The Preston Six Collection: (Book 1, 2 and 3)

by Ryan, Matt

  Julie wiped her mouth and stood straight.

  “You guys okay?” he asked.

  “Let’s just move faster, please.”

  Lucas picked up the pace and by the time they were a hundred feet from the door, there wasn’t any way for him to create a path. They would have to walk on bodies. Stepping on the first grinner, his foot sagged deep into the body. He heard Julie behind him heaving and coughing. He kept moving, the faster they got to the door, the closer they were to getting their friends back.

  “Stomping grapes,” Julie called out.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “Just tell me I’m stomping on grapes.” She looked at the sky and took another tentative step.

  Lucas knew she would fall if she didn’t watch where she was going. Turning around, he stomped over the bodies. He took her hand and she lowered her head, panic swelling in her face. He bent over and swept her up into his arms. She looked shocked, and he thought she might protest. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest.

  He turned and carried her the rest of the way to the door.

  When they reached the door, Lucas glanced down at Julie. He set her on her feet in front of the door. She found a small space not occupied by a charcoaled body.

  “Let’s go in, anything’s better than this.” Julie grabbed the door handle and opened the door.

  There, in the stairwell, were Poly and Samantha . . . hovered over Joey’s limp body.

  JOEY FELT HIS HEAD JOSTLING up and down. His fingertips rubbed against fabric. The rhythmic sound of heavy breathing and the smell of sweat—where was he? One crusty eye opened and he gazed at the building next to him moving by. Passing a window, he saw their reflection. Hank carried him over his shoulder as he ran. Hank!

  And Poly, with knife in hand, jogged behind him, looking in every direction with a nervous look on her face.

  “Poly,” Joey whispered. His throat felt dry and the word was full of air. She didn’t hear him. “Poly,” he croaked out. Hank stopped and lowered him on his back.

  “Joey?” The big guy hovered over him.

  “You’re here . . . how?” Joey asked. He must be dreaming or worse, he was trapped in another scene generator and none of this was real.

  Lucas’s face appeared behind Hank’s. “We rescued you, man.”

  The idea wouldn’t sink into his foggy head. They all seemed so real.

  Poly lay down next to him and hugged his head. “I thought we were going to lose you, don’t ever do that again.”

  Samantha knelt on the other side and patted back his hair. She stared at him with blood shot eyes. Had she been crying? “How are you feeling?”

  He thought of his last thoughts. He was dying in the stairwell with them. It was so hot. Now he was on a sidewalk with all of his friends surrounding him.

  “I don’t know, my head hurts. Let’s see if I can get up.” If he could stand, he thought he would be able to decide if it was real. He rolled on his side and pushed himself up. His head pounded in retaliation and he sat on his knees, waiting for the wave of pain to pass. He pushed himself up to his feet. “We’re together?” he asked, taking each of his friends in. They were alive, in front of him. All of them.

  The thoughts of what he’d been through flooded his mind with shocking detail. What did Lucas, Julie, and Hank have to endure to get here? “You’re alive?” he directed at Lucas.

  “Yep—” Lucas started to say.

  Joey hugged him, then moved to Hank, Julie, Samantha, and Poly. He never thought he would see them again. He had written off this part of his life, given up. His eyes watered and he couldn’t stop taking in each of them as if seeing them for the first time. His whole body shook with emotion and his throat clogged up with unspoken words.

  “You’re a bit late to the party,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, you should have seen Lucas, bawling like a baby in the stairwell,” Hank snickered.

  “Hey, don’t act like you didn’t get emotional. I didn’t think you were ever going to let go of our group hug.”

  Joey smiled. With each of them surrounding him, he felt as if he could take on anything. Even his body felt better, just knowing the Six were back together.

  “I can keep carrying you,” Hank offered.

  The idea of flopping over Hank’s shoulder sounded like a nightmare. “I can walk.”

  “Dude, we need to be running,” Lucas said.

  Joey’s head stopped throbbing long enough for a rational thought. “Where are we?”

  “Still in LA.”

