Nathan held her arms and bent down to look into her eyes. “They’ll come inside the house.”
“My God.”
“It’s better that way. Go now, lock the door, and don’t open it until you hear me or Jane.” Nathan pivoted to his right and flicked off the kitchen chandelier light.
“We need a word,” Lydia said, seizing his left arm.
“What?”
“A word so I’ll know it’s you.”
Nathan fumbled.
“Penguins,” I blurted out.
They both turned to stare at me.
In an instant Nathan was pushing Lydia toward the cellar door on the far side of the kitchen. He hit more lights on a switch near the foyer, flipped another switch near the baseboard in the kitchen, then motioned for me to follow him. In the television room on the other side of the kitchen he pushed down on a large toggle switch that appeared to shut off all of the lights on the right side of the house. He turned the television back on, then hit yet another baseboard switch of some kind—a sensor, I guessed—before we headed out of the room and into the great room.
“There are two probable points of entry,” he said, crouching down and motioning with his hand for me to follow suit and put my back to the side of the stone fireplace. “The large windows to the left—that’s where one of them seems to be heading—and the sunroom at the back of the house.”
“I know where that is.” I removed my gun from its holster.
“We’re going to let them come to us.”
“They’re Sacks?”
“I don’t know, but since one of them is carrying a rifle, I don’t think they’re here for early trick-or-treating. If the lights go on in the kitchen or TV room, it’s one of them.” He stared ahead into the darkness beyond the great room windows. “I need to get to my other monitor. Stay here.”
Crouching low, he darted across the great room and down the hallway on the far side of it. I peeked around the fireplace at the windows, cupping my gun in my hands and resting my elbows on my knees, my trigger finger flat on the frame. There was enough light from the moon that I should have been able to see someone move among the sagebrush and low, scrubby pines on the Tennants’ property, but I saw nothing, not even the speck of a reflection from a gun. If one of the Sacks was heading this way, he’d either stopped moving or he’d changed his direction. I turned my head to the right and listened for sounds coming from the kitchen or television room. All I heard was a TV commercial.
Nathan whispered “Penguins” just before he cut back through the great room and made his way to the fireplace. “One’s going to come through the sunroom,” he said, looking back to the hallway. “I’ve lost track of the other.”
“I haven’t seen any movement out the windows,” I said. “Maybe he’s waiting.”
“He’s either coming in another way or he’s waiting for his friend to move. Stay low, watch your right too. You’ll hear me in a minute.”
Nathan headed back down the hall. For an excruciating thirty seconds the only sound was an insipid commercial for used cars on the TV. Then the sound of shattering glass set me back on my heels. The sunroom. I fought the urge to run to Nathan’s aid, knowing he needed me here in case the second Sack came in through the great-room windows or somewhere else in the house.
I heard two shots followed by the sound of a man grunting and falling to the floor. I readied myself for someone crashing through the windows to my left or creeping up on me from the direction of the television room, but instead I heard another grunt. Then what sounded like a short scuffle and two more shots.
Nathan could handle it, I told myself. What I’d heard were four shots into the Sack, not the Sack returning fire. I looked into the darkness past the television room, reasoning that if I heard glass breaking in the great room, I had time to turn at the sound. But the Sack had backed off his move there, I was certain. He was going to enter the house from another direction. Silently.
When I heard Nathan again whisper “Penguins” before running back to the fireplace, I nearly whooped with joy. I turned, looking for blood or an injury of some kind that would account for the four shots.
“They’ve got body armor,” Nathan explained. “Aim for the neck and head.”
“Shit.” Since when did Sacks wear body armor? In all my trawling for Sacks, I’d never heard of it.
“Steady,” Nathan whispered. “Take deep breaths.” He glanced out the great-room windows but I could tell that he too thought the second Sack would make a stealth entry. “If a light goes on in the hall, turn and fire. He might try to come in through the broken window. If a light goes on in the kitchen, I go through the TV room first.”
