Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  Cyndi tied off her wrapping with a knot. “That’ll do for now. But I might need to stitch it.”

  Nathan nodded, getting up, glad of the distraction of everything going on around him.

  Rose approached with a wild, wide smile playing around her face. “We couldn’t leave you to do this on your own, pretty boy,” Rose said as she pulled Nathan’s head down by the back of the neck and kissed him hard on the mouth. He tried to pull away, but her grip was like iron. As Nathan’s head came up for air, he saw that Rose was winking at Cyndi. “Sorry, lovely. Couldn’t resist. He all yours.”

  The mob from the outer city was catching up with Danny’s gang. The Seven-Ones had tried to disappear into the buildings, but they were being tracked, traced, and yanked struggling back into the street as Nathan and Rose watched.

  Rose went over to the nearest pair of captives. The looks on their faces moved between terror and remorse, but Rose just crossed her arms. “If you play ball wid us, we play ball wid you. Be good. Be cool and live.”

  Snow was howling up the concourse now, collecting in places where it hadn’t for years and silting up the sidewalk, smattering and then settling on the windows.

  Cyndi was now kneeling by Stryker, who had fallen over by the burning trailer. Nathan had helped Cyndi drag him away from the wreck to safer ground. Tony was holding Brandon, rocking him slowly. Remarkably, the baby was silent and calm, almost on the verge of sleep. Rose spoke to the captured gang members well away from the flaming truck, but the conflagration was thankfully dying back down now, even though the flames were still crazy hot, roasting one side of Nathan’s face with the glowing embers of the trailer.

  Horace had already disconnected the Mack’s tractor unit and driven it away from the flames so that the Mack wouldn’t be engulfed. Now, Rose walked up to the Mack, opened the door on the cab, and shouted inside at whoever was there to come out.

  Harmsworth came first. Bloody and beaten. Uniform in tatters. He was forced to his knees by Horace, who used one hand on the man and didn’t look like he needed to put any effort into it. Then came Brant, his face a mask of fear and discomfort. Someone had broken his nose and the blood ran in a stripe down from his nostrils, over his lips, down his chin, and onto his chest. It looked like it had been painted on by a precision brush.

  Brant’s voice was clogged with anger and blood, and he looked at Rose with the rawest hatred Nathan had witnessed. “You won’t get away with this, you waste of oxygen. My men will come back and take this place from you and I will see you hang for this. You will hang!”

  Rose chucked him under the chin. “Your men? Men run, remember?”

  Harmsworth looked at the floor, embarrassment clear in his eyes.

  “Soon as we stand up to dem, they fold like house of cards, Brant. They run like kiddies from the boogeyman. You is nuttin’ without dem. Soon as those who aren’t dead come lookin’ for food or warmth, do you reckon dem will care who’s giving de orders? Me or you? All man care about is where next meal is coming from. I’ll give dem that meal. You can rot. Take them away.”

  Horace pulled Brant and Harmsworth up by the collars and led them away.

  “What will you do with them?” Nathan asked.

  Rose shrugged. “If they be good, they get to live here. If not, they leave the city. If they try anything, they get slapped.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do this?”

  “I figured you might change plan if you thought Trash Town willing to help. I wanted your surprise to screw up the Greenhouse—give us the distraction we need, pretty boy.”

  “So, you were willing to sacrifice us?”

  Rose’s eyes twinkled. “Why you think the worst, pretty boy? How about I knew that you’d do it with bravery to spare? I’s got faith in you, pretty boy.”

  “Just not enough to let me in on your plans.”

  “Woman gotta have some secrets, even from a pretty boy.”

  Nathan shook his head. Rose had taken a terrible risk with him and his family, and for that he should have felt anger, but on the other hand, he had to admit to himself that he liked the idea of someone like Rose thinking that he’d hold his end up so that the whole edifice of Brant’s small world of discriminatory, parasitic exploitation could be brought crashing down.

  “Nathan!” Lucy’s voice carried across the concourse to him. There was new panic in it now; fresh fear. Nathan stepped out from behind the hydroponics unit and saw Lucy staggering towards him, one hand at a gash on her cheek. “Nathan!”

