“What can I do?” he asked.
“I need—I just want to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “Let’s go back inside, and we’ll talk—”
But she jumped to her feet, quick as a cat, turned away from him, and sprinted for the stairs that led back down. Adam let out a curse and jogged after her, down to the sixth floor.
He was just in time to see her slam a door shut and to hear the deadbolt clunk into place. She had locked him out. They had agreed that sharing a room would be the best thing to do, but she had locked him out.
Adam knocked gently on the door. “Ella?”
No answer.
He thought of Sara. The night Cody had died, Sara had acted just like this. She had retreated to her cabin and locked Adam out, and when morning had come, Adam had found that she had jumped from the yacht in the night, taking her own life.
But that won’t happen this time, he reassured himself. Sixth-floor hotel windows don’t open for that exact reason. She can’t jump out that window even if she wants to.
And then a cold understanding washed over him. Ella’s mother committed suicide. Of course.
No wonder she was a mess. No wonder she seemed so broken down by what had just happened. It must be triggering all sorts of traumatic memories for her. Watching Tucker jump, she must have been thinking of what it had been like for her own mother.
It occurred to Adam that he had never asked Ella by what means her mother had committed suicide. Nor did he wish he had asked—it seemed like a highly insensitive question—but it meant he didn’t know if she had died in the same way Tucker had.
I should leave her alone, he thought. She must be in hell right now.
He decided to find a room of his own. Fortunately, many of the doors on the sixth floor hung open, so he didn’t have to go back downstairs to find a key. He located an open door two rooms down from the one Ella had disappeared into and went inside.
The room was spacious—you could definitely tell this was a resort town. Adam went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Ella had been right. He was a bruised-up mess. He looked significantly worse than he felt. That’s probably a blessing.
He went back into the bedroom and collapsed on top of the king-size bed, not even bothering to draw back the covers. He meant to stay awake a bit longer, to think things over, but before he knew it his eyes were slipping closed and sleep was reaching up with insistent fingers to claim him.
Chapter 16
July 20, 2026
Adam had no idea what time it was when he awoke. The sun was high enough overhead that it could have been any time between nine a.m. and noon. He hoped he hadn’t slept too late.
There was no moment of the events of last night coming back to him—he woke up with the memory at the front of his mind. He supposed he was grateful for that. It would have been more unpleasant to have to wake up to it—the image of the kid disappearing over the side of the building, the way his body had looked sprawled out on the pavement below. He was glad to have the memory between his teeth, to be able to examine it and then carefully set it aside.
He checked his reflection in the mirror again—he thought maybe his injuries looked a little bit better, although it was hard to be sure—then made his way out of his room in search of Ella.
She wasn’t hard to find. She was on the first floor, in what looked to be the Ocean View’s restaurant dining room. She had spruced herself up a little since last night, he saw—her face was clean, and her hair was smooth and tied back with a piece of string. She had a book in her hand.
He was relieved to see her. Even though he had reasoned that she couldn’t do anything to herself alone in her room, he realized he had been afraid of losing her in the same way he’d lost Sara on the yacht. Everybody has their scars, I guess.
He made his way over to her table and sat down beside her. “What are you reading?”
“Just some trash.” She showed him. It looked like a standard bodice-ripper, except that to judge from the graphic on the cover, it seemed to be from the eighties. “I found it in my room. Whoever stayed there last left in a hurry, and they left a few things behind.” She reached beneath her chair and pulled up a stack of folded men’s clothes. “Clean outfit, if you want it,” she said. “I don’t know if it’ll fit you or not, but it looked about your size.”
“I’ll try it out,” he said. “Thanks.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry about the way I acted last night.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Adam said. “I was freaked out by it too. You’re allowed to need some time to yourself.” He didn’t mention his theory that she had been especially affected because of the way she’d lost her mother. He would let her introduce that topic if she wanted to.
It seemed she didn’t. “What do you suppose Tucker was talking about?” she asked. “He said something about—criminals and military men, was it?”
“No idea.” Adam reached into the duffel bag, pulled out a can of potatoes, and opened it. He placed it on the table between them and reached in to pull out a potato and pop it in his mouth. “He wasn’t in his right mind, though. It might not have meant anything.”
“Yeah,” Ella said doubtfully. “Maybe. But he did sound like he was referring to something concrete. Do you know what I mean? It didn’t seem like he was just babbling. He was talking about something, even if his response to it was…a little askew.”
“Right.” Adam chose another potato, then hesitated as a distant rumbling sounded. “Do you hear something?”
Ella looked up. “What is that? An earthquake?”
“The ground isn’t moving…” Adam got to his feet and moved slowly toward the window. If it was an earthquake, putting himself in close proximity to a window was probably a stupid move, but he had a feeling something else was going on. He pulled back the shade—
And jumped back.
“Ella. Holy shit. You’d better get over here.”
She was at his side in a second. “What is it?”
“Look.” Carefully, he pulled back the window shade again.
