The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  Ahead, Danisha’s red SUV was parked next to a ladder propped against the wing of a blue jumbo jet. Just beyond it, Lawless was pinned behind his car. He crouched, his back against the wheel well, reloading a shotgun. Nearby, a Ford F-150 pickup was awkwardly stopped, driver’s door open, steam blowing from the grille. It looked as if Lawless had shot out the radiator.

  Grissom Briggs was halfway up the ladder, firing repeatedly at Lawless as he climbed. He was going after Zoe and Danisha.

  Above him, on the wing, Nolan was making his way unevenly toward the fuselage.

  Sarah ran.

  Grissom reached the wing at the same time Nolan reached the emergency exit door. Their footsteps clattered on the aluminum surface. Nolan glanced inside the jet, put a foot on the exit door, and paused. He turned. Grissom was coming at him, ten feet away. Nolan pulled his foot back down, put his back to the exit, and blocked it with his body.

  Grissom raised his handgun and fired.

  Nolan collapsed with a thud, rolled off the back of the wing and dropped like a bundled carpet twelve feet to the sand. He hit and lay still.

  “Oh, God,” Sarah said.

  Grissom kept walking toward the emergency exit.

  Lawless broke from cover and ran to Nolan’s side. Sarah sprinted across the sand toward the ladder.

  Lawless dropped to his knees and leaned over Nolan. “Hold on, man. Hold on.”

  He heard her coming. Jerked up, swung around, shotgun in his hands.

  “Michael, no,” she yelled. “Grissom. Zoe …”

  Above her, footsteps cranked on the wing. Lawless nodded her toward the ladder.

  She ran to it and began to climb.

  In her pocket, her phone buzzed. She kept going. She heard the metallic footsteps reach the fuselage and a grunt as Grissom climbed through the emergency exit. He was inside.

  Fell nearly stumbled. Nolan lay splayed on the dirt. Grissom had shot him like a dog. Shot him without a word or a pause while Nolan stood in front of him unarmed.

  Reavy let out a cry. “Done.”

  Fell turned her head. Reavy was lagging, her face still striated with pain. But her eyes were alight, her lips drawn back. She grunted with effort, bringing up the shotgun in the general direction of the blue jumbo jet.

  Grissom edged into the gloomy interior of the jet, a tangled hole of torn-out seats and tumbled wiring. He looked up one way and down the other. No sound, no movement. Where were Helms and the child?

  He ran forward through the plane. He saw no sign of them. Not in the cockpit, not in the remnants of the galley.

  Outside, footsteps rang on the ladder.

  He looked around again.

  They weren’t here.

  He glanced to the far side of the plane. The emergency exit on the other wing was also open. It had been tossed out, and on the wing were fresh scratches.

  And footprints in the thin coating of sand on the wing surface.

  They’d gone.

  They’d climbed out the other exit and split. And Nolan, in an act of fool misloyalty, had tried to keep him from seeing their escape path.

  He spun around and fired the revolver back through the door he’d come through, at the ladder. Then he jumped out the far door and ran along the wing.

  Sarah cringed on the ladder, her mouth so dry she couldn’t spit, fingers gripping the hot rungs. The shot had grazed the wing. It echoed like a wire being pulled.

  Beneath it she heard running footsteps, distant and receding.

  Grissom had gone out the far side of the fuselage and was headed along the other wing. Why?

  Her phone buzzed again. She pulled it from her pocket. “Danisha?”

  “We gotta go.”

  “Where are you?”

  Danisha looked out the window of the wrecked B-52 where she and Zoe were hiding. She was facing back toward the blue KLM jumbo where she’d left the SUV. Three planes were parked wingtip-to-wingtip between the KLM and the B-52, like a chorus line. She and Zoe had walked along those wings and jumped from one plane to the next, never leaving footprints on the ground. She thought they’d been safe. But outside, it wasn’t birdsong that echoed. It was gunshots, and now footsteps. In the distance a man appeared at the top of a bomber’s hulking fuselage. He had a weapon in his hand. He balanced and skidded over the roof of the craft and kept coming, headed in their direction.

  “We’re in the military section. I parked and we jumped from plane to plane. We’re in a B-52 and somebody’s coming. A man.”

