Scott finally spoke up. “I wasn’t her captor. Like Bryn said before you got here, I’m just a lackey. You want to take the matter up with Lupus if you got complaints.”
“Maybe I’ll take it up with Fournier,” Carla snapped.
Scott snorted. “Oh, yeah. I’d like to see you find someone to carry that message.”
He was walking towards the door as he said it. With a sinking heart at her own foolishness, Bryn realized she might actually run after him if he crooked his furry finger. Pathetic. Carla’s words about Stockholm syndrome really hit home. Bryn knew it was bass-ackwards, but if she was honest with herself, she had to admit she was attracted to Scott. Maybe it was genetic; her mom picked a bad boy. Or maybe it had more to do with the way Scott looked at her. Instead of sneering in disgust at the porcupine quills, he was almost…admiring. All those despairing days thinking no one would ever love her seemed to melt away when he looked at her.
He opened the door, and with a pang of regret, Bryn resigned herself to never to seeing him again. He stopped short, though, when Carla said, “I’ll deliver the message myself.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Scott had to proceed very carefully here. If Bryn’s friend Carla, or Mouse the waitress, as he knew her, really did know how to get to Fournier, he’d be derelict in his duties if he didn’t follow that lead. However, along with the slap in the face that still stung, she’d set those drunken goons on him and Padme last night—it was obvious she was highly protective of Bryn. If he showed any interest in her alleged knowledge of Fournier’s whereabouts, it would either invite her suspicion or she’d clam up just to spite him. Plus, she had to know how dangerous the knowledge itself was, and was probably regretting her outburst at this very moment.
He thought fast. There was only one thing he could do to foster Mouse’s goodwill and possibly find out what she knew. Bryn may talk like she hated him, but her body language after he’d disarmed her said otherwise. She’d had no idea what she was saying when she’d asked to become an XBestia, but if she meant it she’d only go off and eventually get herself killed, or worse. At least this way, he could protect her while potentially benefitting at the same time.
She was standing next to Mouse with an almost forlorn look on her face. “You coming?” he asked, like it was his intention to take her with him all along.
“What?”
“You can stay here and wait for the XIA to make their move, or you can come with me.” He turned to Mouse. “You know where the Bungholes are?”
Warily, she nodded. After hurricane Poppy destroyed the stadium, the city installed prefabricated temporary housing on the baseball field for those among the displaced with nowhere decent to stay. The bungalows, or Bungholes, as they were nicknamed, were one-room structures with no electricity and no plumbing. It didn’t take long for the cheap, short-term solution to make a mockery of the word ‘decent.’ Separate sanitary facilities were inadequate to handle the volume of human waste, so many of the inhabitants resorted to make-shift toilets inside the structures. Rats and cockroaches took advantage of the lack of refrigeration and running water, creating an insurmountable infestation. The city eventually routed out everyone who hadn’t already abandoned the place and pasted condemned notices on each unit, after which the Bungholes became infested once more—with the XBestia.
“We’ll be in number nine,” Scott said. He raised his eyebrows at Bryn. She took a hesitant step towards him, but Mouse said, “Wait.”
She went to the desk and retrieved a flashlight from one of the drawers. “If you walk out the front door, you might not get very far. I know a secret way out. Bluto said Fournier has them in all his buildings.”
Mouse went to the corner of the room and opened a closet door. She shoved a couple of hanging coats aside and kicked the back panel in the lower left corner. It magically swung open to reveal a dark space. “Follow me. Watch your step.”
Scott went last, squeezing into the narrow space and pulling the back of the closet into place behind him. The bodies of the two women blocked the flashlight’s beam, leaving very little for him to see by as he slowly moved ahead. The ground appeared to be bare concrete that slanted down for about six feet before becoming a steep staircase. He negotiated the steps sideways, his chest and back scraping the moist, rough walls as it led down into the ground. The air was dank and cold. At the bottom was a ninety-degree turn where the already low ceiling dropped two feet or so. He bent nearly double, but at least this part of the tunnel was wide enough for him to walk forward.