A line of what appeared to be military vehicles was cruising by outside, each one painted in midnight black, each one about four times the size of a standard four-door sedan.
“Is that…is that actually the military?” Ella asked.
“Why do they have working vehicles?” Adam asked. He hadn’t seen a working motor since the day the EMP had gone off. Ever since he and Ella had returned to the mainland, they’d been surrounded by a veritable graveyard of dead and abandoned cars. Why were these vehicles working?
What technology was this?
And if whoever was in those tanks and trucks had working engines, what else did they have that worked?
For a moment, Adam wanted to go running out the front door of the hotel, waving his arms over his head and calling out to them. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to be picked up and taken care of by someone who obviously had more expertise in the post-EMP world than he did. Whatever these people knew, whatever they had on their side, it was a hell of a lot more than he did.
“Do you think this is what Tucker was talking about?” Ella asked. “He did say something about the military.”
“Could be,” Adam murmured, watching the trucks roll by. Maybe the kid had had a tighter grip on sanity than Adam had originally thought. Which wasn’t a good thing, he reflected. If someone jumped off a roof because they were loose a few screws, that was awful, but if they did so because they were completely sane and just had a realistic grasp of the fact that coming down off the roof would be a worse ending for them—well, that was objectively horrifying.
“Ella,” he whispered, noticing something, and pointed.
There was a shape—an ugly, all-too-familiar shape—mounted on the rear vehicle, on a spike.
“Is that—” Ella swallowed. She sounded nauseated, and Adam couldn’t blame her. “Is that a head?”
He didn’t answer, but as the
truck pulled closer, he saw that it was. The skin was dry and shriveled but not enough so that he would have been able to say the head had parted company from its owner all that long ago. It still had its hair. The lips were blue and the eye sockets were empty.
Adam turned away. He didn’t want to watch another minute of this.
“That isn’t the military,” Ella said. “There’s no way that’s the military.”
Adam pressed his back to the wall, moving away from the window and pulling Ella with him. No matter who these people were, the last thing he wanted was to be discovered by them. Not if they were the kind of people who took the heads of those they encountered.
This is what Tucker was afraid of. He thought we were with people like this. He was right to be afraid.
“Stay back,” he said quietly. “Just let them go on by. We don’t want them to see us.”
“No kidding.”
The sound of the trucks seemed almost deafening in the morning air. Adam supposed that was because it had been so long since he’d heard the sound of a vehicle. It was strange to think that, not so long ago, every day had been full of the sounds of cars and trucks whizzing by.
Finally, there was nothing but silence from outside. Adam let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “I think they’re gone,” he said.
Ella leaned out around Adam to peer out the window.
“No,” she said quietly. “They’re not gone.”
Adam froze.
“There’s a truck out there,” Ella said. “One of them parked.”
“Oh my God.”
“Some men are getting out,” she said. “They’re armed.”
Adam tried to think back to the previous night. Had he and Ella left any sign outside of their presence? Had they indicated, somehow, that they were going into the Ocean View? He couldn’t think of anything—but they hadn’t exactly taken steps to obscure their presence either. They hadn’t bothered to wipe away the footprints they might have left in the dirt. And Ella had been bleeding—there could be blood on the pavement, blood on nearby plants.
Idiot, he berated himself. He had done well to survive this long, but he should have known it would be only a matter of time before he made some stupid mistake, before he allowed himself to be caught or attacked or captured. Ella had been lightheaded with her injury when they’d arrived here last night, but he had been thinking clearly—at least, he should have been. It would be on his head if these soldiers, or whatever they were, discovered him and Ella now.
“They’re coming toward the hotel,” Ella said, her voice shaking. “I think they’re coming inside.”
“We should move,” Adam said. “We should find a place to hide.” He’d be damned if he was just going to stand here and wait to be captured.
But Ella shook her head. “They’re too close,” she whispered. “If we try to move, they’re going to see us. They’ll know we’re here. Do you have your gun?”
He closed his eyes. “It’s in the duffel.” And the duffel was still sitting at the dining room table. He hadn’t expected to be attacked at breakfast.
Ella seemed to take it in stride. “Get behind me, then,” she said, pulling her own pistol out of the waistband of her pants.
Adam did as he was told, grateful for the fact that take-charge, no-nonsense Ella seemed to have been restored sometime during the night. She kept him alive just as much as he kept himself alive, and he knew it. And in a situation like this one, it was a relief to see that at least someone had their game face on.
I’ll apologize to her when we survive this one. Assuming we do.
“Okay,” Ella said. “Stay low now. Here they come—”
Adam waited.
And waited.
What felt like ages passed.
Finally, he spoke. “What’s happening?”
Ella sounded confused. “I’m not sure they’re coming in,” she said, as if she didn’t really dare to believe it. “They’re looking around outside. It’s like they’re examining something. But I don’t know what—”
She gasped, and Adam knew it had come to her at the same time as it had to him.
