Cry For Tomorrow

by Dianna Hunter

  “Doesn’t mean I didn’t see you,” O’Malley laughed softly. “You think you’re the only ones know how to put in security cameras?”

  We had gone from surprised to annoyed and were puffing up for an argument when the commotion started.

  “Hey! What’s the big idea!” roared Carl. “You’ve got no right to come snooping around me like some damn big invisible cat!”

  “Yeah, right, and just what are you doing making telephone calls on a cell phone no one even knew you had?” demanded Jennie. “Who were you calling?”

  “Hey, what’s going on man?” Jake was at Jennie’s side, ready to defend her. “First you volunteer for this mission—you never risk your ass for something dangerous unless there’s something in it for you—and I’d really like to know why you would even think about coming when you have absolutely no psi talent that would help.”

  “He doesn’t have psi ability?” demanded Rainor as we all converged on Carl.

  “No, he doesn’t. What he does have is a lot of clandestine meetings with people we don’t know,” Jake told him.

  “What you don’t know is what the hell you are talking about,” Carl growled defensively, “and I don’t have to answer to any one of you!”

  “Yes, you do, when it’s our lives you’re risking.” Jake was so angry that his face had turned bright red. “When Zack and I questioned you about your absences, you kept implying that you had a couple of girls on the side and didn’t want Halie to know. But you know what? I thought that was a pretty dirty thing to do to her so I thought I might sorta follow you a few times and see for myself what was going on before I told her about it.” He looked at me apologetically. “And you know what I saw? I saw you meeting with women who took folded sheets of paper from you and exchanged whispered conversations and then took off.”

  “So, either you have a really bad come-on or you were giving them info on something, or someone,” deduced Jake. “Which was it, Carl?”

  “Hey, now you know we’re all good friends here, I would never do anything to hurt any of you,” Carl stuttered and tried to put the small phone in his back pocket, but O’Malley’s hand shot out and snatched it from him.

  “How about if we just have a look to see who this boy’s been calling?” he said as he began pushing buttons.

  “Hey! Give it back!” Carl lunged for the phone, but Jake and Jennie grabbed him and pulled him away.

  “Well now, how about that,” O’Malley glared at Carl. “You want to start ‘fessing up now, or do you want me to read them all these nice text messages you been sending to Agency Central?”

  When Carl merely continued to glare at him, O’Malley began pushing the buttons on the face of the small cell phone. “Don’t want to talk about it? Well, let’s see now, how about we start with your most recent text message. Just entering the compound. looks like freak central. am sending coordinates now,” he read when Carl didn’t immediately answer.

  I could only stare in shocked silence as I watched Carl struggle fiercely against the hands holding him. He kept up the charade for several more minutes before giving up. He was a large man and very strong, but I also knew that part of Jake’s talents was the unusual strength he was able to exhibit when necessary.

  When he’d accepted that we had no intention of releasing him, Carl stopped struggling.

  “Okay, so what if you do know? You all think you’re so high and mighty ‘cause you got special abilities! Ha! See what they get you now? Are they going to pay for the groceries or get you one of them fancy apartments in New Towne? Hell no!” he laughed. “Hell, the reward I was going to get from just the three of you was enough to get me that new condo! What do you think they’re going to give me for giving them the location of this place? Hell, this is Freak Central!”

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” growled Pete. “Karol, I told you we were taking too big a risk in bringing them here!” He snatched Carl by the shirt front. “I think you’d best let us deal with this piece of crap now.”

  Jake and Jennie exchanged questioning glances with me before relinquishing their grip.

  “Yeah, okay, that’s probably best,” Jake took a step away.

  Two other men joined Pete as he twisted Carl’s arm behind his back and began pushing him in the direction of the locked and barred door at the far side of the room.

  “Wait—” I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself not to look at Carl. “Wh-what are you going to do with him?”

