“Drop it,” Frank snarled from below Cole’s position.
Picturing the other Skinner pointing a gun at Frank’s head, Cole swung the barrel of his rifle over the side and pointed it down to find Frank clinging to the rock wall like something from the pages of a comic book. Instead of a weapon, Asher held on to a pink and purple carryon bag by its collapsible handle.
“It ain’t that heavy,” Asher insisted. “You can lift us both.”
“We can move faster without it.”
Even from a distance, the almost feral rage on Asher’s face was easy enough to see as he snarled, “We’re almost there, goddammit!”
“Can you toss it up here?” Cole asked.
Both of the other two looked up at him. Asher smiled, and Frank shook his head while muttering to himself as he stretched out his free hand. With a heave, Asher tossed the bag up into Frank’s waiting hand. With an even stronger heave, Frank tossed the carryon up toward the ledge.
Cole’s intention had been to make a convincing effort before ultimately missing the bag and letting it fall. Instead, he managed to grab it by the extended handle. He was so surprised to have caught the damn thing, that he held on to it for a couple of seconds. Dropping it after that would have been an obvious move on his part. Although he didn’t care about upsetting the feelings of a cracked prisoner, it was simply easier at that point for Cole to pull the bag the rest of the way up and set it aside. By the time he’d done so, Frank was up there with him.
Perching at the top of the canyon like a gothic statue, Frank reached down to grab Asher by the arm and drag him up. As soon as he was on solid ground, Asher hurried over to the carryon and patted it. “This was the best one I could find,” he said. “Real pretty and damn durable to have made it through that crash!”
Frank walked over to him and unzipped the carryon to sift through its contents. “Was this really necessary?” he asked.
“I been wearin’ the same clothes since I was caught,” Asher said. “Hell yeah, it’s necessary! Not like those passengers are gonna need any of this stuff.”
“Let’s just get moving,” Cole said. “You want to bring a suitcase?” he told Asher. “Then you’re the one carrying it.”
“Fine by me,” Asher replied. He then set the pastel carryon down onto the little wheels at its base and pulled it along behind him as if he was walking across an airport to make a connecting flight.
They walked in relative silence for a few miles. Cole watched the road while Frank scouted ahead and Asher dragged his bag. Every so often, they could hear a car coming. When that happened, Cole and Asher hurried to the trees growing alongside the road and hunkered down. They were crouching behind some bushes after hearing what sounded like a semi approaching from the east when Asher asked, “You think Gorn is comin’ back?”
“If he wanted to ditch me, he could have done it way before now,” Cole replied.
“They eat their young, you know.”
“What?”
“The Squams. They eat their young. I’ve seen it.” Asher shrugged before adding, “’Course, could have been that the ones I was tracking at the time were just crazy. They also ate a few dogs, part of a tree stump and most of an old Frigidaire.” When Cole looked over at him, Asher nodded and laughed. “Swear to Christ. It was the big part too. The fridge. Not the freezer.”
“Weird.”
“That’s one word for it.”
The semi they’d heard rounded a bend and rumbled past them without slowing. The trailer bore the name of an auto parts manufacturer and was open at the back. Cole spotted two people sitting at the rear of the trailer, looking out at the road behind them over the top of assault rifles held to their shoulders.
Once they were gone, Cole said, “Looks clear.” He stood up, worked a kink from his back and started walking around the bushes.
Asher stayed put, hugging his pink and purple carryon. “You weren’t shitting me,” he said. “About the whole apocalypse thing.”
“Everyone likes to call it the apocalypse, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Not yet, anyway.”
“But the shifters are running loose. The air reeks of them!” Asher’s eyes bounced from point to point, faster and faster until they were rattling in their sockets. “It just don’t feel right out here. Feels…empty. Are we the only ones left? Us and those pieces of shit who kept me in that box?”
“No. We’re not the only ones.”
“Who could survive if those things cut loose? I mean…that’s always been the big scare. Every Skinner fights to keep that from happening.”
“Things could have been a lot worse,” Cole said as the all-too-familiar ghosts reached out to rake icy fingers through his chest.
“Where’s the military? Did they get wiped out too?”
“They took a hit, but they’re still pulling something together. I’ll get into it later, once we’re farther from here.”
But Asher was too distracted by his thoughts as he took in the world around him. “They should just nuke this whole fucking place.”
“Already tried that,” Cole said. “Melted a bunch of Half Breeds and burned a bunch of cities, but the Full Bloods lived. Spotters saw them bolt from the spots targeted by the nukes seconds before impact. Must have heard the missiles coming or smelled them. Who the hell knows? Some say one or two Full Bloods killed each other in the last year, but there’s more.”
“Full Bloods,” Asher snarled as his eyes narrowed into fiery slits. “Those shit bags who locked me up were real interested in them. Every so often, they’d crank open the door to that hole in the ground and question me about Full Bloods.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Not a goddamn thing. That’s how I lived this long.”
“Those shit bags are called Vigilant,” Cole said. “They’re disciples of Jonah Lancroft.”