Directly in front of him, Bryn suddenly produced a series of short, sharp shrieks and shuffle-hopped backwards until he had to place his hands on her backside to keep her from crashing into him. Mouse turned the flashlight on her as she dropped to her knees and frantically slapped at the front of her jacket. “Is it on me?”
With the increase in illumination, Scott saw several webs lacing the walls, nests both abandoned and occupied. “Theridiidae,” he said. “Common house spider. It’s probably long gone.”
Bryn swiveled her head to glower up at him. “If you say it was more scared of me than I was of it…”
The words had been next in line to come out of his mouth.
“You’re tens of thousands of times bigger than it,” he said instead, trying to inject reason against her phobia. “Would you be scared of Godzilla?”
Mouse waved the flashlight around. “Come on. Suck it up, Brynnie. Xenos eat spiders for breakfast. It’s not far.”
Bryn got her feet under her, but he noticed her quills seemed to have puffed up around her head. He made an effort not to brush up against her.
The tunnel ended in a shaft with a tall aluminum ladder propped against the wall. At the top, Mouse crawled onto a slab and stood facing a panel similar to the one at Bluto’s end of the tunnel. Instead of kicking the lower corner, she banged a fist against the top left corner. A gap appeared, but whatever was inside the closet prevented it from opening inward. Mouse leaned against it and shoved until she was able to reach inside and do some rearranging of the crowded broom closet in order to get to the door handle. She opened it a crack and peered out before stepping over a janitor’s bucket into the space beyond.
Once they were all standing in the dark hallway of a building that looked vacant, Mouse aimed the flashlight to the left and whispered, “This way. Keep quiet; I’m not sure who’s squatting here, but they raid our dumpster and mug our clients on a regular basis.”
At the end of the hallway was a large open space that appeared to have once been a waiting room adjacent to the building’s reception area. The floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall had all been broken out at some point and were boarded up. Light from outside shone in through the gaps between boards, enough to see by. The front door had also been glass and was set in the center of that wall. Scott reached for the handle, but the door in its intact metal frame was locked.
He stepped back and eyed it. Someone had taken the trouble to bolt two-by-fours to the metal to hold composite wood planks in place. Those were only nailed on, however, so if they couldn’t find a better exit, he’d have to locate something to use as a lever to pry the boards off.
“Is this the only door?” he asked.
“Shhh!” Mouse said. “Trust me, we do not want to go wandering around in here. Just open it!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered. He headed back down the hall to look in the broom closet. It would have been too lucky to find a pry bar or a tire iron, but there was a broom with a hollow metal handle. On the way back, he glanced through the reception ‘window.’ The room beyond was filled with what looked like coffins set in a row, five of them.
He started to tell Mouse he’d solved the door problem when he noticed she’d gone very still. He followed the direction of her gaze and immediately moved in front of Bryn, who clung to the back of his hoodie.
There were five of them, not surprisingly. Four men and a young woman who’d appeared from the hall on the opposite side of the recept
ion area. The man in front was short, bald, and had the palest skin Scott had ever seen—so pale he could make out the blue tracing of the man’s veins along the sides of his face. His white hands clutched the edges of a floor-length wool cloak, inch-long fingernails filed to a point.
“Nosferatu,” Mouse said in a derisive tone. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“’Ello, delicious,” the man in front, clearly the leader, drawled in a Cockney accent. His upper lip curled when he talked, revealing a set of yellowed, vampire-like fangs. He flicked the tip of his tongue against his lower lip before leaning to the side to address Scott. “Is that your wife? What a lovely throat.”
His black-garbed minions began to fan out, surrounding the three of them, all except the young woman, who hung back in the shadows of the hallway. Scott felt Bryn’s cold hands slip under the back of his hoodie. She gently pulled the gun from his waistband. He slid his hands down the length of the broom and held it up defensively.
Nosferatu laughed. “You gonna sweep us under the rug, Mate? That, I’d like to see.”
Minion number one produced a switchblade and number two a billy club. The third man was huge, fully a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than Scott. He stood there with a look that said, ‘I don’t need no stinkin’ weapon.” Scott considered the man with the knife the most dangerous, so he hefted the broom briefly to test its balance before raising it like a lance and hurling it, brush-end first, into the man’s face. Billy club guy let out a disconcerting war cry before charging forward, arm raised to strike.
