“Have you noticed there’s no snow on the ground up here?” Connor asked.
He was right. The snowstorm that had blanketed New Mexico north to Denver while I was enjoying myself at the Hotel St. Michael in Santa Fe hadn’t made its way up here. I hadn’t taken the time to look. The sky was cobalt blue, and cottonwood leaves, like jewels reflecting the sun, shimmered gold in the wind.
“Nathan, maybe this is a stupid question,” I began, “but didn’t Hall change when she became an Elation?”
“You mean cellular change?” Connor said. “Damn.” He was digging deep into his jacket pockets then reaching around to the back pockets of his jeans. “I left my fake debit card at the counter.”
“Connor, Connor,” I said, smiling and clicking my tongue.
“Well excuse me, Jane Bond.” He turned and headed for the gas station, Kath calling after him to hurry up.
From the corner of my eye I saw Nathan snap to attention. His hand moved to his suit jacket as he stared into a field of dry cheatgrass north of the station. All I saw in the field was an old car, its hood raised as though someone, ages ago, had been working on it but had deserted it as a hopeless case. Then I saw the car drift slowly forward, floating on a straw-colored sea.
“Drop!” Nathan shouted. I fell to the ground and pulled Kath down with me, but instead of dropping, Connor wheeled back. An instant later he was struck by two rounds, both of which exited his chest. The light went out of his eyes before he hit the asphalt.
Two more shots sounded and Nathan, already down on one knee, fired off several rounds as I reached for my gun and took aim. I didn’t fire—I couldn’t see anyone in or around the car—but Kath began firing blindly, in a scattered pattern and using only her right hand. I was terrified she’d hit the clerk in the station or one of the pumps.
“Hold!” Nathan yelled. Gripping his pistol in both hands, his eyes fastened, hawk-like, on the car in the field, he watched for the faintest movement inside it. The car, still drifting forward, rose a foot at the front end as its tires encountered something in the field, then it ceased moving.
I was frozen in a half-slouch, my arms rigid before me. I didn’t dare let my eyes slip from the car to Connor’s motionless form.
“Bastards!” Kath screamed. “Damn cowards! Come and get us! Do it, do it!”
Still focused on the car, I shouted at her to shut up, and in my peripheral vision I saw her turn her face to mine. Her hand went limp and she lowered her gun.
“Connor,” she moaned.
My eyes dropped to Connor. The blood from his chest pooling and now flowing our way, he stared ahead toward Nathan, the last place his living eyes had focused.
“Get your packs now,” Nathan said. He stood, still watching the car in the field. “Now,” he repeated. “Both of you in my car.”
Kath began to argue and Nathan cut her off. “We don’t have time. Do it now.” He moved quickly to Connor’s body and bent down to feel for a pulse, all the while eyeing the car in the field. There was no need—we all knew Connor was gone—but we couldn’t leave him without making that final gesture, that acknowledgment that two minutes ago he’d been alive.
Following Nathan’s gaze as he looked to the gas station, I noticed for the first time the shattered window on our side of the building and tempered glass, like small, rough diamonds, peppering the lot. Unless Kath had hit the window with her undisciplined firing, the two shots I’d heard after Connor was hit had been fired from the field and had gone from one side of the building out the other.
“Both of you get in,” Nathan repeated. He straightened, his weapon still trained on the car, and headed to the station.
I put my gun in its holster, grabbed my backpack from my Forester, and hopped into the front seat of Nathan’s SUV. Kath, two steps behind me, threw her backpack onto a second-row seat and clambered in. Nathan stood two feet inside the gas station’s door, still facing the field but glancing down at something on the floor. He bent low and came back up. I knew then what he’d found. He sidestepped his way to the counter then exited the station, wiping his hands on something as he strode for his car, then stuffing it—a bloody napkin, I now saw—in his coat pocket.