  Nathan left Cyndi and Rose with Stryker. Tony held onto his hand and came a few steps up with Brandon. Lucy was distressed and in full-on panic, so Nathan turned back to him quickly. “Stay with Mom, Tony. I need to find out what’s upsetting Lucy, okay?”

  Tony didn’t argue, taking his responsibility with Brandon seriously enough to whisper into the baby’s ear, “Everything will be okay, Bran, don’t worry.” As he returned to Cyndi, who was now raising Stryker’s leg and dealing with his wound with a first aid kit Rose had liberated from the Mack.

  Voices were echoing and snow was coming in on every blustery gust of the wind as Lucy stumbled again and almost fell into Nathan’s arms. “It’s Free and Donie—come, please. Help them…”

  Nathan supported Lucy, but quickened his step towards the entrance. In the murk of fizzling snow and lack of illumination, he saw Freeson laid out on the floor, unconscious. Donie wasn’t far away. Face down. Like Lucy, she had a wound wet and bloody on the side of her head.

  As he reached Freeson, Lucy fell to her knees—not from emotion, but because it looked like her legs had just given way. “Attacked from behind. Don’t… don’t know what he hit… us with. They… they’re both unconscious. I saw him… I saw him run out into the… night.”

  Nathan had already begun checking Freeson and Donie over. They were breathing and alive, and they’d both have the mothers of all headaches in the morning.

  “Who did it? Danny?”

  “I don’t know his name, but that’s what… that’s what it sounded like… what Syd screamed…”

  Syd.

  Nathan looked around, trying to find the teen among the mess of wreckage, glass, plants, and raging snow.

  She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Lucy pointed into the raging night.

  “He… he took her, Nathan… out there!”

  15

  “Hike! Hike! Hike!” The team of dogs began pulling at the sled, taking Nathan into the night.

  He’d run from the Greenhouse once he was sure Freeson, Lucy, and Donie were okay and that Cyndi was tending to them. They’d been hit by something hard and heavy, but not been shot, which suggested that, at least up until that point, Danny had been unarmed. He may have taken Syd, but the fact that no one had been shot suggested that when everyone had been sent scattering by the Mack crashing through the entrance to the Greenhouse, Syd had lost her firearm, too.

  Danny had left with Syd on foot.

  That was another advantage. Even if she was unconscious and he had to carry her, that would slow him down. As to the direction he was taking her in… well, there was one obvious place, or a million others in the city. Danny might not know that Stryker and Freeson had followed the Mack back to a warehouse on the river’s edge when they’d taken the supplies there from the tenement, though, and Nathan had to bet on that. Freeson had told Nathan the rough area of where it was. The Mack had been unloaded there into a bonded warehouse, and then driven away again. They’d seen inside the warehouse, and Freeson had noted two Ski-Doos in there, half under tarps.

  Ski-Doos had been Danny’s gang’s vehicles of choice when they’d met them months ago. Back when fuel had been a little more plentiful, and many people still on the move. It made sense that Danny and his people had answered Brant’s call to come to Detroit. The lure of a slice of the action keeping the outer city fearful and oppressed had made them come here on Ski-Doos, maybe bringing the supply-stuffed Mack with them.

  Perhaps
there had been more in the warehouse Freeson hadn’t seen, in fact, and maybe they’d been kept fully fueled for emergencies. Couple that with the crates of weapons they’d taken back there, and it would be an obvious place for Danny to make for.

  If Danny did the obvious.

  That was something Nathan couldn’t be at all sure of.

  Nathan encouraged the dogs on. Not having to steer with his hands made going by sled easier on his arm, but it was still throbbing like hell. His grip was solid in his right hand, but occasionally the fingers on his left would slip off the bar.

  The storm had blown through the city now, mostly leaving virgin snow for him to skim across as the dogs pushed on. The sky was still glowering and angry, of course, but the snowfall, without the gale to energize the flakes, was now just a steady curtain that fell silently around him, truncating the acoustics of the night.