  He glanced behind him at the long, straight street with multi-story buildings on each side. Cars filled the sides of the streets, many with broken windows and rusted bodies. Weeds invaded the cracks in the road.

  “Think you can run? There’s like ten million grinners in this city,” Julie asked.

  “I think I can.”

  “Well, let’s get this train a moving.” Lucas adjusted his bow and pointed down the street.

  “You can hang onto my shoulder,” Hank offered.

  Joey didn’t need a shoulder, the natural high of seeing his friends was more than any drug or crutch could ever do. He couldn’t stop smiling. “Let me try it on my own.”

  After a few minutes of a light jog, he felt the blood pumping in his body. He felt better than he had in a while. The puncture marks on his arms had turned into small red dots and soon they would be gone.

  “So, what’d I miss?” Joey was dying to know what his friends did to get there, and where Harris was.

  Hank, Julie, and mostly Lucas, recounted their journey for the next hour. Joey couldn’t believe their journey. They should have been dead five times over, but they made it, they were here. He kept counting each of them. The encounter at the hotel wrenched at his gut and when they got to Bob, Lucas started walking. He told them about how he was there when it all went down with their parents. He was the one who allowed Isaac access to the Alius stone.

  “What are the chances?” Joey asked, bewildered by it all.

  “Infinity.” Lucas said.

  “Well, it happened, so it can’t be infinity. More like, one in a billion,” Julie replied.

  Lucas ignored her correction and continued to explain how they escaped into the city and how he caught the grinners on fire.

  “It was you who almost killed us in that?” Samantha asked.

  “Like I knew you were behind that door, trapped in a stairwell,” Lucas said.

  “Well, it ended okay,” Julie added.

  They ran up a freeway ramp, clogged with cars, sticking to the edge of the road. Lucas moved slower and kept his bow out. Joey felt for his guns for the hundredth time. He glanced at each car as they passed, looking for that small chance of a gun on the dash, or frozen in a dead person’s hand.

  “Why don’t we grab a Tesla car again, like you said brought you here?” Poly asked.

  “I’ve seen a few, but we need to get past this clogged mess first.” Lucas walked around a car that hit the concrete sidewall.

  Lucas had changed; he’d lost some of his joviality and innocence. He seemed older now. His confidence in his jokes had translated to confidence in leading them. Joey had failed at that role at a number of occasions. Maybe Lucas could fill the spot better than he could. He watched Lucas pull his bow back and launch an arrow at a grinner stumbling toward them. He’d seen him do this half a dozen times now since he woke, and he’d never missed.

  “You feeling okay?” Samantha walked next to him.

  “Yeah. How about you? You were in the same heat box.”

  “Marcus pulled a lot out of you, and recently too. You weren’t at one hundred percent.”

  Poly moved to his other side. The knife never left her hand.

  “How are you doing, Poly?”

  “Great. Even in this wretched place, having us together feels like we can do anything.”

  “Yeah.” He knew what she meant. The world around them was collapsing and ro
tting. Things lurked in every corner, wanting to kill them and eat them. But when he could count to six with his friends, they felt unstoppable.

  “If it’s not too difficult, I’d like to hear what happened to you guys.” Hank met eyes with Joey. Joey almost felt embarrassed about their hardships compared to his friends. He had been living in a wonderland, even if his life was being leached from him every night.

  “Yeah, Poly and Samantha been talking about a freaking country manor and stuff.”

  Joey started off by telling them what happened after he’d been taken by Max, seeing Samantha for the first time. Then the Mindyland started, he tried to hide his wonder when describing the amazing things in the land, the strange robot caretakers. Samantha told them about the door, it was her idea. She found it and brought them to the manor where Joey collapsed. She left out the kissing, and skipped to the day Poly arrived. Poly looked at the ground and he saw her white knuckles on the hand holding her knife.

  Over the next hour, the cars began to thin out and the search for an all-electric car started. The first one they found wouldn’t start and by the third, Joey started to wonder if they had picked a fluke of a car on their first try, like Julie’s one in a billion.