I leaned forward and opened the driver’s side door just as Nathan, turning back for a last look at the field, reached behind him for the door handle and backed his way into the car seat. Whoever had shot Connor was either playing dead or Nathan’s bullets had found him. My guess was the latter. I’d never seen a better shot than Nathan. No wild ammo spray, no trigger spasms. He simply hit his mark.
I knew Nathan had no interest in searching the old car. If Sacks had found us here, at a quiet gas station during an unplanned stop, then we were being tracked somehow—as insane as that seemed. Our best hope was to keep moving. And to find out how we were being tracked.
“They shot a kid,” Nathan said, starting the Explorer. “The station cashier.”
Kath and I kept our eyes on the field as Nathan exited the parking lot and drove us back to the county road. A wave of grief swept over me as I took a last look at Connor, alone in a nowhere lot, and thought of the gas station attendant, shot because Sacks don’t like witnesses. Even if the kid had run, they would have chased him down.
I leaned back on the headrest, staring numbly through the windshield. Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t met Connor more than a few times, glad I’d hated him calling me Jane Bond. If I’d known him better, how could I bear the ache of losing him in such a useless way? Of leaving his body on the asphalt like discarded trash? An unsolved murder or a gang-initiation shooting—Gatehouse would come up with something to explain his death, and none of it would honor the sacrifices he had made as a hunter. And neither Gatehouse nor the hunters he knew would contact his family. His parents lived somewhere in Colorado, that much I knew, but they would never know how Connor had lived and died.
Like Nathan always said, it was a never-ending battle. Innocents were lost just maintaining the status quo, just keeping the battle from going out of control. Sometimes I wondered if we’d all be better off if Gatehouse declared total war and wiped every Sack from the face of the earth, but apart from far more innocents dying in such a war, I knew we couldn’t find every Sack. Inevitably some would be left behind, and they’d make others willing, and the willing would turn, and it would start all over again.
When you know you’ll never lift a glass in victory, how do you find the will to keep fighting? I’d told myself that I’d accepted the endless nature of the battle. Until the day I died I would fight it, first as a hunter and then at Gatehouse. I’d trawl and hunt, with a gun when I was young, with a computer when I was old. No family, no real friends except Kath and Nathan.
But I needed hope. I needed to believe that if we couldn’t win, we could at least tip the scales in our favor. Us on the offensive, Sacks on the run. That’s what I wanted. So I studied them. Nathan encouraged me to be informed and gave me copies of his files on Sacks in Colorado and New Mexico—except for the Elations and Embodiments. I studied how the dead ones had been killed and tried to find more efficient ways to kill the ones who were still alive. And I hoped that the great rumor—that Sacks could be restored—was true. Nathan seemed to believe it, at least when it came to Elizabeth Hall.
I gave Nathan a quizzical look as he pulled off the highway onto a dirt lane that led to a farmhouse and series of outbuildings in the distance.
“Everyone out,” he commanded. “I want you to check everything. Your packs, clothes, jackets, burners, everything.”
“Are we looking for trackers and bugs?” I asked, sliding down from my seat.
“Anything that shouldn’t be there,” he said.
I took off my jacket and checked the lining inside, feeling it for tracking chips or anything out of the ordinary, and Kath began to do the same.
“Inside your shoes too,” Nathan said.
“Good grief,” Kath moaned.
Nathan glanced up at her but said nothing. He took a
flashlight from his glove compartment and began to ferret out the inside of his Explorer, running his hand under the seats in all three rows, lifting the floor mats, looking under the hood and the cargo protector. He’d torn out or disabled everything from the car’s Bluetooth to its navigation system long ago, but he checked it all again.
Kath and I had emptied our packs onto the cargo liner and I’d started to finger the seams of my pack when I saw Nathan pluck something from the third-row floor and examine it in the palm of his hand.
“What is it?”
He walked to the back and held out his hand. “A GPS tracker from under the seat.”
“Shit.”
“I swept this car four days ago.”
