Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  They started back down the hallway, fast.

  “Has to be an exit out the front, across the factory floor,” Aiden said.

  Piper’s feet tangled again. Her head lolled to one side.

  “No, girl,” Harper said. “Walk. You have to.”

  They rushed down the hall with everything they had, but Harper could tell they were moving more slowly than they had even five minutes earlier.

  In the earpiece, she heard Zero’s voice. “Found Zhurov and Rodchenko. Dead.”

  “Fuck,” Travis answered.

  Aiden kept going. “Don’t slow down.”

  A second later, the hallway emerged onto the factory floor. It was spooky with moonlight. There was a large set of double doors on the far side.

  Harper said, “Those doors have to lead to the exit to the front gate. If we can get through them, I can run for it. The MINI’s there. I can drive it back and pick you two up.”

  Aiden nodded.

  They rushed onto the factory floor. They were five feet from the double doors when the first shouts echoed behind them.

  She looked back. At the far end of the factory floor stood a dark figure in a hoodie. Every hair on her head stood to cold attention.

  Piper turned her head.

  “Don’t look,” Harper said.

  They shoved through the double doors, into a hallway that led to the front entrance. Aiden found a metal broom handle and jammed it through the door handles. It was better than nothing but wouldn’t stop them for long.

  Twenty yards ahead was the rolling garage door that led to the driveway, the gate, and the road. It was open. Outside was the chilly desert night, and freedom. Piper gasped, almost a cry of desperate joy.

  Behind them, the doors Aiden had jammed shut rattled. They hurried toward the rolling door. On the wall beside it, a red warning light began to flash. The door started to roll down.

  Behind them came sounds of battering, something heavy smashing against the jammed doors. Ahead, now just ten yards away, the rolling door creaked down. There was room for them to get under, but it was diminishing fast.

  Piper slid in Harper’s arms like a sack of rice. Aiden rushed to Harper’s side and started to pick her up.

  “No.” Harper said. “You stop anybody coming at us. I can carry her.”

  She crouched. With Aiden’s help, she got her shoulder under Piper’s midriff and slung her over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Groaning, she stood up. Her legs were shaking.

  She hunkered toward the rolling door. Piper’s arms hung limp, hitting her in the back. The door rolled lower, creaking and clattering.

  She let out a manic gasp and hugged tight to Piper’s legs. Together with Aiden, she bent low and ran beneath the door as it fell. They stumbled out into the cold darkness and Harper fell hard to her knees.

  Piper crashed off her shoulders to the concrete. “Jesus.”

  Harper said, “We’re out. We have to keep going.”

  The rolling door groaned down and hit the floor and stopped. The silence outside was all at once vast and welcome and terrifying.

  Harper said, “Arm over my shoulder. Let’s go.”

  Moaning, Piper sat up. With an effort that seemed like she was moving through molasses, Harper got to her knees, bearing Piper’s weight. She groaned to her feet.

  They heard more smashing sounds deep in the building, Zero trying to get through the doors. Aiden turned to the wall beside the garage door, where there was a large switch. With his HK, he fired at the mechanism. Twice. Sparks ejected and smoke curled out, sizzling.

  Harper had never felt so relieved and scared all at once. Aiden backed away from the door. Harper turned toward the gate and the run to freedom.

  The MINI was gone.

  She stared blankly at the desert, and the darkness beyond the gate, and a part of her thought: It’s there. I just don’t see it. It has to be there. Why am I not seeing it?

  She heard a sound she took too long to understand was her own half sobs. The car was gone.

  Behind them, an engine buzzed to life again and the rolling door began to crank open. Aiden’s shots hadn’t fried the interior circuitry. Zero and Travis were coming.

  “Oh, my God.” Harper’s breathing stuttered, until she said, “We have to run.”

  Piper whimpered. “I can’t. I can’t walk. I can’t go any farther.”

  Harper tightened an arm around Piper’s waist, but the girl sagged and resisted. “I can’t.”