“Yeah, they talked about him a lot. Kept tellin’ me I owed Lancroft my life just because I’m a Skinner. I even met the old prick once. At least, I met some dude who claimed to be Lancroft.”
“What did he want from you?”
Asher glanced over to him and then looked back down at his bag. He unzipped it, peeled off his t-shirt and stuck it into the carryon before pulling out another one. The new shirt was dark brown with horizontal green stripes and fit him like a pup tent. “He wanted the same thing the rest of ‘em wanted.”
“To track Full Bloods?”
Snapping his eyes up to glare at Cole, Asher seemed prepared to jump at him again. Instead, he zipped the carryon shut and swept some of the greasy braids away from his face. “Yeah,” he said. “That.”
Another vehicle was coming down the road from the direction the semi had just gone. Cole recognized the sputtering roar of his Ford pickup and brought his rifle to his shoulder in case anyone else was trying to run it off the road.
“That’s why you came, right?” Asher asked. “To get me to work for you? Maybe teach you what I know?”
“Partly,” Cole admitted. “I’ve been trying to find a way to get to one specific Full Blood ever since the day the world was flushed down the toilet.”
“Which was…how long ago?”
Cole had to think about that. The first several months after losing Paige were a blur of terrible memories and agony, blended together like watercolors smeared by pain. His time in Cody was necessary and allowed him to pull himself together somewhat, but those days formed a straight, uneventful line fading into one long, dry routine. Sick of thinking about both ends of that spectrum, he said, “Right around two and a half years. Give or take.”
“Christ.” Shaking himself out of his thoughts, Asher said, “Finding me was only part of your reason for coming here?”
The Ford had pulled over to the side of the road and was waiting there. When Cole looked through his scope, he could see Frank hunched over the wheel, glancing up at the rearview mirror. There was still nobody else on the road.
“All I knew at first was that there was a w
ay to track Full Bloods that was better than anything any other Skinner has done before,” Cole explained. “Then I heard there was only one person who knew about all the specifics. Later, I found out that person was being held by The Vigilant. I was held by The Vigilant too.”
“No shit?”
Cole nodded. “They wanted something I had and put me through hell to get it.”
“Something you had or something you have?”
“Something they never got,” Cole replied as though he was spitting every word into someone’s face. “They were holding me in an old prison. Me, Frank and a few others. After we got away from there, I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open for any word about other places like that. When I heard about this one, I stepped up my effort to find it so I could hit these pricks where they live, get what I need as far as finding that Full Blood and blow another Vigilant hellhole to pieces.”
“I like the blowing up part,” Asher said. “Should we go back and light a fuse?”
“Nah. That place is already done. There’s no way The Vigilant will keep it running now that it’s been found. The location was pretty much all it had going for it.”
“I thought it was done when the plane crashed.”
“What?”
“The plane. The one on top of my hole in the ground. Didn’t you see it?”
“Yeah, I saw it. I just…” Cole thought about it for a second and then felt like an idiot. All the evidence he’d seen made it look as if the crash had happened after the packs took over. Plenty of planes were downed once the Full Bloods found a way to spark the change in humans from a distance. Pilots shifted or were killed by passengers who’d turned, and the planes started to fall. If Asher didn’t know about all of that, then he must have been underground for a while before the plane had crashed.
“I heard the crash a while back and thought the shit bags had finally given up on me and decided to blow the place up. Then I heard scraping, machines, workers. Every so often, a bunch of ‘em would show up and stomp around over me. I think they were meeting about something. I tried to listen, but some of the other voices drowned them out.”
“They were setting up a base,” Cole said. “I bet that’s it! The plane crashed pretty close to your prison, and they decided to fortify that spot and grow it into a full base. That way they got a nice, strong structure in a defensible spot, and from the air or anywhere else, it would just look like a wreck. Not too shabby.”
Asher shrugged. “Or they could’ve been building a bigger prison. This one’s been here for decades.”
Turning to him, Cole asked, “Decades?”
“At least. Some of the markings inside my box went all the way back to April eleventh of seventy-three.”
“That far back? You’re sure?”
“It ain’t like I had much more to read. The last time they let me have my own light down there was a while back, though. At least a few months.”
Cole looked through his scope once again. Frank’s expression seemed less anxious than before, but wasn’t exactly easy to read. “Doesn’t matter now. This place is still done.”
“Not necessarily,” Asher said. “Looks like they’re still bringing in truckloads of men and guns.”
“Those are just the reinforcements that were called in when we busted you out of there.”
“What happened today may have been enough to shut this place down before. Now, though, it seems they can get away with a whole lot more. I mean, it ain’t like the Highway Patrol is making regular stops around here. Even the military must have better things to do than worry about some bunch of crazies keeping a few people locked up, especially if they’re only human crazies.”
“You sure you couldn’t hear much while you were locked up?” Cole asked.
“I heard some things, but I was on my own a lot longer than I was locked up here.”
At the first sign of movement further down the road, Cole took a quick look and said, “Frank’s bringing the truck this way. Get ready to jump on.”