“Get down!” Scott shoved Bryn out of the way. There was very little likelihood Scott would win against three experienced opponents. He’d begun learning how to fight from a young age, and even though by seventeen he’d won his first junior extreme-fighting championship, he’d come to realize that the learning never stopped. He’d studied offensive and defensive maneuvers from just about every discipline there was. In a real fight, the moves he’d learned on the street—the dirtiest, most effective ones—were the ones he usually fell back on.
Billy club guy went down with a kick to the groin, but strong guy was right behind him and the broom had only delayed knife guy for a few precious seconds. Scott’s claws came out, but they weren’t much use against fully-clothed opponents. He risked ripping them out at the nail bed if they got caught in tough fabric like jeans or leather. He ducked a sluggish punch from strong guy, but the big man backed him into the boarded-up windows and with a deep-throated chuckle, body-slammed him. Scott’s head struck the metal frame with a ringing sound that reverberated through his skull. He lifted his knee, targeting the groin again, but strong guy had already backed off. Scott barely ducked the ham-sized fist that came at him, gratified when it clanged into the same metal frame his head had struck moments before. Knife guy moved in, elbow raised back; the four-inch serrated switch-blade pointed right at Scott’s midsection. Strong guy got in the way, though, by thrusting his other forearm under Scott’s chin and pinning him to the boards by the throat. Both of Scott’s arms were still free. He could barely see past Strong guy’s arm, but when knife guy struck, he still managed to deflect it with a simple karate chop to the wrist. The blade penetrated the board next to his abdomen with a thunk.
Scott had been forced onto his tiptoes with Strong guy’s face inches away—the big man was chortling wetly through teeth that looked like they hadn’t seen a toothbrush in years. Scott was almost glad he couldn’t breathe; the guy’s breath would probably wilt a stalk of garlic. As his vision began to fade, he reached around the beefy arm at his throat and raked his claws down the side of his opponent’s face.
Strong guy let out a rather girly shriek and fell back, giving Scott time to take a much-needed breath of air. But knife guy tugged the switch-blade out of the board and pulled his arm back for a second attempt.
“Stop or I’ll blow his head off!” Bryn yelled.
Startled, Scott and his two combatants spared a glance in her direction. She held the gun in a steady hand, aim dead center of Nosferatu’s chest.
With a convincing smirk, she said, “It’s not a wooden stake, but I bet a bullet through the heart will slow you down.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Despite her terror, Bryn was experiencing exceptional clarity of thought. She hadn’t acted as soon as she should have, but the situation was controllable because she had the gun. The man at the lethal end of it wanted everyone to think of him as inhuman or he wouldn’t be living his life as a modern-day vampire. It made it easier for her to accept the fact that she might have to squeeze the trigger. If the thugs started pounding on Scott again, she was determined to overcome her fear and shoot the pasty-faced Nosferatu in the leg and then attempt to pick off Scott’s opponents one by one.
With bravado she didn’t feel, she waved the gun briefly in the direction of the door. “Open it.”
Getting Nosferatu to walk over to unlock the door also placed his men in her line of sight. Scott, breathing heavily, rotated his shoulders and stretched his neck briefly as he moved to join her. Bryn gratefully relinquished the gun to him and hid her shaking hands in her pockets. He examined it, flicked a little switch on the side of the snub-nosed firearm and said, “Safety’s off.”
Nosferatu reached into an inside pocket of his cloak. Scott said casually, “A lot of people don’t have much respect for the accuracy of these short-barrel handguns, but I know you won’t make that mistake.”
Nosferatu hesitated. When he pulled his hand out, he held a set of keys. With the door open, Scott gestured for Bryn and Carla to precede him. When she stepped outside, the bright sunlight lanced into her eyes and blinded her. She wondered what it would do to Nosferatu. Just as Scott appeared in the doorway, she heard, “Wait!”
It was the girl. She appeared next to Scott and said, “Help me!”
Bryn could no longer see inside the dark interior, but she did see Scott raise the gun. At first, she thought he suspected the ghoulish-looking girl was trying to trick him, but then she noticed he wasn’t aiming at her, but past her, presumably at the four wanna-be vampires.
