by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Fifty
Cold and wet, Chris closed his eyes beside the campfire—
—and opened them to find Chicago in the grip of a massive power outage. Word on the street was that lightning had fried at least two power plants and that most of the Midwest was floundering in electrical blindness. At ten in the morning, the streets were surprisingly full of people crowding in the cold. Some of them mobbed the city buildings, demanding answers no one could give. Others just followed along to keep from being alone.
He caught a taxi to the South Side and got out to walk several neighborhoods from his dad’s, just in case he was being tailed.
Less than a mile later, a car squealed around the corner. It shot past him and swerved to a stop, branding black rubber onto the asphalt.
His pulse spiked and he froze, dropping into a defensive crouch. If Kaufman had followed him after all, he was dead.
But the driver was a woman. Brooke. By comparison, he was actually glad to see her. He released his held breath and straightened.
She burst out of the driver’s door, caught herself on the seatbelt, and ducked back inside to unbuckle it. She rounded the back of the car and threw her arms out to him. Tears shone against her mottled face.
His pulse sped up again. The last time he’d seen her, she had been spitting mad and too upset to even talk to him. “What’s wrong?” He caught her elbows. “Mike? My dad? What is it?”
“I spent the night in an L-train!” she wailed.
He pushed her back. “What?”
“The power went out!” She started crying. “I was taking the L through the subway, since I didn’t have a car. I was going to a movie with a friend, and then she was going to lend me her car.” The tilt of her head indicated the station wagon behind her. “And the power went out! It was pitch black in the tunnels. Nobody could see to get home.”
“Brooke . . .” She had always been neurotic, but since when was a power outage enough to conquer her overwhelming optimism? Had his little disappearing act with her Land Rover pushed her over the edge? He patted her arm awkwardly. “It’s just a power outage. It happens.”
“No.” She swiped at her tears. “No, this was different. They couldn’t get the backup generators running or anything. I heard on the radio the entire country’s shut down!”
“Just the Midwest.”
“The Midwest, the entire country, what difference does it make? This sort of thing is not supposed to happen!” A fresh batch of tears glossed her eyes. She trembled.
“Brooke, listen to me.” He tried to infuse every ounce of confidence, along with a few ounces of sheer make-believe, into keeping his own voice calm. “It’s going to be all right.” He steered her around to the station wagon’s passenger side. “I’m going to take you over to my dad’s. He’s got a gas stove. We’ll get you some coffee, get you calmed down. Everything’ll be fine.”
She folded into the seat, then snatched at his sleeve. “What you said . . . about the weather—”
“What—you decided to believe me? After you chucked me into a mental ward?”
She dropped her face into her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe!”
“All right, all right. We’ll talk about it later. Just get in the car.” He pushed her legs inside, then slammed the door.
_________
Mike answered the door. “Hey . . . What do you look so down about?” He glanced over Chris’s shoulder to where Brooke was sniffling. “Oh, so you’ve made up? Would have been nice had you done that before you dragged me down to the loony bin yesterday.”
“Ha ha.” She whimpered a laugh. “You’re so uproarious in the middle of a crisis.”
He took in her tear-streaked face, and his eyebrows came together. “What’s going on? What crisis?”
“It’s all right. She got stuck in the subway last night.” Chris led her inside by her coat sleeve. The house was cool and stuffy, and all the curtains had been drawn tight across the windows to keep out the cold. “Any trouble here?”
Mike shook his head. “Not except for the power.”
Harrison, up to his chin in blankets, glared at them from the sleeper couch in the living room. “If we freeze to death I’d call that trouble enough.”
Mike slammed the door. “Give it a rest already. It’s August. Nobody’s going to freeze to death.”
“Yeah, that’s right, it’s August. And look at that, it’s snowing in August!”
At the foot of the bed, Brooke stopped and stared at Harrison and the clutter of notebooks scattered on either side of his pillow. With the back of her hand, she rubbed her red nose. “You’re the guy who got shot?” A spark of her old curiosity lifted her voice.
Harrison scowled. “Who are you?”
“She’s a friend.” Chris eased her toward the kitchenette. “Sort of.”
His dad stepped into the doorway, drying a tumbler with a ragged blue towel.
Chris shot a glance from the glass to his dad’s face. Paul’s eyes were bloodshot, but clear. If his dad had actually made it through one whole night without a drink, that was more than Chris had ever given him credit for.
He pushed Brooke forward. “Dad, you remember Mike’s sister Brooke?”
She gave him a listless wave. “Hi.”
“She needs some coffee. In fact, we could all probably do with some if you’ve got enough.”
“Sure, sure I’ve got it.” Paul let Brooke sidle between him and the island cabinet. He looked at Chris. “Black, right?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, surprised his dad remembered. “Black would be great.” He turned back to Mike. “Would you mind giving them a hand? I need to talk to Harrison real quick.”
Mike lumbered across the living room. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making coffee if it means you talking to him instead of me talking to him.”