He stared down at the tracker, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw and running over in his mind, no doubt, who in the past four days had been in or near his car. He’d probably parked it outside El Tirador every one of those days. It had been sitting in the lot, available to anyone, just the night before, when I drove there to tell him about Kath. Until now, he, like other porters, had had no reason to obsess over the security of his car. He swept it for bugs or trackers every now and then, that’s all. At first I was surprised to hear he’d swept it just four days ago, but then I remembered that things were changing.
“Who had access to your car?” I asked.
“Access to the inside of my car,” he said. “Anyone who found out I owned El Tirador and was willing to risk breaking into my car in an open lot.” He turned the tracker over in his hand, his expression uneasy as he examined it, as though a new and dangerous idea was taking form in his mind.
“Have you found a tracker inside your car before?” I asked him.
“Outside, not inside.”
“How often do porters find trackers?”
“Not often.”
“Should we stop looking in our packs now?” Kath asked.
“No, keep looking. And when you’re done, drop your phones in the ditch by the road.”
“The burners?” I said.
“Yes. And all your ID. Debit cards—all of it.” He went back to the third row and continued his search, and when he’d finished with that, he searched the wheel wells then told me to keep watch while he laid down next to the Explorer, stuck his head under it, and ran a flashlight beam along the undercarriage. Satisfied it was clean, he searched his pack then handed me the tracker, telling me to chuck it out the window a couple miles down the road, away from any buildings, especially houses.
Kath and I flung our burners, fake ID cards, driver’s licenses, and the rest into the shallow ditch along the road, far from the farmer’s house and barns, and dropped a few rocks and clumps of dirt atop the cards to keep them from being carried by the wind to the farmer’s land.
Staring down at the makeshift interment, Kath said, “What about Connor’s debit card? It was fake but—”
“I’ve got it,” Nathan said. He dropped Connor’s card in the ditch and, using his foot as a scoop, dragged loose dirt over it. His normally pristine black shoes were now dusted with dirt, and the back of his coat, I saw as he walked back to the Explorer, looked like it had been used as a welcome mat.
“Why Connor?” I asked. “We were all out in the open.”
No one answered. That Connor had been closer to the car in the field was the only reason I could come up with, but that wasn’t good enough somehow.
Three miles down the road, in an open area between two office parks, I threw the GPS tracker from the car and turned to Nathan, determined to get him to tell me more about Elizabeth Hall. It was clear that Kath’s reaction to her irritated him, but I thought if I asked a few quiet, sensible questions, he’d answer me. I started with the most obvious one. How did Gatehouse know Hall had been restored?
“They followed and interviewed her for months before letting her anywhere near Gatehouse.”
“She could still be conning them.”
Nathan gave a tight-lipped nod. “That’s always possible.”
“What was her Sack name?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Is she human?”
“Yes, Jane, she’s human.” He gave me a sidelong glance before looking back to the road. Nathan was the only porter I knew who actively discouraged talk of Elations and Embodiments being something beyond human. All porters were instructed to dampen such talk, but Nathan kicked it to the curb and stomped on it. The first few times I met him, I thought he did it because he didn’t want his hunters to fear encounters with superhuman entities, that he needed us to believe we could defeat them—if not right away, then one day. Later I realized that despite all the rumors, not just here but around the world, he didn’t believe upper-level Sacks were anything more than ordinary monsters.
I didn’t know what I believed. I was still working that out. But I knew what Kath thought. She was making it clear, shooting curses and Hall’s name from the seat behind me like a tennis-ball machine. Elizabeth Hall was still a Sack, she said. Elation scum who had directed underling Sacks to kill for her pleasure. Elation filth who was probably responsible for Connor’s death.
Chapter 9
Our safe house about twenty miles northwest of Fort Collins was more cabin than house, and the road leading to it was dirt and gravel, but its relative isolation and rough nature gave me a greater sense of safety than any in-town safe house could, which was something I desperately needed after the strain of the past twenty-four hours.