  Aiden said, “Sorenstam’s car.”

  Harper said, “I’ll go.”

  Piper grabbed Harper’s shirt. “No. Don’t leave me. Don’t go, please.”

  Aiden said, “Take shelter.” He looked around at the factory complex. “I’ll find a way around the outside and get the unmarked car. I’ll be back.”

  He looked at Harper. She was trying not to cry. He took off.

  Harper said, “Piper.”

  She turned and knelt and told the girl to climb on her back.

  Without a sound, Piper threw an arm around Harper’s neck and leaned her weight on Harper’s back. Harper wrestled Piper’s knees up against her elbows. Leaning forward for balance, carrying Piper piggyback, she tried to continue. The gate loomed but didn’t seem to get any closer.

  Piper said, “Wait.”

  Harper didn’t slow down. If she slowed down, she would never get back up to speed. If she slowed down, they were dead.

  “To the left,” Piper said. “There’s a storage yard behind an interior fence. Look—the fence has a break in it.”

  She weakly lifted a hand and pointed. A section of the fence leading to the storage yard had been torn open. Arms burning with the strain, Harper veered left and squeezed through.

  The light was nearly nonexistent here, the ground dusty. Harper looked for a place to hide. Behind a clutch of fifty-five-gallon drums and a six-foot stack of rotting wooden pallets, she sagged and went down on all fours.

  Piper slid off her back to the ground. Harper tried to rise, but her legs wouldn’t straighten. She crawled back to the fence and shoved the torn section closed, awkwardly.

  They were out. Outside, alone, unseen, as far as she could determine. No security lights came on. Moonlight whitened the walls of the factory. She peered around for telltale cameras but saw none.

  She crawled back to Piper’s side, fell to her butt, and pulled Piper against her in a hug.

  “Almost home. We just have a little farther to go.”

  Piper nodded. They leaned back against the pallets. Harper caught her breath and listened for the sound of a big block engine.

  Instead, she heard a clinking chain.

  From the shadows near the building, the dog appeared.

  54

  The dog padded from the shadows. Its eyes glinted in the moonlight. Its leash scritched on the concrete behind it.

  A buzzing rose in Harper’s head. Her mouth felt full of cotton.

  She got to one knee in front of Piper. “Hold still.”

  The dog walked with predatory deliberation, its steps full of restrained energy, its head low. Its teeth seemed to take up the horizon.

  She needed something long and heavy and blunt. A two-by-four. An RPG launcher.

  Piper slowly got to her feet.

  “Shh,” Harper whispered. “Don’t move. Don’t run.”

  Piper put a hand on Harper’s arm. “No. It’s okay.”

  Harper turned to her in confusion. Piper was staring at the dog. In the moonlight, the girl was as pale as a crushed lily. But her grip on Harper’s arm actually was a grip. She took a step.

  “Hey, boy,” she murmured. “Hey, dog.”

  She spoke soothingly. The dog stood, ears flat, eyes on her.

  Piper inched closer. “It’s okay, boy. I’m your friend. You’re
a good boy, aren’t you?”

  The dog’s ears pricked up. Piper crept forward and slowly picked up its leash.

  “Sit,” she said.

  The dog sat.

  Harper gaped. The dog sat, breathing fast. The leash hung loose from Piper’s hand. She had seemingly mesmerized the dog. It stretched its neck, sniffing at the blood on her shirt, but stayed sitting. Still, unless she could control it, she might as well have pulled the pin on a grenade.

  Harper murmured, “I’ll find something we can tie the leash to.”

  Something heavy, that it couldn’t drag while chasing them. It looked strong enough to pull a tractor.

  “Don’t bother,” Piper said.

  “Careful. It’s not a normal dog.” It was a chain saw with four legs and a tail.

  “I’ve got him.”

  Piper softly whistled. The dog rose off its haunches. She twisted the leash around her good hand to remove the slack. Harper’s skin prickled again. Her nerves were vibrating at some quantum frequency, invisibly quick.