  Pete got a real mean look in his eyes and jerked Carl’s arm a little tighter. “Well now, I think we’ll just let your friend here spend a little time in tunnel number thirteen until his buddies get here to rescue him. That ought to make him think real hard before he goes getting greedy again.”

  “Tunnel thirteen?” I asked, trying not to let anyone know how sick I felt.

  “Right, you see we’re so close to the rifts here that we’ve been getting more than our share of phantoms coming through, and they’re not all big pets like Rainor’s little serpentines there,” Pete informed us.

  “Yes, that’s true,” interrupted Karol. “To gain entry into the over-world, most of the phantoms must pass through the curtain or barrier between the dimensions, which seems to act like some kind of filter. Those that do are rarely dangerous or aggressive, but these creatures entering through that particular tunnel are different. Rainor says the curtain is damaged in that area and isn’t properly filtering the ghouls before they pass into over-world. So many of them proved to be violent and dangerous that we renamed it number thirteen and sealed it with the lead door.”

  “Right,” sneered Pete. “The spooks down there may not actually kill him but they sure will give him the scare of his life.” When he saw the looks on our faces, he added, “but don’t you worry, we’ll leave the lock off so his friends will look in there and maybe let him back out when they get here.”

  “Hey! You can’t do this to me!” shouted Carl as he was dragged toward the big door. “You just wait, you bunch of spook-lovers! When my friends at the Agency are through with you, you’ll be just as mindless as that bunch of mangy freaks!”

  After what we had just learned, none of us felt any inclination to interfere as we watched Carl being pushed into the mouth of the black tunnel waiting to swallow him.

  “Here, take this!” Pete growled as he tossed Carl a large flashlight.

  Carl caught the flashlight and immediately flipped its switch. We could see the bright beam of light striking the cold stone of the tunnel walls in the brief space before the door slammed shut.

  “That was more than he deserved,” spit Jake. “I’d have left him to sweat in the dark.”

  “Oh, he didn’t do him any favors,” smirked Karol. “The phantoms are drawn to the light. It won’t be long before they find him.” She spun away and started across the room.

  “Okay, Rena, Cassie! Get everybody into the tunnels, we’re about to have company,” she shouted.

  Even the nearly comatose freaks scattered about the room responded to Karol’s orders and began stumbling about in confusion until she and the other two women expertly gathered them together and began herding them toward the two open doorways to the left-side of the room. All except the two tall, bearded men I’d noticed earlier docilely obeyed. The two, one tall, with a mop of shaggy sand-colored curls, the other shorter and stouter with lanky, black locks drooping over his collar, watched Rainor’s every move.

  Karol noticed them and took a step in their direction, evidently intending to herd them along with the others but when she saw the fanatical glaze of their eyes she turned away, shaking her head. “Rainor! If you have any hopes of getting these people to Tereus, then you’d better take them now, before any of the others decide to follow you through,” she called over her shoulder.

  Chapter Ten

  “Okay folks, we won’t be going with them.” Rainor informed us when we would have followed Karol and the group of freaks disappearing into the semi-darkness of the two tunnels. He
drew a large, shiny key from one of his pockets as he waved us in the direction of the closed doorway adjoining the one Carl had been pushed through.

  I had taken a step to join him when I noticed Jake examining the sword Carl had abandoned on the bench. “It would be a shame for it to go to waste, and there’s no telling who or what we might encounter on this little trip,” I said when he looked up at me.

  “You’re right, he doesn’t need it now,” he shook his head, plainly trying to contain the anger he felt. “I still can’t believe he did something like this.”

  “Me either,” I told him as I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and hugged him to me. “We trusted him and he betrayed us. That’s something that will always hurt.”

  Jake nodded without looking me in the eyes as he wrapped the straps of the harness around the sword. “Coming?” He nodded in the direction of Jennie and Rainor across the room as he tucked his new weapon under one arm.