  He kept close to Samantha and Poly, while they kept close to him. Julie, Hank, and Lucas took the front line, forming two groups.

  “Hey, I see another up there.” Lucas jogged ahead to a red car.

  They caught up to him and he was already in the front seat.

  “Give this one a minute before you try to turn it on.” Julie sat in the passenger seat and Joey leaned over, sticking his head in the car. At least this one didn’t have bodies in it. “The batteries are taking power. Go ahead, try it.”

  Lucas turned the key and the dash lit up. He high-fived Julie, and Joey smiled. They piled in the car with Lucas driving, Hank in the passenger seat, Julie sat on the center console and Joey sat in the middle of Poly and Samantha. The AC blew cold air as they moved forward. Lucas took it to the shoulder and drove in the dirt. The car bounced and jittered along the unkempt path, but it was far better than walking.

  Hank dug into his bag of stuff and handed a packet of condensed water to everyone, and two to Joey. Next, was some weird dehydrated food squares. Anything with calories was good to them at this point.

  “You know,” Julie held her Panavice close to her face, “if we head south and go through Big Bear, we can avoid Victorville.”

  “Julie, you’re amazing. I’ve been sick to my stomach thinking about going through Genter’s area.” Lucas took a right turn on the off ramp marked 210 East. “So why did Marcus put you into that Mindyland playground thing?” Lucas asked as he looked in the rearview mirror.

  Joey took a deep breath and figured Samantha hadn’t let on that they were trying to breed them like livestock. He thought of his parents and didn’t want to keep any secrets from the people he loved. “They wanted us to conceive a child.”

  “What?” Julie turned around and gawked at him. “Why?”

  Poly faced him with the same question hanging on her face.

  “I’m not sure, but I think it’s for Marcus.” Samantha said as she stared at the dead cars they passed. “I hadn’t really taken notice until we met the woman in the manor. She was very pushy about me and Joey hooking up. Everything she did seemed to revolve around it.”

  “So . . .” Lucas let his unasked question hang in the air.

  Joey felt Poly’s glare and everything in the car became silent.

  “We didn’t go all the way,” Samantha smiled at him.

  Poly let out a slow breath. He was the only one close enough to hear it.

  They drove up the mountain and the sparse landscape changed into steep hills littered with pine trees. The road became an obstacle course of fallen rocks and dead trees.

  “Take a left, up here,” Julie said.

  Lucas turned the corner, dodging a fallen tree.

  “There’s something in the road,” Julie said.

  “I got it.”

  “No, not that.”

  Lucas jerked the wheel, but it was too late. The car jumped and Joey’s head hit the ceiling. He crashed back down and landed on Poly.

  “Oh no,” Lucas said. The tires flopped on the road, blown out. Lucas pushed on the pedal and turned the car around. Two large trucks pulled in behind them. Lucas spun the wheel and the blown out tires flopped against the fender. He steered the car to go around the truck when it struck the side of the car.

  Joey flew against the window, missing Samantha’s head by inches. His hip struck the glass and he plopped on the floor board.

  “They got us, stop,” Julie screamed.

  Lucas punched the steering wheel.

  Joey, with a pain in his leg climbed up to the seat and inspected Poly and Samantha. They seemed okay. The large pickup truck’s grill stuck against the window and the smell of exhaust filled the car. Two more trucks pulled up on the other side of them and a group of men jumped out, holding a mix of rifles, shotguns, and handguns. If he could get one of those, he might be able to do something.

  Lucas grabbed at his bow, but Julie took it first. “No, there’s too many, you’ll just be killed,” she pleaded with him.

  Lucas gripped the steering wheel and swore loudly. He rolled down his window as the man approached the car with a rifle stuck out in front of him. “Genter, how nice to see you again,” he said.

  The man twitched at the name and pointed his rifle at the backseat of the car. “I see you found your friends.”

  “Yep.”

  “They must mean a great deal to you guys. It would be a shame to see them killed.” Genter pointed his rifle at the back of the car. Joey moved in front, he could take the bullet for the girls.