  “Hold still,” Piper said. “He’ll attack you. I can feel it through the leash. He’s nothing but a bullet, and I’m holding the trigger.” She tugged again on the leash. “Eagle, heel.”

  She raised her chin, a signal. A motor ground into action along the wall of the factory. Somebody had thrown a switch that activated a rolling door.

  A chasm seemed to open. The rolling door slid wide, giving a view into a half-illuminated assembly room at the east end of the factory building. Through the door, out of the shadows, came Travis Maddox.

  He swaggered across the concrete paddock, backlit by the factory lights. Harper tensed to run. The dog strained against the leash.

  Piper said, “Unh-uh.”

  Travis raised a finger and wagged it at Harper. A lament rose toward her lips.

  It was the first time she had seen him in ten years. The decade had worked a transformation on him.

  He may have grown a couple of inches. He may have been wearing motorcycle boots. His heels clicked on the cement. He looked lean and cut, with shoulders broadened by prison weight lifting, and all the baby fat burned away. In the light angling from the factory door, his eyes were deep-set and lined. His corporate haircut looked like a bad joke. He was wearing the same black tactical gear as his dead Spartan Security goons.

  Piper handed him the leash. “You were right. Harper and Garrison and Sorenstam—they killed your men. No warning, no chance to surrender. They just took them out, like it was their privilege.” She sounded semi-stunned.

  “Piper,” Harper said, her voice half-racked and breaking. “Why?”

  Standing beside Travis, Piper no longer looked wounded and weak. She no longer looked injured at all. In her right hand, she held Harper’s Swiss Army knife. She had swiped it from Harper’s back pocket, probably while she was slung over Harper’s shoulder in the fireman’s carry.

  “Nobody cut you,” Harper said. “The kidnapping wasn’t a kidnapping.”

  Travis petted the dog’s cement-block head. “You’re slow, but you got there.”

  Her strength drained from her fingertips. She was backed into the last space on the chessboard. She knew it was half a minute from checkmate.

  So make them take you down.

  Don’t give it to them. Aiden was coming. The local sheriffs were coming. If she had half a minute, she would use it. Every second was a chance for rescue. She stood, her fists slowly drawing tight. Fight.

  “Good one, Travis. Kudos. You punked me good,” she said.

  Piper handed the dog’s leash to Travis and walked up to Harper. Her face was dirty, but even in the moonlight, she looked flushed. She eyed Harper for a long second, then inhaled and spit in her face.

  Travis laughed.

  Hot spit dribbled down Harper’s cheek. She wiped it off. Her vision had seemingly gone out of true. Piper looked like the same girl who’d been clinging to her all night, but something else was animating her. Something inside, snakelike and venomous.

  Travis walked over, stopping directly behind Piper. He was giving her room, maybe to throw a punch, but Harper could sense him pulling the invisible strings.

  Harper stared at the girl. “You have permission to speak?”

  Travis spread his arms. A grand gesture, as if he were giving Piper permission to fly.

  “I yield the stage,” he said.

  Piper stared at Harper. “You get it now?”

  “No.”

  Say it isn’t true, Harper thought. But she knew that betrayal was the way of the world. It was the way she had been raised. It was every lost weekend with her mom. It was being left in a wrecked car on the highway downhill from this godforsaken compound, alone and facing the law for a crime her own mother had committed. It was caring for this girl, and seeing hatred spin in her eyes.

  “Tell me this is a joke,” Harper said.

  For the length of a breath, Piper stayed quiet. Then a fault line seemed to slip inside her.

  “A joke? How could I make a joke? Drew is dead. How could I ever find anything funny again?”

  Harper stood and listened. I know.

  Piper glared at her, searching every facet of Harper’s face. “That’s it? Silence? You have nothing to say?”

  Harper didn’t move.

  Piper stepped closer. “You don’t, do you? Drew is dead, and you made it happen. It’s your fault. And you have not one word to say.”

  She didn’t. Speaking would get her nowhere. Her face heated and her heart thundered.

