He could hear the floorboards creaking from the girls upstairs as they explored the bedrooms but then they called out the all clear.
Damn it.
Jackson stalked back upstairs, pissed off that this lead had brought them to a dead end.
Claudia was down in the main foyer, holding a framed picture in her hand. She turned it towards them and Jackson recognized the man from the hospital. He was younger, wearing graduation robes, and he was smiling, standing next to a girl with similar features. An older man and woman stood with them, the family resemblance marking them as their parents.
“We found three bedrooms up there,” Claudia told them. “Looks like Jamie was here at some point. His bed is a mess while the others are neatly made. The girl’s room had a two year old acceptance letter from Michigan State taped to the dresser mirror. Pretty sure she was away at school. No sign of the parents.”
“Got something here.” Banks pulled a piece of paper that had been tacked to the front of the fridge with a magnet. “A letter from him.”
Erica,
Mom and Dad are gone. I’m sorry you had to find out this way. You’ll find me at Paradise Court. There’s a group there that’s been taking in people. If you make it back here, come find me.
Love, Jamie.
“Paradise Court? That a street on the maps?” Jackson asked and Mendez pulled out the map from her pack, spreading it out on the breakfast bar. She ran a finger down the index list in the corner but when she got to the bottom of the list and shook her head, he cursed. “Ya gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“It’s not listed as a street, but it has to be a place here in town,” Mendez said. “His letter doesn’t make it sound like it’s far from here. Maybe it’s a nickname of a place instead of a street name.”
“Then let’s go out there, drive ‘round and find it,” Jackson said, straightening his pack on his back and heading back to the front door. When he didn’t hear the others following, he turned back to see Mendez still standing at the breakfast bar. “C’mon, we’re burnin’ daylight.”
“That’s the thing,” Mendez said, glancing back at the window over the sink. “We’ve got maybe thirty minutes left of daylight. We can’t be out there after dark. We don’t know this place and we’re already running low on gas. We shouldn’t waste it searching when we can barely see anything. We might drive right past this Paradise Court and have no idea. I say we stay here tonight and go looking at first light. That way we can look at the maps, figure out the best places for a group to hole up in this town.”
For a moment, he was tempted to head out on foot but Mendez was right about stumbling around in the dark in a strange town. It would do nobody any good if he got himself lost or injured. He would just be someone else they’d have to find. If they stayed here, worked out solid search plans and headed out at daybreak, they’d be better off. They had to be smart now, not impulsive.
“We’ll hunker down in the living room,” Mendez said. “The picture window gives us a view of the street. We’ll do four two hour shifts on watch, that way we get some decent sleep. Let’s secure the doors and then eat.”
They secured the front and back doors before settling down in the living room. Jackson took out one of the meal replacement bars from his pack as Mendez pulled out the sat phone to check in with Elaine.
“Hey guys, you find them?” Elaine’s voice echoed over the speakerphone.
When they had left the hospital, Mendez had called in a report of what they had found at the hospital.
“No, not yet,” Mendez told her. “We know the dead guy went to a place called Paradise Court. We can’t find it on our map.”
“I’ll see if I can find it mentioned anywhere in the maps we’ve got here.”
“How’re the kids and Craig doin’?” Jackson called out.
“They’re doing better,” Elaine said. “Quinton says the medicine is working.”
Good, that was good. At least this hadn’t been a complete fuck up. They got their meds and that was one less thing to worry about. He could put his focus on finding Veronica.
“Tell ‘em we’ll be back soon,” Jackson said, “And don’t worry ‘bout us.”
They were weak words but they were all he had to offer. No matter what he said, he knew Audrey would worry. She couldn’t help it. Her abandonment issues ran deep and until he and Veronica came back, she’d feel the loss.
“Will do,” Elaine replied. “I’ll let you know if I find anything on Paradise Court. Keep up the hourly reports. Clinic still has someone here round the clock. We’ll answer. Good luck.”
Jackson was silent as he chewed the protein bar, the chalky taste of the fake chocolate sticking to his tongue. He didn’t like the idea of just sitting here, doing nothing while God knew what was happening to Veronica out there. He knew she was a survivor, all the people in her group were, but it didn’t make him any less antsy to be doing something. Even if he needed it desperately, he had the feeling that sleep wasn’t going to come easily to him tonight.
Well, better to put that restless energy to use then. He wiped his hands on his shirt and reached over to grab the map. Wherever these guys had taken their people, it had to be big. The group that took their people had to have good numbers. The only way anyone could get the jump on Malcolm, Veronica, Nas and Travis would be if they had them outnumbered. Anything less and there would have been more than just one body left behind when Malcolm and the others were done with them.
So if they were at this Paradise Court, it had to be a big place. There was a high school in the centre of town but the map labelled it as James Madison High. He doubted anybody would give it the nickname Paradise Court. Maybe these people took a page from their friends in Port Meyer and had secured a shopping mall. Paradise Court sounded like it could be a shopping mall.
“Should find out if there’s a shopping mall ‘round here,” he said. “That might be what it’s called.”