We listened for the sound of shoes on broken glass and kept an eye toward the hall leading to the sunroom, but we focused our attention on the television room and the kitchen beyond it. We didn’t have to wait long. When the Sack hit Nathan’s sensor, every light in both the kitchen and television room turned on at once, creating a popping sound like an old-fashioned camera flash magnified ten times over. Nathan burst through the TV room, firing his gun three times before reaching the kitchen. A step behind him, I fired twice, striking the Sack in his upper arm and shoulder as his body dropped to the tiled floor.
One of Nathan’s shots had struck the Sack under his left eye, a second had hit him just above his Adam’s apple, and it looked like the third had grazed his left cheek. Nathan felt for a pulse—I imagined it was habit since the Sack must have died instantaneously—then hurried to the cellar door, shouting “Lydia” and “Penguins” before knocking on it.
He stood in the doorway as Lydia came up the cellar stairs, blocking her view of the kitchen, and quickly ushered her out of the room and toward his office. When he returned to the kitchen, he was already on his phone, and whoever he was talking to was getting the benefit of language I’d never heard him use. He saw me staring down at the Sack and physically turned me away with his free hand. Then he pointed toward the television room. I complied. I put away my gun, sat down on the couch, found the remote, and turned the damn TV off. My ears were ringing from the gunfire.
Nathan was demanding a clear-out, Gatehouse’s term for a Sack body disposal and cleanup, and informing the listener of the Sacks’ new body armor. Then he made a point of saying he and Lydia were going to separate safe houses, and I knew right then that he didn’t fully trust the Gatehouse member—and it must have been a member—he was talking to. It was him they were after, he was letting them know, and they wouldn’t find him anywhere near Lydia. I felt as though the world was turning upside down.
Nathan hung up and I peered out the television room door as he checked the Sack for a tattoo.
“Find anything?” I asked.
He walked over to the couch. “His name is Without, and if I’m right, he’s a Resolute. Go sit with Lydia in my office.”
A minute later in his office, pulling up a chair and taking a seat alongside Lydia, Nathan told us that the Sack who had burst through the sunroom window was named Falling Away. A Festal, he thought. He was going to call Brent Vogel’s wife and tell her to take her children to a safe house, and the three of us needed to do the same, Lydia on her own.
“The place we’ve talked about?” Lydia asked.
“Yes. I’ll switch your license plates and mine. Jane?” He turned to me. “I’ve got new plates for your car too. Then we’re going.” He pointed at the ceiling. North.
I’d never had to switch the plates on my car, though I knew of porters who had. The plates were fully legal. Gatehouse had registered them—and created phony drivers’ licenses, passports, and all sorts of other ID—for circumstances like this. It had always given me a sense of safety as a hunter, knowing I could kill Sacks incognito and not run afoul of the law unless I stepped way over the line, but that sense of safety had crumbled.
“Do you think anyone else is coming?” Lydia asked.
“Probably not tonight,” Nathan said.
“Want me to
toss this?” I asked, pointing at his cell phone.
“No need,” he said. He removed the false front from the bottom section of a bookcase, retrieved two backpacks, and handed one to Lydia. I imagined they held items similar to those in my backpack. Not only did Lydia know what her husband did for a living, I realized, but she was prepared to take flight because of it.
He instructed me to stay with her until he switched the plates on all three cars—a task that seemed to take forever as I listened for footfalls elsewhere in the house and waited for fresh pings signaling new intruders on the grounds. I heard a car starting up and Lydia said it was Nathan bringing her SUV around to the front.
Back in his office, Nathan took several flash drives from his desktop, including the Gatehouse drive, dropped them into an inside jacket pocket, and told us to wait while he got Lydia’s and his coats from the foyer. He still wanted to keep her from seeing the dead Sack in the kitchen. He even shut the lights off on his way back to the office.
He checked his monitor one last time then scooted us out of the office, through the foyer, and up to the front door. I noticed he was still careful to block Lydia’s view with his body, and she wasn’t eager to crane her neck in order to see around him.