  Before he’d left the Greenhouse to run to where they had stationed the dogs for the getaway that had never needed to happen, Horace had pressed an AK-47 into Nathan’s hands, along with a cluster of taped magazines, and he also slipped a walky-talky into the pocket of Nathan’s anorak.

  Nathan still hadn’t heard Horace speak, but he’d thanked the enormous man all the same and shaken his hand. Rose and her people were still mopping up the last of the cops and security in the Greenhouse, and as none of his people were in a position to go, Nathan had told Cyndi to look after the kids and he would be back as soon as he could.

  Cyndi had kissed him, saying, “Bring Syd back, please. It’s not the way this should end.”

  Nathan had hefted the gun onto his shoulder with a grimace of pain and put the extra magazines into his pocket. “It won’t. I will get Syd back. I promise.”

  The streets down to the river were dark and silent, and the dogs seemed to pick up the atmosphere, running without making any noise at all. Nathan had grown used to their yelps and growls, but now as they skimmed on, the lack of doggy sounds allowed him to listen out for what he could hear above the shooshing of the sleds on the fresh snow.

  The street he was on had started to bend around and run parallel with the ice on the river. Nathan got the clearest view yet of Winsor across the ice—a few fires still burned there, and smoke showed a darker black against the night clouds as it rose up in shimmering columns.

  The street had chain link fencing on both sides and had narrowed to one car’s width. The buildings on Nathan’s right were, like nearly all the building on this side of town, factory units, business offices, and shipping establishments. All of the windows that were intact—and there weren’t many—were dark, and every building, if Danny had gotten there first or had managed to meet up with any of his people, would make for a great place for an ambush. Nathan suddenly felt very exposed, and an easy target on the sled. He whoa’ed the dogs to a halt, the breath from their panting mouths making a foggy cloud around them. He didn’t have time to unhitch them so he just tied a strap from the sled to the fence, and then, keeping himself low as he could with his AK-47 out in front of him, its safety off, he crouch-ran towards the dock. The air stung his cheeks and bit into his neck where it was exposed. His ears burned. He dared not put up his hood, either, as it would obscure too much of his vision, and so ice was forming in the sweat of his hair and across his eyebrows. He felt the skin of his cheek stiffening with it.

  The building where Freeson had followed Danny to was the third bonded warehouse in front of a wide expanse of snow. There was a concrete jetty angled down, spearing into the ice. It must have been used for unloading cargo from boats that couldn’t get right up to the dock, or for launching pilot boats when the river wasn’t frozen over.

  It wasn’t until Nathan was almost upon them that he saw the muddled footprints in the surface of the fresh snowfall. They led him into an alleyway between two of the warehouses. Nathan was no tracker, but he could see that someone was being dragged by another, and that at some point at the end of the alley there had been a scuffle, and as Nathan looked at the churned-up snow, he could also see that dots of blood had fallen alongside the tracks.

  With his shoulder wound from where Cyndi had shot him, there was a very good chance that the blood was Danny’s—and Nathan didn’t want to think about it being Syd’s. Especially as, after the area of scuffle, the evidence of resistance stopped, the tracks only showing two feet digging into the fresh snowfall, dragging two tram lines along.

  Nathan tried to walk in the snow as quietly as he could, but each footstep, however circumspect, sent a ploof of sound out of the alley, over the docking apron and across the river ice.

  Walking as gently as he could, to keep the sounds from his feet to a minimum, he emerged from the alley and started to move along the front wall of the warehouse.

  He reached the blue warehouse door and saw that it was closed. There was a body-shaped indentation in the snow beside it, and a few more dots of blood seeping into the crystals. The snow was disturbed in front of the warehouse door in a wide arc, showing that the door had been opened outwards, recently, and once the body—unconscious, he hoped—of Syd had been dragged inside, the door had been pulled closed.

  Nathan’s heart was taking up residence in his throat as he placed his ear against the wood. Glad that it wasn’t made of metal because it was so cold, he felt his flesh would have stuck to it, but even so, his numb ear was made to burn even more by the surface of the door.