“Them shit bags had plenty of time to drag a goddamn passenger plane to where they wanted without bein’ noticed. They’re drivin’ around like they’re the goddamn Army! You think losing me will really be enough for them to pack up their stuff and leave?”
“We know where this place is,” Cole said while standing up to signal Frank. “We hit them pretty hard. That’ll have to be enough for now.”
Asher stood up as well. “Eh, you’re just like all the others. You ain’t got the stomach to do what needs to be done.”
“We came and got you! What the hell else do you want?”
“How many of them shit bags did you kill? I saw ‘em laying on the floor, but they were still breathin’! What were you keeping them alive for? You figured on feeding ‘em to the Half Breeds? Damn! That would have been great!”
As the Ford rolled to a stop near them, Cole said, “Shut up, and get in.”
After taking a moment to think about it, Asher shook his head hard enough to get all of his braids swinging back and forth. “Nah. I prefer to be on my own.”
“How about this?” Cole added while pointing the Brown Precision at him. “Please.”
“You got food? Something good like pancakes or waffles or corned beef hash?”
“We should be able to scrape something up.”
“Why are you waiting?” Frank called out from the truck. “We need to go before more of them drive down this road!”
Asher looked at the truck and then looked down the road toward Tensleep Canyon. Next, his eyes wandered in the opposite direction without once giving the slightest bit of attention to the large rifle in Cole’s hands. “You think we could burn these guys some other time?”
“Trust me,” Cole replied. “All three of us want to burn them. We’ll have to wait for another good chance, but we’ll have plenty to keep us busy in the meantime.”
Now Asher looked at Cole, studying him with eyes that were a milky shade of green. Finally, he smiled and said, “The two of you seem like a couple of real prime specimens.”
“I know where to find a large pancake breakfast,” Frank said.
Asher clapped his hands together and shoved Cole’s rifle aside so he could climb into the truck. “Me and Gorn out for flapjacks! This apocalypse ain’t so bad.”
Cole climbed in after him and shut the door.
“Sorry it took so long,” Frank said. “There were other trucks filled with armed men heading for the canyon. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.”
Suddenly, Asher snapped his head up and clambered over Cole to force his way out through the passenger door. By the time Cole had jumped out after him, Asher had disappeared into the bushes. Almost immediately, Asher returned dragging his pink and purple carryon behind him.
“Can’t forget my new threads!” Asher said before tossing the case into the back.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sodrazica, Slovenia
Randolph hadn’t shifted into his upright form for days on end. In fact, he’d hardly stopped running in that time. Only when he needed to sleep or eat did he slow down long enough for the wind to stop singing in his ears. The lands he’d visited were cold and stark, which was mostly how they’d been before the days had grown so dark for the human race. Unlike the urban sprawl of London and Paris, Slovenia lay in front of him looking much as the continent used to when he’d first stretched his legs as a Full Blood. Randolph had never visited this exact tract of land, however, and was somewhat intrigued by any piece of ground that didn’t seem at least a little bit familiar.
Trees sprouted from the ground but swayed in peculiar directions as if they were being pushed by winds other than the ones that rustled the Full Blood’s fur. When he looked in one direction, Randolph saw dirt that had been piled into grassy mounds. A glance in another direction showed him bare rock scarred by the elements that seemed just a bit too close to the surface. Small animals could be seen and not heard. Birds flew just a little higher than normal.
A vague trepidation sank into the pit of Randolph’s belly which, for a Full Blood, was the most peculiar thing of all.
Suddenly, Randolph regretted diverting his travels to go there. Time was no longer something he had in abundance. Even if he did find what was supposed to dwell there…
And then he saw it.
His eyes had just swept over a plateau to the north a few seconds ago. When he looked back that way again, he’d expected to find the same emptiness that had been there before. Instead, he saw a beast crouching atop the subtle rise. It wasn’t standing tall enough to assert itself as keeper of this domain yet dominated it all the same. It had the shape of a Full Blood but not the scent.
It had no scent at all.
“Impossible,” Randolph growled.
After staring at him for a short while, the beast atop the rise lowered itself to lay with its head resting upon its front paws. Its eyes were still fixed on Randolph, but it no longer seemed concerned about his presence if indeed it had ever been concerned in the first place.
Randolph approached the rise cautiously. His ears pricked up, and he drew in twice as many breaths as he needed so he could taste as much of the air as possible. As he got closer, he still couldn’t smell the other beast, but he could hear its breaths rolling in and out of cavernous lungs.
Now that he was within three paces of the beast, Randolph could see it was more than just another Full Blood. Its thick coat of fur was dark, misty gray peppered with strands of black. Long, curved fangs extended from its mouth at irregular intervals like spires of rock that had formed within an ancient cave. Its paws were large and flattened by untold years spent hammering against the earth. It stared at him with mild curiosity and pearl white eyes shot through with veins that looked more like cracks upon the surface of weathered marble.
“You are the Celtic child,” the gray Full Blood said in a deep, scratchy voice. “Birkyus.”
Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series Page 25