“Tucker’s body,” he said quietly. “They found him.”
Will that be enough to distract them from finding us?
Adam was flooded with shame at the thought. But on the other hand, Tucker was already dead. There was nothing more that could be done for him. And Adam wanted very much to survive.
There was a shout from outside. Adam frowned. He hadn’t been able to make out the words.
“What did he say?” he hissed in Ella’s ear.
Ella turned to look at him. Her eyes were full of tears, Adam saw with a sudden pang. She looked absolutely furious, as if she had borne witness to a great injustice.
“He said,” she hissed, “that the kid saved them a job.”
“Saved them a job?” Adam repeated.
“Tucker was right,” Ella said. “These people were going to kill him. Maybe they were going to mount his head on one of those spikes, like on that car out there. He was completely right, and we made him feel like he was crazy. Of course he killed himself. He wasn’t afraid of us. He just saw that nobody would ever listen to him.”
“Ella,” Adam whispered. “It wasn’t our fault. We did everything we could.”
“We could have believed him. We could have treated him like what he had to say mattered instead of like he was a crazy person. But we didn’t. Why didn’t we just listen to him?”
Adam didn’t know what to say. Tucker’s words had been so hard to follow, so hard to understand and hard to believe. He didn’t fault himself or Ella for having trouble with Tucker’s story, and he knew perfectly well that Tucker could have tried harder to make himself understood before resorting to the measures he had taken.
But he also knew how sensitive a topic this was for Ella. So he said nothing.
“What’s happening now?” he asked after several minutes had passed.
Ella took a steadying breath and leaned out again.
“They’re going back to their truck or their tank or whatever it is,” she whispered. “I think they’re leaving. They must have just been here for Tucker. I don’t know why they would come out here just for him, but they must have. And now that they saw that he’s dead—now that they’ve been saved a job—they’re just going to move on to wherever else they have to go today.”
That was good. Adam didn’t dare say it aloud, not while Ella was still trembling with rage and horror, but he was able to admit it to himself. He mourned the loss of Tucker. He wished he had been able to save the kid. But the fact that those soldiers weren’t going to be coming into the Ocean View was a good thing, a lucky break.
I’ll take all the lucky breaks I can get.
But his relief was short-lived. The fact had to be faced that there was at least one violent band of mercenaries patrolling the streets. This was the worst thing Adam had seen since the advent of the nanobots. It was enough to make him long for the days when the worst thing he’d had to face was the erratic behavior of Rhett Birkin.
We should never have left the island, he thought grimly. We had no idea how good we had it there, and we just threw it away. We should have been down on our knees thanking God every day for that place.
But they had chosen, instead to run.
Now they were here, on the mainland, and there was nothing to do but to make the best of it.
“Ella,” he said.
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were still glued to the scene outside.
“Ella,” he tried again.
This time she turned around and looked up at him. He could see the fire behind her eyes. Even this new horror hadn’t quenched it. She’s going to come out of this okay, he thought.
“We need to stay together,” he told her. “No matter what happens. No matter what we encounter. We need to promise each other that we’ll stick together.” He didn’t want to be alone in this world. As long as he had a par
tner, he thought, they had a chance.
Ella nodded, not breaking eye contact. “I promise,” she said, and he knew she meant it. “Together. Whatever comes.”
Chapter 17
Staying at the Ocean View, after what they had seen, felt like the worst idea in the universe. They hurried back to the dining room and quickly stuffed all their worldly possessions into the duffel bag. Adam didn’t bother with packing carefully, as he had done until now, making sure that the cans were at the bottom and the water bottles were at the top, making sure that the can opener and the darts he’d picked up at the fairground were wrapped in bits of cloth to keep them from biting into anything. He just shoved everything into the bag.
“Are you going to change?” Ella asked, indicating the pile of clothes she’d brought him.
Adam hesitated. He did want to get out of there quickly, but at the same time, the clothes he was wearing were crusty with blood and sweat and they felt awful. “Turn around.”
She shrugged and turned to face the window. It felt strange to be worrying about modesty after everything that had happened, but Adam couldn’t help it. He shucked off his clothes and pulled on the fresh ones. They were a perfect fit, and he allowed himself a couple of seconds to luxuriate in the feeling of clean garments against his skin before he turned to Ella once again.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
She nodded. “Let’s make tracks.”
After a final check to make sure the coast was clear, they left the Ocean View through the front.
“The military guys, or whoever they were, went that way,” Ella said, pointing.
“Good,” Adam said. The route they would need to take to return to the highway went in the opposite direction, which meant they weren’t going to have to worry about running into those creeps. As long as they don’t come up behind us, that is.
They found their way back to the main road quickly enough. Adam set them off at a jog, even though it was hard to keep up the pace. He was in better shape than he’d been before this had all begun, he could tell, but on the other hand, he hadn’t had a decent meal in a few days, and he was definitely dehydrated. Behind him, he heard Ella wheezing, trying to get her breath.
Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins Page 13