  The rest of the dock was deserted as far as he could see along the buildings. Snow-humped crates, dead machinery, and the rusting ghosts of cranes added to an air of empty desolation that pressed down on Nathan with a heavy anxiety.

  He couldn’t hear any movement within the warehouse—no voices, or any other sounds. The area at the front of the warehouse was dark and deeply shadowed. If there had been any light from the moon or stars, it would have been easily hidden by the clouds moving above, trailing streamers of snow.

  Those flurries were reducing by the second now. Visibly, the air was clearing. The baby-step patter of flakes hitting the snow, already fallen and sculpted by the wind, was lessening, as well. Soon, the air would be clear.

  It was possible that Danny had already been in the warehouse for some time. It was difficult to gauge from the tracks. He could be in there now, holed up, defended, or worse… doing whatever travesty of things he wanted to do to the unconscious Syd.

  There was nothing else for it. Nathan didn’t have time to look for another entrance to the warehouse. This was the door Danny had used, and he was going to have to open it, ready or not.

  He placed a hand on the handle and pushed it down.

  Danny had been waiting on the other side of the door. As the handle came down, the Ski-Doo engine roared to life and the machine gunned forward, smashing open the door and splitting it down the middle as he burst out into the air.

  Nathan had just enough time to dive out of the way as the Ski-Doo launched itself at him. He raised his gun to fire at the machine but saw there were two people seated. Danny up front, driving it forward, and Syd behind him, her head lolling backwards. She was unconscious astride the Ski-Doo, her arms tied around Danny’s waist. The red machine skidded away, bursts of snow and ice forming a cloud behind it and dumping a ton of wet snow where Nathan lay.

  Speeding away, the Ski-Doo churned up the snow like a winter buzz saw and chewed its way down to the ice.

  Nathan knew he only had seconds before there was no way to be able to catch Danny against his huge head start. He got up and ran through the warehouse door, slinging the AK-47 across his back as he moved. Inside, weak light came from an oil lantern settled on a packing crate. As Freeson had said, there was another Ski-Doo poking out from under a tarp. Nathan ran to it, glad to no longer be trudging through snow, and threw back the tarp and reached down to the starter cable.

  The handle had been sliced off. Danny had sabotaged anyone’s ability to start the engine.

  Most of the cable was still intact, but the winding spring had taken it right insi
de the mechanism. Even if he’d had time to get the Ski-Doo’s toolkit from under the saddle and fix the spare emergency pull-cord, he’d still have had to take the housing apart to get the old cable out.

  There was no time to go back to the sled, and even then, the dogs couldn’t match the speed of a Ski-Doo.

  Then Nathan remembered the jetty out front.

  The pain in his bicep was crippling.

  Pulling and heaving the weight of the Ski-Doo across the floor of the warehouse, even if it had been over less than twenty yards, had required an explosion of effort that had all but torn out his lungs. It had also sent warm blood from the bullet wound cascading down the skin inside his shirt.

  The Ski-Doo was a dead weight, but Nathan yanked at the handlebars and the faring. Digging his boots down in the snow to his knees and bending over, and then with an arching back, he turned the machine around until it was facing the iced river from the top of the thirty yards of the jetty’s slope. The incline was gentle, around thirty degrees, but if he got the Ski-Doo going, a clutch-start was not impossible. Insanely hard, yes, but not impossible. He’d tried the same maneuver out on Royal Bluff many years before when a friend’s Ski-Doo had snapped its starter cable and there’d been no tool kit with a spare. Admittedly, there had been more of an incline, and somebody’s life hadn’t hung in the balance if he didn’t get the machine going, but there was a chance here and now, and Nathan felt he had no choice but to take it.

  He let loose the brake and took a last look out over the ice.

  Danny was a black speck in the gloom against the slightly less dark expanse of white ice. Nathan kicked forward and began to push. The incline was just enough for him to build momentum. Soon, his legs were skipping in a blur alongside the Ski-Doo. Fifteen yards from the ice, Nathan Cossacked into the saddle and stamped on the gear lever.