Mendez nodded, looking down at the map. “Alright, sounds good. Now, question is do we split up or stick together? We can cover more ground in pairs...”
“But we’re gonna need the numbers when we find these guys,” Jackson finished her thought. “Better we stick together.”
“Alright, so at daybreak, we start looking for a mall. If they aren’t there then we will search from one end of town to the other if we have to."
It wasn’t the greatest plan but it was better than nothing. He just hoped they were right about Jaime staying in town. If it turned out that Veronica and the others had been taken out of town, the search would be for a needle in an even bigger haystack.
“Imma take first watch,” Jackson said, pushing himself up and heading over to the bay window at the front of the house. He nudged aside the white curtain so he could see out to the deserted street.
“She’s okay,” Claudia said.
“Yer gut talkin’ to ya again?”
“She left that message. She was conscious when they took her. Conscious means alive. If they were taken alive, it means they want something from them.”
“What the hell could they possibly want from ‘em?”
“I don’t know but I know she’s okay,” Claudia insisted. “She’ll be working on finding a way out. They all will.”
He appreciated that Claudia tried but he wasn’t ready to celebrate just yet. He couldn’t rely on maybes and possibilities. They might have taken the others out alive but that didn’t mean they didn’t kill them some other place. The others might have fought their captors and ended up dumped out to rot in the street. They might drive up one of those streets tomorrow and find their corpses piled up like trash next to the curb.
He ran a hand over his face, trying to get rid of the images that flashed through his mind. He couldn’t think about it. If he did, he’d end up running outside into the night to search.
If he had, had any choice about it, he never would have let his feelings for Veronica get this deep. It hurt to know she was out there, vulnerable, s
cared, thinking she was a moment away from the end. Problem was he never had a choice in the matter. He had resisted as much as he could but there was no stopping it. He had fallen in love with her and now he had to face the possibility of losing her. Fuck, it hurt.
“It’s good that you care about her as much as you do,” Claudia said. “She deserves it. Her last boyfriend could be a real asshole.”
“What’d he do to her?” he asked, curious about the man. Veronica never really talked much about her past relationships, though neither did he. In fairness, he didn’t really have many past relationships to talk about though.
“Disappointed her mostly,” Claudia said. “He’d flake on plans with her a lot. She’d invite him to visit our family and he’d always say he had a work thing come up at the last minute. In my opinion, he was too selfish, always put himself first. That’s why I like you. You aren’t selfish.”
No, he wasn’t. Or at least he tried not to be. He spent a good chunk of his life being a selfish asshole so he knew what it looked like.
He’d put his need for drugs above everything else and had lost too much because of it. When he had gotten sober, he promised himself he would never be like that again. He'd done his best to abide by it. It was the only way to make amends for the wrongs he’d done in the past.
He found his hand had slipped into his jeans pocket without him realizing, seeking out the familiar weight of the sobriety chip he carried there. His fingers ran over the ridges along the edge, a pattern he had played out millions of times.
Except it had been a while since he had reached for it. Every day he made sure it was in his pocket, an old habit he hadn’t gotten rid of, but he hadn’t reached for it in weeks. It had been that long since he had to remind himself of the work he had done to turn his life around. Even through all their stress out on the road and making it to the island, he hadn’t reached for it
Maybe that was because it was the first time he didn’t have Veronica or the girls around him. For years his sober chip had been his anchor when the seas got rough but now he had something else to hold onto.
“We gotta find her,” Jackson said, clutching the chip in his palm as he made a fist. “Don’t care if we gotta burn every building in this town to the ground, we gotta find her.”
“While I admire the determination, I’m not sure if that plan would work,” Claudia said, a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Speaking as someone who once blew up a tanker, it’s hard to control the burn and it draws all sorts to it. We could end up overrun by freaks.”
Wait, draws all sorts...
“That’s what we should do,” he said, a plan starting to form in his head.
He moved back to the map, Claudia following him as he bent over to study it.
“We should light up one of the buildings. Somethin’ that would get attention. If there’s a group in town, they’ll come check it out, see what’s goin’ on.”
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Banks said as he joined them over the map. “Better than playing a guessing game. We draw them out of their hiding spot then we can follow them back.”
“But what if we draw the wrong kind of people?” Mendez said. “We could be sending up the bat signal for every freak in town.”
“Then it clears every other place out for us to search safely,” Banks replied. “It sure as hell can’t hurt.”
“What do we use for fuel?” Mendez said. “We barely have enough gas to get us back to the marina. We can’t waste any on a fire.”
“Bound to be a hardware store ‘round town,” Jackson said. “We get shit like paint thinner and lighter fluid. We don’t need to burn the place to the ground, even just a shit ton of black smoke should bring ‘em to check out what’s happenin’.”
Mendez considered what he said, exchanging a look with Banks who nodded his approval.
“Alright, that sounds like a plan. We scope out a building to burn, see what it draws out. We get nothing, we head to the places on the map to search.”
Jackson felt better knowing they had a solid plan. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the sunrise. He just hoped the others could hold out that long.
Subject File #742
Administrator: The man who ran that place, what did you think when you first met him?