“Keys, everyone.” He handed Lydia’s keys to her. “Let’s move fast. I go first, then Lydia, then Jane.”
“Got it,” Lydia said.
“I’ll call, but not for a few hours,” he said to Lydia. “I’ll wait until you’re around the corner.” He paused, regret and concern in his eyes. “They won’t be looking for your SUV, especially with those plates.”
“I’ll be fine. We’ve planned for this, remember? You be careful.” They hugged briefly, then Lydia turned to me. “You too, Jane.”
The three of us drove down the Tennants’ driveway, each in our own vehicle. Nathan stopped where the drive met Carson Street and pulled forward a car length to let Lydia around him. She turned left, giving a single wave of her hand out the driver’s window before accelerating. Nathan waited until her taillights disappeared from view then hung a right on Carson.
Chapter 7
October 30
At three o’clock in the morning, I followed Nathan’s Explorer to an I-25 truck stop off a Trinidad, Colorado, exit. We parked close to the stop’s convenience store, where even at that hour truckers and other travelers were loading up on coffee, vase-sized cups of cola, and hot, greasy snacks. After picking up chicken sandwiches, the least noxious-looking food in the stop’s refrigerated case, we both got into Nathan’s Explorer. He laid his gun on top of the console and put a folded map over it. The idea was to eat then sleep in his car for an hour. We were both punchy from the breakin at Nathan’s home and a lack of sleep, and the truck stop was the safest place for us to nap between Trinidad and the safe house just south of Denver, a three-hour drive.
I wanted to ask Nathan more about the LCA and who he thought had sent Sacks to his house, but he kept his head down as he ate, a couple times extracting a piece of brown-edged lettuce from his bread roll. It was clear he wasn’t interested in talking. I knew he was worried sick about Lydia. Though Sacks rarely went after porters’ families, especially if those porters were once in Gatehouse, lately they had delighted in breaking our unspoken rules of battle.
The fact that I ate my entire sandwich was testament to how hungry I was, not the quality of the food. Nathan ate half his sandwich, stuffed the remainder in the store’s plastic bag, then ran the heat on high for a minute before turning it off.
“Try to sleep,” he said, folding his arms over his chest and leaning back on the headrest. I closed my eyes and laid my head on the window. A minute later I opened them, wondering absurdly how we would know an hour had passed and we should be on our way again. I glanced at Nathan, about to ask him, when I saw that his eyes were wide open. He was scanning the dozen trucks parked near the pumps to his left and a row of parked cars near the trucks. He wasn’t planning on sleeping. That’s how we’d know.
I was going to close my eyes again when I noticed a man watching us from the cab of his truck. My radar went up, and so did Nathan’s. He lifted his head from the headrest.
“Do you think he’s just a trucker?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he said, still focusing on the cab.
“Why is he staring at us?”
“Maybe because we’re staring at him.”
I laughed. God, I needed to sleep. There was nothing remotely funny about our situation.
The man shot us his middle finger then reached up and snapped down the shade above his window.
“Just an everyday jerk,” I said.
“Probably, but you never know.”
“Do you look at everyone as a potential Sack?” I asked.
He shrugged. I translated that as Yes, I have to.
“I’d go crazy.”
“Don’t think about it.” He kept his eye on the window shade. “If you think someone is a Sack, report him then forget about it. You can’t and shouldn’t do anything more.”
“Porters can kill on sight, can’t they?”
“Jane, go to sleep.”
“How do you know someone’s a Sack if he’s not on a list? People go from willing to turning every day. No list can be that up-to-date.”
“They’re followed, observed.”
“But even then.”
“Your targets are all you have to worry about.”
“Yeah, well that’s enough worry, especially after tonight. Now I’m really glad I buzz.”
Nathan’s head whipped around and he sat ramrod straight. I thought he would hit the roof of the SUV. “What did you just say?” he asked.