  “Get out of there,” Sarah said.

  Danisha took Zoe’s hand. And she saw his face. The Shattering Angel.

  Sarah yelled, “Lawless. They’re not here. They’re in another plane—a bomber. And Briggs is headed for it.”

  She looked down. Lawless had dragged Nolan back to the black car and propped him up. He was holding him in place, one hand on his shoulder, another supporting his head, talking to him.

  She hesitated on the ladder. A pang took her in the chest. Nolan was staring at nothing, his shirt a sopping mess of blood.

  “Michael,” she said.

  He held onto Nolan’s face a second longer, talked to him a second longer, as though as long as he spoke, he could keep a conversation going, and Nolan would still be alive. Then Lawless’s shoulders dropped. He gently lowered Nolan to the ground.

  Lawless looked up. He didn’t need to shake his head.

  Sarah clung for a second to the ladder, strangely stung. Then behind Lawless, somewhere under the mass of scrapped planes, a woman cried out.

  Fell and Reavy were coming. Sarah scrambled onto the wing.

  “Lawless, come on,” she yelled.

  He didn’t move.

  “Lawless.”

  He stood and hoisted the Remington and faced away, toward the angel’s wings. “Run, Sarah. I’ll cover you.”

  She ran to the emergency exit door. She was halfway through when someone fired a shotgun.

  67

  Sarah scrambled inside the fuselage, yelling, “Lawless!”

  The blast of the shotgun was followed by return fire, terrible sounds, flat and ripping. She plunged across the interior of the plane, out the emergency exit on the far side, and ran along the wing.

  At the end of it, she saw a gap. Three feet, maybe, to another wingtip, another commercial jetliner. She accelerated and jumped and landed half off balance. She slid to her knees.

  “Jesus.”

  Ahead, now two hundred yards distant, Grissom Briggs crested the top of a B-52, looking like a mite on the back of a beast. He slid onto the far wing and charged away.

  She got to her feet and clunked across the wing after him. She climbed through an emergency exit into the jet and out the other side. She paused to look back, hoping to see Lawless bringing up the rear, but nobody was there.

  Sarah put on a burst of speed and aimed for the wingtip. There was another short gap—but she could make it. Zoe had made it. She watched her balance and leaped.

  Below her, between the wings, on the blinding white sand, stood Reavy. She held a shotgun, aimed skyward.

  Holy Christ. Sarah yelled, a crazy shocked cry, midflight, unprotected. She landed and behind her, close, a shot echoed.

  The wingtip twelve inches back whanged and split.

  She ran, the Glock swinging. Below the wing, Reavy pumped the shotgun.

  Sarah got through the door of the plane a second before the shotgun blew another hole in the wing. She kept going, her mouth dry, her legs shaking so hard she thought they might buckle beneath her. She looked back and still saw no sign of Lawless.

  And heard no more shots. She realized that Reavy was running along the sand beneath the jet, trying to get ahead of her. She climbed out onto the far wing and ran, eyes on the bombers ahead.

  Fell dropped to her knees by the marshal’s car. Nolan lay slack on the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. His chest was still. His blood soaked the white sand beneath him.

  She tried t
o say his name, and no words emerged. She’d seen so many dead, but her uncle, the one person who had always been kind to her, the only one in the family who had taken her side when times got tough, who thought it was wrong when her baby was taken away …

  She didn’t touch him. She stared, and didn’t understand the stinging sensation behind her eyes. It burned.

  Grissom had shot him. The marshal had dragged him here and laid him down and she supposed that meant Nolan had slipped into the arms of the law. But Grissom had shot Nolan without so much as speaking to him. All because Nolan had blocked the wing door with his own body, to keep Grissom from getting hold of his child.

  Grissom had declared war on anybody who was standing in front of him, and decided his gun was the purifying force of the universe. Grissom had decided he didn’t need scripture to show him the way—he was the way, and if you were in his path, good-bye.

  Reavy had smiled. Limping along, shotgun at the ready, Reavy had smiled when Nolan fell from the wing and hit the ground.

  In the distance, she heard people running across the wings of a jet. Grissom was after Zoe.

  She needed to get her first. She stood and ran after them.