Chris stopped him as he tromped past. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“I came back after dropping Brooke off with her friend last night. I figured if one of those hoods came around here, your dad might need some help.” He shrugged and followed Brooke into the kitchen.
Harrison drummed his fingers against the green notebook at his side. “So why the long face?”
Chris walked back around the bed and dropped into a chair next to the bedroom door. His elbows landed on his knees, and he rubbed his thumbs up the ridge of his nose. “I need your help.” Harrison was the last person in the world he wanted to be taking advice from. But under the circumstances, he had no one else he could turn to who would understand the magnitude of what was going on. “Tireus is dead.”
Harrison scrunched his face and gave his head a shake, not comprehending. “Dead.”
“Mactalde killed him yesterday.” Chris leaned his chin on his clamped fists. “And it gets worse. You heard about those earthquakes down in Texas? Well, one hit Glen Arden too.”
Harrison’s jaw dropped. “Earthquakes don’t happen in the high country! What have you done to the worlds?”
“Glen Arden’s destroyed. The Searcher and most of the high-ranking officials have evacuated.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve got dozens of people sleeping out in the snow. The army’s scattered, and Mactalde’s huffing down our collars. I don’t know what to do with them. I thought maybe we could find shelter with the Cherazii.” That had been his one idea before falling asleep.
“Ha. Don’t be brainless. The Cherazii will chase you out of their country with sword and hatchet and laugh at your bloodstained footprints as you go.” Harrison scooted down until the blanket overlapped his chin. “The Cherazii aren’t going to be interested in helping Gifted.”
“Thanks to you.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
“You’ll be thanking me sure enough if you’ll just stop trying to think for yourself long enough to listen. Look at this.” Harrison pushed the green notebook across the bed. “This is for you. This is all my secrets. Been working on them ever since I died in Lael. Tri
ed to give ’em to you that first day you was at my house, but you were too stuffed full of your own ideas to listen, weren’t you?”
Chris reached for the notebook and riffled through pages of notes and diagrams. “What kind of secrets?”
“Secrets that’ll keep you from needing the Cherazii.” Harrison reached for more of the notebooks piled beside his head. “There’s lots of things you don’t know about Lael, sonny. Things like the secrets in that big black fortress by the lake.”
Chris halted the pages on a sketch of a castle above a waterfall. “Réon Couteau?” A chill touched the back of his neck. Maybe there was something in here he could use after all.
“That’s right.” Harrison gave the handful of notebooks a little heave toward Chris and settled deeper into the pillows. “And there’s other things too. Things like maybe none of this unbalanced stuff is what you think it is. Maybe it’s not what anybody thinks—except me.”
Chris looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s a good thing you got me around to direct this crummy show, or you’d all be out in the cold, now wouldn’t you?” He guffawed.
Chris set the notebook aside and leaned closer. “All right, I’m listening.”
Before Harrison could respond, the front door smashed open.
Salvidore Flores had found them.
A noise-suppressed pistol coughed twice, and wood and plaster spattered in the kitchen. A short, dark-skinned man kicked the door shut behind him, swiveled to face the couch, and ripped two shots into an explosion of chicken feathers.
Harrison half-rolled, half-fell off the couch. “You led him right to me!”
Chris hurled himself around the corner into the bedroom. Shots splintered the doorframe.
Brooke shrieked. “Sal! Stop, stop! It’s me!” Her scream shot up the decibel scale into unintelligibility.
Chris lunged at his dad’s nightstand, tore out the top drawer, and caught up the Glock 35 Paul had owned since his days on the force. He ran into the adjoining bathroom, chambering the gun as he went, and crashed through the hall door into the kitchenette. The Glock’s sights found Flores in the kitchen doorway, and Chris pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked against empty steel. He pulled the trigger again and again. Empty.
“Drop that.” The long barrel of Flores’s pistol pointed at Chris’s chest. Above the gun, his eyes were cold and steady.
Chris’s hands tightened around the useless gun.
Flores took one step, grabbed the Glock, and prodded his pistol into the flesh beneath Chris’s chin. “Everyone, get over against the counter, back of the kitchen. You want to keep him alive, you do as I say.”
Paul pulled a fallen chair out of the way and started backing up. A whimpering Brooke clung to him. Mike caught Chris’s eyes, his eyebrows a hard line across his face. Chris gave a tiny nod, and Mike promptly backed right over the top of a chair and fell flat on his back.
Brooke yelped, and Flores twitched the pistol in Mike’s direction. That was all Chris needed. He twisted back into the hallway and grabbed the first weapon that came to hand: an old cast-iron floor lamp.
“Hey!” his dad shouted, and the gun started coughing again.
Chris made it back to the kitchen just as Flores turned in search of him. Before the little man could bring the gun up to Chris’s chest, Chris swung the lamp. The heavy glass shade smashed into Flores’s face, and he staggered. Chris came through the doorway and battered the lamp into the man’s stomach. Flores’s upper body snapped forward. Air rushed from his mouth, and blood spritzed from his smashed face. He toppled to the floor, and Mike landed a knee in the middle of his back.