Shit. That’s what happens when you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in days—you let down what’s left of your guard and say stupid things.
“I’m asking you a question. What did you just say about buzzing?”
Two years I’d known him and I’d never seen him so angry. Not even close. “I’m tired, I’m just babbling.”
“Don’t lie to me. Are you telling me you buzz before a return?”
I couldn’t answer. I just ran a hand across my face and looked at him.
“Jesus Christ.” He got out of his car and slammed the door, storming up to the convenience store’s window before turning back and glaring at me. He turned back to the store window then back to me again before doing another about-face and heading inside the store. I thought he’d take the handle off the door when he pulled on it.
I tried to prepare my argument while he was in the store. The logic of buzzing. But all I could think about was how I’d disappointed him. Though after tonight, knowing I’d be dead now if Kath had strictly followed orders, surely he could see the logic in pausing before a kill.
Breaking a major Gatehouse rule usually meant being yanked from the field, reduced to compiling computer lists, making maps, or doing the payroll—if that. I was afraid Nathan would return to the car and tell me it was over. He knew about Emily, but even so I wasn’t sure he understood what this job meant to me. Once I’d discovered that the world of Sacks existed—it took a month for Gatehouse to convince me, so unlikely was the whole scenario in my eyes—I knew what I’d been born to do. And I knew I’d found away to assuage, over and over again, the helplessness I’d felt as I watched Emily die at the hands of an Alarm. Trapped at first in our overturned car, then thrusting my way out a backseat window by force of my one unbroken leg, I’d finally clawed my way toward her. But too late. Being a hunter, I knew one day I’d find her killer, the bastard who against all Sack reason had decided to let me—a witness—live.
Nathan exited the store, got in the car, and shifted in his seat so he could look me in the eye.
I opened my mouth to speak and he held up a hand. “Don’t say a word. If you ever buzz again, you’re out. Not just from the field, but out of Gatehouse altogether. If I had the authority, you’d be out now.”
“There’s a reason—”
>
“Be quiet and go to sleep. We’re leaving in forty-five minutes.”
We were silent, barely looking at each other, as we bought coffee in the convenience store and filled our cars with gas. We made our way back to I-25 just after four o’clock in the morning and headed for Denver, Nathan leading the way. The farther north we went, the more snow there was on the ground, though never more than a couple inches in the snowiest spots, and the interstate stayed dry.
A few miles south of Colorado Springs, Nathan pulled into a gas station near an off-ramp and I followed suit, my Forester hitting a few well-worn potholes on the way. Avoiding the single streetlight in the station’s lot, he wound his way around the gas pumps toward a Dumpster then stepped out of his car and waved me over. He motioned for me to lower my passenger-side window, leaned down, and announced that we were heading to Connor Doyle’s house west of the Springs before driving to the safe house.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I asked. The first words I’d spoken to him since Trinidad.
“No, I thought it would be safer for all of us if he didn’t. He’s isolated—only a handful of neighbors, no porters, no Gatehouse members. I think he should get out and head north with us. Hopefully Kath slept longer than we did and she’ll get to the safe house about the same time we do.”
He paused, lowering his forearms to the door frame. “Jane, hunters have died because they buzzed. Desires and Alarms are dangerous enough, but you hesitate with a Resolute, Festal, or Elation and they’ll kill you.”
“I know.” I knew buzzing was dangerous, I really did. How could I explain to Nathan that my conscience demanded it? I didn’t think I could live with a mistake of the sort Kath had nearly made. I couldn’t blow it off as a Gatehouse error, not when I’d pulled the trigger.
“I know you know. The question is, will you stop buzzing?”
I waited too long to answer. His eyes squeezed shut, and I thought when he opened them he was going to tell me I was out as a hunter. Peel out in his Explorer and leave me sitting at that gas station, my mouth hanging open, gathering flies. Before he could speak, I said, “Let me ask you something first. What if you killed an innocent by accident? Could you live with that?”
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 6