“I want to go home,” the girl cried. Bryn saw her face more clearly now. She was young, not more than fourteen years old. Scott only nodded, holding the door so the girl could run out—right into Carla’s waiting arms.
Before he let the door swing shut, Scott said coldly, “The first one of you steps outside gets a bullet in the brain.”
They were facing a dusty, deserted street, one of many all across Coney Island. The buildings that were still standing looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, and Bryn wouldn’t be surprised if their next encounter was with a bunch of flesh-eating zombies. Carla led them west and then south, through an alley that came out on a stretch of old boardwalk. The girl clutched her hand the entire way.
“Okay, I think no one’s following us,” Carla said before turning to the girl. “What’s your name, Sweetheart?”
“Abezinga,” the girl replied. “I mean…Ellie.”
She was thin, the unnatural kind of thin that came from starvation. She wore a short, tattered black dress that looked like it had been taken off the corpse of a flapper from the 1920’s. Fishnet stockings didn’t hide the bruises on her legs, and her feet clumped around in huge combat boots. Her eyes were sunk deep into her face, framed by dark half-circles underneath. Behind those eyes was a blankness that said nothing and everything about the things Ellie had seen and done—and had done to her.
Carla spoke gently. “There isn’t a police station here anymore and the subway collapsed. We’ll have to take the bus.”
Ellie stiffened up and shuddered all over her body as tears spilled down her cheeks. Her breath came in great, gasping sobs. Carla wrapped her arms around the girl. Over her head she said, “I’ll meet you in number nine later,” referring to the bungalow Scott had mentioned. “Go.”
Bryn reached out a hand, but didn’t touch Ellie’s fragile shoulder. She exchanged a sympatheti
c look with Carla and continued with Scott down the boardwalk. When the sounds of the girl’s heart-wrenching sobs had faded to nothing, Scott said, “You should cover your head.”
She pulled her scarf absently into place. The beauty of the day, the blue sea and bright sun, barely intruded on her consciousness. So much had happened in the last 24-hours, but her thoughts were disjointed. Nothing specific presented itself for her to contemplate. Instead, her mind replayed random events, like a collage of memories. Her father’s burning eyes as he told her about his plans. The white mouse nestled in Carla’s cleavage. Ellie’s face as she remembered her real name. Scott’s furry fingers caressing her in the dream. And his voice when he said he’d shoot those men if they came after them.
Bryn wouldn’t have been able to articulate how she felt if someone tried to torture it out of her. Like a pendulum without a plotted course, her thoughts swung wildly back and forth. She wished everything were normal, but that was impossible. She wanted her life back—the exact life she’d had before her father had betrayed her—again, impossible. Her choices were limited to bad and worse, and for the life of her she couldn’t say if home was the better of the two options, or if the path she was set upon—becoming an XBestia and trusting Scott to protect her—was more acceptable. And that was really the crux of it all: trust. Her father had lost hers forever, and Scott had done less than nothing to earn it. Bryn wasn’t sure how to live in a world without trust. She wasn’t sure how to go on when every fork in the road was unacceptable.
For now, all she could do was put one foot in front of the other.
They walked past a hotdog stand just opening for business and the savory smell brought her to an abrupt halt. “I need food. I can’t think straight.”
Scott obliged her by buying each of them a dog smothered in toppings and a couple of cold sodas. By the time they reached the former ball field with its row upon row of falling down bungalows, she’d eaten every bite, never once considering how many calories she was consuming. He unlocked the door of number nine and seemed cautious as he entered. There was no electricity and only one window, covered in aluminum foil to block out the light. Someone had mounted a series of eight battery-powered LED lights on the low ceiling, however, and Scott went down the length of the place tapping the lights to turn them on. The one-room structure was cleaner than Bryn expected after seeing, and smelling, the refuse outside. It reminded her of the inside of an R.V. with the narrow bunk beds at one end and compact bench and table combination at the other. Cupboards lined the walls. It appeared to be empty, but when Scott went poking around, he found linens in one cupboard and a manila folder in another.
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