  Sarah ran along the drooping wing of the B-52. Beyond it lay the airplane abattoir. Bombers sat chopped, their amputated wings and tails lying on the sand beside them. An enormous crane loomed in the distance, the heavy steel blade of its guillotine hanging high above the scene. Excavators with grappler claws were parked nearby. Around them the carcasses of commercial jetliners lay ripped and strewn across the desert floor.

  In her pocket, the call with Danisha was live and on speaker. Danisha said, “Somebody’s coming. Think it’s him. Sarah …”

  Sarah saw Grissom a hundred yards ahead. He was climbing a ladder to enter the front door of a 747.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  Below her came the sound of the shotgun being pumped. She shouted and ducked and kept running. The gun fired, blowing shards of aluminum from the wing in front of her. Below the hole Reavy limped into view.

  Sarah pulled to a stop. Not without a goddamn fight. Nerves crackling, she swung the Glock around and aimed straight at the hole in the wing. She fired. The pistol kicked. She ran.

  Metal twanging beneath her feet, she thumped to the end of the wing. As she leaped to the hard white sand, she fired another shot straight down. She landed hard and rolled. The air felt charged with static electricity. When she came up, she saw Reavy on the ground, taking cover beneath the wing. She was trying to stand but one of her legs wouldn’t hold. She was using the shotgun to haul herself up. Sarah steadied herself, thinking, It’s Reavy or Zoe. Both hands on the weapon, she fired. And hit nothing—she was out of range. Reavy didn’t even flinch. Instead, she rose and took more shells from her pocket and began to reload the shotgun. Sarah ran again, hot, nearly insane, to the ladder. She started climbing.

  From inside the jet came a muffled gunshot. Danisha cried out.

  “No,” Sarah said.

  She kept climbing, the gun clanging against the rungs of the ladder. The door above her drew nearer. Ten feet, seven, four. Sarah squirmed up another step and threw herself inside. She squirreled into the plane and lay in the sudden shade, panting.

  She held the Glock with both hands and rolled to her knees. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Her nerves felt afire. Where was Grissom?

  Just for a second, she thought she heard a little voice near tears. Every last bit of adrenaline in her body poured into her bloodstream.

  Outside came heavy breathing and limping footsteps. Sarah scuttled to the doorway, grabbed the ladder, and began pulling it up into the jet. It was flimsy but awkward as hell. She heard Reavy jump, trying to grab it. She missed and landed with a moan. Frantically, Sarah manhandled the ladder inside.

  She paused, breathing hard, trying to quiet her heart and lungs so she could hear. When she turned from the door, her eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  The giant jet was half-gutted. Rows of seats had been torn out. But the stairway to the upper deck was still in place. And that’s where she heard noise, the sound of somebody shoving aside debris. The sound of Danisha crying in pain.

  Silence from Zoe. Sarah ran for the stairs.

  68

  Sarah edged up the stairs of the 747, deep in shadow, the Glock growing heavy in her hand. From above her came a repetitive thudding. Somewhere a heavy diesel engine gunned. Near the top of the stairs, she crouched and peered gingerly at the upper deck. It stretched forward a good fifty feet, past rows of seats and a narrow passageway to the cockpit.

  The cockpit door was closed and bolted. Outside it Grissom stood battering it with his shoulder.

  On the floor between his feet lay Mousie.

  She stood and raised the Glock. She steadied her aim with a two-handed grip. Her vision pulsed. She took a breath—and held still.

  Was the cockpit door armored? Zoe and Danisha were on the other side. She couldn’t risk firing .40-caliber rounds into old plastic and plywood.

  With a metallic shriek, the entire aircraft lurched.

  Sarah grabbed the staircase railing. Below her at the bottom of the stairs, where the main deck had lain in gloom, a blinding strip of sunlight now poured across the floor. In front of the wings, a gaping hole had been torn in the fuselage.

  The excavator’s grappling arm swung into view. Its claw attacked the airframe again and with a diesel roar ripped out a new six-foot hole. The plane shuddered and rocked. Reavy was tearing the jet apart.