  I watched my friends shuffling towards the doorway and hesitated. I just wasn’t ready to join them yet. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  Jake gave me a curious look and for a minute I thought he was going to argue, but then he seemed to think better of it. Nodding his head to let me know he understood, he turned away. I settled on a bench set off to one side of the room where I had a clear view of Rainor, who was still fumbling with the key and lock. Dusty jumped onto the bench and lay down at my side with her head in my lap and watched me with patient eyes. She was good with taking a break from all these strangers.

  “Yeah, you’re the only one I can totally trust now, aren’t you?” I crooned softly to the dog as I rubbed her ears. “All you want from me is a safe place to lay your head and a good meal.” I continued stroking her silken head, thinking. This whole business had come on me so sudden and there were so many decisions, important decisions, to make that I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do anymore. I was so deep in thought that I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt the pressure of an arm encircling my waist. Even Dusty jerked in surprise.

  “Hey, it’ll be okay, you’ll see,” O’Malley said softly in my ear. “We just need to let this play out and see where it takes us.”

  I shook my head indecisively. I didn’t pull away from him when he settled on the bench beside me with his hard muscled body touching mine. “It’s just that there is so much happening and it’s happening too fast. We don’t know anything about this so-called agent except that he’s real quick to kill when it suits his purpose. What if this whole thing is some elaborate trap?” I turned and looked up into the old man’s face. Old? The body I felt pressing against me was as firm as any I’d ever touched—and those eyes!

  “Ben?” I blinked my eyes and stared. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, I already told you my name is Ben O’Malley, that ain’t news little lady,” he grumbled and looked away.

  “No—” I grabbed his arm and turned him to face me again, “I’m right! You are Ben Holiday. You were one of the old men we met at that big Victorian house!” My suspicions were immediately confirmed by the slight alterations I detected in the old man’s face-and the twinkle of those bright blue eyes. But no, surely neither the man in the city or the old man from my building had been quite this young.

  “What’s going on?” I resisted when he tried to pull me closer and would have gotten to my feet if he hadn’t been holding onto me so tightly. “You’re a morph, aren’t you?” I stared at him incredulously as I picked out other little tell-tale signs.

  “Shsh!” He put his finger to his lips to signal my silence. “I’ll explain everything to you later. Just, right now, you need to trust me. All I can tell you is that I’m an agent working directly for the president of our country—please don’t blow my cover yet.”

  I went limp in his grip and just stared at him, trying to wrap my mind around this turn of events. Totally distracted by the man, both Dusty and I yipped in surprise when we were suddenly tackled by two small bodies.

  “Halie! We want to go with you and Jennie,” whined Merry and Jon. “We’re afraid to go into those dark tunnels and we don’t know those people!”

  “Hey, everything will be alright now,” I soothed the children. I gave Ben a nod over the tops of their heads as I gathered the little ones close. “Listen to me, it’s not safe for you to come with me and Jennie anymore. We’re going into a place that’s really dark and scary. Go with Karol, she’ll take good care of you.”

  Karol arrived a moment later looking moderately flustered. “Thanks, I’ve got them now.” She took each of the little ones’ hands in hers and led them away. When she was half-way to the tunnel door, she turned her head back and called, “Take care and good luck.”

  I made a quick visual scan of the room until I made eye contact with my sister. She was at the far side of the room stuffing food bars into her backpack. The look in my eyes must have been enough, for Kelly immediately shouldered the bag and started towards me.

  “Hey, sis, is everything okay?” she asked with a curious glance at Ben who was still hovering nearby.

  “Yeah, sure, everything’s great.” Taking my sister by the arm, I started walking toward the door the agent was crouched by. “Let’s go see if we can help Rainor get that lock open.”

  Kelly threw a suspicious look over her shoulder at the old man but she didn’t resist.

  Before we reached him we heard the clatter of the metal lock hitting the floor followed by the scraping of the heavy door against the concrete floor—he didn’t need my help after all.

  “Gods, it smells like old socks in there!” Kelly gasped as we joined the men gathered at the doorway. Dusty wedged her body between us and growled her agreement.

