has he bled from the mouth? From the backside?”

  “No. Not as far as I know.”

  “Dat’s good. Man not split his gut. Might just be a blood vessel.”

  “But doesn’t he need a doctor?”

  Rose laughed as she reached to a shelf behind her and took down a pile of old, dusty books. Without bidding, Horace lifted Dave’s feet and Rose slid the books underneath them before, more gently than Nathan would have considered possible, Horace put Dave’s feet down so that they were elevated nearly twelve inches.

  “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 Green
house 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 through 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?”