“Call the cops.” Chris dropped the lamp onto the linoleum and kicked the pistol away from Flores’s limp hand. He found Brooke clamping her cell phone to her head with one hand and trying to tear open his dad’s bloody sleeve with the other.
Chris’s heart stuttered. He crossed the kitchen, pushed Brooke’s flailing hand out of the way, and ripped the sleeve all the way down.
His dad breathed through his teeth. “It’s nothing. Nothing, don’t worry.”
Chris found the hole, grabbed the last clean towel out of the drawer, and applied pressure. “Went through your triceps.” He shot a glance at Brooke. “Tell them to send an ambulance.”
She was crying again. “I know, I know!”
Mike looked up from Flores and scanned Paul’s wound. “You’re one lucky dude. You stepped right in front of that shot.”
Chris looked at his dad. The eyes staring back were steady—the kind of steady he hadn’t seen from Paul in forever. The kind of steady he saw from Worick every single day.
“He’d have shot me in the back,” Chris said.
His dad shrugged. “Guess I have some reflexes left after all.”
“Got rope or something to tie him up with?” Mike asked.
Chris led his dad to a chair. “If he wakes up, I’ll break his skull.” He looked into the living room. “Harrison? Everything all right?”
Brooke’s trembling hands had to try twice to close her phone. “They’re coming. She said they’re coming. I don’t understand. Why is this happening? I know Sal! Why would he try to kill me?”
Chris stepped out from between her and his dad. “Here. Hold this for me.”
As soon as she had a grip on the bloody towel, he sidestepped Flores’s body into the living room. “Harrison? Flores is out of commission. Everybody’s okay.”
A moan floated across the living room.
Chris darted around the edge of the bed and ripped through the pile of blankets and cushions to find Harrison’s chest flooding blood over everything. The shag carpet absorbed the sticky wetness like a sponge.
He thrust the heel of his hand into the wound. “Call the ambulance back! He’s bleeding to death!”
Feathers from the exploded pillows spiraled above the bed. They mired wherever they touched the expanding sheen of red that coated Harrison’s chest and Chris’s arms.
Harrison arched his back. His mouth gaped, his breath rasping. “Mactalde . . . not . . . Mactalde . . .”
Then his eyes drifted shut, and the rattle of his breathing was all Chris could hear.
_________
The hospital glowed in the falling darkness. Thanks to its backup generators, it was the only building on the street that had electricity. Even the traffic lights weren’t working.
Chris entered through the main doors and headed up the halls. Mike walked behind, silent except for the jingle of his key ring on his finger. On the second floor, Chris let himself in to his dad’s room.
The fingers protruding from Paul’s elastic sling trembled with the need of a drink. His face was twisted, gaunt, as though the bones had all receded from his skin. But his eyes met Chris’s with a quick flash.
“Harrison?” Chris asked.
Brooke huddled in a chair at the foot of the bed. “They’re supposed to come tell us as soon as he’s out of surgery.” The red tear streaks had faded and left her face pale and strained.
Paul raised the bed to a sitting position. “How’d it go with the police?”
Chris leaned his shoulder against the window. Cold from the glass seeped through his coat sleeve. “They’re not going to do a thing. They’ll keep Flores, but I don’t have sufficient evidence against Kaufman, so there’s no way they’re going to divert men for protection right now.”
“The police station was insane,” Mike said. “Between the weather and the power outage, the whole city is going nuts.”
Chris turned to his dad. “You’ll have to stay in the hospital awhile. You and Harrison will be safe here.”
Brooke slumped deeper into the chair. “I don’t understand. None of this makes sense.”
Chris pushed away from the window and balled his hands inside his coat pockets. “Kaufman’s after me, not you guys. I’m going off the radar. I’m getting another hotel. This is the last time I endanger any of you.”
A petite blonde nurse knocked on the half-opened door and entered the room. Exhaustion pulled at her face. “You’re all friends of Harrison Garnett?”
“More or less,” Mike said.
Chris stepped forward. “He’s out of surgery?”
“Yes.”
“And?” He held his breath. He needed Harrison alive. He needed questions answered. He needed help.
The nurse clasped her hands. She shook her head.
Brooke choked.
“I’m sorry.” The nurse looked at Chris. “He lost too much blood. The damage was irreparable.”
He stared past her. One more dead. Without a word, he squeezed by her into the hall.
“Hey, bro,” Mike called. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t slow. “To sleep.”
His first stop was to fetch Harrison’s bloodstained notebooks from the backseat of Mike’s Bug. From there, he hiked down the sidewalks to the nearest hotel. He locked himself into the room, sat on the bed, and started flipping through the notebooks, reading by the light of a flashlight between his teeth.
He didn’t have time to read them all. It would be morning soon in Lael, and he had to get back. They would need an early start. But there had to be answers in here. Harrison had kept things from him. He’d been hinting at secrets ever since they met.
Chris stopped on the drawing of Réon Couteau. What had Harrison meant when he said Chris didn’t know everything about the black fortress above the lake? His eyes snagged on two words:
Subterranean Caverns.