There was electric power for lights, which surprised me, given that Nathan said the nearest house was a quarter of a mile away, and fuel oil for heat. The food in the house was canned and packaged, none of it fresh, but there was plenty of coffee and tea in the kitchen cabinets, and there was a clean, white-tiled shower in the bathroom that called to me almost as much as the bed in one of the rooms did.
The bed won out. I fell asleep in minutes but jerked awake twice, thinking I was still in the car, the road in motion beneath me. I woke six hours later, just after sunset, slipped my gun back in its holster, and wandered into the kitchen to fill the tea kettle with water. Nathan, who I thought had been sleeping in one of the house’s four small bedrooms, was instead sitting in an armchair in the living room, his gun on the table beside him. When he saw me, he headed off to bed, telling me to wake him in five hours. Kath was still asleep in her room, which meant I finally had time to myself, something I’d been craving.
I set the kettle on the stove and found some black tea in the cabinet. Tea bags, naturally, but that was good enough. As with most cabins, the kitchen and living room in the safe house were a single open room, and as I leaned against the kitchen counter and waited for the water to boil, I took my first real look at the living room. A couch and two armchairs, both brown and impervious to stains and mistreatment, three small side tables, no television. Nathan had turned on the room’s three lamps, one on each side table. The only decoration was a framed photo of Long’s Peak over the couch. It was miserable but safe. Lonely and spartan, and Connor should have been there.
Absentmindedly, I reached for my cell phone on the kitchen counter, where my own phone usually sat when I was at home in Loveland. I didn’t even know who I wanted to call, I just wanted to grab hold of that connection to the world outside. It chilled me to think that for the foreseeable future, that thread of communication didn’t exist. But as much as I hated throwing away our phones, I figured dumping them was worse for Nathan. Now he had no way to contact Lydia, or she him.
I spent the next few minutes making my tea and rummaging through the cabinets, digging through cans, boxes, and bags for items that, cobbled together and using some imagination, might make dinner. It had been too long since we ate.
“Good morning, sort of,” Kath said, entering the living room in a stumbling, just-woke-up gait. “Or good evening. It’s almost seven o’clock. I feel all turned around.”
“This is worse than jet lag,” I said. “Hungry? I’m making pasta with vegetables, and I found some dry sausag
e that looks OK.”
Kath grimaced and made for the coffeemaker. “Where’s Nathan?”
“Sleeping, finally.”
“So what do you think about Elizabeth Hall?” she asked, spooning coffee into a filter and switching on the machine.
It had taken her all of thirty seconds to mention Hall. Here I’d thought it might take her a minute or more. “I don’t know what to think yet,” I said. “I want to find out more about her and what made her want to be restored.”
“She wasn’t restored.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I do. I know what her game is.”
“To get into Gatehouse.”
“Think of all the information and names she’ll have at her fingertips.”
“For now she doesn’t have access to any lists.”
“She will.”
“She could be helping Gatehouse more than we know.”
Kath folded her arms across her chest, a look of exasperation in her eyes. “Jane, she’s a Sack. Worse, an Elation. Can you imagine how many innocents she’s killed?”
“I’ve considered that.”
Like a schoolteacher stunned by a pupil’s ignorance, she threw up her hands. “And?”
I laid a fistful of dried spaghetti on the counter and turned my face to hers. “I’ve heard rumors of Sacks being restored for two years now. There are hunters who swear it’s true. Zack Lowell’s porter swears it’s true. Do you think they’re all making things up?”
“I think you can only go so far before it’s impossible to turn back.”
“Meaning what? Desires and Alarms can be restored but not Elations?”
The coffeemaker gurgled as the last of the water hit the filter. Kath grabbed a mug hanging from a hook under a cabinet and began pouring. “I don’t think any of them can be restored. Once you become willing and turn, that’s it, say goodbye.” She blew over the rim of her mug and gingerly took a sip before meeting my eye. “But Elations?” She shook her head slowly.
“So we just keep killing them? Trawl, hunt, kill? There’s no hope for anything else?”
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 8