Subject: I wasn’t impressed. I thought ‘Well here’s a nobody living high at the end of the world.’ I didn’t have any idea I was looking at a monster.
It was nearly five in the morning, according to Malcolm’s watch. He was starting to get impatient. They’d been in here over twelve hours with no sign of their captors. He didn’t know why these people had put them down here but he sure as hell was ready for them to come down here and get on with it.
The storage room was stuffy and hot, leaving a sheen of sweat on his skin. The sweating just made him thirsty and which made him conscious of the fact he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He’d at least managed to drift off to sleep for a couple hours, conserving what energy he had for what was to come.
Except nothing was coming and it was driving him crazy. He hated the waiting. All it did was give him time to think.
Which would be good for coming up with a plan to get them out of here but the problem was he had no idea where here was. The brief glimpse of the apartment building wasn’t enough for him to get an idea of the setup here. He couldn’t plan an escape with so little info.
But they needed to get the hell out of here sooner rather than later.
He prayed that the other group had made it back to the island with the meds but he couldn’t count on it. Before they escaped, they had to get the meds back and that might prove to be an impossible task.
They had to be smart about this if they wanted to get out alive. They weren’t in a position to fight their way out of this. They had no weapons, no supplies, and no idea where the hell they were. Their best bet would be to negotiate their release.
“Is their plan to bore us to death?” Veronica asked from somewhere to his right. “Or leave us here to rot?”
“They want us dehydrated and hungry,” Nas said from his left. “If we’re weak, we’re less likely to fight back.”
He heard Travis sigh from further on his right. “So they’re sweating us out. Great.”
“It’s smart,” Malcolm said.
These men weren’t idiots. They’d been smart back at the hospital, keeping themselves hidden while they waited for Malcolm and Travis to walk right into their trap. Even when that dumbass kid had tried to charge him, wanting to be the hero, the other men had kept their cool. While Malcolm and Travis had been focused on taking down Dumbass, they had surrounded them.
They’d been efficient, keeping a reserve of men back to bring down the hammer when needed.
The men didn’t have the military look but they sure as hell operated like they were. Whoever this group was, they knew what they were doing. It was probably why they had the luxury of keeping prisoners.
He heard the scrape of boot heels on the ground and for a moment he thought it was one of them but then someone pounded on the door.
“Put your backs to the far wall! You do anything stupid and we’ll put a bullet between your eyes!”
They were already all sitting against the far wall so Malcolm just waited as the key slid into the lock and the door opened.
Even the soft lamplight from the hallway was bright after the total darkness and Malcolm’s eyes snapped closed.
When he opened them again, the first thing he saw were a couple of M-4s pointed at them. Well, that sure as hell let him know where they stood.
“Which one of you is Malcolm Evans?” one of the men asked.
For a moment he was surprised they knew his name but then he remembered that they had searched his pockets after they had tied them up. His badge had been in its usual spot in his back pocket, his lucky talisman that had failed him today.
He raised his hand. “I am.”
“On your feet,” the man gestured with his
gun. “No stupid moves.”
Malcolm followed the orders, keeping his hands out and visible so they didn’t get a happy trigger finger.
“Alright, you come over here and step outside with us,” the man ordered. His partner kept his gun on Malcolm while he pointed his gun at the others. “Don’t any of you try to be a hero.”
Malcolm knew that they wouldn’t. They’d already gone over this during their wait. If they were taken from the cell, they were supposed to take in as much as they could about the place. They needed to gather as much information as they could before they planned their next move.
When he was out in the hallway, Malcolm stood under gunpoint as the man bound his hands in front of him with a zip tie. He wrapped a length of chain around Malcolm's legs, locking it together with small padlocks. His very own pair of makeshift leg irons. Fucking great.
“You smell like shit,” the man said with a disgusted look at him.
“Sorry, we didn’t have the facilities in there for me to freshen up,” Malcolm said.
The man didn’t appreciate his humour, giving him a shove forward with the barrel of his gun. “Get moving. The boss wants to talk to you.”
Malcolm followed the directions, the two men flanking him as they walked up the stairs where they had first come down.
So that was likely the only way out of the basement. It was narrow but there was a small space at the bottom of the stairs where they could have cover. The doors to the main floor swung inward, giving them the drop on anyone coming down the stairs. It wasn’t the worst bottleneck to get out of if they were smart.
They didn’t stop on the main floor, continuing up the stairwell to the next floor where the door was propped open. It was definitely an apartment building. Doors lined the hallway with apartment numbers on them. The men didn’t let him linger, urging him up to the third floor where they directed him down the hallway to stand in front of apartment 306. The man knocked on the door and then opened it when he was told to come in.
The door opened directly into the apartment’s living room. In the centre of the room, a man sat behind a large oak desk in a wingback chair. The man was short, made even shorter by the way the large chair dwarfed him. He was thin and pale, his face sharp angles in the lantern light and his thin lips pursed as he rested his elbows on the desk and steepled his narrow fingers. He regarded Malcolm with large eyes magnified by the thick horn rimmed glasses he wore.
The Complex (The Omega Protocol Chronicles Book 3) Page 33