  Heart thundering, Sarah raised the gun again toward Grissom’s back, and tried to see whether the cockpit door had been reinforced with locks and a spyhole. The claw opened and spilled vast chunks of metal and insulation and wiring on the ground. It rose again, aimed for the door Sarah had come through, and sank its teeth into the floor of the main deck, shaking the jet like a predator with a rib cage in its teeth. Thrown off her feet, Sarah stumbled down the stairs. She hit hard, slid hands out like Superman, and smashed against a bulkhead. A chunk of insulation and airframe spilled on her, trapping her arm underneath a pile of debris. She tried to worm free. The Glock was tangled in wiring. She twisted and pulled, but couldn’t dislodge it.

  The claw rose again, jaws opening.

  “Shit.”

  She yanked again, but the Glock was firmly entangled. Shit. She let go of the gun, withdrew her arm from the debris pile, and rolled aside. The claw ate the debris, Glock included, and scooped it away with a six-foot chunk of the floor.

  She scrambled to her feet, barely able to breathe in the abrupt plume of dust and fiberglass that swirled from the torn airframe. Upstairs Grissom was still battering the cockpit door, trying to get past Danisha’s barricade, but now it sounded like he was attacking the door with a heavy object.

  And she remembered her phone. Heading for the stairs, she pulled it from her pocket. “Danisha.”

  She heard hard breathing, and more distantly, the sound of Grissom battering on the cockpit door with something like a lead pipe or sledgehammer.

  “Danisha,” she repeated.

  The diesel excavator roared again and the grappling arm appeared. But this time it opened its claws and reached into the interior of the jet.

  It swung toward Sarah, blind and raging, its teeth dripping torn metal and cabling. She jumped out of its reach across piles of debris.

  “Danisha!”

  “Sarah …” Danisha was nearly whispering. “Door’s not gonna hold. So listen.”

  Then, audible from the deck above, Danisha yelled, “Aft. Get aft. Cargo hold—she’s …”

  Sarah stilled. What was Danisha doing?

  “Aft, there’s stairs down to the hold. Hurry, Sarah.”

  Then she knew—or hoped she knew. And she gambled.

  She took a big breath and shouted up the stairs. “Zoe?”

  “Go,” Danisha shouted.

  She turned and ran down the length of the jet, climbing over jumbled seats and ripped ri
bbons of carpet and buckled sections of the floor. She ran for the back, loudly, shouting and stumbling. And listening.

  She heard reckless footsteps pound down the stairs. Grissom was coming.

  Every hair on her head prickled to attention. She thought, Okay, come on. She put the phone to her ear.

  “He’s coming.”

  “Good,” Danisha said.

  Sarah’s heart leaped. She shoved the phone in her pocket and scrambled past tilting lavatory doors and a set of beverage carts that had come loose from a galley.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Grissom was down the stairs and charging after her. Behind him, the grappling arm rose again. Crouched on top of its clenched claw was Fell. She was getting a lift.

  Reavy nudged the grappler to the edge of a hole she’d torn in the airframe. Fell jumped through it.

  Reavy ripped another hunk from the jetliner and spat it on the sand. Sarah kept going.

  Let ’em come. All of ’em.

  She just had to get them to follow her, and keep herself alive long enough to let Danisha escape with Zoe.

  Zoe wasn’t in the cargo hold. She was in the cockpit with Danisha. That’s what her friend had been trying to tell her. She’d been trying to misdirect Grissom into following Sarah. Sarah was sure of it—she’d seen Mousie on the floor outside the cockpit door. If Zoe had run from the cockpit on her own, she wouldn’t have left Mousie there. She would have picked him up. The only reason he got left behind was that Danisha had hauled her to safety behind the cockpit door.

  Grissom shoved debris aside, blundering through the jet. Fell, farther away, was quieter. That scared Sarah more. And now the excavator had subsided to a low idle.

  Then a new engine fired up, a rolling drone. Another big machine.

  At the back of the plane, still twenty yards away, was the aft galley. Like everything else, it looked like it had been looted in a riot.

  Outside, the new engine revved up and a creaking sound twanged through the air.

  A second later, a towering shriek tore through the wing of the 747. The jet rocked and outside came a hideous collapsing sound. She looked out the empty windows. Dust was billowing, huge white swirls of sand. Then she saw the blade of the guillotine rise slowly on its cables.