  “Hey Kelly, it’s not too late for you to go with the kids,” I tugged at my sister’s arm to turn her around. “If you hurry you can catch up to them.”

  “No way! From now on I am going wherever you go,” she answered before jerking her arm loose. Shaking back her mop of thick auburn hair from her face, she self-consciously gathered it in a pony-tail. “Don’t happen to have something to tie this mess back with, do you, sis?”

  I already had my hand in my jacket pocket, fishing for the hair-ties I usually had stashed in its depths. “Here, this should help.” I passed a bright red tie to Kelly and kept a blue one for me. I was still twisting the tie into my own hair when Ben caught up to me again.

  “Brave kid,” he commented with a nod at Kelly.

  “She’s had to be,” I answered without explaining. Feeling a little crowded by Ben’s constant attention, I turned away and joined my friends as they began filing into the dark passageway.

  “I’ll take one of those too,” I told Rainor, who was standing at the side of the doorway, handing out flashlights from a stack on a table beside him.

  “I think you’ll find that the phantoms cruising this tunnel are considerably less aggressive than what your friend will encounter in tunnel number thirteen.” He smiled reassuringly. “I promise.”

  “Thanks.” I looked up into his pale face and tried to read the thoughts boiling around in the depths of his deep grey eyes. I was relieved when he met my gaze without flinching. Every line in his not-so-old face and the silver sparks in his eyes shouted with the conviction of his need. As far as I could tell, he completely believed in the truth of what he’d been telling us.

  A flash of movement caught my eye. “What’s with the two freaks trailing you?” I nodded in the direction of the two men lurking in the shadows a few feet behind Rainor.

  “Unfortunately, this happens whenever I pass back into Tereus,” he shook his head sadly. “Some of these poor souls are so desperate for relief from the nightmares that they’re willing to follow me to the under-world. They believe that a merging will finally give them some peace.”

  “Merging? You mean they want to meld with one of those phantom-things?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. Unfortunately, it really is too soon and i
t’s not always the right answer, but they’re just so desperate that they’d rather risk dying than to go on the way they are.” Without further explanation, he waved me into the passageway. “You should hurry on now and catch up to your friends.”

  I could tell that the dog plastered against my leg was totally freaked out by the dark tunnel, but she bravely stayed with me as I walked. The walls exposed by the beam of my flashlight were comprised of blocks of ordinary looking grey stone. We both jumped when the ghostly form of a serpentine flashed through my beam of light, but it merely swooped along the wall for a few feet before merging with the stone. Curious, I ran one hand along the stone blocks at my side and found them to be cool and almost wet to the touch.

  “Does this tunnel pass close to the river?” I turned my head, expecting Rainor to be behind me, but I didn’t see him. I could have sworn I heard footsteps behind me a moment ago. I flashed my light along the walls of the tunnel behind me, but when I didn’t see anything I kept walking.

  We’d been walking for nearly an hour and I was beginning to get tired, but the passageway we were following seemed endless. It continued to slope downward, always widening, and now it was wide enough for us to walk abreast.

  “Hey! Everybody be careful, there’s a big drop-off here.” Jake’s warning echoed from the front of our procession.

  It took only a moment for us to gather beside him at the sheer edge of stone where the floor of the passageway abruptly ended. The lights we flashed over the precipice revealed that the passage continued three feet lower.

  “It’s not too far for you to jump,” Rainor called from the dark, somewhere below and ahead of us, “but be careful, the slope of the floor will continue to get steeper as we go on.”

  “Hey, how did you get ahead of us?” I called but he didn’t answer. I was definitely going to keep a closer eye on him from now on. It seemed that maybe my friends and I weren’t the only ones with special talents.

  Jake had already jumped and I could see the beam of his flashlight flickering along the walls of the passage ahead but I wasn’t in such a big hurry. I crouched at the edge of the drop-off and flashed the beam of my light across the smooth surface of the lower floor before lowering my body. I was most definitely not just jumping anywhere that I could not see.