  “You thought you got away with it,” Piper said. “You still do, don’t you? Look at you. You’re just taking it. You’re not even reacting. You’re the one who’s responsible for my brother being dead and it doesn’t even matter to you?”

  Harper raised her hands, helpless. It seemed only to enrage Piper all the more. In the background, the dog stirred.

  “I know all about you, Susannah. Travis told me. All this time, you’ve been playing innocent. The goody two-shoes, Navy veteran, Miss A-student. What bullshit.” She leaned toward Harper’s face. “You’re a thief and a whore.”

  “Not a whore, honey. Never.”

  Piper seemed to get knocked back at that. Her mouth parted.

  “I loved Drew,” Harper said.

  Piper swung an open palm at Harper’s face. Harper blocked it. Piper pulled back to swing again before she remembered that her other hand held a knife. She raised it, rigidly, at Harper’s neck.

  “I will. I will do it,” Piper said.

  Harper held still. “And I love you, Piper.”

  For the smallest moment, Piper seemed to process that, and Harper had hope.

  Then Piper seemed to ingest it, and the words hit her nervous system, and she didn’t relax, or soften. She crouched and gripped the knife tighter, and Harper realized she was going to lunge.

  Harper raised her hands defensively, but as Piper drew back the knife, Travis stepped forward and grabbed the girl’s arm.

  “No,” he said.

  Piper bared her teeth. “Why not?”

  “Because I run the schedule.”

  Piper was leaning forward in Travis’s grip, like the dog straining at its leash. He took the weapon from her hand. She backed off. Then pointed at Harper. “Eye for an eye,” she said. “You for my brother.”

  Harper felt a weird shift in the air behind her. A heavy presence drew near, silent and abrasive. Eddie Azerov stepped into view.

  “Hello, Zannah. Let’s go.”

  55

  He smelled the same. Fifteen years on, Eddie Azerov smelled the same as he had when they were fourteen, same as he had the night he told Harper she worked for him or she got eaten by the wolves. He smelled like sweat and cigarettes and fear.

  He moved in on her, a shadowed face behind the drooping hood of his s
weatshirt. A chain clinked, the dog collar he attached to his wallet in the pocket of his sagging jeans. The guy hadn’t changed his style since he was twelve. She knew he was stuck, knew he had the emotional maturity of a middle schooler, and knew that meant nothing good when it came to the next few minutes. He was a violent felon with the impulsivity and vindictiveness of a child, and the amoral wants of a sociopath.

  He tilted his head, sharply, and lifted his chin as though to sniff her. “We’re going now.”

  “Zero, I won’t ever go anyplace with you again,” she said. “Whatever we do, we do it right here.”

  He was so close that his breath moved her hair. His teeth had worsened in the last decade, growing more crooked inside lips that looked gray in the moonlight.

  He leaned in. His eyes had a dark sheen, almost glazed. She held his gaze, but her left leg began to twitch. He was not there, she realized. Whatever made a person a human being had turned to sand and blown away. What was left in its place was a spirit that was somehow void, antimatter, a thing that fed on light and blotted it out. It was chaos, entropy, and it was looking for fuel.

  He tilted his head the opposite direction, a quick swerve and snap. And then he clacked his teeth.

  “Su. San. Nah.”

  The twitch in her leg worsened. She realized that Aiden was probably dead.

  Travis snapped his fingers. Zero stayed up in her face for a moment longer, then stepped back.

  Travis took her arm. “We’re going for a walk.”

  And he didn’t smell of sweat and fear. He smelled of leather and aftershave and gun oil. He smelled of certainty. He marched her toward the open door of the factory building.

  They walked in the rough moonlight across the dusty storage yard, Zero and Travis on either side of Harper, Piper walking ahead, half turned so she could look back.

  Zero leaned in again from her left, and for a second, she thought he might take a bite out of her shoulder. The dog bulled along at his side, shoulders switching, head low.

  “Why are you doing this, Piper?” Harper said.