  “Come on, there’s no need for this, we want the same thing you do. We can go there together now, straight there.”

  Genter lowered his gun and his tongue worked its way around his lips. He glanced at the men around him. “I want them separated.”

  The men with guns opened the car door.

  Joey rubbed his bracelets and wished he’d found a way to remove them before this.

  “No,” Poly yelled and went to stab the man.

  Joey caught her arm and she scowled at him. “Not now, Poly.”

  The man with the gun pried the knife from her hand, grabbed her by the hair, and yanked her out of the car.

  “Easy.” Joey climbed from the car and received a punch to the stomach. He fell to his knees and stared at the man’s grimy grin and unshaven face. The man moved Poly by her hair into the truck that struck them.

  At gun point, they split them up into the four trucks. Joey ended up in the grimy man’s truck with Julie. From the window, he saw them stuff Hank in the back of a truck and Samantha and Lucas into another. He sighed. They’d been free for only a few hours and now they were split and captured again by the man who started it all.

  ENTERING THE POLICE STATION, JOEY and Julie moved past the offices and through a series of doors, before coming into a white hallway with glass windowed doors flanking each side. He passed the first one and saw Hank’s face in the glass. Then Samantha and Lucas. Then Poly. They opened the door to Poly’s room and pushed Joey in the door. They shoved Julie in behind him.

  Poly ran to him and they embraced. Letting him go, she moved to Julie. The small room had a white cot hanging from the wall. The men left the hallway and the door closed with an audible thud.

  Joey sat on the edge of the cot and rubbed his temples. How could they be captured again? The cot moved with the weight of another person sitting on it. He turned to face Julie. She put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s good to see you guys again,” Julie said. “Joey, I have to admit that after that roof scene with Max, I really didn’t think we’d see you again. I’m sorry for ever thinking that.” She took in a deep breath. “This lady right here, however,” she pointed to Poly, “went through a great deal in trying to get back to you. She never
believed you were gone for good.”

  Poly’s back faced them as she looked out the window. Her hand played with the pocket on her pants.

  “Thank you, Poly.”

  “I don’t think you get it. She’s like the rock star of Vanar now; people had posters and were chanting her name. Not to mention, she single-handedly killed Max. And she did all of it just to get back to you.”

  “That’s enough,” Poly said.

  Perplexed, Joey stared at Poly’s back and then to Julie. People made posters of her and chanted her name? What else did she hold back on?

  “Don’t be shy about it, Poly. I mean, you freaking dueled Max on a worldwide stage and won.”

  Poly turned around and crossed her arms. “And how far did that get us? Look at us now, back in someone’s control. Prisoners.”

  She was right. No matter how much they marched forward, it seemed they ended up trapped and held down by everyone around them. The edge showed in Poly’s eyes and Julie’s as well. They both had been in Sanct, battling the entire city and Max. He couldn’t imagine the strain they were both under.

  “You’re both rock stars,” Joey said. “You were alone in a strange city, and look at what you were able to do. What you are still doing. I know we’ll get through this. With us together, I’m more confident than ever we will win.”

  “Right on, Joey,” Lucas cheered in the cell over.

  Poly let her arms fall to her sides. She smiled at him. Had he finally returned a favor to her and made her feel better? He owed her a hundred more.

  A door opened in the hallway. Poly looked through the window.

  “It’s that Genter guy.”

  Joey moved to the window and peered through it with Poly. Genter moved to each small door window and opened them. He leaned against the white wall with one foot against it while he played with a stack of keys. “I’m going to be honest with you right now. You will take me back home—”

  “We’re on our way—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. Lucas, right? Don’t answer, I don’t care. The only reason I don’t kill you, save one, is because I need you.” Genter closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He clutched the keys in his hand. “I remember Simon’s face when I showed him your medical scan. He nearly fell down. I know you’re important and I bet if I brought you to him. . . Well, you’d be my ticket back to Vanar. Back to my family.”